Who is most prone to having mental illness?

Some mental illness is genetic, some spontaneous. However, I believe many of the neuroses we see today, particularly anxiety disorders and depression, eating disorders, etc, are products of strong societal messages coupled with the fact that we have stopped teaching people how to be resilient and how to use logic and reason. Our society encourages FEELINGS, not "THINKINGS".

The anxious person feels anxiety whether it is warranted or not. Since primitive emotions and drives are held in much higher esteem than logic and reason in our society, the anxious person believes that what they feel is reality, and do not know how to use logic and reason to overcome. Also, our society rewards the "victim" not the "victor" (except in sports), with extra attention.

That extra attention can be very appealing to people in such a disjointed and ill-bonded society such as ours. Chat rooms, forum boards, can provide a community (though based on illness) that is very appealing, especially to the lonely. This provides no incentive to get better--if they get better, they lose their "community".

Our society encourages finding one's identity in weakness or trauma. Therefore someone stops saying "I am a teacher...who happens to have OCD" and soon becomes "I am OCD". That subtle change of wording means a significant change might have happened in the psyche of the speaker--they may have taken OCD to be a trait of "them".

Then we add in the pervasive idea that adults cannot or should not be responsible for their own successes AND FAILURES, and that breeds the concept that "I am not trusted to act like an adult. I cannot do anything for myself, and if I mess up, someone will bail me out as if I was a child". It is a devastating concept for an adult mind, and I think we see the fruits of that in our society.

Interestingly, people can learn resilience in some areas, but not others. For example, someone who had health issues since childhood is "used to them". They may not be as devastated by a health report that would devastate someone who had always been healthy and strong.

However, that person might not have the same emotional resilience when it comes to, say, finances, that that strong person developed from growing up poor. I know of one person who truly struggles with what to eat for supper, but easily deals with major catastrophes. That person learned that she was resilient in a catastrophe, but for some reason developed fear over food choices.

Of course, each person is different in what is a trigger for them. Each person will have his or her own level of "overall resilience", as well as what they have gone through and learned. This is why it is very important for society to stop treating adults like children--people never learn how strong they can be until they need to be.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.