Listen to us before you talk over us

The misunderstanding around Bell Let’s Talk Day 

Content warning: Mental illness, suicide

Every year, there is one day that I avoid social media because, to put it bluntly, I am afraid I will spiral into another depressive episode if I don’t. This fear is founded on experience: my first exposure to Bell Let’s Talk Day in high school landed me back in the familiar void of isolation and apathetic despair. Every year, the day that is intended to bring me solace instead fills me with resentment. 

My opinions are not representative of everyone with a mental illness—I say this because it is important to avoid universalizing the experience of “mental illness” by recognizing the multitude of perspectives that exist within the community and by striving for a nuanced, complex understanding of individualized experiences. It is also important to acknowledge that my cis, white identity provides me with a position of privilege in this community.

Many of the issues with Let’s Talk Day have already been voiced: the repercussions of a movement that is inherently capitalist and corporate[1], the hypocritical treatment of Bell employees regarding mental health, the lack of representation in the campaign ads, the legal loop-holes Bell exploits, the recipients of the donations, and the focus on stigma rather than material realties of discrimination. There is a limit to what can be achieved under a corporate, capitalist framework, even if Let’s Talk does some good in terms of publicizing mental health advocacy or raising money for certain organizations. 

I think the way that responses are articulated can have repercussions beyond their intention, and the way support is conveyed can make people like me feel even more misunderstood and isolated. If the people you are trying to help feel worse from your attempt to help them, something needs to change. Here are some ways that change can happen:

Trigger/content warnings:

Please provide them. Let’s Talk Day is no exception, and people rarely include them! Logging onto social media and being bombarded with intense mental illness–related topics can be very overwhelming.  

Speech bubble responses:

Bell provides a toolkit for Let’s Talk Day that includes a download for a speech bubble that asks “What does mental health mean to you?” and invites people to display their answers. Every year, many of these responses are patronizing, reductive, and universalizing, such as the following: 

“Mental health affects us all”

Yes, but that should not the point. Universalizing like this takes the focus away from the very people who should be central to this conversation. The phrasing of Bell’s campaign slogan undermines any benefit I could potentially derive from it. If mental health truly did affect us all, we wouldn’t need to be having this dedicated conversation. Also, we shouldn’t only care about things when they affect us personally, or when they’re expensive for the federal government. Helping people has value beyond whatever money it can save you in the long run.  

“Talk to someone, get help!” / “Talk it out, don’t hold it in!” / “Don’t stay silent!” / “Be kind to yourself”

Please don’t order me to do something I’ve been trying to do for years as if the problem was that I didn’t think of doing it. There are systemic issues that prevent people from accessing help. This wording also puts the onus on people with mental illness to reach out for help when mental illness inherently makes asking for help extremely difficult, if not impossible. 

“It’s okay to not be okay” 

No, it sucks. And I don’t need your permission to not feel okay.

“You would never shame someone for having a broken leg! So why should you be shamed for having a mental illness?” 

Please stop comparing mental illnesses to physical injuries because false equivalences don’t help anyone. It’s not a productive conflation for mental illness or broken bones (i.e. broken bones heal).  

“Turn ‘I’ into ‘we’ and illness becomes wellness”

There is no cure. There are treatments—but they require access to healthcare, medication, insurance, therapy, diligence, patience, energy, effort, self-control, and relapses still happen.

“It’s normal to feel anxious, depressed, unstable”

We shouldn’t define mental illness as the norm. Clinical depression isn’t sadness and anxiety disorders are not stress.

“You are not your mental illness!” 

Don’t tell me how to identify. It takes away my agency, and I’m allowed to identify as mentally ill if I choose to. 

I’m tired of people saying, “We should make sure to talk about this every day, all year round!” as if they’re saving the world. You don’t get my thanks for recognizing my existence. Am I a selfish cynic? Absolutely. That’s what mental illness does to a person. So when you decide to tweet about always being there to listen, understand that it might involve listening to selfish, cynical, angry, isolated, mean, hopeless, hurting people, and remember that mental illness can and does ruin friendships, lives, and connections. It’s not just being there for half an hour while your friend cries; it’s intervening when they haven’t left the house in days. It’s trying to understand that the awful things they say to you are a result of the mental illness and are not indicative of your relationship with them. It’s waiting out long periods of isolation for them to be able to hang out again; it’s having to end two-year friendships because their mental health is impacting yours; it’s repetitive and taxing and it drains your energy because there isn’t always a silver lining. Sometimes it’s putting in decades of time, effort, and money without necessarily getting anything in return, based on a faint hope that it will make things slightly less awful.  

And it’s sometimes accepting that as much as you want to be there for a person, it will destroy you to stand by them. It’s choosing between staying and ruining a friendship or leaving and trying to salvage it. Many times there is no moment of triumph, no “I’m eternally grateful” emotional victory, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. It just means we need to be realistic about the situation so no one feels ripped off at the end, because everyone knows what “I’ll be there” entails. Otherwise trust can’t be established; as soon as it gets hard, people tend to pick up and leave. I’m not innocent of this. Joy and connections are not guaranteed when mental illness is involved.

Despite everything, one of my fondest memories is reading those speech bubble responses with a few friends, all of us mentally ill, all of us scarred and in the throes of existential apathy, pulling our regular second all-nighter of the week in a common room at dawn, all of us laughing out tears that connected us in the face of this wall of misunderstanding. I’m trying not to romanticize it, but that year was hard and that situation provided a much-needed moment of kinship in which I briefly felt okay.