World Mental Health Day 2019
It’s World Mental Health Day again. For five years in a row now, I’ve sat down on this day and written about what mental health means to me. Over the years I’ve talked about the importance of making care accessible; the need to be proud of ourselves even when we’re sick; and the role self-compassion plays in helping us heal. But I’ve never talked about oppression. And I think it’s time.
Because mental health doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We live as a part of social systems, and those systems are often set up to harm us. This is particularly true for marginalised people. As an autistic person, I know that if I had been accepted for who I was as a child, if I hadn’t been taught to see myself as inadequate, if the doctors trying to “cure” me hadn’t prescribed literal abuse, my situation might be very different today. I might not have spent decades grappling with C-PTSD. I might have been a happy person, if only they had accepted autistic lives as valid. If they hadn’t spent years trying to cram my square peg into a round hole.
I think about oppression a lot these days. Every time I experience disability discrimination in a healthcare setting; every time a doctor dismisses me because I’m a woman; every time someone tells me I’m too fat or too crazy to really be ill. Every time my existence and experience are questioned because they do not meet the expectations of the majority. I am privileged in many ways, and yet oppression still has a significant impact on my mental health. I feel invalidated; I feel gaslit. I feel like I’m banging my head against a brick wall because the brick wall told me I had to.
Oppression is insidious. It eats away at us like a worm in an apple. Poverty contributes to mental health issues; so too do racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism. Capitalism is a huge factor. It’s the water torture of mental health triggers, dripping steadily on us, drop by drop, until the pressure makes us scream. And the mental health system is failing us when it comes to facing this oppression. Too many healthcare providers focus solely on the personal aspects of mental health, ignoring the systemic issues behind it. They teach us coping mechanisms, ways to accept, encouraging us to do all we can to tolerate our oppression. Far too few of them encourage us to fight it. Far too few of them understand what it feels like when you feel you cannot.
There’s nothing I’m saying today that hasn’t been said many times by marginalised people before. I’m also aware that the ideas I’m discussing can’t be neatly summarised in a Medium story. I’m just adding my voice to a necessary chorus, calling for more awareness of oppression in the mental health world. We need mental health care services that understand the needs of oppressed people, who are sensitive to the ways oppression interacts with mental health. Most crucially, we need to remove the oppression inherent in how we handle mental health. Discrimination against mentally ill people is still rampant. You can have mental health issues because you’re oppressed, and then be oppressed for having mental health issues. And as long as a black person or a disabled person or a queer person can’t get the same treatment as a straight white abled person, we have a long way left to go.
How do we overcome oppression? It’s a big question, but I think the answer is: together. We overcome it together. We reach out and uplift marginalised people, we support each other both within communities and across communities. We listen to the people who have already spent decades telling us what needs to be done. Most of all, we be what those oppressing us don’t want us to be. Ready, compassionate, unafraid. United against the systems that seek to divide us. And if we can do that, if we can be the strength that rebuilds these systems and makes them inclusive for all, the mentally ill of this world will be in a much better place.
