A new mental health paradigm starts with the language we use

How does language shape the ways we think about our own mental health and wellbeing and the experience we have in our pursuit of health and wellness? We have certainly all heard about the power of positive thinking, placebo effects, and other ways that our mindset and beliefs can have physical impacts on our bodies. The language we use is no different - something as simple as vocabulary can have a profound impact on how we experience the world around us and the world within us.

Consider this: The Inuit community - indigenous people living in regions of northern Canada, Alaska, and Greenland - have 15 different lexemes (a unit of meaning in language, i.e. a word or group of words) for snow. Where speakers of languages that only have one lexeme for snow see snow, Inuit speakers are able to see and describe an incredibly precise picture of the world around them. 

The Himba people of Namibia have a different way of classifying colors in their language than English speakers. While the Himba people do not have clearly distinct words for blue and green, they do have multiple ways of describing shades of green. When shown a wheel of tiles with nearly identical shades of green but one outlier, they were able to pick out the outlier with a higher accuracy rate than Western counterparts. However, when shown the same wheel with a blue tile instead of the slightly different shade of green, they were unable to identify the difference. Through this experiment, scientists were able to conclude that we can experience color-blindness not because we can’t see the colors, but because we do not have a perceivable difference between them in our vocabularies. Similarly, if we do not have the words to shape our understanding of our emotions, it can be hard for us to recognize our emotional needs and communicate them with the people around us. 

What does this mean for mental and emotional health? If we do not have the ability to name and articulate our physical and emotional feelings and needs, it makes it difficult for us to understand them ourselves and to communicate them with others. Our journey in exploring and understanding wellness as humanitarian actors begins with the language we use. 

When you are feeling mentally, emotionally, or spiritually unwell or when someone around you is in a state of mental, emotional, or spiritual distress, how do you describe that experience? How do you conceptualize that experience yourself or communicate your feelings to others? When our default language uses words like "illness" or "condition," a few major assumptions are made:

1) That mental, emotional, or spiritual distress is a pathology or illness even though emotional ups and downs are a normal part of being a human

2) That there is an inherent deviance when someone is experiencing an "illness" or has a "condition" and that this deviation from the norm is wrong

3) That this state is the fault of the person experiencing it or that it is due to some individual problem rather than a reflection of disharmony in relationships or the world around us

Can we embrace a new way of conceptualizing mental health that challenges these assumptions by simply changing our language? Yes, we can. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Understand the difference between wellness and wellbeing. People often use the terms wellness and wellbeing interchangeably, but it is important to recognize the difference. Yes, this matters. Wellness is a state of being in good health, especially when it is being pursued as a goal (an active vs. passive process). Wellbeing is a feeling of safety, contentment, and comfort. You can be in a state of poor health - unwell - and still have a strong sense of wellbeing. You can have a poor sense of wellbeing while being in a state of good health. There are many of us right now who exercise, hydrate, eat well, yet we still feel... off. When we open our phones we are blasted with anxiety-inducing headlines, images of atrocities, and endless marketing schemes designed to make us feel like something is urgent or missing. It is possible to be doing all the right things to maintain your "health" and still feel deeply unwell.

2) Instead of referring to mental, emotional, or spiritual distress as a mental "illness" or "condition," learn to recognize these experiences as a response. The origins of modern psychiatry are rooted in the policing of human responses to oppression and injustice. Early psychiatry was deeply rooted in white supremacist, patriarchal, classist, and capitalist beliefs that still persist to this day. Psychiatric patients are evaluated on their ability to be productive and to conform to social norms rather than their sense of wellbeing and the health of their relationships and social support. This leads to "deviant" behaviors being pathologized and punished. This looks like those protesting against oppression being framed as deranged rioters; those carrying deep, deep grief being pathologized for their sadness; those who refuse to buy into capitalist productivity propaganda being labeled as lazy - are these behaviors "illnesses" or are they appropriate responses to cultures and systems that are harmful and violent?

3) Embracing new mental health paradigms includes shifting our perspective of time. The current dominant paradigm sees time as linear. In reality, everything in the world around us moves in cycles, spiraling through time and space as we move through different seasons of life with different perspectives, and new wisdom. You are not late or behind in a world that is rooted in cycles of birth and death, beginning and ending. Shed the belief that you are behind, stuck, or need to be on a certain trajectory - embrace the reality that each day we are given the opportunity to collect your lessons learned and begin again. You are moving through seasons; the dark and reflective winter nights will give way to the growth and expansion of spring. You will move through periods of grief, of contentment, of radiant joy and everything in between. This is what it means to be human.

4) Recognize that you can't heal within the environment or system that is making you sick. We need to reimagine the current systems we exist in or seek new communities in which to belong. We need to learn to reject current paradigms and see that a world beyond supremacist, patriarchal systems rooted in scarcity and power struggles is possible and we can bring it into being.

Why is this important?

Humanitarians should not be blamed, pathologized, or feel isolated for having emotional responses to the things we witness in a world that is incredibly violent in covert and overt ways. We should be supported and encouraged to express the way our work and our witnessing of atrocities makes us feel. We should gift ourselves and others new lenses through which to view our mental health, our wellness, and our sense of wellbeing. This World Mental Health Day, we encourage you to join us in exploring new ways of understanding mental health and to share them with your collective!