Welcome to The Man Talk Show. I'm Connor Beaton, and on this midweek mini episode, we are going to talk about the looming mental health crisis.

So I want to just start off by reading you something that's going to point to part of the issue that we are experiencing.

And then I'm going to get into some of the data and research and some of my own speculation

and understanding of why this mental health crisis is unfolding besides the obvious reasons

of COVID and lockdown and quarantine.

But I'm going to look at a little bit of a bigger picture here.

So here we go.

And this is actually from Bill Plotkin's book, Nature and the Human Soul.

In contemporary culture, the rare myths that we share with our children tend to be few and

unimaginative. We have Disney movies that degrade archetypal stories into sitcoms and shallow

heart-warmers. We have Hollywood sci-fi and

action films that have traded the original richness of mythology for the endless portrayals

of superficial male adolescent heroism and the sexual objectification of women. We have tasteless

and insipid television stories and ads designed to raise

profits, not children. The enchantment of the world has been stifled and corrupted. We do still have

fairy tales, but all too often, they are contemporary, sanitized versions of ancient stories, the invaluable

dark elements having been removed or minimized, some of the deepest mysteries and keys to our

individual destinies are hidden in those shadowy places.

Seek out then the older, original fairy tales, such as those compiled by the Brothers Grimm.

This in some way alludes to the larger picture of what is happening in our mainstream culture,

in our mainstream media, in our societies around the world, but especially being amplified in North American

culture right now. With the global crisis happening, with lockdown, with quarantine,

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