Lionel Antonio Chevez, EWBI Cluster Director of Latin America
Emotional health is not ‘a-nice-to-have’ but ‘a-must-have’ state of well-being to cope with life’s challenges.
Today, as Western societies boast their highest levels of development and technological advances, they also face an inconvenient paradox - an increase of psychological morbidity in their population. However, this is not to say that non-Western societies live in bliss.
In fact, I see with great dismay how in Latin America, urban and rural families adopt foreign patterns of consumption and lifestyle beamed into their homes by global TV networks and the internet. These non-local patterns bring new complexities to their lives, which include new clusters of co-morbidities that overburden their health systems.
Furthermore, among indigenous people of the Americas, new co-morbidities create barriers to traditional healers who, for more than ten thousand years, were able to manage their tribal wellness.
This disruption forces populations to disregard traditional ways of wellness, delegitimize tribal healers, shun natural pharmacology, and worst, it furthers the attitude of abdication by the locals, and neo-colonization by the dominant foreign pattern.
To counteract this, governments, NGOs and citizens at large, must ensure that national health policies and health data includes well-being indicators as a baseline, not as an add-on.
In the same way that we track unemployment levels, birth rate and so forth, we must include levels of emotional wellness in each family, street, neighbourhood and nation.
Indigenous wellness also needs to be looked at with the historic and cultural context in mind. This can only be done by disaggregating this data, and thus, truly inferring meaning to it.
The EWBI may attempt to seek this data from indigenous peoples in their jurisdiction.
We are privileged to live in an era of convergence of great technology, interconnectivity and global approach to human problems.
With the inception of the SDGs, we, the citizens of the world can be partners in solving our own problems and baking into the process our own means and meaning.
Our challenges are complex, our approach, therefore, must be pluralistic and inclusive. Our collective brain can solve most challenges, if we let it. The time is now.
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