World Mental Health Day is upon us, and we can expect a slew of platitudes and quotes that would make even the corniest wine mums cringe. If you happen to live in a country like Luxembourg, where progress can at times feel agonisingly slow, you may encounter articles by mainstream outlets aimed at their mostly boomer audiences that sound as if they were written by an extraterrestrial lifeform who has just discovered that humans sometimes get sad.
There will be much talk about not feeling ashamed. Going to therapy. Eating healthily and getting enough exercise. Spending time in nature. The importance of taking breaks. In short: all the things YOU can do to fix YOUR pathetic brain that started being a big dumb idiot about this whole life thing for no reason.
One thing neoliberalism really likes to do is individualise societal issues. Thatcher famously said that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families. And even years after the wicked witch returned to the hellfires from which she clearly emerged, we are still firmly under the influence of her curse.
Let’s take a brief look around: most people work increasingly long hours; some have more than one job, while others work within very unstable frameworks (part-time, fixed-term, freelance…). Luxembourg is now No. 1 in Europe in terms of working poor. Many either can’t afford to eat healthily, or have so little time that they have no option but to go with ultra-processed, instantly available food. It has become completely normal for people my age to say that they expect never to have a home of their own or a sustainable pension in old age. Companies more powerful than most governments are investing trillions into data centres for a technology whose primary use cases appear to be inducing cognitive decline and telling depressed kids to off themselves. For the past two years, we have collectively witnessed the first livestreamed genocide in human history. It has become normal for me to open my social feeds and see babies with their limbs torn off. Our leaders have either reacted to this apathetically or by branding anyone opposing this atrocity as antisemitic. The guy in charge of the world’s biggest military is a racist paedophile with dementia who is increasingly turning his country’s colonial violence against its own citizens. Our leaders joke around with him and call him Daddy. Oh yeah, and the world’s climate is collapsing and, instead of treating it as our No. 1 priority, we are actually rolling back some of the tiny progress that has been achieved in recent years. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
The violence in this world is relentless and increasingly pervasive, whether it is the violence of capitalists and technofeudal lords against the working classes, the violence of patriarchs against women and queer people, or the unspeakable colonial violence of white supremacists against people all over the world. Forests are burned to the ground, animals hunted to extinction, the earth is plundered, and our fellow human beings are slaughtered – for what? GDP? Growth? Shareholder value? To soothe the egos of a handful of billionaires who will never know love?
Now, let me ask you: how could anyone be healthy in such a world? In fact, I would argue that experiencing anxiety and depression is the only natural response to living in such a violent, dehumanising system.
At this point, I should clarify that I’m not saying that therapy or self-care is useless. In fact, I believe they are both very useful tools and can be of great benefit to anyone. However, any therapy unwilling to acknowledge the systemic violence inflicted on us daily is doomed to remain ineffective in the long run.
Any mental health activism that aims to truly help the people must be revolutionary in nature. It must look critically at power structures and institutional control to identify the origins of our suffering. And it must dare to imagine a better future instead of settling for crumbs. For us neurodivergent folks, this means moving beyond a world in which our humanity is pathologised, beyond diagnoses and support measures that are only available to a privileged few.
There’s no two ways about it. If humanity is to have a future, we must end the capitalist economic system and the imperial-colonial exploitation of the Global South by the Global North. If humanity is to live, we must build a new society that places social values and the needs of the people at its core.
On World Mental Health Day, we should not content ourselves with plasters, but renew our resolve to defeat the cancer that is ravaging our planet.
just thoughts 