guest blog post: to a more meaningful mental health awareness month

Mental Health Awareness Month is coming to a close, and as a psychotherapist, I am particularly discouraged this year. Mental Health Awareness Month found its beginnings in the United States in the late 1940’s, and with the globalisation of the world through the internet, social media campaigns now happen all over the world during the month of May. Over the last few years, I have noticed a trend in messages that come from companies and mental health professionals alike. There tends to be two prominent topics: diagnosis and coping.

Where Diagnosis Can Harm

The diagnosis posts on social media attempt to normalise (I think) mental health difficulties by saying things like ‘1 in 4 people are diagnosed with a mental health disorder’ or some other statistic based on a particular diagnosis such as generalised anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder. This message, however, does not explore or interact with the harm done by the lens of pathologizing people. Some individuals have found and will continue to find relief and solace in receiving a diagnosis; that is valid and also has its place in Mental Health Awareness Month. It is true, too, that a diagnosis is a categorization of symptoms. Categories are of their time, as seen in the introduction and removal of being queer as a disorder. Or the once pathologized experiences of nostalgia and also the controversial label of hysteria for women who experienced sexual abuse. Centring the amount of diagnostic levels of symptoms in a community suggests that the world we have created is not sustainable or suitable for our needs as human beings. As Victor Frankel once wrote, “an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour”. High levels of diagnoses may be an indication that people are reacting to the ways in which the world is set up to not support our continued health and wellbeing.

When Coping is Not Enough

The second set of posts attempts a palatable and un-nuanced list of coping skills – often classist and ablest – that can be laid against a pretty graphic for lots of likes and shares. The classism in coping skills shows up by encouraging people to spend money on bath salts, different food, and/or holidays; as if the majority of the population has disposable income, a wage that sustains living, or the ability to take paid time off. Ableism in coping skills comes in with scented candle suggestions, mental health walks, and/or displaying coping skills lists in hard to read colours or fonts often also without alt. text at the bottom for screen readers, for example.

Another unhelpful part of the coping skills posts during this month is that it is often not discussed that coping is not in-and-of itself healing. Coping skills can (but not always) assist in regulating our nervous systems to bring us back to a state where we can intake information, make informed decisions, store memories, and emotionally regulate. The need to teach and reteach coping skills to adults on the internet suggests that the relationships and connections we have are not holding us or supporting us in the way we want or need. Co-regulation is what happens in relationships with others (not just in the romantic way, but friendships, co-workers, family, and so on). When we are missing these relationships in which we can reliably ask for support, we are often told to use a coping strategy. A coping skill or strategy is sold as something to do on our own to regulate ourselves. However, as social creatures, sustainable wellbeing is connected to meaningful, reliable, and safe relationships with other human beings.

Photo from Canva

Critical Engagement with Mental Health Awareness

To bring us back around, neither of those common examples of mental health awareness posts move the conversation toward genuine and sustainable wellbeing for people around the world. Neither are particularly critical takes for Mental Health Awareness Month as both are without context for the social, political, and cultural impacts on mental health and wellbeing.

These two narratives of coping skills and diagnoses do not consider the impact of poverty, racism, dehumanisation, sexism, isolation, war, anti-fatness, environmental crises, shame, or that human rights are up for debate, on a human’s ability to have safe relationships or regulate their emotions or go to work. Neither have any insight around intersectionality or accountability or repair. I will forever cite Audre Lorde here: “we do not live single issue lives”. There is no conversation about mental health that isn’t always also a conversation about housing, wages, health care, the school-to-prison pipeline, poverty, domestic violence, education, the criminal punishment system, human rights, food security, white supremacy, gun rights, etc. etc. etc. Improvements in the mental health and wellbeing for humanity as a whole, and for people as individuals, hinge upon how all of these systems and identities function together; it’s time we start the conversation for Mental Health Awareness Month there.