An Elephant in the Treatment Room; Neoliberalism, Mental Health and Children in Ireland

While trawling job websites recently I came upon an advert for a role which I felt I would be particularly suited to. While I won’t name the advertising organisation, the position exists within a third-level institution, and the purpose of the role is to create easier pathways for disadvantaged groups within society to access third-level education. My enthusiasm was short-lived, my eyes drawn to that dreaded phrase for those of us who yearn to start a life, get a mortgage, or have children after years upon years of precariousness. “2 year fixed-term contract”.
Precarious work conditions are an increasingly common aspect of modern life, yet impressing that disadvantage upon a worker whose role it is to assist populations in navigating disadvantage was perhaps a touch too ironic on this occasion. That a public, third-level, institution would do so? A forthright assertion of the hegemony of neoliberalism in Ireland today. This may seem like a peculiar observation to highlight when discussing children and young people’s mental health, but ultimately it has much more pertinence than would appear at first, which I will illustrate shortly.
As someone who has worked with children and young people in various guises, I have been fascinated by the focus on their mental health in recent years, and more specifically what society deems responsible for their mental health problems, and how it attests to ‘solve’ them. Thus, given that media narratives either shape public discourse, or are reflective of them, for a recent research project I decided to conduct an analysis of print media articles that focused on children and young people’s mental health from the year 2018.
The foremost conclusion I reached was how we have simplified human experience in order to fit certain narratives, in the process rendering much media and public discourse entirely inadequate. For example, across the full body of articles I analysed there was no mention of poverty, inequality, or social structures as bearing any level of responsibility for the mental health problems faced by children and young people in Ireland today. This deficit is against the backdrop of inequality being proven to be one of the driving forces behind mental health problems in myriad of research.
Furthermore, homelessness was only mentioned once, and that particular commentator identified young people’s lack of ‘resilience’ as instigating the mental health problems experienced by young people facing precarious living conditions. In contrast to this, and entirely predictably I must add, digital technology bore a significant brunt of the ire. What is striking about the scapegoating of digital technology in this respect, is the lack of any form of consensus in research that correlates a definitive cause-effect relationship between the overuse of digital technology with mental health problems. In fact, some researchers have pointed to the possibility that digital technology could be used excessively by children and young people who are trying to navigate mental distress, rather than being an instigator of it.
Thus, the drive to blame any and all forms of digital technology for our children and young people’s mental health problems, while ignoring the oversized elephant in the room, appears symptomatic of a desire to simplify complex issues in order to suit a particular narrative. That is the primary issue with the discourse regarding children and young people’s mental health as I see it, and one that shone through in my research. The media individualised and pathologised children and young people’s distress as a matter of course, and in doing so overlooked social influences in driving this distress.
International research I drew upon in my research, which was conducted with young people, shows how neoliberalism has informed their views of the social world, with many completely normalising and internalising the concept of individualism. Young people recognised that failure to achieve meritocracy from within the narrow construct of value in the neoliberal society, would ensure they would be ‘left behind’. But it was their fault if they were left behind.
Given the tone of the discourse within an Irish context, our children and young people are no different, I would suggest. For example, a psychologist bemoaned the pressures of our education system in driving mental distress, but proposed an antidote of pushing young people to ‘achieve’ individual excellence in business. Another commentator proposed pushing children to ‘achieve’ individual excellence in sport as an antidote to individual pressures in the online world. Yet, moving goalposts is hardly a solution, if the pitch remains waterlogged with individualised pressures and there is a constant threat of the bus leaving you behind if you can’t ‘achieve’ excellence in something society deems of worth?
This increasing pressure to perform in every aspect of their lives makes a mockery of society’s dissociation from the perceived pressures of the online world. Every day children and young people are castigated for being too ‘image conscious’ or ‘self-absorbed’. Yet we have constructed a social world, one which we can’t blame Facebook for, where children and young people are all too aware that unless they perfect ‘brand-me’ they are destined to be of ‘no value’ in our society. After all, what is different between the pursuit of individual academic excellence, individual sporting excellence, or Instagram excellence other than our perceptions of its worth? We have created a society of inescapable and unrelenting mental turmoil, where there is a constant pressure to prove one’s worth. Our children and young people are all too aware of this, it would appear.
Neoliberalism and its stranglehold on everything from our job prospects, to access to secure housing, to how our children and young people view how our society values or devalues them, deserves much more scrutiny. We have completely normalised neoliberalism with its traits of precariousness, individualism, and extremely narrow constructs of ‘value’; the job advert I highlighted at the start of this piece illustrates just how hegemonic neoliberalism has become.
Yet, Irish society and the media continue to be obsessed with how ‘likes’ are apparently causing depression, always looking for some bogey-man to be the instigator of our children and young people’s distress, never self-reflective enough to delve deeper. After all, do we really think social media exists in a vacuum? Surely then reports of ever-increasing anxiety and depression in our children will not be cured by pills, talk-therapy, or the new fad of ‘resilience’ building? Sure, some of these things may help, some much more than others I would suggest.
However, Irish society needs to identify the enormous role the particular embodiment of neoliberalism it has engendered has played in damaging and casting aside many of our children and young people. Ultimately it is us, Irish society, that is fuelling the distress our children and young people are experiencing. Until such a point as we accept that, any media and social discourse that only problematises service gaps and social media, and sees Aldi sponsored talk therapies as the panacea to our children and young people’s distress, is merely tinkering around the edges of the problem. This tinkering is an abject failure of our children and young people, and ultimately all of us.
