“It’s a lie to say we can’t afford to take care of each other. It’s the entire point of society.”

Reflections on World Mental Health Day

I guess it’s World Mental Health Day and we’re supposed to have some profound piece of wisdom to share about mental health, this thing that’s become decoupled from who we are and the contexts we live in. World Mental Health Day seems difficult to swallow, like so many ‘awareness’ days. Those who struggle with mental health, whether temporary or lifelong, are never unaware of it. They aren’t always helped by stories of your resilience, or reminded that ‘it gets better.’ It’s great when people find their inner resilience, but sometimes it does not get better, and we can’t pretend that all it takes is a CBT app and some willpower.

We’re told to “take care of our mental health” as if it’s as simple as cleaning our rooms, buying groceries or remembering to feed the dog. We’re told to “reach out” and talk to people who may or may not be equipped to help us. In fact, sometimes the people most eager to talk to us about our situations or our feelings are mostly eager to “fix” things with unwanted advice, tough love, or other forms of help that can do more harm than good. We’re told to “listen” to people who are struggling, which of course, we should. Social support is unbelievably important to our health and well-being, and we can’t find our place in the world through intermittent therapy sessions. But a cup of tea can’t replace a psych team when you need one. And for most people, it’s harder and harder to get the psych team, which makes it harder for social support to do much good.

Connecting the rhetoric of personal responsibility with the language of mental health is a neoliberal strategy and it’s not political to say so, it’s a political strategy to feed us these narratives that leave us feeling like having mental health struggles is another personal moral failure that we have to fix alone. Mapping narratives of progress to our mental health and then treating everything as a cognitive distortion is dangerous. It kills people by convincing us it’s our fault, our problem, that if we’re not improving, it must be because we aren’t trying hard enough. That it’s all just a matter of reframing the problem.

We’re told that all of us are spending too much time looking at screens, and our lack of in-person contact is hurting us. Social media is harming our mental health. But when we need a professional, we’re expected to solve our internal strife with a meditation app or some positive self-talk. We’re facing into a future where mental health across all demographics is poorer, and resources are dwindling for anything except short-term interventions for mild situations that have more to do with internalized stress than material conditions.

And far too little is done to improve those material conditions: financial health, housing instability, poor employment rights, insecure immigration status, systemic discrimination, and unequal access to health services. The more you experience the things in the beginning of that list, the more likely you are to bear the brunt of the last one. The problem of access grows with the problems of insecure conditions. And the further you get from solving your problems with an app or a cup of tea.

The physical presence of a compassionate, non-judgmental person in the room who is invested in our well-being is worth more than a data-driven digital experience with some cute buttons and some encouraging language. People need to be paid real money to support people, who are themselves able to access or create stable conditions, for whatever depth or duration they need, even if that’s their entire lives. There is no other way. It’s a lie to say we can’t afford to take care of each other. It’s the entire point of society.

We need to recognize that instability isn’t always internal. Poverty is not a cognitive distortion. That overwork is very often out of necessity, rather than ambition. Telling someone to reduce their stress levels as they work on temporary contracts or move from unregulated sublet to unregulated sublet isn’t helpful. Sometimes people aren’t just feeling fear or anxiety, they’re living with risk and danger they can’t do anything about – but collectively, we can.

If we care about the collective mental well-being of everyone in society, then we absolutely must care about housing justice, immigration rights, disability rights, worker rights, racism, LGBT rights, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. I don’t want to see your hashtags, your campaigns, your unwanted blanket advice about yoga or walking because there are no shortcuts, platitudes, or substitutes for justice.

We can’t reframe our unequal society as a cognitive distortion, but we can reframe the mental health conversation as an issue of justice that starts with access to all of our basic needs, without conditions, explanations or promises to become better people. We can make our communities safe for people with diverse needs. We can make our workplaces compassionate and just, our employment contracts secure, and our pay scales enough to live on. We can demand access to health, housing, and education as a basic human right. That’s a start. Mental illness won’t go away, but we can alleviate the conditions that make it worse and that further marginalize people who need support, not judgment.