Beyond Coping
Emotional distress, negative thoughts, psychosis, and relationship difficulties, require more than coping and medication to address. This is because the complex pictures of emotional suffering and behavioral divergence that we categorize as mental illnesses result from the totality of our experiences in the world. We all have our own unique genetic makeup, but neurobiological risk toward certain expressions of distress (mental illness) is significantly modified by environmental, social, and psychological factors.
Coping skills help people manage distress in the moment but they are not inherently transformative, nor are they therapy. Psychotherapy attempts to restructure deeply ingrained cognitive and affective processes that cause you suffering in order to enable you to live a more emotionally and relationally full and meaningful life. However, psychotherapy cannot change the world.
Today we live in a time of rapid changes in the technosphere, social oppression, unparalleled wealth inequality, spiralling debt, climate crises, political breakdown, mass paranoia, and world war. These bear down on all of us, but they impact the most vulnerable significantly more, leading to higher rates of diagnoses of mental illness. If we seriously want to address the widespread crisis of mental illness and suicide in our world today, we need to address the social order, and recognize that we live in a mad social order. Therefore transforming our social situation is a critical mental health intervention. Scroll down for a few ways to work toward transforming your social situation.
Work
The regime of enforced work for others, in which workers do not own or have say in their work, is one of the major drivers of emotional suffering today. What are ways out of this?
Debt
Housing
Housing is another area of our lives that should be a universal right but is not, and drives our emotional suffering and precarity. What can we do?
“Debt is a tie that binds the 99%. With stagnant wages, systemic unemployment, and public service cuts, we are forced to go into debt for the basic things in life — and thus surrender our futures to the banks. Debt is major source of profit and power for Wall Street that works to keep us isolated, ashamed, and afraid... We want an economy in which our debts are to our friends, families, and communities — and not to the 1%.”
- Strike Debt (2012).
Learn more about debt and your options in the Debt Resistors Operations Manual.
Join or get involved with the Debt Collective.
Mutual Aid
Mutual aid is a way for people to support each other's survival needs in times of crisis. Mutual aid is a radical act that involves caring for the most vulnerable, pooling resources, and choosing to help others. Mutual aid is also a long-standing tradition in communities that have been historically mistreated.
Dean Spade's book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) offers tools for organizing and building sustainable mutual aid networks. The book is written for both those new to activism and those who have been involved in social movements for a long time.
Get involve with New York Mutual Aid projects.