The COVID-19 epidemic opened up a window into many issues we've sidelined as a culture. One major issue that became radically clear is. Humans have no clue how to handle mental health.
We know anxiety exists, but we don’t talk about it. We know depression is a thing, but we assume it’s a form of weakness. We don’t speak about it, so we assume it shouldn’t be something we explore as a culture. The presumption that a culture should silent about an issue is predicated on the value that weakness, in any form — even if the culture misinterprets the human experience —should be rejected immediately. This primal evolutionary fear of being vulnerable demonstrates a certain kind of behavioral taboo we’ve normalized over a long period of time.
The behavioral taboo is more than just that we shouldn’t talk about our own internal struggles — but, by extension, supporting each other in a public context, like work, or at a local cafe is something that should never happen.
Supporting one another publicly is a sin. Of course, no one would confess to that being the truth — but, if we saw someone having a mental health episode on a train, car ride or any other place, we would automatically relegate them to either being homeless, or even possibly, beyond our measily compassionate attempts at understanding their experiences. We ultimately let ourselves off the hook.
In hyper-individualized contexts, empathy tends to only be valuable when it benefits our individual experience or when it positively influences our social value from others.
This is a form of cultural deprivation. Let me make sense of this, by sharing a definition and then tease out the nuances.
Cultural deprivation is a theory in sociology where a person has inferior norms, values, skills and knowledge. The theory states that people of lower social classes experience cultural deprivation compared with those above and that this disadvantages them, as a result of which the gap between classes increases.
For example, in education, lower-class students can suffer from cultural deprivation as their parents do not know the best school for their child, but middle-class parents "know the system", and so can send their children to the best school for them. This puts the lower-class students at a disadvantage, thus increasing inequality and the gap between middle-class and lower-class students.
Although mental health extends well-beyond economic expression — this definition acts as a metaphor for how mental health has become conceived as an ‘inferior norm’. We know it exists. We know we have all these experiences, but we don’t feel good about having them. This creates a gap where classes between those who deny mental health phenomenon
We are constantly negotiating our sense of self across the many environments we interact with. This negotiating process also informs us what roles we should play depending upon the context. values of the time and our childhood map of the world. What this means in this context, is that if we were taught being a victim was how to navigate in the world, then we could use
If all we do as a culture is valorize mental health experiences, we could also end up with the very opposite phenomenon. Which is that we would build a culture of perpetual victims looking for significance, hiding under the umbrella of overcoming mental health limitations and never really actually finding relevant solutions.
On the other hand, we could also end up with a culture that becomes numb to people consistently pointing out their own mental health as shortcomings. That numbness could have us return to a culture where the true value of mental health support becomes shunned, mocked, or devalued.
So, then why do things like this occur in society? It’s referred to as social contagion, or the bandwagon effect. It’s an idea that catches on and by catching on becomes its very own fuel that continues a form of behavioral hysteria. It becomes a popular way to identify across a culture — and can also be a way in which other behaviors are judged. It’s referred to as a capstone behavior because it becomes the template by which values, beliefs, and actions become ethical rules others should live by.
Awareness is key. to making the necessary changes towards a culture where we don’t undermine the value of subjective experiences of mental health. This means that the culture needs to change and move into a more lateral way of thinking — one where people’s experiences are valued over and above becoming a model for popularity.
Hyperfocusing on any issue is not the same as supporting, celebrating and normalizing it into a context - in fact, hyperfocusing on one area of mental health minimizes all its other factors.