Your book is definitely a challenging intellectual and literary work, with respect to ecological environment and mental illness (health). The unnaturalness of the human nature (being out of nature, but having nature within) can lead to serious alienation of humans to nature (and human to human), degeneration of the human potential by existential stress and serious mental health problems.

I do regard this historical problem generation mainly as an evolutionary selection process, where humans have to find healthy procedures and responses to modern alienation. It is necessary to apply time-tested wisdom and to achieve a harmonic balance between humans and nature; the industrial assembly line created the modern consumer (about +100 years ago) and the resulting consumerist life style (now globalized) is surely neither sustainable nor healthy, because our resources and life-supporting systems are finite.

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The greatest reward of righteousness is peace of mind

Δικαιοσύνης καρπὸς μέγιστος ἀταραξία.

Epicurus

The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.

Epicurus

Mental is very deep, if you say psychological, it could be better. Regards

I appreciate your compliments Ternyik. I have learnt that mental or psychological illness has several causes that arise from our cultural milieu. As much as homocentric factors such as othering have been singled by experts as a cause of psychic collapse, ecological factors have been neglected. Thank you Medhat for the correction.

Am in agreement with your observation Andrew Nyongesa that the cultural milieu is a decisive factor for mental health or illness, i.e. cultural psychology may not be causal, but conditional. In this sense, country-specific conditions of mental health (or illness) are essential to understand the acute rise of psychological pathologies, which end up in certain chronic pathologies of human populations, in terms of statistical distribution in and between countries.

A characteristic feature of modern science is the increasing interpenetration of its branches and an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems. Increasingly, new scientific directions and disciplines are emerging at the intersection of sciences. Medical ecology also belongs to such sciences. Particularly strong ties connect it with medical geography, human ecology, social ecology, hygiene, ecotoxicology, medical statistics, environmental informatization and modeling.

Medical ecology is based and developed on the achievements of medical geography acquired over a 200-year period of development. Medical ecology reflects the need to study the main general patterns of interaction between the environment and health.

The state of health of the population is increasingly recognized as an indicator of the final ecological effect of the impact of natural and anthropogenic factors on people. This refers to both negative and positive and protective interactions. There are many definitions and models of health, but there is no one generally accepted. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons (determined by the level of modern knowledge, the state of environmental and medical statistics, the degree of availability of the necessary information, etc.), not all of these interactions can be studied and evaluated with sufficient completeness, primarily in quantitative terms. It should also be borne in mind that tens of thousands of factors can directly and indirectly influence the state of individual and public health and the incidence of the population.

In the structure of medical ecology, general and particular medical ecology are distinguished. Insufficiency of initial data, departmental disunity and inaccessibility, unevenness and incompleteness of medical and geographical knowledge of various territories of the country are currently a serious obstacle to the development of medical and environmental mapping. Medico-ecological mapping is now in the stage of data accumulation and development of its theoretical foundations, principles and methods. Another direction in medical and environmental mapping is the compilation of maps that simultaneously show adverse environmental factors and the incidence of the population.

The third direction in medical and environmental mapping is the compilation of medical and geographical "cartographic dossiers" containing the initial data necessary for the spatial analysis of correlation and cause-and-effect relationships between natural, socio-ecological situations and people's health.

At present, medical ecology in its entirety can be defined as a complex scientific branch based on the association of the sciences of medical, biological, geographical, physicochemical, economic, sociological and other cycles. Each of these sciences is an independent system of knowledge about man, nature, economy, technology, etc.

The association does not represent the unity inherent in branch disciplines. It operates with natural laws (related to both man and the environment) and socio-economic ones. The center of association, uniting the efforts of particular disciplines, in this case is the problem of a comprehensive anthropoecological assessment of the environment. A special place in this association should belong to social ecology, medical geography, geohygiene and human ecology.

The development of human society, globalization have led us to understand the world as consisting of opposites of one common whole. The perfection of the world is in the unity of its elements. This is achieved only by the coexistence of the parts of nature, when each part works for the life of the whole system. Since all nature, except for man, rigidly fulfills its destiny, the obvious highest goal of all nature is to bring man to perfection, to the property of bestowal. This, apparently, is the program of natural management.

Contrary to such a management program, the general world crisis of mankind is obvious, which is part of the natural and civilizational crisis, as well as the accompanying depression, drugs, family breakdown, terror, uncontrollability of social systems, the danger of using atomic weapons, environmental disasters, the crisis of science, culture, etc. For example, according to data published by the European Commission in the "Green Book" ("Gruenbuch"), Europeans suffer from severe depression, which is the cause of 58,000 suicides a year, and 30% of EU citizens suffer from a mental disorder.

The signs of the crisis are obvious, but because of the seeming impossibility of getting out of it, its very existence and aggravation, as a rule, are hushed up by governments, scientists, sociologists, and psychologists. The reason for their conscious hushing up of the crisis is that they often do not see the means of correcting the current state. As a result, this ostrich policy only exacerbates the problem.

Secondly, in the present culture, nature has become a materialized concept. "Nature" is typically viewed as the material world rather than as a process of events. According to scientists, it seems that at the beginning the word was used as a description of a quality or process and later became an independent noun, it is also possible that in the beginning, in its origin, "nature" was not a word in our sense, but a statement expressing the experience of the external world.

Third, the word "nature" is most commonly used to refer to anything other than humans and their creations. This, of course, is ambiguous. To correct this, it is now said that human beings are "part" of Nature or "in" Nature, although this also comes with its own problems, as it implies that all human constructions and man-made products are related to Nature (natural), which does for humans difficult to argue against some of these cultural products.

Fourth, the word "nature" carries a significant amount of baggage of accompanying meanings. For example, such as "nature with bloody teeth and claws", "nature as capricious and vicious" and "nature as a barbarian", but there are also positive connotations associated with the romantic tradition (a source of inspiration, creativity, love, etc.). ).

This is a problematic word, and yet it is central to the discussions on the pages of this textbook about natural-civilizational processes, the environment and environmental ethics. We need a word that allows us to talk about the difference between human artificial products and structures and the living world, and we also need a word that expresses the fact that humans are an aspect of this living world, despite their seeming desire to either eliminate, or domesticate her. Undoubtedly, in the near future - this word needs to be restored, redefined and given new strength.

The same applies to the adjective "natural" (natural), which means many different things. The word "natural" is a sense with a disputed final essence; its meaning is a matter of ideology. Moreover, "natural" in general has very positive connotations: "it's good" or "it's right." But paradoxically, the natural world seems to be more of an object of indifference in our society. In discussion of the environment, this term usually means related to nature, but since this approach is also problematic, the adjective "natural" carries with it all the difficulties of the noun "nature".

In science and everyday life, the concept of "wild nature" is sometimes used, which indicates the separation of man from nature and can be considered a derivative of civilization and which is also inevitably associated with arbitrary criteria. For example, wilderness is usually viewed as an area of ​​the earth that people only visit and that they have not changed much from its "natural state", whatever it may be. Wild nature means the dialectical opposite of everything that represents civilization and artificiality. However, this does not provide anything more than a vague definition of the overall view. How much impact humans would have to have on an area for it to no longer be considered a wilderness area. If any human impact on a place excludes it from being classified as a wilderness area, then there is no place on Earth worthy of this name, since it is known, for example, that a chemical such as DDT - dichlorodiphenyltrichloromethylmethane, colloquially "dust" from English. "dust" - powder, dust) are found in the tissues of living beings everywhere, even in the liver of Antarctic penguins. In addition to these naming issues, the values ​​that are associated with the word "wilderness" are also vague and run the gamut from fear and hostility to love and admiration. We can understand the meaning of this definition of wilderness, but it will always be a relative term.

Your pointing to medical ecology Sergey Viktorovich Pushkin , with respect to the query of Andrew Nyongesa , is a very helpful contribution.

Both of you may be interested to learn about the following European network on mental health:

https://www.mhe-sme.org/

This is fiction - not science.

In the (part of) chapter available, you addressed the dynamic in context of 3 works of fiction. These are fictional characters, and the analysis is subjective and casual. Expertise in literature does not establish qualification regarding diagnosis of mental illness.