Building Resilience in a Turbulent World

Family & Relationships
Building Resilience in a Turbulent World
Summer 2008 Issue



“I know that I need to deal with it to heal,” says a woman we’ll call Ramona. “But sometimes I just have to take a step away from it too. I have experienced very painful flashbacks. The memories get so vivid; I literally, physically feel the pain again.” Ramona suffers from depression and has also been diagnosed with PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), the result of childhood experiences she prefers not to describe. Though Ramona often feels alone, according to the World Health Organization she is not. Far too many others are caught in the same struggle.

In its 2007 World Health Statistics report, the WHO calls depression “an important global public health problem” by virtue of both its prevalence and its far-reaching effects. Even worse, the WHO insists there is new research to establish that PTSD occurs more often and carries far more serious consequences than was previously believed. Such reports feed the widespread perception that stress- and anxiety-related depression has skyrocketed in recent decades.

To complicate matters, terrorist attacks have affected Western nations more directly than ever before, and governments and media do not seem terribly reluctant to play on resulting public fear.

Because of such considerations, communities would love to know how to prepare people for psychologically stressful events and to increase the potential for recovery. Researchers, in turn, are busily working to find out what traits are shared by those people who demonstrate a greater capacity to cope, in the hope of helping others to become more resilient to stress, trauma and depression.

But is it really possible to effect human resilience? Aren’t some personalities naturally just more optimistic than others? Can anything be done on the individual level to promote robust emotional health in an increasingly turbulent world?

It’s true that some people are born with a naturally positive outlook, and that optimism is seen as a key factor in resilience. But researchers now know that new experiences and supportive relationships can literally change brain structure. This has led psychologists to understand that optimism and resilience can be built, and that adults as well as children can, in effect, be inoculated against depression—at least to some extent.

Despite this good news, however, building resilience is not as personally heroic an achievement as Western individualist culture and these new discoveries may lead us to believe. One doesn’t become the type of person who can weather adversity simply by adopting a fiercely independent resolve to single-handedly pull oneself up by a pair of bootstraps. In fact, say researchers, building resilience is nearly impossible outside of the protective influence of positive interpersonal relationships.

Louis Cozolino, author of The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, concurs. “For most of the past, people lived in groups of 50 to 70 and there were multiple generations and multiple people we were interconnected with,” he told Vision. “But in societies like our own, the emphasis is on individualism. I suspect that the increase of mental illness that we’re seeing is related to that factor. It’s hard to prove it because we can’t go back in time, and we can only guess that there really is more depression today than there used to be. But we can make a compelling case for it.”

In addition to Western individualist ideals—or perhaps because of them—there are other factors that contribute to the perceived rise in the prevalence of depression and PTSD.
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