Aleena Qasim: How Mental Health is Truly Treated in Western Society

Aleena Qasim: 

_{Mental health is already viewed as an unimportant subject in our professional lives. While we are pursuing our post-secondary education, all our professors parrot the same thing at the beginning of each semester: “If you find yourself struggling, counselling services are available on campus”; however, at some point it becomes laughable. Counselling services isn’t really going to fix the immense pressure that is put on us to be successful at school, even during a global pandemic.} 

 

_{Currently, I am a psychology major and I’ve hadso many professors who lectured the class about the importance of taking care of your mental health, yet refused to grant extensions whatsoever later during the semester. Isn’t it ironic? Having PSYCHOLOGY professors who refuse to give extensions, even on your shittiest days. In my undergrad years I had days where I was in tears or was experiencing immense levels of anxiety, yet still had to open up my laptop and find the mental capacity to finish an assignment because my professor was not understanding of my situation.} 

 

_{Many people love acting like they care about mental health, maybe because that has suddenly become the standard in the society we live in, but I believe society at large still possesses a very superficial and performative understanding of mental health. It’s apparent in the way that academic institutions have a “mental health awareness week”, but do very little to actually support their students who are experiencing poor mental health. Or maybe it’s in the way that the same friends who have caused you great levels of emotional distress try to have a conversation about therapy with you; it’s all just very fake and disingenuous.} 

 

_{I believe that we all have got it wrong. We attempt to fix mental health after undergoing emotionally distressing and traumatic experiences, but what if we didn’t normalize living such difficult lives to begin with? For instance, why is it the norm to expect students to break their backs just to obtain a degree. A degree that likely won’t get us very far in this day and age anyways, to truly be successful we would have to go to grad school. What if we didn’t treat people we claim to love as disposable in the first place? Perhaps a lot of us would be saved from the heartache that lands us in the therapists office in the first place. What if we didn’t have to work ourselves to the point of utter exhaustion just to pay our way through school and not be knee-deep in debt? First we push people to get a post-secondary education, then we punish them for it by making them pay off student loans for a significant amount of their lives.}

 

_{Western society puts up the biggest façade by telling us that  our mental health is important while simultaneously forcing us to live lives that are inevitably stressful and anxiety-inducing. We have made poor mental health the standard for normality, yet we are trying to fix it at the same time while turning a blind eye to the root of the problem.}

 

_{By continuing to take this approach, we will truly never change a thing..}