> It's made me believe that modern psychiatry is myopiclly focused on identifying and treating symptoms and largely ignores the avoidable causes of those symptoms.
I disagree with that, even though I agree a lot of mental issues are heavily environmental. The reason psychiatry tries to work around them is that the environment of modern civilization is what we have, it's not going to change (easily), and in the meantime, people need to live somehow. Backpacking retreats are a cool hack if you can afford it regularly, but most people can't - they get maybe one longer stretch of free time a year.
The environment we live in is wholly unlike the environment we're adapted to. I'm not sure if we can or want to get meaningfully closer to the old days to alleviate our mental pains - for all our adaptations, the ancestral environment sucked hard compared to today, and modern civilization fixed at least as much as it broke.
I disagree with that, even though I agree a lot of mental issues are heavily environmental. The reason psychiatry tries to work around them is that the environment of modern civilization is what we have, it's not going to change (easily), and in the meantime, people need to live somehow. Backpacking retreats are a cool hack if you can afford it regularly, but most people can't - they get maybe one longer stretch of free time a year.
The environment we live in is wholly unlike the environment we're adapted to. I'm not sure if we can or want to get meaningfully closer to the old days to alleviate our mental pains - for all our adaptations, the ancestral environment sucked hard compared to today, and modern civilization fixed at least as much as it broke.