Next week is men’s health week. I don’t go in for days, and weeks, and months, much. Indeed I find them about as meaningful as those Hallmark holidays designed by capitalists to try to get you to express basic human emotions via consumerism. As a male, and a (very) middle-aged one at that, I guess I should be grateful some mob of lobbyists, public health advocates and bureaucrats have got together and dedicated an entire seven days to keeping me well, but I’d rather they minded their own damn business.
Now, sure, I have as many (and very likely a lot more) health problems as the average male my age, and I’ve had all the MRIs, colonoscopies, gastroscopies and various things shoved up me. I’ve cracked the traditional’ “you using the whole fist doc?” line as tears sprayed from my eyes (I’m talking about a medical procedure. Get your minds out of the gutter). Like most people, I manage my ailments with a variety of pharmaceuticals, exercises and self-medication. But you can stick your men’s health week about as far up as that needle went in my last prostate biopsy.
Particularly irksome will be the emphasis on men’s mental health, with blokes being urged to express themselves about their mental health, and talk to their mates (it’s always about the mates). We’ll endure the great cliché of mental health, that awareness must be raised, that stigma must be curbed, that everyone must feel it’s OK to “reach out”. But I have an alternate suggestion: shut up about mental health. Let me explain this heresy.
First, all the awareness-raising of the past two decades or more hasn’t shifted the dial on mental health. According to the good people at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the incidence of mental health disorders hasn’t changed since 2007. The only change has been the greater incidence of depression and anxiety among young people — something the corporate media and censorship activists will blame on social media (more on that in a minute). More alarmingly, despite all the “awareness raising” and “RUOK” campaigns, the incidence of suicide has actually risen steadily since 2006, especially among men.
And I’m not alone on this. University of New South Wales professor Samuel Harvey, writing for the Black Dog Institute, has said “can we please not have any more mental health awareness campaigns and events? … I do not think Australia has a mental health awareness problem.” Harvey points to evidence that mental health awareness campaigns can actually have harmful effects.
Similarly, American clinician Colette Shade noted in 2021 that “campaigns telling people to become ‘aware’ and ‘reach out’ strike me as —at best — an incorrect diagnosis of the problems at hand. At worst, they feel like gaslighting. In my experience — both professional and personal — most people are already aware of their own mental health. And what they’ve found is that it sucks.”
Both argue that there’s no point encouraging people to be aware and reach out if there’s no-one to reach out to — if mental health services are inadequate, if mental health professionals are fully booked for months on end, if we simply don’t have the workforce or funding to enable people to easily access help for mental illness.
Second, endlessly telling the population that they need to be aware of mental health and that they need to reach out if they think they have a problem risks a situation like we have with the NDIS. The NDIS is a service with limited resources which both eligible and non-eligible people will try to access, and in which eligible people will try to access the highest tiers of the service, thereby risking cutting out those most in need.
The relentless focus on mental health risks conflating widespread and easily managed mental health conditions with serious mental health illnesses that require substantial resourcing to treat or manage effectively — resourcing that becomes harder for people with those serious illnesses to access when, as Harvey puts it, “GP surgeries up and down the country are full of people asking for help with their mental health.”
That problem is exacerbated by celebrity mental health confessions, in which the mildly famous “reveal” to the media that they have long “struggled” with or “battled” various mental health conditions, or claim to be neuro-atypical in some way — presumably delighted they can use such a socially positive form of self-promotion to keep their names in the headlines and signal to fans that they’re really just like them in their daily struggle with depression/anxiety/ADHD/addiction etc.
Third, to use the delightful phrase cited by Shade, “they constantly swat at the flies while there’s a 20-foot pile of shit right behind them.” That pile of shit is 21st century capitalism, an economic system that relentlessly pushes people toward precarity and uncertainty, that instils in them that their only value is economic and the only expression of their personal worth is economic, which disempowers them and makes them resources to be exploited by large corporations that have captured the governing apparatus.
Depression, anxiety and addiction are sensible and normal responses to living in such an economic-political system. It used to be it took you a few decades to work out that capitalism was an emotional Ponzi scheme and no matter how much you consumed, it would never fill the abyss of meaninglessness it creates inside us — indeed, that was the point. But since we’ve begun systematically immiserating our young people in recent decades, it’s no surprise that their collective mental health has worsened more rapidly than that of the rest of us.
Telling people to be aware of mental health is the psychological equivalent of lecturing people about their carbon footprint (or telling men they need to “step up” on domestic violence) — it takes a responsibility that rests with our governing class and institutions and dumps it on individuals, when we should be considering the failures of our economic-political system in favour of posters, billboards and health weeks. The babble of awareness-raising is a distraction from the real cause of what so many of us suffer from. Stop babbling.
Are awareness-raising campaigns on mental health effective? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
