As someone who has lived with depression for several years, I want, on this year’s mental health day, to shout out: No to openness about mental disorders. I am of course not against society acquiring greater openness about mental disorders, in the form of increased insight and understanding of causes, consequences and prevention. All of this is of course both important and extremely desirable. Transparency at community level can help increase funding for various forms of treatment for mental illness, increase understanding and reduce prejudice against mental illness. I myself lived with depression for about five years. The depression was caused by a dramatic and complex break-up. Today, I remember these years primarily as a sustained and intense standstill, where all energy went into getting through days filled with pain. I was lucky in the sense that I managed to get into working life after education before the depression hit. I therefore had a job from which I could be on sick leave when it became too unbearable to associate with other people. The fact that I was in work also meant that I don’t have “holes in my CV”. This means that the disease is not immediately visible. This experience makes me skeptical that an unvarnished speech about openness at the societal level translates to the individual level. Does it really always benefit people who have or have had a mental illness to be open in their relationships? When openness is held up as a good and given a moral value, there can quickly be a shift from how we want society to be to how it actually is. This difference between would like and is, becomes most evident in working life. Participation in working life and how we participate – i.e. which career we get – is absolutely decisive for how our lives turn out, whether we are mentally ill or not. For most of us, as job seekers, we want to be one among many other good applicants. Of course, information in an application or interview that you have a history of mental illness could have a negative impact on the employer’s overall assessment of the applicant. For example, the employer may be afraid to give this particular applicant the position for fear of calling in sick, which leads to extra work for the employer and colleagues. One can wish it wasn’t like that. But are you as a job seeker willing to take the chance of giving a future employer a reason to choose another applicant? I myself have chosen not to talk openly about my depression to those closest to me. I have chosen not to be open in the working communities I have been part of or am part of. I work within a competitive industry, academia. I am convinced that if I had talked openly about my own depression, I would never have the job I have today. I have often wondered about people who “stand up” in public about their mental illness. There is a paradoxical duality in such “stand-up stories”. On the one hand, such stories tell of the interviewee’s vulnerability. On the other hand, such stories simultaneously stage the same person’s invulnerability, i.e. that the person is in a position where they have the surplus to take the chance of not being affected by the possible negative consequences of the openness. Such stories are told from positions where one can take the chance of not being chosen. A great many people – myself included – are not in such a position. The vast majority of us are employees who depend on the favor and critical judgment of others in order to have a job and get new jobs. It is very important that young people understand that although openness about mental illness can give influencers more followers on various social platforms, the combined openness does not necessarily give workers an employer. And whether we have a long academic education or a shorter vocational education, most of us have in common that we are, or will become, employees. That is why this chronicle is written anonymously. It is a paradox that good intentions to increase the quality of life for people who have experienced mental illness can in practice contribute to impairing the quality of life of the same people. This happens because people who have lived with mental illness are, in practice, invited to make themselves even more vulnerable on the labor market. An invitation to openness about mental illness must therefore have a class perspective: Making use of the freedom of being “open” is a freedom that will have different results, depending on where you are in society. It is crucial that a desire for openness about mental illness does not mean that the current/former mentally ill gets a reverse scapegoat function: to be someone who carries society’s wishes to be a society that is open and generous towards people who are mentally ill sick, but where the already exposed individual himself has to bear the consequences that this openness can also close opportunities, both in private and professional relationships. That is why I want openness about mental illness on a societal level. At the individual level, openness is a far more complex issue, which must be managed with caution and prudence, not celebratory speeches. The chronicle is published anonymously, but the Ytring editors know the author’s identity.
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No to openness about mental disorders! – Speech
