50 years ago, I was a young adult and I became aware of the taboos that surrounded mental health, through the unsaid, the heavy silences, the embarrassment that afflicted the existence of people who had received care , of their own volition or against their will.
I knew that suicide existed, in our country and within our culture, as it still exists and existed in ancient times throughout the world1, but I had learned little on the subject, except that it was object of reprobation by the religion. We didn’t talk about it or very little, the internet didn’t exist, we learned about it through television and newspapers which, on occasion, broadcast the news of the death by suicide of a writer or a famous artist.
The distress that could lead to suicidal action was most often hidden, concealed by the suffering people and their loved ones, in a well of silence or a fog of denial when it was revealed. Even today, despite our desire to change our society with regard to mental health, suicidal distress is not easy to detect, even less to entrust, despite the extreme suffering it generates.
If you question those around you, you may find a few people who have known victims or bereaved by suicide, but the subject makes you uncomfortable, even more so when it concerns us intimately.
The negative representations conveyed for centuries about what was called, at a certain time, the disturbances of the mind generated a stigmatization anchored in our attitudes and behaviors, then transmitted to the heart of families, our educational institutions and health care. Confiding one’s distress, talking about one’s emotional states, one’s mental or psychological health still very often generates fear, feelings of shame or guilt. It may even be accompanied, for some of us, by the risk of alienating our own family, being shunned or dishonored.
Despite the progress made in raising awareness of this form of suffering, its expression is still stifled by the prejudices and preconceptions that prevent us from talking about it with confidence and safety. The tragic testimonies of young adults and loved ones that have been published on social networks and in the media in recent years and very recently bear witness to this.
So that the suffering does not become chronic
These testimonials reveal the immense effort that we must still make to consider the health of the mind in all its complexity, taking into account its emotional, affective, relational, cultural, moral and spiritual components which make it so rich. In our highly medicalized society, we most often talk about it from the angle of symptoms of this or that disease, and less as an essential dimension of our health as a whole. However, emotional pain and psychological distress are not always symptoms of a psychiatric illness, nor are they synonymous with it. They can represent the expression of feelings of impasse, despair or intense discouragement that deserve attention in order to prevent the suffering from becoming chronic and causing further damage to our health.
In societies that thrive on performance and productivity, we can forget or prefer to neglect that various so-called bio-psycho-social factors help maintain our balance and our overall health.
Habits, socio-economic contexts, life events, hardships, adversity in different forms mark our journey and our personal history. Each of these elements has its place on the chessboard of our health or our suffering.
Distress, suicidal or not, is an alarm signal that needs to be heard, welcomed and validated, without preconceived judgment. She ceases to be invisible or stifled when she has access to a space to say herself without shame and without fear. My dream is similar to that of many young people I have met: care environments that promote well-being and overall health, spaces for healing and repair in which holistic approaches are deployed, integrated around the principle of a common humanity. Places where we talk about appeasement and meaning as well as treatment.
Young people dream of it, adults in distress too. Preventing suicide, promoting mental health, fighting prejudice, means denouncing inertia and putting an end to the dichotomous body-mind vision that perpetuates stigmatization and the arbitrary hierarchy of our health services. It is to allow psychologists to meet the needs of the population and to enrich the teams with their know-how and interpersonal skills. It means recognizing the expertise of the person who seeks our help, and that of their loved ones. It is to accept to see in the distress of the other my own humanity.
1. Culture and voluntary death: suicide across countries and agesÉric Volant (2006), Editions Liber