When Life Happens…
“To hurt is as human as to breathe” (JK Rowling).
“…in this world you will have trouble…” (Holy Bible, John 16:33)
“Human life is fatally fragile and subject to forces beyond our power to manage. Life is tragic” (Timothy Keller).
Indeed there are many euphemisms and sayings that help us to articulate the occurrence of the happenings in life that are unpleasant and/ or unpredictable, to say the least. Many people can acknowledge that inherent to humanness are experiences that might be characterized as painful, confusing, unnerving, and the like. These experiences can influence our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Despite a largely collective awareness of life’s “happenings”, people continually struggle to find language that adequately captures the depth and breadth of such experiences, particularly when the perception of one’s mental state is vulnerable to scrutiny. The question may arise, “is this person mentally healthy or mentally ill?” “Is this person stable or unstable?” “Is this person’s response normal or abnormal?”
In his essay, “Too Human”, Daniel (Dan) Oppenheimer of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health writes passionately and critically about conceptions of mental health and mental illness, challenging the idea that mental health is the absence of pain, distress, and vulnerability and instead positing that varying degrees of pain or psychological aching are intrinsic to life happening.
Particularly fascinating is Oppenheimer’s perspective on the language associated with describing mental health and mental illness. He writes:
Just once, though, I’d love to see a public awareness campaign from a major mental health group that aims its language in the other direction. Instead of humanizing and normalizing the experience of mental illness, imagine a campaign intended to destabilize the idea of “normal” by interrogating whether normalcy, or for that matter “mental health,” is as uninteresting or as uncomplicated as we persuade ourselves it is.
The point of such a campaign wouldn’t be to erase the distinction between mental health and illness, between flourishing and suffering, between being in rough control of ourselves and not being in control at all. The point would be to highlight the degree to which rough control is about as good as gets.
Oppenheimer’s proposed critical deconstructionist viewpoint about mental health and mental illness is interesting along a few dimensions. Mental health professionals have grappled with how to talk about mental health and mental illness for decades. From research examining mental illness stigma (see Bathje & Pryor, 2011; Crowe & Averett, 2015; Stuber, Rocha, Christian, & Link, 2014 for examples), to theorizing that questions the very concept of mental illness (Szasz, 1960, 2011), to paradigm shifts in mental health that more adequately address the role of multiculturalism in treatment contexts (see Sue and Sue 2015 for example), the language of mental health and mental illness is vast and influenced by a number of indicators including an individuals’ conception of what it means to be mentally ill or mentally healthy.
In exploring conceptions of mental health and illness, I asked a group of Mental Health Counseling graduate students in my Clinical Instruction course to share words and phrases they perceived were commonly associated with mental health and mental illness (pictured below). Words like suffering, trapped, and struggle described mental illness and words such as balance, strength, and awareness described mental health. Although not surprising, the difference in language is notable when considering that how we talk about mental illness and mental health often has implications for how we understand and respond to mental illness and mental health. It is amazing, for example, that so many people recognize the universality of suffering; yet, seeking help from a professional (and sometimes seeking help from anyone) to cope with sadness, loneliness, frustration, confusion, fear, doubt and more remains negatively stigmatized. Could this be because we lack language for and fail to talk about what mental health looks like?
Like Oppenheimer, I would suggest that mental health, in many instances, can be depicted and talked about by highlighting a range of human responses (e.g., emotional, behavioral, cognitive) to life’s happenings. Perchance, our struggle with such a depiction is that the way we talk about mental health often calls us to distinguish it from or even define it as antithetical to any experience that might be conceivably associated with mental illness. As highlighted by my students, concepts such as pain, struggle, and distress are not often used to describe mental health. In fact, many definitions of mental health include notions of wellness and an ability to adjust to ordinary life demands.
Attending to language, ordinary life demands is an interesting concept. In today’s society these ordinary life demands — managing family, relationships, career, school, finances, etc — have taken on a life of their own and can be, arguably, contextualized based on one’s internal and external resources. For example, the life demands of someone managing a family in a resource poor community are likely different than the life demands of someone who is raising a family in a well-resourced community. Further, we exist in a time where even children are experiencing increased anxieties and schools are implementing mindfulness based interventions to reduce stress all due to ordinary life demands.
Our inadequate language-based reflections about the mental experiences of ourselves and others tends to set up dichotomies of health or illness, stability or instability, normality or abnormality. However, it’s been stated that “life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr). With such dichotomies often deeply cemented in our language expressions, we can fail to provide space for synthesis, to acknowledge that ordinary life demands may mean that struggle interacts with strength and awareness is informed by suffering.
Mental health is not at all “as uninteresting or as uncomplicated as we persuade ourselves it is” (Oppenheimer). Mental health is not even as simple to work toward as our language would have us believe. Because mental health, and mental illness for that matter, are so diverse we cannot rely entirely on language to change the dichotomies entrenched in sociocultural and political systems but we can use language to catalyze change in how we think about and relate to one another. As Oppenheimer encourages his readers to consider the power of language, perhaps we might all reflect on how our own language around mental health and mental illness serve to stigmatize or destigmatize, to conform or deconstruct, to hurt or heal.
Thank you Mr. Oppenheimer for encouraging this discussion, and I hope that this dialogue is one that will continue.
