The suicide of Robin Williams has led to a renewal of the ongoing discussion about the legitimacy of depression and anxiety.
On the one hand are those who think suicide is cowardly and conditions like depression and anxiety are made-up, excuses for people not to try harder.
On the other is a vast amount of medical and experiential knowledge that suggests depression and anxiety are physical conditions, not fabricated excuses that, therefore, can and do have physical solutions.
Do those who choose not to believe in mental illness (instead preferring the catch-all of "crazy", that stigmatic term that redefines the mentally ill as non-human Others) think that heart attacks and strokes are excuses? That no medical intervention is necessary, a person with a heart attack just has to will themselves to get over it?
Of course not. A heart attack is like a broken bone - it's physical, you can see it. Diabetes is equally physical, though you don't see it - only its manifestations. You can disagree with allergies as a valid condition, but when someone goes into anaphylaxis, it's kind of hard to deny something's going wrong with that person.
What of carpal tunnel syndrome, or back pain? Do we believe those are real things? A person who types constantly with no break can develop (accrue) carpal tunnel syndrome - we get that. We get that craning your neck to cradle a phone can hurt the neck, too. In fact, we get that all kinds of physical illnesses can be accrued throughout life, and at the workplace.
We insure against them. We legislate against them. We even design around them. These are givens.
Yet mental health remains something taboo, fantastical, unbelievable. If you're too stressed out to do a job, you are clearly the problem, not the job - no one else has trouble with it, right? If you're too sad because of whatever, you just have to shake it off and keep on keeping on, like other people do.
We accept diet as something which impacts health, exercise as part of health, strain as part of health - but mental health remains taboo.
Is the brain not part of the body? Why should it alone be immune to the impacts of external factors?
The truth is, it isn't - and many physically manifested illnesses, like heart attacks, can trace their origin back at least in part to mental stress factors.
Yet at the same time, we all talk about mental health self-treatment all the time. Need a vacation? Why's that? Need a drink after work, or an advil? Is that any different for mental strain than it is for physical strain?
It isn't. We don't like to believe this, because the implications about how we view ourselves and how we go about our lives, work and relationships is enormous.
It remains true nevertheless.
So long as we deny mentalhealth and it's importance to overall health, we're going to keep treating lead poisoning instead of fixing the problem by changing the pipe.
And that's a bloody shame, considering how much time, energy and life we're wasting by trying to solve the wrong problem - not to mention lost opportunity.
Cognitive labour reform, conscious revolution. The Knowledge Economy and Open Government are two things that will never happen without it.
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