People often discuss “health” without even dwelling on mental one. Acquaintances ask each other “How are you?” but seldom the answer that comes up is psychologically in nature. What, then, is mental health? It is an integral part of an individual’s well-being and can be influenced by various external and circumstantial, social, economic, environmental, and political factors.
When mental health fails, disorders may arise in the person. One of the age groups most
affected by mental disorders is adolescents. To aggravate an already complex situation, there was the lockdown that people suffered during the height of COVID-19. Indeed, the pandemic led to forced isolation and prevented the development of sociality and convivial experiences typical of adolescence and pre-adolescence. In this regard, it would be appropriate to turn to professionals to achieve real health promotion in the psychological sphere and recreate new habits and rhythms. However, it is still difficult to clear this topic, although it is no longer taboo.
It is also challenging for people to ask themselves how they feel mentally. Many people believe that turning to specialists is inappropriate or that the situation must be “serious” to do so. Mental health problems and disorders are still underestimated and viewed with detachment. The older generations still regard psychologists and psychiatrists with suspicion. Moreover, young people, also because of a distorted representation of reality due to the excessive use of social media, are inclined to seek high-performance standards in every area of their lives and at every stage of growth. Therefore, a vicious cycle is being established, in which more and better must be done.
Healthy eating is a fundamental part of an individual’s well-being too. Closed related to healthy eating is obviously physical activity. They help you to prevent a lot of diseases, improve your mental health, boost your energy, keep you in shape and control your weight: healthy eating and physical activity have very significant benefits for heart, body and mind.
And what about nature? Well, nature is simply the most important thing we have and we have the responsibility to protect and look after it: nature houses and nourishes us and we should not bite the hand that feeds us...Instead, we destroy it in so many ways: air pollution; water pollution, soil pollution; deforestation. It is of vital importance to invert the trend we are seeing right now.
We should take effective action to preserve nature and the environment, to transfer a
better world to future generations. To do so, we have to take collective and individual actions. For example, government should implement more effective policies to protect the environment, while we as individuals should reduce, reuse, recycle.
Written by the student Antonio Durante
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