Author’s note: In the previous article, the index was referred to as both UPSI and USPI while the naming was being refined. The final name used here is USPI — the ʿUmar Stewardship Performance Index. The underlying idea has not changed; the terminology has simply been standardised however both names remain valid and can be used by authors, academics, public policy think tanks, governments as they deem fit. A note on provenance, for any academic papers emanating from this and the previous article (same as GLP), please refer to this originating article and credit it as Ibrahim Mukherjee (ORCID- https://orcid.org/0009-0003-0067-3715) from this article on the Times of Israel.

This article highlights two key concepts :-

Mental Health as a “public good” is currently underrated.

Pathways to execute USPI. 

Al-ʿAql is a public good

The classical necessities associated with Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah include preservation of religion, life, intellect, lineage or family, and property.

One is ḥifẓ al-ʿaql — protection of the intellect or reason.

We should not lazily translate al-ʿaql as though classical jurists meant the modern diagnostic category “mental health.” They did not.

But its contemporary application necessarily reaches into mental well-being.

A damaged mind cannot reason properly.

A chronically overwhelmed person struggles to flourish.

Severe psychological distress can impair work, learning, family relationships, physical health and participation in society.

WHO now estimates that nearly one in seven people globally lives with a mental disorder, while many still cannot obtain effective treatment. It defines mental health more broadly as a state enabling people to cope with life, realise abilities, learn, work and contribute to their communities. (World Health Organization)

Mental health therefore cannot be treated merely as a hospital problem.

It is simultaneously a housing problem.

An employment problem.

An education problem.

An environmental problem.

And sometimes a war problem.

WHO itself has now moved explicitly toward this whole-of-government view, publishing guidance in 2025 calling for mental health to be integrated across education, employment, social protection, justice, urban development, health and other sectors. (World Health Organization)

USPI simply takes the logic one step further:

if different departments can damage or improve the same human mind, model those effects together before policy is implemented.

We already know what happens when we do not

The argument for digital twins is not that previous governments possessed no data.

Often they possessed enormous amounts of data.

The failure was different.

They optimised one objective while failing to model the system around it.

They built the road without modelling the neighbourhood.

Changed the water source without adequately modelling corrosion and trust.

Moved people out of institutions without always building the community system around them.

Allowed housing policy to operate separately from child health.

they modelled the project, not the human consequence.

Case Study One: the road that cut through a society

The Cross Bronx Expressway was supposed to solve a transport problem.

Increase metropolitan efficiency.

On those terms, a highway appears almost entirely to be an engineering object.

But neighbourhoods are not engineering objects.

New York City’s own contemporary review says construction displaced tens of thousands of people, demolished thousands of homes and divided densely populated communities. The city now describes the expressway as having imposed generations of noise, air pollution, poor health and neighbourhood disconnection. (New York City Government)

The irony is profound.

Decades later, government is spending money to study how to reconnect the communities that infrastructure disconnected.

Recent quantitative research also supports the wider phenomenon: urban highways act as barriers to local social ties and are associated with reduced social connectivity across the communities they divide. (PubMed Central (PMC))

A conventional transport model might have optimised:

A Public Life Twin would have also asked:

How many families are displaced?

What happens to social networks?

What happens to air quality?

The error was not simply “building a road.”

It was optimising the road independently of the life around it.

Case Study Two: Flint — when an infrastructure decision becomes psychological

The Flint water crisis demonstrates something even more important.

A decision about water infrastructure did not remain a water problem.

It became a trust problem.

And eventually a mental-health problem.

Five years after the crisis began, a population-representative study of Flint residents found high levels of presumptive depression and PTSD: 22.1% met criteria for past-year depression and 24.4% for PTSD. Low confidence in official information was itself associated with greater PTSD risk. (JAMA Network)

That last finding matters for USPI.

Government........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)