According to a study of 18,000 young people, more than half have symptoms of anxiety and depression, reported Josée Blanchette in her latest column, which she concludes with relevance with “no one is an island”, title of an essay by the monk Thomas Merton.
Since the pandemic, the importance given to mental health has increased. It is now one of the main social concerns: from anxiety to depression, from difficulty concentrating to difficulties in social adaptation, we are witnessing a resurgence of “cases”.
But are these really individual problems that the state takes care of with its mental health professional schemes? Doesn’t the very concept of mental health have the effect of individualizing global problems, by placing the responsibility on the individual to adapt to a constantly changing, even sick society?
On show Without daring to ask, of France Culture, Claude-Olivier Doron, historian and philosopher of science, traced the birth of the concept of mental health and questioned its effects. Here is a summary of his very enlightening remarks.
During the war, among the combatants, there were those who managed to adapt to the violence, the mass graves, the bloody horrors and those who could not. This is how the first techniques of group therapy developed to support and empower the misfits. As early as 1949, the World Health Organization (WHO) created a mental health unit. For the WHO, mental health then resided in the ability of the individual to adapt to his social environment.
However, after the Second World War, when people began to understand the workings of Nazism and to attribute the massive support and blind participation in the Holocaust to social conformity, the WHO could not keep its definition of health unchanged. mental. Indeed, we understood that, in certain situations, it is better to change the social environment than to adapt to it. The WHO, unable to position itself in favor of the revolution – the most radical way to bring about a change in society – will opt for a definition of mental health exempt from the risk of revolutionary drift.
This definition still prevails today, that of a balanced individual who manages to develop harmoniously while contributing to society.
The mental health market
The concept of mental health developed by the WHO will guide public policies aimed at preserving that of citizens. Not only will an arsenal of professionals emerge, but a whole market will also be created around mental health (from psychological services to applications for integrating healthy lifestyles, including a whole range of health products), not to mention colossal benefits for the pharmaceutical industry.
With a view to prevention, we will even go so far as to pathologize problems that should not be. Indeed, a simple passing discomfort, perfectly normal in any sane individual, will be quickly taken care of and, in the name of the prevention of an emerging pathological state, treated as a pathology. Detecting a problem where there is none necessarily puts the individual in a state of worry and modifies his perception of himself, which can go so far as to induce symptoms.
A plethora of public policies and human resources approaches will then be implemented. The misfits will be entitled to psychological support in the workplace, school or other. Mental health defined as an ability to adapt to changing environments (workplace, school environment, “progress”, etc.) seems to have the effect of individualizing the problems.
We try to equip the individual to adapt rather than questioning the environment. For example, eco-anxious people will be offered individual therapy, even though the problem is global. Rather than attacking the source, which would have the effect of cracking the foundations of our society, it is less risky for the established order to individualize a global problem.
The same is true for anxiety; we will offer therapy, medication to make the person feel better, but we will not question the way of life induced by a post-modern neoliberal society which communicates by interposed screens.
In the mold of a sick society
As early as 1960, Michel Foucault raised the question of the power of instrumentalization of psychiatry and psychology. Isn’t the fact that they are legitimized since they are scientific a way of subjugating individuals? he asked. In other words, doesn’t psychiatry have the effect of trying to normalize individuals and force them to fit into the mold of a sick society?
With the concept of mental health, are we not depoliticizing crucial societal issues to turn them into individual problems? It is high time to open the social debate and to reflect together on what is wrong with our society, of which the citizens that we are, it must be remembered, enjoy a way of life and social progress to which very few humans on Earth can aspire.
Throughout the history of mankind, we have reached an unequaled level of comfort, not only materially, but also in the physical effort to be deployed to live or even in the alleviation of physical and mental suffering by pharmacopoeia and increasingly effective medical advances. Why then are more than half of our young people grappling with this pain of life, at a pivotal moment in life when the breath of freedom that lifts us from adolescence to adulthood is supposed to make us bite with full teeth and big bites in this life that we have the privilege to lead as we see fit?
Shouldn’t we look for the sources of this general malaise in contemporary dehumanization? Given the lack of real ties, of face-to-face encounters, of community spirit, the loss of bearings and meaning in a postmodern world where everything is now possible, the disconnection from nature, the injunction to happiness when we no longer know how to recognize and appreciate these furtive moments of grace that are given to us when we are attentive to them, should we not question our consumerist and destructive lifestyles, our enslavement to technologies that disconnect us from space and very real time, which carries us at full speed and overtakes us?
It is high time to initiate this revolution towards a profound paradigm shift, to ax everything that dehumanizes us, to take the bull of climate change by the horns, to tackle the scourge of screens and to reinvest our energies in the presence to the other, in the preservation of nature, in the collective management of our lives and ways of living, and this, because “no one is an island”.