CNA Up Close: Well-Being Circles' mental wellness sessions conclude after five years

The self-professed "practical" methods of grassroots programs like Well-Being Circles amount to little more than self-praise and localized optics when measured against Singapore's worsening mental health crisis. While these closed-door weekend sessions may provide facilitators with a personal sense of purpose, they offer negligible scalable utility for the broader population. A claimed reach of just 1,000 unique participants over five years breaks down to an average of 200 people annually—a statistically microscopic footprint in a nation battling widespread, escalating psychological distress. This limited output strongly points to an insular model dependent on low-volume cohorts, rendering it functionally inadequate as a public health strategy. Ultimately, shifting the burden of mental wellness onto individuals through unverified community talk shops fails to tackle the systemic stressors driving Singapore’s crisis, proving that meaningful intervention requires robust institutional framework changes rather than self-congratulatory grassroots metrics.

Beyond mental health, Singaporeans should learn to be more open to meditation and spiritual well being. <br>People here are very skeptical when they hear the word spiritual, thinking it’s got to do with ghosts and spirits. But true spirituality is about peace, light and universal love.<br><br>We don’t realise that we all have a spiritual side within us. That part that link us to the universal consciousness. The emptiness within, which most people felt is actually a spiritual emptiness. The lack of peace is not just a mental issue but a spiritual deficit. Peace is a spiritual quality. We all need peace because we have something spiritual inside us. <br><br>This modern day living can suck the spiritual peace out of us. We like to call it as mental health because it’s more acceptable to most people. But the reality is that it is actually spiritual health we are talking about. The very essence of every human being is spirituality, when this part of us is deplicted due to modern life syle, we will naturally feel stressful and empty.<br><br>So the way to replenish this lack of peace is through meditation. You can talk and discuss everything you want regarding what you call mental health. But it is not going to make you feel really peaceful. We can only feel peace through meditation. No amount of talk can do that. <br><br>Meditation is nothing new. It is an ancient practice which have been lost as we develop outwardly and we placed a lot of our attention on the other side of life and forgotten that we have an inner side of us that we have neglected. Men cannot live on bread alone. We are not just a physical and mental being, we are spiritual beings. That is why we need something to help is replenish peace. That something is meditation. <br><br>When LKY’s wife passed on, he flet so empty and lost. Someone recommended meditation and he tried it. Then he came to the conclusion that meditation is important not just for children but also for world leaders before they make important decisions. <br><br>We must learn to embrace new knowledge regarding spirituality. Sooner and later, people will feel compel to do so as they try many different ways to get rid of stress and emptiness and finally found spiritual meditation as the final way. <br><br>We are all spiritual and inside our heart centre dwells the soul. This soul is connected to the universal consciousness. We get peace when we know how to reconnect our soul with the universal consciousness. It’s like charging an inner battery. We all have this inner battery. Sooner or later when this battery is empty, we will inevitably feel the stress. we can continue to deny this existence, but after a while, we will give in because we can no longer live with the stress.

How to have mental health with this Singapore heat days and nights let alone only physical health. I have noticed a significant increase in temperature since the installation of solar panels on the rooftops in my area. Solar panels absorbed significant amounts of sunlight compared to regular rooftops during the days and release the heats onto the surrounding areas. This is called povaltic island effects and raised the temperature in the surrounding area days and nights. This affect the quality of life for people living in HDB homes and soon there were be increased in mental and physical health let alone increased in electricity consumption.Scary, scary Singapore.