The headline alone should get your attention:
We Taught a Generation to Name Their Feelings. We Never Fixed the Conditions That Were Breaking Them.
The rest of it goes on from there, talking about the story of mental health awareness. We talk about mental health much more; we recognize that mental health issues are common and nothing to be ashamed of, we tell people it’s OK to reach out for help, etc. But, it’s incomplete:
Because embedded in that narrative — in its emphasis on the individual’s illness, the individual’s help-seeking, the individual’s resilience — is an assumption so pervasive it has become invisible: that mental distress is primarily a problem inside the person experiencing it, to be addressed by interventions directed at that person.
This assumption is not supported by the evidence. It is contradicted by it.
And this is the core. Mental Health awareness is great, but the political will to solve some of the core issues that lead to increased mental health difficulty doesn’t exist. There is ample evidence that poverty, domestic abuse, bigotry, harassment, etc., lead to higher numbers of people struggling with their mental health, and we do nothing to prevent that.
We look at people living with food and financial insecurity and tell them to breathe away their anxiety, instead of figuring out how to fix the things that make them insecure. We tell an entire generation that it’s OK to have anxiety, but never take a single step to fix the cost of living and housing crises that increase that anxiety.
We choose not to do anything, and wonder why the statistics on mental health issues don’t go down.