It’s not technically world mental health day anymore, but I think that every day is a good day to advocate for learning about mental health, because I feel our society and our dialogues do a poor job of addressing the overwhelming severity of mental health related issues afflicting people not only in the US but around the globe.
If you’re looking for a simple place to start, The National Institute of Mental Health (nimh.nih.gov) is a good resource for understanding mental illness and it’s effect on the US in numerical terms. The website has information explaining a variety of mental illnesses as well as how they’re often diagnosed and how they are proportionally represented within the population. With that in mind, I’d like to argue that we can’t keep measuring human well-being in terms of diagnosis and death. When you hear a story, see a statistic, or make a comment in passing, those things are generalizing and desensitizing issues that affect millions of people, oftentimes to an extent that cannot be understood or fully empathized with.
I’ve grown accustomed to brushing off fragments of conversation where people say things like “I’d kill myself,” or “I wanna die,” because I recognize that not everyone has had the experiences I have had, and to the vast majority of the country this is just how people talk. Which is the truth. Most people have not lost a close friend to suicide, most people have not experienced suicidal tendencies themselves. It’s hard to tell complete strangers that the way they talk “triggers” you, especially when it doesn’t feel like it should be your place to tell people what’s okay or not okay to say. More than that, it’s hard to tell them why. About a month ago, a friend told me she refrains from using the words “crazy” and “insane” because she feels that they perpetuate a stigma in relation to mental health that we should be trying to change, and that they bring up old memories of hurtful names people used to call her. I regularly use these these words, and I had never thought that they would stick out like that to another person because they are a part of widely accepted colloquial language.
See, in a lot of ways, our failure to recognize the reality of this growing desensitization to issues of mental health is not “our fault”. It has been passed down to us through popular culture, from comedy shows where someone screams “I WILL KILL MYSELF” as a punchline to music that can turn the word “suicidal” into a melody. Self-harm and suicide jokes are often found funny because the punch line is so audacious, and the sad reality is that acts of suicidal intent are no longer so unparalleled.
I could tell you that the CDC estimated over 44,000 deaths caused by suicide in 2016, or that between 1999 and 2016, suicide rates have risen by 28%. But this couldn’t possibly describe how to feels to hear a word, or a turn of phrase, something as simple as “imma die,” and to suddenly feel your stomach drop. It’s not as if it’s fundamentally inhibiting, but without fail it recalls a time I spend every waking minute trying to avoid. It’s a lot like walking on a tightrope, trying to balance a need to validate past experiences by recognizing the pain and grief still harbored, and at the same time recognizing the need to let those comments go because they are unavoidable on a day to day basis.
I’d also like to point out that suicide is not the only mental health related topic that should be more taboo to talk about. Clinically diagnosable conditions like bipolar disorder and depression are often appropriated into adjectives and used to describe people or situations. Malapropisms like this are detrimental to improving the quality of mental health care, and are generally disparaging to a community of people who are actually, legitimately afflicted by mental illness. That in mind, it’s incredibly difficult to change the language we use, and it’s definitely not going to happen just because you read this post, or you know it can hurt people. I used the same phrases, joked in the same way, up until I lost someone to suicide. It’s almost as if there are two different worlds. In one of them, death is a distant, vague joke, and in the other, death is very real, very unyielding, and very irreversible.
It’s going to take a long time for us to correct the way we perceive mental illness. It starts with thinking about the way we speak, the things we say, and the implications behind them.
Thanks for reading.