Psychological suffering belongs to all of us. Imagine the blood pressure of an entire population being measured. People with an average blood pressure are less likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke. But as the average blood pressure of the population gets higher, the number of heart attacks increases as well.

Psychological suffering: The population mean drives the extreme

That’s because the average blood pressure getting higher results in more people reaching the ‘extreme level’ of high blood pressure at which the risks are the highest.

This principle – “the population mean drives the extreme” – also applies to psychological suffering. It’s been scientifically proven that the more people within a society show symptoms of anxiety and depression, the more often full blown psychiatric disorders occur, like clinical depression and anxiety disorders. This means that the average level of vulnerability in a society decides the quantity of severe psychological problems.

Psychological disorders are linked to ordinary human emotions

This means that severe cases of an illness are linked to the condition of people who appear to to be healthy. And furthermore, we discovered the same principal in psychotic disorders. Twenty years ago we already demonstrated that the more people within a society have a mild vulnerability to psychosis (for example, they might be a bit suspicious or have delusional thoughts), the more serious psychotic disorders occur, like schizophrenia. This means that psychological disorders consist of a continuum, a spectrum. What we call psychological disorders are in fact linked to the ordinary human emotions that we all experience.

Think about anxiety, gloominess, or suspicion

When these feelings get stronger, they sometimes develop into specific types of psychological disorders. But these extreme manifestations often start out as more subtle, more ordinary emotions we are all familiar with. This helps us understand that psychological suffering isn’t something that ‘only happens to others’. It lives in everyone of us, in the way we are sensitive to vulnerability, and it is strongly linked to the human experience.

Psychosis is an interesting example of this

We discovered that in urban areas, where the population is denser, the chance of psychological disorders is bigger. The more people residing per square meter, the higher the risk of new cases of psychosis. This is probably caused by the complexity of the social environment in cities, that can sometimes be experienced as threatening.

Psychotic disorders in rural areas

What’s remarkable, is that not only the occurrence of psychotic disorders is higher in cities, but that all the people in rural areas, even the ones without any diagnosis, experience subtle psychotic disorders more often than people in quieter areas. For example, people can feel slightly suspicious of others, or feel like other people are talking about them. Maybe they are hearing voices, or feeling depressed or anxious for no obvious reason. Even though these are not cases of actual psychosis, it shows that the mild symptoms can turn into severe mental health issues.

This shows us again that “the mean drives the extreme”: the higher the average level of mildly psychotic experiences within a population, the more severe psychotic disorders we witness. This insight helps us understand that we have to acknowledge that psycological suffering is something that affects all of us – not just those who have severe symptoms. It’s about the state of the mental health of the whole society.

And therefore, psychological suffering belongs in essence to all of us

By acknowledging this, we can get a better understanding of how important it is to allow vulnerability and mental health to exist in our society, and to prevent that the pressure on people with average levels of mental health issues drives us  to extreme and severe cases of suffering.

Translated from Dutch by SGM Taplin