Who is Ill? Society? Individual?
- powersprout
- Mar 25
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – J. Krishnamuarti
Although experiences such as anxiety, depression, and paranoia have historically been pathologized and stigmatized in Western culture, what happens if we consider symptoms as sometimes being a normal response to abnormal societal conditions? For example, if we understand depression as sometimes arising when other emotions are routinely pushed out of one’s awareness, depression can be understood as arising from a coping mechanism in place.* The coping mechanism is to push down emotions that are painful, overwhelming or are ones we’ve been told we should not feel. This is very understandable when we consider how many people may grow up seeing harmful or nonexistent expressions of emotion in family, culture, and social media. What is considered an acceptable experience and expression of emotion certainly shows up in how we are taught to perform gender. Many of us are also not taught how to approach and engage difficult emotion, nor are we taught to consider emotion as an invitation to understand how we might devise a sense of meaning and personally curated integrity while also living in a societal hall of mirrors. In this brief clip, Canadian psychiatrist Gabor Mate shares more on this perspective.
If going to therapy has been historically stigmatized among certain populations as a practice only done by those who are deeply disturbed or weak etc, what is therapy if we understand mental illness as a normal response to cultural illness? From this angle, therapy is a practice undertaken to receive support on learning to live a fulfilling life while facing societal and cultural ills. This is one perspective, of course. However, it can be a helpful perspective if it is one that allows for individuals to release internalized shame around certain emotions, thoughts, or mental illness.
Considering depression as an experience that can arise from repressed or stuck emotion helps us, as well, to understand why emotion-focused therapy (EFT) interventions combined with a trusting, empathic relationship can decrease depressive symptoms. In a 2006 study using EFT, interventions were used that brought awareness and understanding to implicit feelings underlying explicit self-criticism. Self-criticism can be an attempt at self-regulation or self-protection that both perpetuates as well as represses the very feelings trying to be avoided: shame, disappointment, fear, and so on. This self-criticism and repression has been shown to correlate with increased depressive symptoms. A second intervention used in the EFT study guides participants into the expression of previously “suppressed” emotions such as anger or jealousy. Once the emotions such as fear or anger beneath depression start to surface, good therapy can support people in developing the wisdom and inner capacity to work through and release difficult emotion. Again, we are not taught in school or by society how to draw our awareness towards uncomfortable emotion in order to gain greater wisdom, or ultimately, relief. However, therapy as well as other resources can fill this gap on being grounded during unstable times.
This discussion serves to illustrate how symptoms such as depression can be viewed as messengers, inviting us to not talk away or talk over our feelings, but to first listen. By listening, there is opportunity to be drawn into an experience that is societal or cultural in nature, rather than just pathologically personal and isolating. Sometimes therapy can serve as a place to better understand how to listen, or it can serve as an experience so that we don’t have to listen alone.
This kind of attention can serve to not conflate personal struggle and societal illness, but to disentangle the personal and societal threads, so that society cannot weave individuals disenfranchised from their own emotional wisdom. Resources other than therapy which might help in this manner are listed below:
“Revisioning Psychology” and other books or resources by post-Jungian psychologist, James Hillman
“The Myth of Normal” by Gabor Mate
Political commentators/comedians who utilize a critical lens while prompting much needed laughter. Evening talk shows, stand up comedians, etc
Check out Fireweed Collective offerings. Fireweed Collective is a peer-support organization offering groups and workshops that challenge the dominant biopsychiatric approaches to mental health, instead using a Healing Justice and Disability Justice lens approach for mutual support and growth. Centering QTBIPOC individuals, they strive to provide support and education that does not replicate oppressive power dynamics found within the medical system as well as other institutional complexes. Get it? Complex...pun. ha. ha. next.
