Let's Talk about Mental Health

Today is the second annual Let's Talk about Mental Health day. It's a Twitter bomb of slacktivism. The goal is to have a conversation, so, I'll bite, let's have a conversation. One a little longer than 140 characters.

For every retweet, Bell is donating 5 cents to mental health charities and organizations (I pity the person who has to count the retweets of the RTs of the #BellLetsTalk and #mentalhealth hashtags). This is slacktivism I can respect. I click a button, a corporation with obscene profits (from the ridiculous money they charge me for my telephone) gives money to charity.

I feel a bit like Robin Hood, or maybe a shareholder. I'm patting myself on the back, giving myself a high five and typing right now. It's quite impressive to see.

Thankfully, this isn't the kind of slacktivism that I can't stand. The memes where you say something completely outrageous according to a formula that is supposed to be so ridiculous that it'll get your friends' attention and then you can let them in on the "joke." Yeah, those are beyond stupid. No money is raised (which can be a good thing, because charities are just as likely as the rest of us to waste money). No awareness is created. The "joke" is often offensive. The annoyance these memes cause is quite possibly more detrimental than not doing anything at all. Pointless.

Bell is putting their money (all five cents of it) where their mouth is, and even though the website was crashed from the staggering success of the program, I was able to find a cached version of the page this morning when I looked. The money is apparently going to legitimate charities and organizations like CAMH and CMHA. This allays my one concern that it was some kind of sham ... thankfully, Bell is not SunTV.

However, there's still a few unsettling things about this whole slacktivism for #mentalhealth. First, why does the amount from Bell have to be linked to the number of people who click a button? They've already set aside $50 million for the cause, why don't they just give the money over the multiple years they have budgeted? Why don't they do it quietly or anonymously?

The good justification is that getting people to talk, even if it's just clicking a button, creates awareness, which is one of the things that mental health and addiction (and general health, for that matter) needs. We need more empathy. We need more talking and more compassion. This is unlikely to happen if we ignore the problem, and slacktivism is one or two steps up from ignorance.

The bad justification is that the money is probably coming from Bell's budget for advertising and outreach (which is a fancy name for indirect advertising), and so Bell has to stamp their name all over this. I'm not sure the good old days where people did the right thing and expected absolutely no personal gain existed, but if they did, then I miss them. We're in such a hurry to win, or at least to claim a victory, that we're missing the lessons along the way.

And one of the lessons along the way, tucked in the middle of the Bell site where they give themselves virtual high fives, pat themselves on the back and list their various partners, is the statement about the complete inadequacy of funding that mental health receives as part of the government's budget for health care. It's brief, but the whole justification for why they're giving money to mental health is hidden in there if you look hard enough. This is the more troubling question that arises from this bout of slacktivism.

There's not really any denying that mental health is underfunded. Health care costs are sky-rocketing across Canada, and the provinces are having trouble keeping up with their end of the bargain. The economy has been in the gutters for several years and we're in the midst of a rocky generational transition in the workforce, so there is less revenue going into the government in the first place, and there's a fear of increasing taxes to pay for obligations (there's a fear of even discussing the possibility of raising taxes - let's blame our libertarian instincts for this paranoia).

The current conversation the provinces are having is about finding efficiencies in our spending on health care; this is fancy talk for getting more for our money. This is a good conversation to have, because we should make sure we're getting the best value for our government's expenditures. However, there's no denying that health care is underfunded, so we also need to talk about increasing our spending (from front-line hospitals to medical research to education in general), which means we need to talk about increasing the revenue going into government.

The other conversation we need to have is about the relationship between mental health and crime. The over-representation of people with mental health and addiction issues in prisons is well documented. The fact that incarceration has little impact on preventing repeat offences by all criminals, but especially those with mental health concerns, is also well established. Imprisonment serves our base need to punish, but it does nothing for rehabilitation of criminals or prevention of crime. Prisons are an acceptable solution for dangerous offenders we have no intention of rehabilitating and releasing into society, but for all other types of criminals prison alone is inadequate. We need treatment and rehabilitation, and this doesn't just go for criminals, we probably ought to be spending more on victim's services as well.

In other words, mental health is the tip of an iceberg full of elephants in the room. If this was a real iceberg, then climate change would be melting it. Unfortunately, as with climate change, we as a society and the governments that represent us are letting us down.

So let's have this conversation. Let's talk about creating awareness for mental health and addiction. Let's talk about slacktivism. Let's talk about advertising. Let's talk about humility and empathy. Let's talk about the economics and politics of this country that have put us in our current situation. Let's talk about the future we want. Let's talk about how the problem is bigger than mental health alone, but let's not allow mental health to get lost in the shuffle of slacktivist retweets and the empty bluster of political rhetoric. We've all got problems, and mental health is one of them.