Fixing mental-health care needs time and space
Embrace yourself, it’s that time of the year! Social media feeds all over Canada are filled this month with heartfelt messages about love, kindness, and our collective need to talk more about mental health. And then we shall never speak about it until next year.
It’s like being nice to your partner only on Valentine’s Day or calling your mother only for Mother’s Day. It doesn’t count for much. This isn’t to accuse everyone of hypocrisy. We all fall prey to the same pressure to be at the forefront of every social cause.
If we don’t, we’re perceived as moral failures. But, instead of encouraging meaningful social awareness, we’re instead encouraging self-obsession and the need to curate our image, to create our very own “branding.”
Creating our brand is a corporate model which has diffused itself into our own social lives. Anyone with a basic understanding of free markets knows that marketing, and by definition it includes branding, is one of the most important aspects of financial success for a corporation.
Every time we make a purchase, from buying an iPhone to buying a Tesla, we’re buying a narrative, a perception, a brand. Utility or the quality of a product is not necessarily the most important deciding factor. Rather, it’s about what that product says about us. What the product says about our lifestyle and overall image. Understanding these dynamics, large corporations are crafty in tapping into these social tendencies and shaping their message around them.
Any corporation that wants to thrive in this environment must announce its allies and denounce its enemies.
The case in point: Bell. No matter how much Bell donates, no one will benefit more from this campaign than Bell.
The amount of free advertisement and endorsement that it will receive from large corporations and important institutions in the country will be worth every cent they donate. And even better than that, it makes up for fantastic branding.
Bell’s consumers don’t need to know how Bell treats its workers. Consumers only need to feel proud that their provider stands for mental health. But hashtags and social media feeds cannot substitute for meaningful engagement with the topic.
In a world where we’re constantly doom-scrolling through disheartening news, meaningful engagement becomes more challenging every day.
We must understand that both our empathy and cognitive capabilities have limits. To meaningfully engage with any complex social issue, such as mental health, we need time and space.
This brings me to the last point. We have created a culture where we think that issues that are systematic and deeply political are rather individual responsibilities. Conventional wisdom tells us if everyone takes personal responsibility then collective problems will be solved by default. But collective problems need collective solutions.
No amount of individual charities will solve a broken and deeply flawed mental-health system. This does not mean that we bear no individual responsibility. But we cannot individually solve what must be addressed systematically and collectively.
As a consequence, sometimes the best way to engage with any social justice issue is to take a step back and reflect. Most importantly, we must refuse to let corporations take advantage of our empathy or our need to maintain a certain social perception. The mental-health system will not be fixed one hashtag at a time.