In a culture where expressing mental distress is often stifled, Ireland faces a significant mental health crisis. Despite high rates of depression and anxiety, access to care remains limited.In a culture where expressing mental distress is often stifled, Ireland faces a significant mental health crisis. Despite high rates of depression and anxiety, access to care remains limited. The influence of social media adds complexity to this issue. While promoting awareness, it also fuels an obsession with “wellness” and oversimplifies complex therapeutic concepts. This can lead to pathologizing normal emotional responses and fostering self-obsession. The author, who has a family history of mental illness, emphasizes the importance of seeking real help rather than relying on superficial online therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy can empower individuals to take an active role in their well-being. Recognizing the difference between mental struggle and mental illness is crucial. While the former is a healthy response to life’s challenges, the latter requires professional intervention. Focusing solely on emotional states can perpetuate a victim mentality and hinder true progress. The author calls for a shift in focus from constant self-scrutiny to addressing the underlying barriers to accessing mental health care. Only by providing meaningful support can we truly address the mental health crisis and foster a society where individuals can seek help without fear of judgment or rejection.
In a country where most of us still struggle to send dangerously undercooked fish back to a restaurant kitchen for fear of making a scene, and where “I’m grand” is the only answer to a question about someone’s well-being that does not let go of the other If someone feels visibly uncomfortable, it is logical that we have difficulty being completely open when we are in need.
Ireland has a mental health problem. Aware’s 2023 national survey confirmed that rates of depression and anxiety are particularly high, with 60 percent of respondents reporting they had experienced depression and 80 percent experiencing anxiety. Meanwhile, research published the same year by the European Commission reported that of the 27 EU member states surveyed, Ireland is the most difficult country to access mental health care.
Demand is high, access to care is limited and Irish culture has historically not encouraged openness about mental health issues. Prioritizing our emotions can be seen as self-indulgence. Encouragement to ‘talk about it’ is also relatively useless – and arguably even harmful – without accessible services to meaningfully help a vulnerable person after they have finally ‘opened up’. Talking is a route to progress and not a solution in itself, but talk is cheap, so governments often encourage it as an easy solution. It’s not just Ireland. Similar trends in mental health care are reflected in other Western countries. People are also suffering in Britain and the US, with young people in particular reporting unprecedented levels of stress, depression and anxiety.
People’s problems can progress from mild to severe to acute as they remain on waiting lists without support to access the dignity of basic care
As someone who comes from a family with a history of serious mental illness, I have seen the public conversation about changes in mental health since being diagnosed with depression in my teens. There’s a difference between mental struggle – a decidedly healthy response to the fast-paced, politically fractured, over-digitalised and financially stressed times we live in – and mental illness. My grandmother was sectioned and hospitalized for over a year after decades of severe mental health problems that eventually culminated in psychosis. She left school at age 12 to care for her younger siblings after her mother’s death and married a much older man at age 18 to escape a difficult family situation. I was 18 when I witnessed her spiral into the kind of madness that most of us only encounter through fiction. While I was struggling with my difficulties, I was diagnosed with depression that same year. I watched my grandmother disappear into her illness, firmly convinced that her fate was one that I would ultimately inevitably have to share. As if it were some kind of genetic fate, through the generations.
As rigorous mental health care becomes more difficult to access and the public conversation about mental health becomes louder and fuzzier, with increasing pathologization of what seem like normal emotional responses to life’s inevitable stresses, our fixation on our emotional state only deepens. It is perhaps unsurprising that this widespread sense of low well-being exists in the context of a social media-fueled obsession with “wellness” as an industry. Poor access to mental health care coincides with ubiquitous therapy conversations. It’s a result of the booming TherapyTok and Instagram therapy content, in which everyone from mental health professionals like psychologists and psychotherapists to vaguely qualified life coaches are distilling complex therapeutic information into one-dimensional video clips.
‘Five signs that someone is a highly sensitive person’. “Three Ways High-Functioning Depression Can Affect Your Relationships.” “Do I have an anxious attachment style?” “Does loss of focus at work mean I have ADHD?” Through social media we are inundated with fluffy, often pseudoscientific therapeutic advice. Wellness companies are pushing apps that encourage us to log in and seriously examine every emotion we experience. We are constantly sold to narcissistic self-obsession under the guise of introspection and are inundated with messages that suggest anything other than a state of balanced, focused contentment that amounts to some kind of mental disorder, often one over which we ultimately have no control whatsoever. It doesn’t matter that ‘Highly Sensitive People’ or ‘High Functioning Depression’ are not actually diagnosable conditions. Or that attachment theory was developed as a means of understanding relationships between children and their caregivers, rather than between adults in romantic relationships. Or that work is sometimes boring and that bored brains lose focus.
Collectively we are in a difficult situation. There is undeniably a crisis of mental distress and ill health. People’s problems can progress from mild to severe to acute, as they remain on waiting lists without support to access the dignity of basic care. They may feel abandoned or rejected by our healthcare system. This objective problem coexists with more subjective and complex problems, with both those without access to care and those struggling in the usual ways seeking refuge by viewing their lives primarily through a therapeutic lens. When I was 18, I viewed their difficulty not as descriptive – a description of the current situation, useful information to build coping skills and become healthier – but as prescriptive. A kind of psychological or neurological life sentence over which our choices have no influence. An irrefutable genetic destiny. This can only promote self-obsession and create the expectation that people adjust their behavior to maximize our emotional comfort. It generates a deeply crippling victim mentality.
Through cognitive behavioral therapy, which I was fortunate to have access to through my university, I learned about my role in getting well again. It taught me to seek constructive discomfort instead of equating what felt safest in the moment with what was best for me in the long run. I pushed myself through a difficult time with support and learned to work on the areas of my life that I had control over, instead of constantly focusing on the areas that were out of my control. Ultimately, I came to realize that my grandmother’s fate was not necessarily my own if I took active steps to help prevent it. That my mental state is something I can actively contribute to, for better or worse, and not just something I am at the mercy of. Without access to that crucial help, my life might have taken a different direction, but one thing is certain. Social media therapy lists are a poor substitute for meaningful support.
If you need assistance, please contact The Samaritans on the free number 116 123 (available 24/7)
