Let’s Talk About Let’s Talk

Last Wednesday was Bell Let’s Talk Day, a marketing campaign where Bell encouraged people to talk about mental health and promised they would donate five cents for each use of #BellLetsTalk on social media. If your Facebook feed was anything like mine, it was filled with post after post about the importance of acknowledging mental health. And, like almost any event that gets that kind of market saturation, there was a parallel backlash. Some of the criticism can be set aside. People critiquing the fact that it was a marketing campaign for Bell are missing the point—it doesn’t really claim to be anything else. But some critiques are more damning.

One of the articles circulating Facebook on Let’s Talk Day was a piece written by a former Bell employee Karen Ho. Ho’s job ruined her physical and mental health, and because she was a contract worker, she was cut out of Bell’s much-touted employee health support. Ironically, Ho knew people involved in creating the Let’s Talk promotional material who didn’t have proper mental healthcare coverage.

The situation points at one of the most serious problems of our current mental health climate—the exclusive focus on “awareness” often masks unaddressed systematic issues. Don’t get me wrong: people knowing more about mental illness is important, especially when we’re looking at highly-stigmatised illnesses like schizophrenia. In a year when Suicide Squad’s trailer used auditory hallucinations as a punchline, we still have a long way to go. But so much of the campaigning around mental health focuses on awareness as the be-all end-all of mental healthcare, when the reality is much more complicated.

I used to volunteer screening calls for a psychologist’s office. In the short time I worked there, almost every call asked if we accepted OHIP insurance. I couldn’t stand my job there because almost all of it was turning people away because they didn’t have the money to pay for treatment. The reality is that a lot of psychological healthcare is expensive, but access to mental healthcare isn’t a buzzword in the same way that awareness is.

The reason this is true is because awareness is relatively easy to change, and it doesn’t ask much of our governments and institutions. My favourite example of this is how Steven Harper used to tweet about Let’s Talk Day when he was the PM, which always filled me with a kind of primal rage. For context, this man spent the other 364 days of the year cutting benefits for disabled veterans, defending laws that made it more likely that mentally ill offenders would be jailed, and quietly decreasing healthcare funding. It’s transparently dishonest for this man to represent himself as a champion of mental health for sending a few tweets.

Making awareness the top priority makes mental health an individual responsibility that can be solved with a few tweets, rather than a systematic problem that needs our society to invest serious time and effort. While I’m thrilled at how much of the current campaign’s money is going to initiatives to improve access, I’m still not over the fact that in a country where we pride ourselves on universal healthcare, we still need corporate donations to fund lifesaving care.

We need to look at the issue of mental health more systematically. We need to look at how punishingly hard it is to access care, especially when you’re below the middle class. We need to look at how marginalisation impacts mental health, and how it simultaneously makes accessing care more difficult. We need to look at the morality of a two-tier healthcare system that’s literally killing people.

Let’s be clear: I’m not saying that a day dedicated to mental health awareness is a bad idea. As someone who plans to work in mental healthcare, seeing people share their stories about mental illness has been really lovely and encouraging. But awareness doesn’t go far enough, and when we act as though it does, people suffer. Let’s talk, for sure, but let’s also do.