Wednesday, April 04, 2007
10-20 % of adolescents have mental health problems
 Neuropsichiatric problem is the most common illness (right after cardiovascular) at the European nations, and mental health issues are affecting one in every four European citizens (at least once in a lifetime). And, according to Erio Ziglio (head of WHO's European Regional OfficeHead of Investment for Health and Development"), around ONE MILLION youth in Europe suffer from some sort of mental ills.Suicide is the main cause of death among young adults (overwhelmed only by traffic accident), from 15 to 35! And 9 of the 10 list countries with higher suicide rate are in Europe!!!
Rank Country Suicides per 100,000 inhabitants per year:
1 Lithuania 42.0
2 Russia 37.4
3 Belarus 35.0
4 Latvia 34.3
5 Estonia 33.2
6 Hungary 32.1
7 Slovenia 30.9
8 Ukraine 29.4
9 Kazakhstan 28.7
10 Finland 24.3
What can be done?
Good question!
I vote for real measures that make us, as European citizens (and world citizen) to stop concerning and start acting. Peseschkian would say we should start changing ourselves first. Frankl would say mankind should revive its sense of meaning. But what we really need is to give attention to our youth population, hear their thoughts and help them improve their self-steam, making them aware of their manifold potentials and helping them make their limitations a target of improvement, because we should see:
Man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom (Bahá'u'lláh, Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh, p. 161).
Labels: Bahá'u'lláh, Europe, Frankl, meaning, Peseschkian, self-esteem, self-knowledge, suicide, WHO, world unity
Monday, March 26, 2007
The world is but one country
Iran and the rest of the world are in constant dispute... But, amazingly the Associated Press just published a text that starts this way: " The Christian concepts of heaven and hell originate in Iran. The Jewish holy Talmud is littered with Iranian words and ideas. And some Iranians cherish the Israeli city of Haifa as a sacred place". Another sentence you can find in the same text is: " Concepts such as the survival of a person's soul after death, the Day of Judgment, heaven and hell, and holy angels all derive from Iran's surviving Zoroastrian faith, a 3,000-year-old religion that predates Islam and Christianity" Attention: this is not a glorification of the History of Persia, or Iran, or anything else. It is just one of the many things that show us, humans, that our bonds are stronger than we think, that our reality is one, that our world is so strangely interconnected that we cannot deny our co-existence. This is a way of reminding that the Earth is, indeed, one country and humankind its citizen!Labels: human nature, relationships, religion, self-knowledge, world citizenship, world unity
Friday, January 19, 2007
From Poirot to life: the reason for mistery to work out
 I grew up watching Perry Mason solving his mystery crimes on court, and Poirot doing the same on an abandoned house in some eastern nation or in a train moving on... Just like life: moving on towards an incredible and surprising ending. We never knew who was the "one", we never new it because we didn't have all those infos an intels Mason's people gave him during court or Poirot discovered somewhere in between-scenes. But, we could guess!
When Pierce Brosnam played Murder 101 he taught me that the thrill of mystery stories is based on one simple premise: surprise! And now, according to a U.S.-German study – with Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick of Ohio State University and Caterina Keplinger of Hanover University as the co-authors –, understanding mystery novels (on paper or screen) has to do with our self-esteem: the lesser our self-esteem is, the more we need to have our ideas confirmed by our surrounding environment, in this case, by the movie that makes us feel smarter. So, if we believe that one character is the responsible for the mystery and it really happens: we get happier and, perhaps, that could even help the improvement of our self-perception as capable and smart beings. But we can't have movies that we know what will happen at the end, like the cult movie Star Wars 3. The authors seem to agree that we, as humans, enjoy some amount of surprise: everyone seems to enjoy mystery stories, specially those in which we don't have many clues of how the plot will end: just like life!Labels: books, human nature, mistery, movies, plots, self-esteem, self-knowledge
Monday, January 08, 2007
Twofold life (2 of 3)
Only through reflecting, and the positioning between those two extremities, will there be forward steps in the relationship. Better said, why speak of relationships when we can talk about meeting? It is by meeting the other that I see who I am, that I see how I act, how I think, and react. It is through this communication (that in Latin could mean “put in common”) that commitment appears (“sending myself to the other”).  And how do two lives become one, one twofold life? Some great thinkers affirm that the human being is a giving being. That means, the same way it is the nature of the fountain to outpour water, showing itself alive and transmitting life, it is the nature of the human being to endow himself incessantly – endow his richness, endow his time, his energy, his values, his support and his love to all those surrounding him. Nevertheless, it needs preparation; a firm and conscious effort of self-knowledge and knowledge of the other. It is this way that, once more, we come to the meeting. It is in this meeting that the “I” and the “You” transcend to a monadic “We” in which the human being becomes able to overcome his limits. Knowing the other means knowing myself; because I reflect myself on the other, as a shadow that manifests itself only when there is a light to shine.
And this light might well be Love! A love that should not be blind, but, once again, conscious! And the problem comes when love, which is born blind, wants to remain blind– or better – when we insist to remain blind, afraid of knowing the real character of the other, the companion we have idealized, afraid that knowing we no longer want him/her; afraid of being abandoned; afraid of solitude: afraid! Sam Cyrous
(published in Psicologia Actual, Portugal, March 2006).
Labels: communication, couples, fear, human nature, love, relationships, self-knowledge, transcendence
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