Cultural Practices You Didn’t Learn in School (Part III)

The Collapse of Collective Caregiving and Its Impact on Mental Health

By Sasha Tanoushka

Here’s something we rarely talk about:

Most of our mental health crisis isn’t happening in individual brains. It’s happening in broken social structures.

Humans evolved in collectives, not nuclear families. For most of human history, caregiving was distributed.

Children grew up surrounded by adults.

Parents weren’t isolated.

Elders stayed integrated.

Emotional labor was shared.

In places like Sri Lanka, historical household systems (including practices like fraternal polyandry) unintentionally preserved this:

Multiple adults.

One home.

Shared responsibility.

It wasn’t perfect.

But it created attachment redundancy.

No single person carried everything.

Then modernity happened

Colonial legal systems (including those imposed by the British Empire ) standardized:

• monogamous marriage

• nuclear households

• individual property ownership

• isolated parenting

Over time, we normalized:

• solo caregiving

• romantic exclusivity as emotional survival

• privatized stress

• separated generations

And we called it progress.

The nervous system didn’t agree

Now look around…..

Parents are burned out.

Elders are isolated.

Children are dysregulated.

Adults are touch-starved.

Depression and anxiety are everywhere.

Not because humans suddenly became fragile.

Because we removed the village.

What this looks like clinically

When collective caregiving disappears, we see:

• chronic overwhelm

• attachment anxiety

• relational dependency

• emotional exhaustion

• nervous-system collapse masked as “mental illness”

People aren’t failing.

They’re trying to regulate inside structures that were never designed for biological safety.

This is why romance can’t save us.

We keep hoping love will fix what community used to hold. It can’t.

One partner cannot replace:

• multiple caregivers

• shared labor

• intergenerational presence

• collective regulation

That’s not fair to anyone involved.

A gentler future

Healing doesn’t mean going backward.

It means remembering forward.

It means rebuilding:

• chosen family

• community care

• relational honesty

• shared nervous-system responsibility

Whether you’re monogamous, polyamorous, or somewhere in between, the real medicine isn’t the structure.

It’s connection density.

It’s support redundancy.

It’s not doing life alone.

Why this matters to me

At ThisCourse ™️ we don’t treat symptoms.

We teach nervous-system literacy.

Because once you understand that your body evolved for community, not isolation, shame dissolves. And choice becomes possible again.