compost in training

As a child, I nearly died of illness. When my parents would say, “We went through a hard time with you,” I thought, “I’ve caused so much hardship for them,” and felt I couldn’t endure my uneasiness. So I didn’t have a happy childhood that I look back on with nostalgia. I passed as a “good kid,” the one among my siblings who was most obedient and gentle. When, at some point, I realized that I had just been matching myself to my parents’ expectations, I became so distressed that I wanted to scream in humiliation. This is why I do remember seeing for the first time beauty in the simple eyes of the cicada or feeling amazed that the tips of the legs of crayfish were scissors, but I erased from my memory how I related to other people. 

I put on a cheerful front when I was among my friends. But inside was a timid self full of anxiety and fear.”

Mental health is “in” right now, if non-profit and corporate awareness campaigns, proliferation of online think-pieces, and social media buzz are any indication. In Canada, where I live, the largest media corporation in the country holds an annual “Let’s Talk” campaign, in which millions of individuals share their experiences of mental illness online, from depression and anxiety to psychosis and PTSD.

Bits and pieces of wellness and positive psychology have entered the common vocabulary, while Asian philosophies such as yoga and mindfulness have been repackaged to become lucrative industries in the West. From diagnostic terms to self-care psychobabble, pop culture is flooded with an ever-growing vocabulary to help us talk about psychological suffering.

All of this for good reason: after generations of stigma and discrimination associated with so-called insanity, why should we remain silent about it? Who doesn’t want to heal themselves, to get better, to become mentally healthy? Who isn’t looking for the answer to the question of how we can be sane, successful, happy at last?

Yet there is something about the emerging popular discourse on mental health that seems profoundly problematic, not the least of which is the assumption that such a thing as mental health actually exists, let alone is attainable in any quantifiable or permanent sort of way. Seven years of study, two post-graduate degrees, and thousands of direct-service practice hours in mental healthcare have yet to convince me of that fact—if anything, the opposite.

For one thing, despite all of the terminology that exists to define and classify the symptoms of insanity, there aren’t very many definitions of what mental health really is, aside from the rather vacuous “absence of mental illness.” The few that do exist tend to be rather suspiciously oriented toward “productivity” and individual achievement—and aren’t those the very values that make late-stage capitalism so very destructive to our well-being?

Take, for example, the above definition endorsed by the World Health Organization, which suggests that mental health is largely about “realizing potential,” “working productively,” and “making a contribution.” Rather conspicuously missing, of course, is any reference to feeling good about oneself, enjoying or finding meaning in what one does, or having better (less conflictual, more connected) relationships with others. Or are we just supposed to assume that such feelings are inherent to working productively and making contributions?