The world we live in is torn apart in many ways. However, the more great concern is mental health. Mental health is a serious issue. When someone is going through upheaval at the mental level the consequences are that society ultimately breaks down or the immediate environment the person is living within becomes disjointed. Never was there such a time as ours when people are suffering from mental issues.
The 21st century is really an age of people grappling with mental issues. But why is it the case? You will think that since the 20th century was a world that saw a plethora and surge of psychology, by this time the world would have been sound in mind. Alas, we know that is not the case.
Psychology and its various branches, some people are coming to believe that, has messed up people. After a big dose of psychology and psychotherapy as well as psychiatry during the 20th century period we are here in a far worse situation.
We cannot continue along similar lines that psychology is in sine qua non. Sine qua non is a Latin phrase and I suppose it captures the essence of what I want to express out of frustration. Sometimes words and the cream of what they mean are sometimes lost in translation or interpretation. Anyway, what sine qua non-means is describing something that is indispensable and essential.
What I have just said above is exactly how people see psychology and psychologists especially applied psychologists like psychotherapists and psychiatrists.
Psychology has simply become a way of life.
I do acknowledge psychology and its various branches. I also acknowledge its importance and contributions to human society in some ways. But I do believe that it is not sin qua non. There must be a balance.
And let me introduce you to my view on the whole matter. I believe at the primary life, at the very heart of the individual and the society, should be history, not the psychological speculations of Sigmund Freud or Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Therapy of Carl Rogers and so on.
What people need is to be connected to their evolution, their source: history. And that is the most important thing to really begin to start the healing process or promote mental health. I belief that the great works of Eugen Weber are in some ways essential to where we are now. Eugen Weber was such a great historian and he comes from diverse backgrounds that kind of set him apart. He has spent more than 30 years at the help and as a professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles. A period that also saw him being the Dean of Philosophy or what is known as the College of Letters and Science.
We have done the hard work of distilling and sifting through hundreds of pages of his work to come up with the cream that can serve as an iron tonic for the modern man and woman.
As Eugen Weber has said: “The true historian must join the people he is studying and the age they lived within. He or she must be able to understand their mindset and their times. Perhaps sympathy may be too much to ask, but the true historian must definitely have empathy. Empathy is essential. The duty and the responsibility of a great historian should be not just looking at but “feeling with and vibrating with” the times, the people, and ideas in the light of the ever-changing world”.
Eugen Weber further says: History is about men and women who live in time and place. Time and place affect them, and they affect their times. Our picture of the whole depends upon its several parts. The general picture depends on its parts. The general picture makes no sense if it is divorced from its several parts. Historians historicize. They take words, works, acts, and figures, and place them in context.
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