Comment: A recent run of media stories has focused on young people’s despondency about the future. In one story, a young woman talked about the hopelessness felt by her generation, not having clear career pathways, struggling to put food on the table, and distress about climate change. She linked these problems to the mental health crisis and called for more government funding to support mental health.
Her comments highlight another problem: we have entered an era where the vocabulary of mental health is used to highlight and propose solutions to most of our problems.
But if unemployment and climate change are causing anxiety for young people, is it better to spend money on mental health? Or on climate change, job creation, and the cost of living? If we focus on the source of worry (e.g. the warming climate), rather than on worry itself, we find different potential solutions and different outcomes.
The Danish psychologist Svend Brinkmann hit the nail on the head when he wrote about the “languages of suffering”. We can talk about our troubles in many different ways, he wrote, and the way we choose will determine not only the vocabularies available, but also the explanations and potential solutions.
In other words, it matters – and matters deeply – whether the distress felt by people is talked about as a psychological, moral, existential, or political problem.
Unintended outcome
The mental health awareness movement has helped teach us to look out for ourselves and one another, and that it’s okay to ask for help. But there’s also been an unintended outcome. Rather than just being aware of the potential to support mental illness, we’ve begun to translate other problems into mental health ones.
The go-to position is to default to a psychological language and its associated treatments for what ails us. Normal emotional responses to injustice, inequity, and abandonment are seen as some sort of psychological disorder.
Rather than seeing this generation as slowly melting snowflakes in need of “tools”, an argument could be mounted that university education should be funded as fully as it was for most of the politicians who have pulled up the ladder behind them.
This “pathologisation” – the treatment of something normal as abnormal – is linked by its logic to a particular remedy (counselling, or psychological and psychiatric intervention), which overloads a slender system designed to look after serious psychological disorders. It’s also the wrong strategy.
By psychologising what is arguably a normal response to an abnormal situation, ‘mental health’ becomes an ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff approach. We attend to the impact of a social problem, rather than to the problem itself.
Talking about problems differently
It would make much more sense to talk about our problems using other vocabularies.
Brinkmann uses the case of the “work stress epidemic” to illustrate the difference between talking about problems with the language of mental health versus the language of politics.
Discussing work stress as a mental health problem can lead us down a path of offering individual employees access to counselling services to help them “de-stress”. Feeling strung-out because the boss is asking you to work unreasonable hours? Here’s a freephone number to talk to a therapist.
Brinkmann points out we could instead talk about unreasonable workplace conditions using “a political language of rights and duties, social justice and injustice”. When people are treated unjustly at work or anywhere else, expressing disapproval in political language is a valid response, he says.
And this, he argues, was what used to happen: “Detrimental work conditions were once something to be dealt with politically and collectively – centred on the work of unions.”
The same political language of rights and duties, justice and injustice could be applied to any one of a number of problems we face in Aotearoa.
Using a political language rather than a mental health one, we could look at the pressures facing university students. Referred to as the “anxious generation” with growing concerns for their stress levels and psychological wellbeing, we support them to develop tools for “resilience” and “buoyancy” as if each individual could simply strengthen their “top two inches” to overcome what are actually structural and economic constraints.
What used to be a free education system now costs thousands of dollars a year. This accompanies increased costs of rent, food, and heating. So, students rush from study to university to work, trying to make instant noodles feel like a meal and worrying about the accumulation of debt they will carry into a job market that is increasingly restricted. The mental health focus makes it plainly their problem. Develop your tools! No wonder they are under pressure.
But what if we deployed a political language instead?
Rather than seeing this generation as slowly melting snowflakes in need of “tools”, an argument could be mounted that university education should be funded as fully as it was for most of the politicians who have pulled up the ladder behind them. And that the young people of today should be given the same educational opportunities as these decision-making MPs enjoyed to be the leaders of tomorrow.
Instead of offering “tools” to help students cope, a political argument would point out the inter-generational inequity resulting from ever-rising tertiary fees and haggle for redistribution of opportunities. It would also raise wider political questions about how we fund tertiary education and whether this is best done through general taxes or student fees.
When we default to the language of mental health to find solutions to our problems, we risk missing the chance to debate these wider political questions and to find an array of potential solutions, rather than just a sticking-plaster solution for each individual.
Importantly, and we mustn’t forget this either, by leaving the language of mental health for problems for which psychological or psychiatric help is the correct solution, we acknowledge that other issues are not “in our heads” or the problem of a sensitive younger generation. They are social, political, and structural problems that concern us all.
