Yes, I’m aware the title is fairly obvious. Mental Health Awareness Week 2023 is over. But I’m inclined to wonder how many of the people, organisations, companies etc are still talking about mental health now that the week is over. Maybe this is cynical but I’d guess it isn’t nearly as many as were talking about it during the week. And that is part of why I wanted to post about it this week rather than last week (shout out to my therapist for talking this out with me).

During Mental Health Awareness Week, I was scrolling through the #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek tag on Twitter and found myself just seething at what I was seeing: the majority of posts were either very basic information about mental health (and I mean very basic), vague platitudes (like ‘it’s okay not to be okay’), and pictures of various royals attending various events. The theme of the week was anxiety but I didn’t even know that until I looked at the Mental Health Foundation website afterwards. And looking at all of these posts, I couldn’t help but think, ‘How is any of this helpful in any way?’

I started ranting and the Twitter thread got longer and longer but, before I posted it, I thought that maybe this blog was a better place for those thoughts. The audience is definitely smaller but Twitter is so full of potential pitfalls (we all know how toxic it can be) and it’s so easy to be taken out of context when you have such little space to try and express your thoughts. So I took a breath, didn’t click post, and then copy and pasted all of those thoughts over here.

My first thought when I checked Twitter and realised that it was #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek (I almost always have family stuff during that week, which completely absorbs my focus, and then I’m always more than a bit thrown when I realise) was “Ah yes, another year, another #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek where organisations and corporations pretend to care about mental health and mental illness by posting the most basic information and platitudes before going back to pretending it doesn’t exist. I’m so glad you guys can take the rest of the year off now because those of us struggling sure as hell can’t.” Again, that’s a very cynical view – I know that there are many people who do care and we don’t need to post about things on social media to prove that we are passionate about them – but I find it so deeply frustrating to watch people (and worse, an organisation or company) act as though they care deeply just because it’s the annual awareness week and it makes them look good to post about it. Because, as I said, many of us – myself included – don’t have the luxury of not caring about mental health and mental illness because we are struggling with it every day. Every week is Mental Health Awareness Week. I have personally spent over ten years living and struggling with the symptoms of several mental health problems, being traumatised by systems that are supposed to be helping, supporting, and protecting me (including the current government – HA); I do not trust them to care for me or even about me – I doubt I ever will – and that is NOT OKAY. That is not how healthcare and mental health support are supposed to work. I am very privileged – and feel extremely grateful – to be able to find care independently, but so many people are not in this position, resulting in many, many people not receiving the care and support that they need, something that is, again, NOT OKAY.

But back to social media and awareness days (as much as I could talk about it, this is not a post about how the systems in place aren’t supporting those of us struggling with mental health problems). It can be very upsetting to see massive, impersonal corporations tweet about ‘reaching out’ or ‘[listing] things to be grateful for’ and it feels very out of touch and performative and just pretty offensive. This is not what Mental Health Awareness Week is about, what it is for. At least it shouldn’t be. Personally I don’t think awareness days and awareness weeks are particularly helpful and, at worst, potentially problematic (for example, it gives people an excuse not to engage with these issues because they feel like they’ve done their bit during the one awareness day or week a year) but, if we’re going to have them, they should be an opportunity to share resources (ones that are actually helpful, not ones with advice we’ve all heard a thousand times), to have real discussions about the perceptions we have about the relevant issue and how said issue is handled by the associated systems (or not handled), to elevate and celebrate the activists trying to raise awareness, and so on. They should not be an opportunity for brands to seem socially engaged or for shops to make money from barely relevant and often obnoxious merchandise. These days could be so much more (this is a really interesting article on raising awareness, why certain campaigns fail, and how we can make them more effective); we could make them so much more.

As I think we’ve established, I am pretty cynical about all of this and do believe that many people will completely forget about mental health as a topic now that the week is over. But while I do think that there are many people who talked or posted about it just because it was trending on social media, I also know with absolute certainty that there will have been many people who didn’t comment and don’t comment for completely valid reasons: we all have our own battles to fight and we, as human beings, can’t fully commit ourselves to every cause (compassion fatigue is a very real thing). And then, of course, there are the awesome people who continue to share their stories, to speak out, to try and push the world towards change – doing everything from making art about it to campaigning for better systems to creating more representation in the media to supporting individuals with mental health problems, etc – regardless of what week it is. I have great respect for everyone doing this (and for all of these important causes but I’m trying really hard not to get derailed within this pretty specific blog post) and I’m so inspired to keep being loud about my experiences with mental health and doing everything I can to make a better, safer world for us.

As I said, I often forget that Mental Health Awareness Week is happening – the 16th May is the anniversary of my Dad’s death and it just takes up a lot of time and energy and emotion, as you can probably imagine – and I have a lot of big, tangled up thoughts about awareness days and weeks in general. The point that I guess I’m trying to make here is that I don’t like the (almost) performative activism it accidentally encourages and rarely helps the people that it’s actually supposed to. And I think we can do them better. I know we can. It’s just a case of figuring out how and making it happen, which I do appreciate is far easier said than done. But then, what isn’t? (Other than silence and we really don’t want that either.)