Over the summer, I listened to an intriguing podcast titled “Are We Talking About Therapy Too Much?” In it, host Jerusalem Desmas talks with Dr. Lucy Foulkes, a researcher at the University of Oxford, who is concerned that movements around mental health awareness are not unilaterally beneficial. After listening to Foulkes’ argument, I began thinking more critically about the ways mental health is discussed in our generation and specifically at Tufts.
On the surface, it appears that having more discussions about mental health can only be beneficial — we are bringing awareness to people’s struggles and promoting much-needed resources such as the Counseling and Mental Health Services and Ears 4 Peers. Moreover, honest and meaningful disclosures of our mental health experiences create a ripple effect, allowing other students to feel comfortable and even confident sharing their own stories. In theory, more students should feel heard and able to work towards improving their mental health.
However, I believe many of our mental health-related conversations are neither honest nor meaningful. Instead of reducing stigma, certain types of conversations make members of our community feel isolated and worsen our community’s mental health. Our society’s rising discussion and awareness of mental health-related topics has come with an increased comfort associating serious mental health issues with normal experiences. Standard worries surrounding academics, friendships and other stress-inducing circumstances are now increasingly interpreted as pathological. The term "anxiety,” which is a normal and healthy response to stress, is often spoken of as if any instance of experiencing it is evidence of a mental illness. Sadness, one of life’s normal daily emotions, is more commonly being spoken of as a synonym for depression.
While we have been trying to normalize mental illness, we have seemingly also normalized inaccurate self-diagnoses of mental illness. Self-diagnosing has become exceedingly easy with the internet at our fingertips, displaying countless social media posts, comments and videos relaying inaccurate information about mental health. Moreover, even if people do obtain information about mental illness from a reliable source, such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness, without proper training, most people are far from qualified to diagnose themselves with a mental illness.
Sam Goldstone, a senior, says, “I’ve seen people [at Tufts] self-diagnose so much more just because they hear others talking about anxiety or depression in such a casual way.” The more those around us self-diagnose, the more likely we are to become skeptical of our own mental well-being and assume our symptoms are pathological. Furthermore, these days, it feels as though we have a requirement to have a mental illness to be seen as deserving of empathy. Experiencing anxiety as part of daily life is no longer enough to garner validation and support. Now, it must be pathological too.
This self-diagnosis phenomenon poses a big risk to our mental health. Foulkes and fellow academic psychologist Jack Andrews write in the academic journal “New Ideas in Psychology” that when people “interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems... [it leads] some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms.” If we believe we have a mental illness when we do not, the misconception can create a self-fulfilling prophecy: our self-concept deteriorates and, consequently, we limit ourselves in the ways we interact with the world, worsening our mental health.
This increasing casualness with which we discuss mental illness can, instead of decreasing stigma and opening the conversation to others who are struggling, actually isolate and close doors for some. For instance, I have heard many Tufts students talk about how they need their notes to be neat, claiming they are “so OCD.” Equating one’s organization to a serious mental illness minimizes and invalidates the hardships someone with OCD endures. As a result, those with OCD may be hesitant to disclose their struggles in fear of them being equated to “a need for organization” by their peers.
Senior Hailey Swett says, “People [at Tufts] use the language of mental health and mental illness too loosely. So people say things like ‘Oh, I’m so depressed today.’ Well, you’re not actually diagnosed with depression because to have that diagnosis it has to be over a long period of time and it has to impact your functioning in a significant way. I think that people don’t quite understand that. When people use that language so loosely, it takes away from the gravity of such diagnoses.”
Moving forward, our society needs to make more of an effort to understand the differences between mental health and mental illness. Just like physical health, mental health can improve or worsen depending on a variety of factors. However, when one’s mental health deteriorates to the point where their daily functioning is significantly impaired over a long period of time, we cross the boundary into mental illness. Despite this key difference, every person deserves support for their struggles with or without pathology. We need to continue to speak about mental health and illness in our everyday lives while refraining from equating mental illness with non-pathological emotions. Once we find this balance, more members of our community will feel comfortable sharing genuine experiences, and we can all work towards improving our collective mental health.
