In this manifesto, based on 50+ years of research and referencing 100+ scientific articles, I am going to convince you that alexithymia - lack of bodily and emotional awareness - is probably the most overlooked mental health factor responsible for significant suffering and negative health outcomes, and that it should be actively screened for, and solutions should be developed for it. By the end, you should have a good idea of what that word means, how it works, who is affected by it, how it develops, what parts of life it affects, why now is the right time to address it, and how you can help.
Mental disorders are the leading cause of disability, causing 1 in 6 years lived with disability. The year 2022 was the first time mental health (36%) was ranked higher than cancer (34%) in people's top health concerns.
Why do we struggle to move the needle on the mental health crisis?
We could discuss many systemic (and totally valid and important) issues, but there’s one problem that seems gravely overlooked even though it could improve both acute care and prevention.
It’s the fact that most of our mental health approaches are still informed by mind-body distinction. The vast majority of the focus is on cognitive - mind-oriented aspects and little on the somatic - body-oriented aspects.
This creates some interesting conundrums. For instance, most therapeutic approaches assume that people can understand and communicate what they feel - it’s the basic building block of therapy, exemplified by the epitomic question “How does that make you feel?”
This seemingly basic question carries multiple implications though - that the person knows what they feel, therefore has a general awareness of emotions, and therefore also so-called interoceptive awareness of their body, meaning they can perceive physical sensations inside their body, which are the most common clues people use to determine how they viscerally feel. And that would mean they have developed emotional schemas, which partly implies that they believe emotions are valuable and useful in life.
Such assumptions are, turns out, very often not true.
Let me illustrate on a specific example.