The System is Broken, Not The People!
Can an app offered by workplaces solve mental health issues?
While it’s encouraging to see more and more companies being proactive about offering mental health perks, individual-focused interventions are problematic; They try to fix people and not the systems.
The problem with focusing on individuals
Providing access to mental health support through apps or digital services can seem like a great approach at first glance, but it reproduces the idea that people are individually responsible for their own “happiness” and “well-being.”
Why is this problematic?
Our capitalist societies love to over-emphasize individual responsibility, stressing the narrative that by working hard and developing one’s willpower, every person can access wealth, abundance, and, above all, happiness.
Following this logic, it is not systems that cause inequality, but it is the individual who needs to learn how to navigate the systems and find a way to fix themselves, in order to not miss an opportunity to thrive within their given context.
This model tells people it’s up to them to find a way to fit in the system, and if they can’t, they better fix themselves. Meanwhile, the system remains unquestioned and is absolved of any responsibility.
Individual-focused means privileged
Truly addressing the topic of mental health and well-being means engaging on a deeper level with a whole range of social and cultural constructs and the problems associated with them, including power structures, and the privileges they afford.
Companies offering individual-focused interventions are often blind to these structures and end up recreating the individualistic paradigm.
By providing access to a mental health care app, companies seemingly fulfill their commitment to mental well-being. They are offering a tool (the same to everyone) that is designed to get people to fix themselves, navigating their own mental health as if it were independent of other root causes — such as a dysfunctional work environment — and solely their own responsibility to improve their mental well-being.
Except that mental health care and individual-focused interventions do not account for the fact that declining mental health does not arise nor exist in isolation from the bigger picture. Or that they are often caused by the weight of systems rooted in inequality and oppressive structures.
If we aim to successfully tackle mental health struggles, we need to broaden the scope of intervention, work through a justice-informed systems lens, and start from the fact that people do not have equal privileges and equal opportunities to access resources in the same way.
Mental Wellness Apps are often the very product of privileged perspectives and provide approaches that only work for people who are part of the dominant culture (usually white, western, affluent, well-educated, able-bodied, neurotypical, cis-gendered, and heterosexual persons) — if at all.
Individual-focused mental health care is harmful because it implies that everyone shares the same experience. This contributes to the invisibilizing of the unique and nuanced experience with mental health, especially for people whose social identities have been historically marginalized: Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian and Pasifika, Disabled, Chronically Ill, Neurodivergent, Poor, Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming, Queer and Stateless individuals.
Poor mental health is a symptom of a sick system
Looking at mental well-being through an intersectional lens means acknowledging that systemic inequalities affect people from historically marginalized groups differently and often disproportionally.
“Social and environmental factors, in addition to their independent and combined effects, can influence genetic determinants of health and illness through gene-by-environment interactions and epigenetic mechanisms. Such social and environmental factors clearly have an effect at the individual level and should encounter intervention in the clinical setting”.
(Source: Psychiatry Online)
In this context, a guided meditation or a breathing exercise won’t fix the trauma of communities made invisible and often threatened by marginalization.
Queer folx existing in a heteronormative system won’t heal with a 30-minute one-size-fits-all in-app counseling session, nor this will work for black, indigenous folx, and folx of color existing in a white supremacist system (including workplaces!).
Folx holding multiple identities and identifying as part of one or more historically marginalized communities are exposed to unique mental health stressors linked to their identity experiences.
The so-called minority stress — understood as the added layers of stress that are felt by those of a marginalized group — is a unique risk factor for folx from marginalized communities.
This stress stems from how our society is rooted in oppressive systems, including racism, white supremacy, capitalism, classism, patriarchy, and ableism.
Asking folx from traditionally marginalized communities to protect their mental health while the system is causing them distress is to add a further burden and unfair expectations on them.
The System is Broken, Not The People
Do workplaces care about mental well-being?
They should and, in recent years increasingly, they do. However, they are still lacking when it comes to fixing systems, not people.
Companies that aim to commit to mental well-being need to go beyond quick fixes and face the deeper levels of their workplace culture and structures, to ensure their environments set the right foundations for folx to thrive by feeling they belong and are cared for.
That may mean
- Introducing more flexible work times, which allow caregivers to participate equitably at work
- Allowing hybrid work models that remove the in-office requirement, which is often a pre-requisite for people with chronic pain, social anxiety, or neurodivergence to work without added layers of stress
- Or educating everyone in the workplace on transgender and non-binary identities, rather than just booking a truck for Pride parades and introducing pronouns in e-mail signatures, without people being able to properly use them.
And it certain includes making sure that in situations where harm is caused in the workplace — and the fact that it will be caused is a certainty, not a probability — we have structures and people in place that are emotionally equipped and empowered to skillfully deal with individuals who have been harmed.
As a society, including workplaces and organizations, if we are not willing to confront and challenge the structures of inequities and oppression we both exist in and reproduce, we are not going to achieve any change toward better mental health and well-being.
If we strive for real change when it comes to enhancing mental well-being, we need to go be willing to challenge systems of inequalities at all levels.
Not leaving the most vulnerable of us alone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps yet again.
This article was co-authored by Margherita Sgorbissa and Dr. Fox Mega
