Mental Health, Social Flows and Postmodern Societies: Challenges for Adult Education and Social Psychiatry

 

Abstract

Postmodern societies are characterized by rapid change, global interdependence, and an unprecedented intensity of social, technological, and cultural flows. These transformations profoundly affect mental health, redefining the concepts of normality, vulnerability, and resilience. Drawing on perspectives from social psychiatry and anthropology, this article explores how postmodern flows shape psychological distress, stigma, and emerging forms of psychopathology. Particular attention is given to long-term and intergenerational effects of social stressors, the role of resilience, and the implications for mental health services operating in conditions of permanent emergency. The article highlights the relevance of adult education, community learning, and policy-oriented approaches in promoting mental health literacy, social inclusion, and the protection of vulnerable groups within postmodern societies.

From Postmodernity to Flows: A Synthetic Framework

Postmodernity describes a cultural and social configuration produced by multiple paradigm shifts occurring within relatively short periods of time. While rooted in industrial capitalism, postmodern societies have evolved into complex systems shaped by globalization, digital technologies, accelerated mobility, and continuous crisis within the bio-psycho-social model of health.

Within this context, the concept of human normality becomes increasingly unstable. Emerging forms of psychological distress can be interpreted either through traditional diagnostic frameworks or as early signals of new forms of human adaptation. Neuroscience and social psychiatry converge in highlighting the fundamentally pro-social nature of the brain and the importance of embedding neuro-evolutionary perspectives within social and cultural contexts. Resilience emerges not as an individual trait alone, but as a dynamic process shaped by environments, relationships, and collective resources.

The notion of flows provides a key interpretative lens for understanding postmodern societies. Flows refer to the high variability of information, events, technologies, goods, and movements that individuals and communities are continuously exposed to. While some levels of exposure are tolerable or even adaptive, others contribute to stress, disorganization, and mental suffering. Long-term exposure to adverse social conditions has effects that extend beyond individuals, influencing subsequent generations through cultural transmission and biological mechanisms, including epigenetic processes.

In highly dynamic and unequal social systems, relational breakdowns, economic insecurity, housing instability, migration-related stress, and environmental degradation weaken social bonds and erode both individual and collective resilience. These dynamics contribute to the growing multifactorial complexity of mental disorders in postmodern societies.

Conclusions: The Culture of Tomorrow

Postmodern societies are navigating what Zygmunt Bauman described as a long and uncertain transition from nation-states toward an imagined global community. At present, this transition produces fragmentation, instability, and systemic risk. The complexity of contemporary life concerns governments and institutions worldwide, yet coherent and credible future-oriented visions remain scarce.

Human beings continue to rely on shared narratives to construct identity and guide behavior. However, after decades of rapid transformation that have not substantially altered power structures, many citizens perceive democratic systems as disoriented or broken. The emerging culture of tomorrow already shows signs of political confusion, reduced critical engagement with reality, and the transformation of individuals into passive consumers and uncritical data processors.

Psychological research describes postmodern Western societies as increasingly populated by more isolated and defensive individuals, characterized by market-oriented egocentrism, exploratory transgression, and socially normalized substance use. These tendencies coexist with growing populations living in social interstices, exposed to poverty, marginalization, and chronic stress. According to the World Health Organization, such contexts are likely to become reservoirs of psychopathology, especially as future waves of globalization disproportionately affect vulnerable countries and groups.

At the same time, psychiatry itself faces a crisis of credibility, shaped by market pressures, the overload and uneven quality of scientific production, and challenges to evidence-based medicine. Mental health professionals are not immune to stigmatizing attitudes, which may emerge early during training. These factors risk weakening public trust in science and mental health institutions.

The social contract between psychiatry and society therefore becomes central. Mental health services are required not only to respond to emergencies, but also to engage with complex ethical, social, and cultural issues, including media-driven cases, new social expectations, and debates previously considered outside the psychiatric domain. In this sense, the future of social psychiatry increasingly coincides with that of global psychiatry. While this represents a demanding challenge, it also offers an opportunity to redefine mental health practice as a key contributor to social cohesion, inclusion, and human well-being.

EPALe Key Takeaways

• Postmodern societies expose individuals and communities to unprecedented social and informational flows.

• Mental health is shaped by long-term, multifactorial, and intergenerational processes, not only by individual vulnerability.

• Concepts of normality and pathology must be rethought in relation to changing social environments.

• Stigma and discrimination are not limited to mental illness but affect all forms of perceived diversity.

• Vulnerable groups are disproportionately affected by economic, environmental, and social instability.

• Mental health services operate under permanent emergency conditions and require systemic, not reductive, responses.

• Adult education plays a crucial role in strengthening resilience, critical thinking, and mental health literacy.

Implications for Adult Education and Policy

For adult education professionals, EPALe stakeholders, and policymakers, these reflections highlight the need to:

• promote mental health literacy as a core component of lifelong learning;

• integrate social, cultural, and emotional competencies into adult education curricula;

• address stigma and discrimination through critical media literacy and participatory learning;

• support community-based approaches that strengthen collective resilience;

• ensure that mental health policies consider structural determinants such as poverty, mobility, and environmental change.

In postmodern societies shaped by continuous flows and uncertainty, adult education becomes a strategic space for restoring meaning, agency, and social bonds.

(inedit partial translation and sintesys of chapter n.39 La psichiatria sociale nelle società postmoderne by P. Cianconi, F. Tomasi, L. Starace of the Italian volume: La Psichiatria Sociale in Italia - The Social Psychiatry in Italy 2020, Pacini Editore)

#Social Psychology, #Mental Health, #Stigma, #Sociology of Mental Health and Illness, #Postmodernism, #Social Stigma, #Postmodernisme,

#Concepts of Modernism and Postmodernism, #Social and Cultural Psychiatry, #Psychiatry