Now, more than ever, people are becoming more comfortable revealing details about their mental health. Is this the new norm, or another trend?
By Tiana Saha
Tiana has recently graduated in Psychology. While she eagerly awaits the start of her masters, she grapples with the harsh reality of employment without experience and publishing without being published. A hobbyist artist, spontaneous writer and consistent reader – she sincerely hopes to work with diverse communities in counseling psychology. She also shares her unabashed opinions on her blog.
I have started therapy this year, and it has been going steadily for a while now. I find it easier to joke about what I tell my therapist to my peers than I do with my parents.
Is it because it’s as easy as recording a reel with the latest trending audio? Or is there comfort knowing that not everyone is as ‘perfect’ as they come out to be. Akin to how it was like when during COVID, everyone was buying a PPE kit or getting a swab test done.
Therapy as Privilege: Who Gets to Heal?
I still find being able to go to therapy a privilege. It is often talked about how concerns about ‘meaninglessness,’ and ‘loneliness’ are more about urban educated populations than about the rural uneducated – and I agree.
I’ve been in an internship where the patients of a psychiatrist still called their counselors ‘doctors’ simply because they worked in a professional setting. These patients come from far places, beyond the reaches of 5G and overpriced cafes hosting ‘mental wellbeing workshops’.
This gap, caused by education and economic status, still separates the counselor from becoming empathetic simply because the privilege they now hold is different from being an empath.
The Professional Gap: Empathy vs. Expertise
The powerplay of being an MHP and being treated as a doctor, still overwhelms many novice counselors. But isn’t this the chosen responsibility?
The choice to burden ourselves with the decision to listen, every day, to individuals with difficulties, with unbearable pain and with challenges that would break our hearts.
Inaccessibility of therapy
Internet culture has made therapy mainstream, with songs discussing how heartbreak is a common theme in sessions. Yet, the majority of the world we live in faces issues that are deeper than a heartbreak or job loss. Survivors of crime still face trauma, due to inaccessibility to modalities of therapy.
‘Talk therapy’ is the only type that is available to many, limiting expression through art, music, or dance therapy. Dissociation in urban setups due to language barriers, inaccessibility to basic facilities due to disability, and added casteism, homophobia and sexism still color the lives of many around us.
Even those with access to mental health care aren’t seeing results immediately. Psychologists across the world are still seeing a disturbing unchanged rise in the number of cases of dissatisfaction with life, unexplained sadness, and larger suicides.
Therapy can be called the ‘new norm,’ but there are a lot of other factors that have remained unchanged in the clients’ environment. Take my family for example – although I’ve been encouraged to attend sessions to “fix” me, there isn’t much belief that simply ‘talking’ is working.
Words of discouragement and highly expressed emotions have hindered my development. The home environment, cultural situation, ethnic privileges, history of oppression, and sexual orientation – are just a few of the interacting factors that can change the trajectory of a person’s mental health.
The Jargon Dilemma: How Language Dilutes Meaning
What I have found problematic is the easy use of mental health jargon being tossed around. Earlier, it was words like ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ that were used to describe spells of sadness or unexplained apprehension. The words that lose meaning from the world of psychology have transitioned into meaningless use in pop ‘psychology.’ ‘Autistic’ is used to describe people with a fixation on goals, and ‘trauma’ is used to describe embarrassing situations that don’t want to be revisited.
Psychological science needs rigorous scientific findings to boost its rigor and to emerge more seriously. Many practitioners depend more on clinical experience and patient values than on evidence-based approaches, according to research by Stewart, Chambless, and Stirman (2018). Research has demonstrated that experience and clinical judgment by themselves aren’t always trustworthy (Shimokawa et al., 2010). This persistent discrepancy between research and practice is worrisome because it compromises the efficacy of psychological interventions and increases public skepticism about the possible advantages of psychological services.
Will Mental Health Care Go Out of Style?
Trends fade in and out. I’ve recently seen a surge in the ‘cocaine’ body, highlighted by an Instagram post by Jameela Jamil. It’s hard to dictate whether visiting a trained specialist regarding your mental health crises will go ‘out’ (as Esme Squalor from ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ would call it) – or if it’ll become a treatment method as common as a general check-up with a physician.
Either way, I hope visits to a mental health specialist become a norm.
A Hope for the Future: Normalising Struggles and Conversations
As a mental health student, I hope it becomes easy to admit having mental health issues. People are still hesitant to come forward and talk about family members with diagnosed depression, or anxiety. Many older family members can still recount stories of how a widow went ‘crazy’ after her husband died and children moved out – and they’ll tell you how she was taken to the ‘mental doctor’. I hope that we understand terminologies in mental health, and become more accepting of cases, more compassionate towards diagnoses, and more understanding of patients with mental disorders. Many of them aren’t even hereditary but many are situational.