RE: The reason for most mental illnesses
Nice point. I feel a lot of mental illness and "mental illness" are due to a disconnect with nature. We like to keep Hingis sterile, to pretend they don't rot, many people I grew up with hated to see ducks hanging from their neck in china town because it reminded them of just they were actually eating. We don't all need to know how to plant vegetable soup but we don't even know where our vegetables come from or what kind of work goes into making them. The biggest cause of mental illness though is our unrealistic attitude towards death. We act as if it doesn't exist for as long as we can and then when we are forced to face it we cover it up with whatever we can, treating it as something entirely negative. It's good that we want to survive and live long healthy lives but rejecting the reality of death is not really a way to do that.
This reply may turn into it's own post. X-D