This type of judgement about mental health is what drove Naomi Osaka to withdraw from Roland Garros yesterday.
It’s about time that as society we open up about mental health and how to deal with our issues, instead of blaming the people with the issues and calling them weak or snowflakes. People with issues need help, not bullying.
Absolutely. True mental health issues need clinical diagnosis and treatment. Things like CBT and antipsychotics have saved the lives of many people with psychological disorders, and modern mental health treatment is as valid as any other area of medical science.
But the type of "therapy culture" the parent describes is absolutely obnoxious, self serving, and all pervading among the upper and middle class. People have been so convinced, jeered on by social media, of this pseudo-Freudian nonsense about deep seated emotional traumas requiring therapy, that the real issue of mental health has been conflated with feeling annoyed about having to respond to work emails or being bummed about a breakup.
What I'm seeing is a sort of "pop-therapy" where people self diagnose and then wallow in it looking for sympathy while not making sincere efforts to overcome what they have to deal with.
The thing about depression is that it makes making an effort hard.
You can feel hopless, have no energy (even to get out of bed, shower, brush your teeth, or feed yourself), and be full of slef-recrimination and self-loathing on top of that. The more they don't do the worse they feel, leading to a worsening spiral.
It's easy to say that the sufferer should just make the effort to get out of this state, but it is the nature of depression to prevent that. The lucky ones can do it, but many others can't.
Saying to a depressed person that they should make the effort is like telling a gambling addict not to gamble, an alcoholic not to drink, or a person with an eating disorder to just eat less.
It's a lot easier said than done, and what keeps them from doing so often runs a lot deeper than people who make offhand dismissals realize.
Therapy and medication can help, but every solution comes down to individual effort, and nobody can do it for you.
It is important to recognize that falling into depression, addition, and neurotic behavior IS a personal failure, as only then can someone forgive themselves and seek change. Acceptance, accountability, and agency are key
Have you considered that people with issues might not even be capable of doing this? That they could have a very low sense of agency and maybe no idea about the real root causes of their issues, and they might have tried a thousand times to “fix” them without success?
>Have you considered that people with issues might not even be capable of doing this?
Nobody can do it for them. Friends, medication, and therapy can help, but progress is impossible without individual intention and agency.
Mental health isn't like a broken leg that someone can fix for you.
Look at how hard your parents work for you, and here you are not doing this and that, or doing something that don’t match our values.
And this is a constant lifelong guilt-burden that they utilize. It’s almost as if they feel entitled to something just because they had to do stuff in life ... like work a blue collar job.
The stuff that the new American generation is doing is a remix of that age old form of abuse.
Do you have any numbers/stats or links to backup this claim? What does “all pervading” mean here according to you?
Also, please don’t be so quick to dismiss or trivialize other people’s issues. Even if to you, from the outside, those issues seem petty or superficial, they could be incredibly bad and debilitating for the people suffering from them.
I've heard this over and over throughout my life, usually presented as a self-evident just-so truism.
My workplace threw a mental health awareness event with a conspicuous absent of any specific persons mental health issues being discussed. I've noticed various authority figures offering to be a figure to cry on who were stoic about their own personal problems. Even this specific post is not an admission of any mental health problems, it's shaming others for blaming and bullying, and calling for society to open up. The linked post does contain a lot of opening up, but it doesn't really advocate for it and has a ton of fatalism wrapped into it .
"People with issues need help" is thrown out there, yet help is a scarce resource. I see that according to every statistic, we're about as anxious and depressed and as open about mental health as we ever have been, and suicide rates have been on the rise for awhile. All I hear in response is the answer is more openness, openness will fix these problems that we're simply more aware of than in the past. I'm more inclined to believe that people who are highly open are more likely to talk about mental health issues in the first place, and their personal biases eventually start to pass as common wisdom.
I can't help but reject the concept that opening up is the answer and am more drawn towards stoic views and the idea that discretion about your own difficulties can have virtues for yourself and others. I'm drawn more towards private discussions of such issues, with consideration for how such discussions may impact others and yourself as being the most socially and emotionally intelligent option.
Because, under what circumstances would that ever be a good idea?
> I can't help but reject the concept that opening up is the answer and am more drawn towards stoic views and the idea that discretion about your own difficulties can have virtues for yourself and others.
Well put.
The focus on openness for mental health, to the exclusion of all other solutions, is about productivity and hierarchies.
Employers and managers aren't ready for their employees to take care of their mental health. That would often involve paying for them to have better access mental health care. That would often involve them having relatively sudden and/or extended absences (followed by greatly improved health and much better productivity!) and they're not going to pay people for extended breaks. It would often involve adjustments to the way people perform work and interact with management. It would likely involve removing a lot of abusive people from management roles, since they are likely causing a lot of these mental health issues.
People with authority are not prepared for a system that accommodates mental health issues in a serious way.
I imagine the parent poster you're responding to would agree with me that the problem here is centering your identity on weaknesses instead of focusing on what you can improve.
I've had my share of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts, but as with anything else in life it really doesn't matter much what other people say about you and those things but how you alone deal with them. Obviously other people can play a part in this but at its core, success is exclusively individually based.
Luck plays a huge role in success though. Literally every breakthrough experienced in my life wasn't because I worked very hard but because I was at the right time at the right place. Yes I wasn't lazy but I still won't lie to myself the same way I lie to HR & recruiter types who want to hear how X led me to Y. (X and Y were so far apart that only a miracle could explain what motivated me to "pivot").
Humans are all blinded by hindsight when we are asked to tell the story that made us (or broke us). People parrot Ayn Rand about "being the master of our success" because it makes us sound so much more virtuous than admitting we were at the right place at the right time, instead e.g.: Some poor maggots born in a 3rd world slum getting their limbs chopped as a child and sent to beg. Or that old homeless guy who has been set on fire twice who they call "the beggar king" who is always at the Frankfurt railway station, and who has a story about his father injecting him smack when he was 9 to get him hooked (and under better control). The majority that we tend to forget about simply never gets a chance. We don't count them because the only thing they are good for is so we feel better about our own great life which is perfectly visible when put into the contrast of such people.
Longitudinal effort is what allows luck to work for you. If you keep trying things every single day, some of that luck will "compound" and pay off.
The problems were already there.
That includes the problems with personal boundaries, with the general brokenness of requiring people to come into the office every day (very extrovert-centric and environmentally disastrous), with income/wealth disparities, with crappy health care, with "truth decay" and preferring Twitter/YouTube conspiracy theorists to actual experts, etc. People have had ample opportunity to look at how we've built our society and consider whether previous decisions had been the right ones, and an increasing number are saying NO.
This story fits right into that, particularly wrt boundaries and mental health issues. All of the comments trying to reestablish extrovert/neurotypical hegemony by flinging names and insults at anybody who doesn't "fit the mold" are just incredibly privileged and offensive. FFS let's allow people to be how they want to be, be open about their needs, cope how they can, and work the way they're most effective.
I hear this general refrain a lot, and something about it has always sounded wrong to me. What do people mean when they say "deal with our issues?" The way this sentiment is conveyed makes it sound like there is some promised land of mental health around the bend, if only enough people have the "right" attitude about it.
I'm not particularly convinced that there's much of any stigma against mild mental health issues these days. And by mild, I mean normal problems that most people will encounter in their lives (ie, OCD, anxiety, depression, etc.) In fact, a lot of people are actively encouraged to talk about their mental health problems, to a degree which would have been unthinkable in the 1950s. Generally, I think this has been a net positive for society. I know a lot of people who had they been born in an earlier time might have been marginalized, or felt that they were truly broken, rather than simply being neurotic. But, I also believe there are eventually diminishing returns to this approach. Constantly focusing on your problems and your negative emotions can have very perverse incentives. It's possible to become addicted to your own misery, and it's also possible to become addicted to the relief and the closeness that comes from people trying to sooth your psychological trauma. Generally speaking, any extreme emotions can be addicting, and moderation is not the same as repression.
Given that we keep talking about mental health issues more and more, but suicide rates for teens are generally increasing, I'm very skeptical that having more "conversations" about mental health is going to do much good at all. In the least, most of the "conversations" I see about mental health mostly have to do with putting on a big show of empathizing with the victim, who themselves are putting on a big show of displaying their emotions.
Now of course, if "conversations" about mental health means something different, such as an analytical approach to causes of trauma and positive mental health outcomes, then I'm all for it.
As someone with ADHD, anxiety/depression, and chronic migraines; the bullshit conversations and 'management' meetings I've had to sit through because people very much still don't have any understanding of these issues is staggering. While I am not getting fired for calling out twice or thrice in a week once in a while, that's mostly due to me being in a "knowledge worker" job, if I was in a customer facing job or other position that requires "butt in seat hours" I am certain that I would have already gotten canned 100 times over due to these mild mental health issues; because quantity attendance is more important that quality attendance in a lot of jobs.
OCD isn't a "normal thing that most people will encounter" problem, neither is depression, neither is anxiety; OCD isn't some "lol I need to fill my gas tank to a round dollar amount," depression isn't "boy howdy did I feel sad for a few weeks after that break-up," anxiety isn't "that was a bit stressful firing that employee." You can feel depressed without having depression, you can feel anxious without having anxiety, you can be exacting without having OCD; but none of the prior are mental illnesses while all of the latter are. So, while the __feeling__ has been normalized, the actual illness absolutely hasn't been; and from experience it's been made more difficult by the generalizing of the words, where now people equate the action/feeling with the much more serious illness - so now I have to spend time explaining how debilitating the actual illness is, just to have people go "well I feel depressed sometimes, and I'm here."
Quite frankly, one of the many reasons folks have to put how bad things are or can get out there is due to this conflation of the feeling with the illness; so you seeing these expressions of "things are actually this bad for me," and conflating it with "emotional porn" because "everybody experiences things like OCD, depression, anxiety, etc" is actually a perfect example of why I can very confidently say that the stigma about mental health hasn't changed that much; it's just been repackaged with a nicer bow.
Refusing to encourage a narcissist is not the same as bullying them. I hope he gets the help he needs, but he's going to have to want it first.
But we don't get that, and we'll never get that. Understanding that our society is incapable of doing this in public is fundamental to navigating one's own mental health.
And part of that is recognizing that if being open about mental health is considered virtuous, then people will work really hard at providing (counterproductive) cosmetic attempts of "openness" to mental health.
Then it's their responsibility to seek it out. If you're privileged enough to lead the life described in the article, you can also afford to visit a therapist on a weekly basis. Otherwise, you can't suddenly expect the general public to treat you with sympathy, particularly if you're among the hyper-rich or otherwise elite.
Why shouldn’t everyone treat everyone else with sympathy? Why should people be “deserving” of some basic human respect? I’ve only lived my own life, not anyone else’s, so I’m in no position to judge others.
A lot of people that maybe should seek help might not be capable of doing so, probably because of taboos, trauma or other issues.
So you can’t offer your assistance, but you still spend your time offering criticism in the form of judgmental comments to their stories. That doesn’t seem very respectful.
Sure.. but what if despite knowing that they still don't?
A lot of people suffering from depression don't seek help despite knowing they should. They watch themselves sinking deeper and deeper, and their lives gradually falling apart and don't ask for help, or even when they do they might not follow through with what they need to do to improve their lives.. from missing therapy appointments, to not taking medication, to not taking the little steps to improve their lives.
There are various reasons for that, but the bottom line is that many of them don't, and no amount of finger wagging at them is going to change that.
Mental health is something that should be taken seriously, not spammed on the internet or commoditized.
Nobody's forcing you to read this.
There's exhaustive discussion of mental health issues in every corner of society. In some corners of society, people announce their mental health issues before even telling you their name.
> People with issues need help, not bullying.
Yes, but some discernment is necessary to distinguish between the ones that need help and the ones that need the HTFU. There isn't enough help to go around for everyone that claims to have issues.
When people are rewarded with fawning attention and privilege because of their issues, you've incentivized people to have issues.
The “brain chemistry imbalance” story is very outdated. That’s not what researchers and scientists think depression is.