Mental Health, the Great Challenge of an Ever-Longer Life
The real question is no longer just how long we are going to live, but whether we will know how to sustain, mentally and emotionally, all that time we have gained.
This week I was listening to a podcast in which Dr. Sari Arponen, a specialist in microbiota and metabolic health, reflected on the relationship between our habits, our mind, and how we age. Shortly afterward I spoke with director Rubén Ríos, who has just finished a documentary about mental health. And almost at the same time I started reading a book with a striking title: Mental Health Does Not Exist, Health Does, by psychiatrist José Luis Marín.
Three very different perspectives that agree on one thing: mental health is much more complex than it seems.
All of this led me to a question that carries more and more weight when we talk about living longer: if life expectancy has kept growing, are we really prepared for everything that implies on a psychological level?
Living longer is not just a matter of physical health. It means going through more stages, facing more changes, saying goodbye to more people, and also having more opportunities to reinvent ourselves. Along that long and changing journey, taking care of the mind becomes one of the great challenges of our time.
Are we facing a mental health epidemic?
The numbers are striking. According to the World Health Organization, more than 280 million people around the world live with depression, one of the leading causes of disability globally. After the COVID pandemic, cases of anxiety and depression increased by 25% worldwide during the first year, according to a review published in The Lancet.
But some experts raise an uncomfortable question: are we really facing more mental illnesses, or are we calling “disorder” things that used to simply be part of life?
Talking about emotions is no longer taboo, and that is enormous progress. But psychiatrist José Luis Marín warns of a troubling trend: more and more everyday human experiences—feeling sad, going through a crisis, having doubts about the future—are interpreted as possible clinical problems. Knowing how to distinguish between the normal suffering of life and an illness that needs treatment is essential. Not to minimize anyone’s pain, but so as not to lose sight of the fact that not every discomfort is a pathology.
The trap of permanent well-being
Walk into any bookstore or open Instagram: the emotional well-being market is huge. Books about anxiety, self-esteem, or purpose in life fill the shelves. Psychologists, coaches, and public communicators talk every day about how to manage emotions, heal wounds, or find inner balance. We have never had so much information about what we feel. And that, in principle, is a good thing. But there is a trap. All this well-being content sometimes conveys an implicit message: that any discomfort has a quick solution and that feeling bad is something that should not happen. And that is not so.
Sadness, uncertainty, fear, or frustration are part of life, not mistakes to be corrected. Learning to live with those emotions—without ignoring them, but without dramatizing them either—may be one of the most useful skills for those who are going to live eighty, ninety, or one hundred years.
The body also affects the mind
For a long time, psychological problems were thought to belong exclusively to the head. Today we know it is not that simple. The brain is connected to the whole body: to how we sleep, to what we eat, to how much we move, and even to the bacteria that inhabit our gut.
Dr. Sari Arponen sums it up in four basic pillars: sleeping well, moving regularly, eating healthily, and taking care of the gut microbiota.
Science supports this idea. Studies published in specialized journals show that physical exercise can reduce symptoms of depression in a way comparable to some medications in mild or moderate cases. The SMILES clinical trial showed that improving diet by following a Mediterranean pattern can relieve depression in people who suffer from it. And there is growing evidence that the gut and the brain communicate in ways we are only just beginning to understand.
Put another way: taking care of the mind begins with taking care of the body.
Mental health does not begin at seventy
You do not begin to take care of mental health at seventy. It has been built throughout life: in childhood, in adolescence, and in how we have learned to relate to others and to ourselves.
The emotional bonds we had as children, the experiences that shaped us, and the emotional tools we developed throughout life directly influence how we will face psychological challenges when we are older. Research in human development has been confirming this for decades.
When art opens the conversation
Sometimes a story told in the first person reaches deeper. Galician director Rubén Ríos knows this well. His documentary Expedition mental gathers real testimonies from people who have experienced psychological suffering from the inside: their fears, their falls, and their ability to get back up again.
The film is shown in universities, educational centers, and public spaces. Its creators explain that it has helped many people speak for the first time about how they feel and, in some cases, to ask for help in critical moments or to avoid suicide.
Because behind every statistic there is a human story. And listening to it sometimes changes everything.
A lesson from two thousand years ago
In the middle of all this modern conversation about well-being, there is an old idea that remains surprisingly useful: Stoicism.
Stoic philosophers, such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, defended something that seems simple but is very difficult to practice learning to distinguish between what depends on us and what does not. According to them, much of human suffering comes from insisting on controlling things we cannot control death, illness, what others think, the passing of time.
Their proposal was not to resign ourselves and do nothing. It was to accept reality as it is and act with what is actually in our hands.
Curiously, some current psychological therapies share this same idea. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, known as ACT, does not seek to eliminate distress but to change the relationship we have with it. And studies on resilience show that people who are able to accept adversity and adapt to it tend to have better mental health throughout their lives.
This does not mean that serious mental disorders do not exist or do not need treatment. They do and denying that would be a mistake. But it does mean that learning to go through difficulties, instead of running away from them, is one of the strongest ways to prepare for a long life.
Living longer… and living better
Living longer is one of humanity’s great achievements. But it forces us to ask questions that were not once so urgent: how do we want to live those years? Are we prepared for everything they imply?
Longevity is not just adding years to the calendar. It is learning to inhabit a longer life, with its joys, its losses, and its transformations.
For that, it is not enough to take care of the body or trust in medical advances. We also need to take care of the mind, cultivate the bonds that sustain us, and find meaning in what we live through.
Because a longer life is not automatically a fuller life.
The question is no longer just how long we are going to live. It is whether we will know how to sustain, mentally and emotionally, all that time we have gained.
