To mark Mental Health Awareness Week, a McPin Peer Researcher & Public Involvement Officer discusses the disparity between awareness-raising and the severity of the national mental health crisis.
Harry Dyson
It is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK, launched in 2001 to “bring together the UK to focus on getting good mental health”.
My experience of Mental Health Awareness Week is primarily one of alienation. There is a disconnect between my experience and the discourse.
I don’t mean to come across as negative, but as someone with lived experience of a significant mental illness in this country, I am, so I do!
As someone who works in mental health research it feels awkward to take a critical stance towards a positive effort, but hopefully I can provide some constructive criticism.
An awareness-raising week seems to be based on an assumption that we live in a system where those in power have their ears to the ground and are proactively responding to the will of the people.
Surely ‘raising awareness’ can’t be a bad thing?
I think the concept of raising awareness has become a platitude. A reflexive and agreeable answer to the complex question of what to do about the national mental health crisis we are in the midst of.
Raising awareness without action or change is pointless. It assumes firstly that not enough people know about the problem, and secondly that if enough people did know about it, then that would fix the problem or mean that surely someone, somewhere, would do something about it. So, any volunteers?
An awareness-raising week seems to be based on an assumption that we live in a system where those in power have their ears to the ground and are proactively responding to the will of the people, and not a system where people have to campaign and fight to get the attention of those in power and then hold them to account until they do something.
Either that, or it’s based on an opinion that mental health is a personal issue, independent of context. This fits with the theme of this year’s awareness week: Movement – moving more for our mental health.
There are interesting and meaningful connections between fitness, metabolism, and mental health. But often this educational angle is neglected in favour of promoting “common-sense” activities, such as going for a walk around the block.
Prescribing patronising and perfunctory physical exercise while gesturing towards unspecified “mental health” is not raising awareness of anything. In fact, it’s anti-awareness. It risks producing mental health vigilantes who confidently dispense invalidating or inappropriate advice.
Another platitude that goes hand in hand with this is that we all have a responsibility to address the mental health crisis.
Obviously, it would be good if everyone made an effort to become more mental-health literate. This would help with certain issues, like stigma. But general public awareness is not going to improve services or reduce waiting lists.
This ‘we’re all in the same boat’ framing obfuscates the responsibility of those in power and depoliticises a national crisis. We are all in the same boat, but we’re not all captains with our hands on the steering wheel.
The response of the Prime Minister is to trivialise mental health as “the everyday challenges and worries of life” while his government actively dismantle mental health services and cut PIP benefits during a cost of living crisis.
Responsibility and resistance
I question my own sanity when people in positions of power within the government or NHS talk about the need to raise awareness. Yeah! This needs to be brought to the attention of someone who can do something about it! It shifts responsibility onto an amorphous and unmeasurable general public.
We are in a national mental health crisis in a context of multiple concurrent crises.
When the response of the Prime Minister is to trivialise mental health as “the everyday challenges and worries of life” while his government actively dismantle mental health services and cut PIP benefits during a cost of living crisis, it feels like I’m being gaslit with further calls to raise awareness.
It reminds me of being bullied in a playground full of those “beat bullying” wristbands of the early 2000s.
I’ll leave theorising about their motivations as an exercise for the reader, but I for one don’t believe these choices are being made due to a lack of awareness.
We need to centre and learn from people with lived experience of mental ill health. We need to be clear about the life destroying (or even life-ending) impact of what is at stake here.
The only way out is through
We need to be more courageous. We need to accept that if we want to change the trajectory of mental health in this country we’re going to come up against resistance and inertia.
We are burying our heads in the sand by raising awareness along the path of least resistance.
We need to avoid pseudo-participatory spectacles which flatter a general audience, offering generic and ableist self-management techniques.
Instead, we need to centre and learn from people with lived experience of mental ill health.
We need to be clear about the life destroying (or even life-ending) impact of what is at stake here.
People with lived experience are some of the most knowledgeable people in this. We need to avoid toxic positivity and be clear and honest about the context in which we’re operating – the roughly two million people on the waiting list for mental health services didn’t just forget to consider the option of a brisk walk to clear their head.
Harry Dyson is a Peer Researcher & Public Involvement Officer at McPin.