Communication and Health by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811642906
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Problematizing ‘Mental Health Literacy’ and Mental Health First Aid

Mental health literacy has been defined as “knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which aid their recognition, management and prevention” (Jorm et al., 2006, p. 3). It is argued that “failures of mental health literacy”, which are described as the “inability to use a correct psychiatric label and lack of knowledge of symptomatology”, may cause communication problems with health professionals and burden the health care system (Jorm, 2000, p. 396). The solution is deemed to be campaigns to educate people about the medical model of mental illness and associated psychiatric vocabulary, which is also linked to reducing stigma. This is despite evidence that efforts to reduce stigmatization should consider alternatives to the ‘illness like any other’ approach that draw upon people’s own causal beliefs and explanatory frameworks (Read et al., 2006). Furthermore, the project of mental health literacy is problematic in its promotion of mental illness as a disease that demands deference to professional/expert authority over diagnoses and treatments (White & Pike, 2013; see also DeFehr, 2016). As White and Pike (2013) argue: Borrowing powerful symbolic and linguistic representations of illness and disease also suggests that mental health can be restored and the ill recovered, but only if the illness is effectively reigned in, decoded, and worked upon by professionals (p. 240).

Mental health literacy positions the ‘lay’ public as lacking understanding and knowledge of the ‘reality’ of mental illness and in need of education to bring their views in line with those of professionals. Lack of concurrence with ‘expert’ knowledge is also often glossed over as a product of stigma or lack of insight, which effectively delegitimates people’s resistance to professional expertise and uptake of alternative sources of knowledge and meaning making (see LeBlanc & Kinsella, 2016; Thornton, 2010). Nonetheless, the rollout of mental health literacy campaigns over the past two decades has arguably further cultivated what Carpenter (2000) describes as “a discursive environment in which human distress and difference are increasingly being defined in psychiatric terms” (p. 615).

Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) is described as “a tool for trained volunteers to support and signpost individuals with mental health difficulties and to provide first aid until professional help is received or until the crisis is resolved” (Mantzios et al., 2020, p. 759). While some point to the success of such programmes worldwide and its potential usefulness, MHFA has been criticized for potentially being seen as a panacea to the crisis in mental healthcare (Mantzios et al., 2020). More critically, DeFehr (2016) describes it as an “apparatus of neoliberal governance” (p. 30) that, together with mental health literacy, is seen as automating, accelerating, enforcing and normalizing the global psychiatrization of human distress. In a similar vein, a consumer academic I interviewed had this to say about mental health literacy and MHFA:I think […] it pathologises people. Instead of asking how are you feeling, you’re stepping back, you’re disconnecting further and you’re trying to become a little mini psychologist and you’re trying to put

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