Title:Mental Health

How we foster wellness within

Where to begin on mental health, a topic that truly touches everyone? Children’s literature offers an avenue. As a child I enjoyed the lilting poetry of A. A. Milne, who covered important subjects like curiosity, disobedience, and playing in puddles.

Today I wonder how Winnie the Pooh and friends would fare in our world. It’s not hard to imagine the disorders we would assign them. The gloomy donkey Eeyore seems to suffer from depression. In direct contrast, the bouncing Tigger offers a textbook example of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Rabbit exhibits some serious compulsive tendencies. And there’s Pooh himself, described as “a bear of little brain.”

How would we help these beloved but imperfect characters navigate school and society? Recess with Tigger would be a lot of fun, but he might be disruptive during storytime. Would mindfulness work, or is medication the answer?

According to the CDC, one out of six children ages 2-8 have a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder. What does a healthy mental state even look like? The extreme ends are clear, but how are we defining “normal” today? Is that range too narrow? Does social media make it even narrower, towards a perfection that no one can achieve?

In researching for this magazine over the past few months, I’ve had a few shrinks on my calendar, as one of them jokingly described it. I know from both professional and personal experience how deeply they care about the well-being of individuals and of society at large. I see how they reach out, particularly to the most vulnerable, those who suffer at the margins. The children we don’t see at the playground, faces on the streets we try to ignore, the incarcerated, the isolated.

In this issue, we bring you just a tiny slice of Georgetown’s work in the sphere of mental health. What we don’t mention can fill a library. Consider this the first part in an ongoing series as we take a look at physician wellness and burnout, student mental health, the neurobiology of altruism, and global cultural approaches to human well-being.

The good news is that each day is new, and as Eeyore says, the rain stops eventually. The community of friends in The Hundred Acre Wood accept and support one another, despite their differences. Our relationships matter, we are all imperfect and in formation, and wellness is within reach as we turn both inward and to each other—to something that transcends and connects us all—in hope.