No, I won’t tell you about Mental Health Week, which ended yesterday. I feel like enough ink has been spilled on the subject and enough of us have clicked, shared, commodified, politicized and hashtagged the thing.
In my opinion, nothing more relevant than this text by the poet Christian Vézina has been said about this week which, let’s say it, should not only last the whole year, but should completely cross all the other themes that we set in calendars to make us aware of them: environment, poverty, injustices, social inequalities, urban planning, education, economy, spirituality, social services, etc.
Because mental health, whatever the still so simplistic — not to say revolting — definition of the World Health Organization (WHO) may say, is perhaps not, no, a “state of well-being”. -being that enables everyone to realize their potential, to cope with the normal difficulties of life, to work successfully and productively, and to be able to make a contribution to the community”. This definition, so embedded in neoliberal logic that it forgets its imposture, illustrates in itself the great paradox of the discourse on mental health. Hard to be more blind, in fact, to what, precisely, underlies the majority of contemporary psychological suffering, namely the reduction of human states to their sole dimensions of productivity, functionality and normality. Defining it in this way is possibly tantamount to doing it the violence from which its symptoms seek to extricate themselves.
Mental health does not exist! I say this with a big nod to my dear Winnicott, again him, who had made the crowd of psychoanalysts react before whom he had launched, in 1943: “A baby doesn’t exist! What he was insinuating then was that it was impossible to isolate a baby’s psychic world by probing it separately from that of its mother, since the latter was “deeply immersed in the maternal womb” and Thus, one could not grasp one without necessarily apprehending the other. A “mother-child unit”, that was what a baby was.
As the poet Vézina says in his magnificent letter, mental health cannot be taken apart either, so deeply immersed as it is in the social matrix.
The only small, light side step that I would bring to this text concerns the primacy granted by the author to biochemistry and the brain, and the analogy that results from this between taking medication for physical health problems and the psychotropic drugs which, to my regret, still cross too much the discourse on our psychological suffering. My years of childhood clinic and my great discomfort with all these brain metaphors “which needs glasses” or “taking insulin compared to taking psychostimulants” resurface every time we compare apples to oranges, or from the principles of techno-scientific causalities to psycho-affective data. If I am absolutely not against the use of these molecules when it comes to making life habitable for children and their families, I have too often seen these metaphors put at the service of a shameless guilt of parents who refused to medicate their children or, at the other end of the spectrum, to the complete clearance of a society that no longer wanted to give itself the time or the means to look more deeply for the sources of discomfort in turbulent children. But I know very well that these metaphors also serve to legitimize suffering and the need for care, so my remarks are intended to be more of a precision and than a response.
Anyway, it is again poetry that captures better than any expert what is involved in this question of mental health, because with its sensitivity, it manages to account for a world without tearing off pieces so that it fits better into a predefined linguistic perimeter. The famous “common sense”, which is always associated with pragmatism, is much more often found on the side of poets, artists and other hearers of voices who, in fact, know better than anyone that mental health is not is probably not to be suited to such a sick society.
Paul Ricoeur on living metaphor said: “Metaphor is not living only in that it vivifies a constituted language. The metaphor is vivid in that it inscribes the impulse of the imagination in a “thinking more” at the level of the concept. »
And if we worked out together an infinite poetic sequence on what this concept of “mental health” would be like, in the manner of Vézina or Ricoeur, in a lively way, far from the moribund definition of the WHO, would we not be not, then, in a much fairer effort, to account for a phenomenon?
I start, you complete?
Mental health is:
Attempt to live one’s life by becoming more and better ourselves;
Dreaming of a world where beauty would be accessible to everyone;
Going through existence by metabolizing ever more of its mystery;
Try not to be dead, behind facades of the living;
To survive as best we can in the increasingly inhuman conditions in which we sometimes have to evolve in order to “be part of the game » ;
Hold the tension between oneself and others;
Extricate oneself from the “family matrix” to become someone who is not just the child of his parents;
To love as often as possible and to be reborn each time one dies of love as well, because “we often die of course”;
Enlarge our interior space, accommodate ever more complexity;
Laugh at yourself more often;
Be less afraid of yourself;
Learn to lose, to die, to let go;
Make our borders more flexible, make them open without them being naive;
Relearning to play;
Do not forget to breathe;
To resist what reduces us, totals us, classifies us, identifies us;
Dance as often as possible in the kitchen, in the street, in the office tower.