The College’s mental health efforts are commendable, but their messaging is wrong-headed.
(Credit: Camp Fire)
Monsour Counseling and Psychological Services (MCAPS)—the 5C’s mental health provider—held, at the start of last month, an event, the title of which reads like an ill-conceived move in the worst-ever game of word association: “National Depression Screening Day: Succulent Arrangement & Pumpkin Painting Activity.” It’s a perplexingly bad banner. It fails because it embarks upon an impossible task: to speak coherently of mental disorders and decorative squash in the same utterance. Blunders of this sort are typical of the College’s well-meaning, though confused, approach to “mental health.”
There’s little doubt that students’ psychological well-being matters to the College. It’s a multi-headed operation: ASCMC Mental Health and Wellness, the Peer Health Ambassadors (PHA), MCAPS, the Dean of Students. Much of what’s done is plainly good. I’m referring, here, to the provision of professional mental-health support through third-parties—through TimelyCare, ProtoCall, and MCAPs. I’ve availed myself of many of these resources. And I’ve been helped by them. The purpose of this article, then, isn’t to take to task the College’s entire mental-health program. It’s their messaging that’s in error. In their sincere attempt to take a serious thing seriously, the College has made a serious thing trivial.
To see how, take a look at the College’s mental health-related flyers. The messaging is, in a word: glib. The positivity is sickly (“You are Strong; Capable & Worthy. Believe in yourself—you’ve got this!”). And there’s a pun, alliteration, or cutesy theme for nearly every advertised event. October 3rd: “Donut Stress.” October 28th: “HalloWellness.” November 7th, from the PHA: “Leaf it all behind.” There’s a place for their wordplay, highly saturated colors, and unflagging upbeatness. But if the College is aiming to address weighty topics this way, it’s getting it wrong. The fluff just isn’t appropriate.
After all, if “mental health is health” (as one “Positive Pin” on the flyer for an MCAPS Wellness Workshop proclaims), then mental illness really is illness. “It’s ok to not be ok,” the posters tell us. But if it’s not “ok” to have pneumonia, or heart disease, or lymphoma, then it’s not “ok” to have OCD, or an anxiety disorder, or depression. Of course, the goal of these slogans is to do away with stigma—and that’s a fair goal. But here’s a fact about mental illness: it’s bad. It’s ugly.
When the College pretends as though that’s not the case, it talks right past the suffering person. In periods of true anguish, the suffering person wants—desperately—just to tolerate themself. What’s desired isn’t a “positive outlook” or a “sunny disposition.” It’s freedom from the torment of illness, of dis-order. The College’s unrelenting cheeriness, I think, just pokes and prods the person who’s unwell. It’s a bit like telling someone who’s broken their leg to get up and jog. They’d like, first, to regain their ability to stand. We don’t do that, of course. Why not? Because it’s insulting, and unhelpful. To speak sensitively to students with mental illness would be to say: “It really does hurt” and “Here’s what you can do about it.” Instead, the College suggests, with its hollow optimism, adorable graphics, and vapid catchphrases, that mental illness is about as bad as a bad day.
No wonder its proposed “treatments,” then, are treatments for bad days. Make pins, make bookmarks, decorate journals with stickers (and then go back to your dorm to decorate the insides of those journals with your darkest thoughts). It’s infantilizing. Of course, making art and being with others—these are good things to do. They’re constitutive of a “good time,” and no doubt features of a good life. But what do we imply about mental health, and mental illness, when we offer up these kinds of activities as if they’re even a little bit curative? The fact is that making art and being with others is good for your physical health, too. But we’d never arrange a campaign against broken arms or osteoporosis around these things, which are just nice to do, but aren’t treatments for disease.
It’s clear enough from the language that’s used—the College misunderstands the perspective of the mentally ill person. And, in doing this, I think, it misunderstands its own project. The College has conflated health with happiness. It’s running a robust fun initiative. And it’s right, of course, to concern itself with students’ enjoyment. But it takes itself to be responding to a crisis, too. It’s pouring resources into what’s labeled “mental health” programming, presumably, because it’s aware of the ballooning rates of mental illness among young people. The College should be commended for mounting an effort against this. But it has made the matter appear frivolous. It has done damage to our concepts of mental health and mental illness. And it has left those subjects vulnerable to mockery.
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