Culture Therapy | Mental Wellbeing
We went through a period of reading mental health memoirs: The Center Cannot Hold, Touched With Fire, Darkness Visible, My Age of Anxiety. We sought them out for information, for resources, for shared experiences. We held onto Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation. We returned again and again to The Bell Jar. We looked to something outside ourselves that made sense of what was happening in our own minds, in our own lives, and with friends, colleagues and family also impacted by depression, anxiety, and other diagnosed and undiagnosable conditions. Through reading we found a way forward that wasn’t yet being spoken about; admittedly we sat alone with our books trying to locate ourselves and others we loved.
Thinking about this, our Prescription for Mental Wellbeing, we’ve realized that there’s been a huge shift in how we now get to talk about our mental health. There are now what seems to be an abundance of publications, podcasts, films and programs which to us collectively say no to that stigma that had previously left us alone with our experiences. There’s been a huge surge in positive media that has created a very real platform for our very real stories. Narratives that are now out there which take ownership of the conversation; that take someone’s experience and throw it out into the world so that we too can shift our relationship with what mental health means and how it shapes us and those around us.
These examples don’t glamorize mental health as bohemian or creative, rather they allow for truth and pain and joy and loss and connection, and for a deep, sometimes lifelong search for equilibrium and understanding. You will find in these pages and in these narratives, lives lived within, or touched by, consumed or imploded, maybe even adjacent to, issues around mental wellbeing. Our culture is now holding this space in a very different way than before for issues around depression, anxiety and mental health more widely. Messy, and unresolved sometimes. Hopeful and self-aware always. And for that we are very, very grateful.
Take up a book, head to Netflix, listen to something on your way to work. Support this shift and these very brave voices. Acknowledge that there are humans behind these stories putting themselves out there so that we may have a way to live our own situations outwardly. Make this openness last. Because we can not go back to not talking, to not reaching out, to being hidden and confused. To being alone with our books and our questions and our lives which didn’t have a place in the world and now very much do.
