In Pawtucket, there's a mural on the side of a two-story building. In bright colors sure to draw the curious eye, it reassures the viewer of human things that it's okay to do. This is obviously a well-intentioned work, responsive, made by and for people who have been there. So what could be the problem?
I've thought about it for some time now, and I think Ashley Frawley might have stumbled on it. If everyone is always thinking about mental health, what else is there?
This is a microcosm of where the rest of the world is headed or has already gone. In England and Wales, where mental health promotion has been in overdrive for decades, working-age claimants of incapacity and disability benefits rose from 2.9 million in May 2019 to 4.5 million in August 2025, with mental-health conditions driving the increase. Meanwhile, in the United States, young people self-diagnose from TikTok reels whose creators doubtless feel they are doing a public service. After all, they are only echoing the common sense of our time: There is no shame in seeking help; “the more awareness, the better.”
That's about the size of it. There are vulnerable people out there taking drugs so strong that they'd have once gotten the dealer a life sentence, ceding control over who they talk to and how they live. Our society encourages this and will never stop, because it's a plainly virtuous and necessary mode of treatment. The whole cycle becomes self-justifying and self-perpetuating. The increased availability of resources for the mentally ill is a good thing. The outsized public focus on their maladies is not.
2 comments:
I agree with you that Ashley Frawley has the right idea about mental health being promoted far too much:
The psychologist Nick Haslam warns that cultural practices intended to increase awareness of mental ill health “may be having ironic effects,” pathologizing human experiences, and “contributing to making us ill.”
If you rely on social media for a diagnosis of your particular neuroses you're very likely to get one and maybe a few more for good measure. I understand that ADHD and autism are both very popular nowadays while depression and anxiety have become far less so. Do you suppose schizophrenia fits in there somewhere as there appears to be a lot of it about these days?
I love that recently coined new word 'neurodivergent'. It seems to cover just about any psychological condition you might want to name. Goodness knows misinformation is very common in social media discussions of mental health and the problem of creating more diagnoses makes for more confusion.
Your take on vulnerable people turning to street drugs (or if you live in Canada legal ones) because they can't cope with what our society has on offer is a very unfortunate result. Yes, having a generally mentally healthy population is a good thing but up to now the focus on it is trapping people in an echo chamber of rigid personal identities.
Haslam is right, too. It's generally acknowledged that illnesses have psychosomatic aspects, i.e. thinking that you're sick can make you sick. how could mental illnesses be exempt from that principle? And, worse, how can it be healthy to constantly scrutinize your family and personal relationships for pathology?
Thirteen years ago the American Psychiatric Association released the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5. The first edition came out in 1952. While some disorders--e.g. homosexuality--have been delisted, the trend has been for many more to be added, to the point where the current edition is as thick as a phone book. And it's occurred to me: how many of these are actual disorders, and how many people actually have them in any meaningful sense?
Neurodivergence is a fairly harmless concept for mature people who have an idea of their own minds. At the very least, it's not much different from theorizing which house you'd be sorted into at Hogwarts. It's quite a different story for young people whose psyches are still being formed. These labels can become more real than reality for them.
To be clear, the drugs that I was talking about were those that doctors prescribe and that pharmacies fulfill. Not that there is as much difference between them and street drugs as people would like to think. Okay, the possibility of fentanyl contamination is a difference. But there's no getting away from the fact that pharmaceutical companies, among others, are as aggressive as anyone about pushing new product.
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