Awareness Isn’t Enough

I’ve never been able to exactly put my finger on why the awareness approach to mental health is so absolutely inadequate. I knew I had an issue with the disease model, I knew I had an issue with performances of the willingness to support people, and I knew that I had issues with mental illnesses being made into identities.

After losing a second person in a year to suicide, and reading some of the late (due to suicide) Mark Fisher’s work, I have a better framework.
Here’s some of that argument:

I am only just diving into K-Punk, and other longer works by Mark Fisher. A shallow point to rephrase: it is not normal for so many people, especially young people, to be clinically depressed. It is not O.K. that smart, kind, weird queer individuals are dying. Revealing mental illness has some potential benefits. But actually helping someone who is ill takes a lot of work.

Awareness is a neoliberal substitute for solidarity and support. It is not enough to be aware. If mental illness were truly like any other disease, take a kind of cancer or chronic issue, it would be a constant public health crisis. The misery, deaths, and losses that are happening are not simply a thing to be aware of. It’s not enough to say “capitalism did it,” it’s not enough to talk with people once in a while. We need to make our world safe for the people who are slowly but surely being ground down, some of them to the point where they choose to not exist.

Originally published at http://ianacerodgers.blogspot.com.