We are already used to hearing certain types of messages about mental health and well-being that preach that happiness is a matter of attitude, and that the path to it is none other than proposing it. It is what is known as ‘toxic positivity’.
For those who actually live with psychiatric conditions such as depressive or anxiety disorders, this type of rhetoric can be very harmful, because in a certain way it charges them with the blame for a malaise of a medical nature. And, especially, for those people whose condition is caused or conditioned by difficult situations that are beyond their control.
“Our mental suffering cannot be isolated from the context”
Inequality, poverty, disease, mistreatment, discrimination… Those who have to deal every day with this type of ill are, logically, especially vulnerable at a psychiatric level. “It is very unlikely that, under certain conditions, they do not occur in those who suffer from them some kind of mental health problem“, points to 20minutos Edgar Cabanas, PhD in psychology, professor and researcher at the Camilo José Cela University and author of Happycracia, work that shells the “science and industry of happiness”. “From more generic ailments to specific problems such as depressive or anxiety symptoms,” he adds.
“Clearly, these are circumstances that have an impact on people’s mental health, although more factors have to be assessed,” agrees Pablo R. Coca, cartoonist and psychologist who created Occimoronsa series of cartoons that claim the importance of taking care of mental health through social networks and the publication of the book Those things that weigh us down. “What happens to us, our psychological suffering, should not be isolated from context in which we live,” he explains.
“In short, having, for example, economic security protect people regarding certain mental health problems, but it does not completely exclude you from suffering from them because many more factors come into the equation,” he points out.
“We must politicize the problem of mental health”
Cabanas, who works in his research on issues such as the social determinants of mental health or, more particularly, the relationship between job insecurity and mental health, explains that psychology as a science You are often faced with this problem.
“One question is that we know how to identify which are the determinants that they have more weight when it comes to explaining a problem, symptom or symptomatology related to mental health and another thing is how we can change it”, he says.
“We do a diagnosis of the situation to understand why these problems occur, persist and why they are distributed unequally in the population: why certain profiles (people with more precarious jobs, or women over 45, or young people who work in sectors such as the riders…) are much more likely to suffer from these types of mental health problems than other people,” the expert continues.
“Mental health must be politicized: it is a social problem with social causes”
“What we have to do is fight politically. Trying to make people aware that the mental health problem must be politicized to make what we already know more evident: that the mental health problem is a social problem with social causes,” he says.
“Everything has an impact on our mental health”
Similarly, Coca argues that mental health protection often goes far beyond the psychotherapist’s consultation: “Not all problems are psychological, but everything has an impact on our mental health. Therefore, when we talk about health mentally we have to talk about the world we live inof what are the personal, social, economic and political circumstances that we are going through”.
“It is true that clinical psychology can provide strategies and tools that can soothe the person’s discomfort, but then we would be focusing elsewhere. Psychology should not consist of ‘fixing’ people to return them to a system that, per se, does not take care of our mental health at all“, he argues. Of course, he says, “everyone should be guaranteed quality public psychological care at those moments in which they may need it.”
Precisely, and although psychotherapy is not going to solve problems such as situations of abuse or economic poverty (“that remains to be done: it is a job that we must undertake as a society, from politics and with laws that regulate, for example, the labor market”, Cabanas points out), what it can do is give some answers to the patient.
“These are problems that have to do with their social position”
“Knowing this (the determinants that intervene in a certain mental symptomatology) and bringing it to the attention of the patient does help to normalize this problem and put it into perspective,” he develops. “For example, it helps them understand that it is not a problem of individual responsibility, that It’s not something they’re doing wrong or that they are not regulating their emotions well”, he details.
“Suddenly, it is not a problem that they carry only on their shoulders, but it has to do with their position within the social framework”he adds, “but they know that people in similar situations have similar problems.”
“Then therapy can be about trying to provide these people with more concrete psychological tools that allow you to somehow navigate through that situation, reduce that suffering and be more functional in your life. Obviously, this must be done, but understanding that what maintains or explains his problem has more to do with the position he occupies or with the conditions he has than with what he has done or not done, “he concludes.