I want to share with fellow psychonauts and psychonaut students some feelings about the current state of mental health and mental health awareness.

The level of connectivity and access to communication that a human can experience today is great. The ramifications of our words, actions and encounters are difficult to control or understand. With our communication tools came tools to exploit them, and tools to counter exploitation, to no end.

For us and the younger generations, the 'hardness' of the objects of human creation has become softer and softer, to the point where they start to be made of uncertainty itself.

Therefore, the things that concern us also change, from the material to the immaterial, to the realm of possibility, for which our human brain is very well tuned.

Mental health is then given more importance, by those interested. It is no longer the point to give words to the objects of nature and the greater mind, but our objective is to understand the source of where the words come from. We can now become familiar with the inner layers of our own experience, with the consciousness generating mechanisms.

Since our brains are powerful learning tools, we can learn healthy patterns as well as unhealthy ones. Of course, healthy for an invidividual can be unhealthy for a collective, or healthy for a collective can be unhealthy for a small part of the collective as well. What we are trying to learn, is what is the truth that allows us to navigate experience in a way that we are content with? The model of the truth will continuously improve, to no end, untill the model will lose access to the attention it needs for improvement.

Therefore, it's possible to never attain true 'objectivity', due to our limited experience. There will always be compromise, untill the next improvement. We can however collectively, and with computational tools, generate a map of objectivity in a way that for our species, it could seem like a never-ending well of objectivity. In other words, Moore's law and mental health are no longer in sync. A human person, born human, is born in a world with enough computational resources to remove a large part of the uniqueness of individual experience.

The resources of knowledge and objectivity of our age of hyperconnectivity is enough to allow easy access to mental health. Mental health is still a mostly unsolved problem as of today, but it seems not because of the lack of knowledge about the concept. It's not only a topic that's not discussed, but in some places, a weapon to be used against the less wise.

What do you think the barriers are to mental health awareness?

Schools, there's little attention to the subject. The minimal time that is reserved for the subject is poorly utilized, not very effective. At least where I live but it is very likely a general shortcoming. I never got a hint of: how to deal with sorrow, with guild feelings, with success or fails, ...
Young people come out of schools mentally deficient, a disaster awaiting sometimes and their parents were raised the same, so 'it's the parents task' is not very easy.

Then there's a market waiting for them, who know the deficit and are all too happy to take their money and 'help' them out. In this vast commercialized mental market it becomes hard to see the gold, they are all labelled very appealing.
By the time people have found a reasonable fitting section they have already a trace of mental havoc in their lives.

If not given mental advice itself in schools, then they could prepare the young students on what is out there, drawing a nice picture of what is what doing what for what reasons, so they can pick much faster a right section because they got an overview.

2 cents.

Just like for any other type of awareness - fear. Fear of feeling responsible for those less fortunate; fear of being labeled as "crazy" if you come out with your problem, even with some mild non-harmful mental illness; fear and rejection of "crazy" people, just like kids reject broken toys.

Fear is what makes us weak, by rejecting others for being simply what they are. Fear makes us turn around and walk away instead of reaching and helping.