I think the tribal society would be better for mental health. It is how humans evolved to live. You have to be raised in it from birth to collect the skills you need for it though. Not something one can switch to very easily.
Modern society is so far removed from how we adapted as a species. It is no surprise so many struggle with it to varying degrees large and small. Depression and obesity are some examples I'd say of modern life ills. We live in this society where we are sedentary all day and constantly in fight or flight response due to work pressures. We were built to forage and hunt over some 8 miles a day. It is no wonder many of us are still fat and sad in this modern world of supposed abundance.
There are some opinions out there of agriculture being this sort of "wrong turn" of our species (1). Yes we could sustain great numbers, but with agriculture we introduced zoonotic disease vectors. Widespread environmental damage replacing native species with crops, and the ecological disturbance that would result from having such an unbalanced amount of resources at that stage of the food chain, leading to plague numbers of pests, also sources for disease. Our numbers also exploded too but are liable to all sorts of famine and other issues from overshooting these resources when a crop failure might occur, and still having all these mouths to feed. Agriculture enabled fielding large armies and violence on a scale never seen before.
"Today, around 75% of infectious diseases suffered by humans are zoonoses, ones obtained from or more often shared with domestic animals. Some common examples include influenza, the common cold, various parasites like tapeworms and highly infectious diseases that decimated millions of people in the past such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis, typhoid and measles.
In response, natural selection dramatically sculpted the genome of these early farmers. The genes for immunity are over-represented in terms of the evidence for natural selection and most of the changes can be timed to the adoption of farming.
And geneticists have estimated that 85% of the disease-causing gene variants in contemporary human populations arose during the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, or alongside the rise and spread of agriculture."
"Another surprising change seen in the skeletons of early farmers is a smaller skull especially the bones of the face. Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers had larger skulls due to their more mobile and active lifestyle including a diet which required much more chewing.
Smaller faces affected oral health because human teeth didn’t reduce proportionately to the smaller jaw, so dental crowding ensued. This led to increased dental disease along with extra cavities from a starchy diet.
These changes dramatically shaped our attitudes to material goods and wealth. Prestige items became highly sought after as hallmarks of power. And with larger populations came growing social and economic complexity and inequality and, naturally, increasing warfare.
Inequalities of wealth and status cemented the rise of hierarchical societies — first chiefdoms then hereditary lineages which ruled over the rapidly growing human settlements.
Eventually they expanded to form large cities, and then empires, with vast areas of land taken by force with armies under the control of emperors or kings and queens.
This inherited power was the foundation of the "great" civilisations that developed across the ancient world and into the modern era with its colonial legacies that are still very much with us today."
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2017/10/was-agricultur...