“Wanna feel better?”, my witch asks me as she presents tonight’s options. Do we want to get drunk and risk a headache? Do we want to try out yoga again although we’ve never managed to take it seriously? Do we want to escape the last traces of reality by watching a sitcom and ignoring the world around for a while?
“Do I want to feel better?”, I repeat the question.
Is this really the time? In recent years, I have been asking myself this question over and over again, and I more and more feel as if I am not the only person struggling to find an answer. “Looks almost as if the world is actually burning, and not just in your head”, my witch giggles and she has a point.
The world is on fire, and we have found weird ways of coping.
When I was in therapy, the pandemic had ended the life that I was used to. I have a new life now, and I like it, but something was destroyed back then, and rather sudden and brutal.
And my therapist told me to buy the most sour drops that I could find to eat them to distract myself from the pain.
Almost as if it wasn’t real.
During that same time, the only person in my family that I had ever had a relationship to died after I had not seen her in over a year. I could not process it, so my therapist did not exactly know about it, but whenever I tried to talk about the thing, he reminded me of the sour drops.
But my pain was real.
Well-being has become an important topic in the recent years. During the pandemic, there were a lot of well-researched guides to triggering endorphins while not being allowed to do anything at all. Later, when Russia’s fucking war against Ukraine shook our world, I read a lot about how to fall asleep after reading stressful news. How to fall asleep when nuclear destruction suddenly is a topic again. Do I even want to sleep right now?
Before any election took place, at least ever since 2020, I read a lot about how to not get into fights with your relatives that vote fucking conservative (or worse), and how to cope with changes that are coming. Why not fight your uncle with a moustache denying you the right to get an abortion?
When I complained about a lecturer at my university for letting us read racist theorists without disclosure beforehand, my friend suggested that I did not put to much energy into it, because those fights were useless anyways. When I asked her and others to join protests early in the Ukraine war (when they did not ask Ukraine to stand down), or against the growing far right forces, I got the same response. Do self-care. Don’t get involved in useless fights. Feel good. Do I wanna feel good?
Something that I see in this list that upsets me is the constant need to feel good. Well-being has become this thing that always needs to be achieved, no matter what. When a plague stops the world, kills your grandmother, and then a war threatens the very world-order that once surrounded you, while the next election might bring back Nazis into the government you live under, I wonder why I am asked to work on my fucking well-being? How sane is it to still feel well in this world?
How to live in a world where being sane and feeling good does not go well together anymore? How do you cut through skin, and be surprised by the bleeding?
I wanted to know more about how to define a good mental health, and so I took the opportunity to write a term paper for my master’s degree in History and Philosophy of Science about it. I study that degree to use my science knowledge in battling those kind of problems. What is illness, what is a cell, and where does fucking bias hide?
So, what is mental health?
As you can imagine, I researched myself into a big mess. I could talk about the question whether it is even possible to define mental health without any social norms influencing it. Or I could talk about the great challenges in designing studies to find out whether brain chemistry is as important for developing depression as we thought (looks like it isn’t). There is something else though that I find more important:
It’s the question of what is normal.
When I trained as teacher for science in special education settings, I learned that it is quite easy to define normal. It’s the bigger part under the bell-curve. No really, if you want to know what is normal and who to describe as abnormal, you gotta love that bell-curve! There is a 15 percent norm deviation, and everything else is just fine.
I hope that none of my readers are surprised when I say that it is not as simple.
First of all, you can easily make illnesses normal under the bell-curve by choosing the fitting population. A population after a war will normalize traumatic disorders, for example. Then again, there are norm deviations that become so common with progressing age that suddenly heart failure in people over 80 is fucking healthy.
So, the statistics alone is not enough to define normal. And there have been so many other attempts. Some say that we always need some kinds of social values influencing the thing, meaning that a norm deviation needs to cause suffering that we seek to avoid. Then there are others who say that just the reference class needs to be correct, meaning that either people need to be compared to their sex and age group, or to their sex and the young and healthy age group – here it gets messy again. Whom do I need to be compared to to be either sick or healthy?
Mental health is a mess, but don’t worry. If you research this long enough, physical health stops working as well.
Talking about mental health
Recently, I had a special training at work. I sat there with all of my colleagues, from researchers to secretaries, and we were trained in doing first aid in a mental health emergency.
We were trained to find out how acutely suicidal someone was, or how to tend to someone having a panic attack. I myself volunteered for a psychosis simulation, where I heard voices through headphones while I was supposed to keep a conversation going. It was tough.
I learned a lot, and I’m glad I participated.
Still, there were a few things that bothered me.
I don’t think that I like the way we talk about mental health now that it is such a trending topic.
For example, I did not disclose to anyone there that I had ever struggled with my mental health. I also hid my arms, so that no deductions about my brutal past could be made. I was professionally curious. Others, however, were a lot more open. When we talked about panic attacks, a colleague disclosed that she had been struggling with those for years, and she shared a lot of very personal experiences. When we discussed how to be certain whether someone had a panic attack or a heart attack, she said that the person would know, because a heart attack would still feel very different.
I did not dare to say a thing against that. I did not want to destabilize her. Still, my panic attacks that I’ve had to deal with for 25 years (I’m only 30) are very different. I am always convinced that I’m dying. I always am 200% certain that I’m having a stroke. And please don’t wait 10 minutes for my symptoms to ease. Please call an ambulance immediately?!
But yea.
I’m not against talking about mental health, but I think that we are at the moment getting it a bit wrong.
It’s this new, cool thing, and everyone seems to be willing to talk about it. I have bad work meetings recently, where people did not discuss urgent work related problems, because they were worried that someone might cry.
And although I know too well how it feels to struggle, and I am compassionate, it upset me.
It upset me for the same reason that I sometimes felt frustrated during my own therapy, or our mental health training:
Mental health is often discussed as a thing unrelated to the world around. We are responsible for our own feelings, and we need to sort them out or use regulation skills while the world around us is literally burning. We need to prove that we can feel good when there is nothing to feel good about.
I think that retreating into your own mental health is a reaction to all the uncertainty around us. It is easier to hide from the global retreat of democracies, or the climate disaster, the growing right-wing forces in politics. Just go into your own head, and work out your feelings no matter what.
I think it’s time to stop feeling good, but to face the things that are wrong. Let’s face the things that scare us, break our hearts, or seem to be hopeless. If you feel like cutting your throat, why not use that last energy to glue yourself to the next highway and at least do something to safe the climate? Why not punch a Nazi in the face. You just wanted to die, so what is left to lose?
When well-being cannot be achieved, I think it’s time to fight. It’s time to hurt, and ache, and struggle, but to let the world know that we are still here, and we are upset!
Mistress witch writes 