The importance of wellbeing in today’s world has drawn increasing scrutiny in recent years, in particular as a response to the 2020 pandemic. With the isolation that it created and spikes in addiction related deaths, society has undergone significant changes. A peek inside the dominant narrative’s agenda reveals profound insights. Maladaptive behaviors can wreak havoc on civilized society, but we must recognize the pressures exerted upon us that influence our behavior, too. The true nature of institutional overreach exemplifies itself in the Mental Health Awareness movement.
Social organization has always had to deal with alignment issues of governing power structures. The way these structures impact our thoughts, actions, and thereby, behavior, is important to understand. When we talk about social movements in today’s age, especially the one mentioned above, look at the established way of relating first; observe what the movement is responding to. Fundamentally, it is confronting institutional power, an established way of getting along and orienting oneself amongst others. Once this premise is accepted, we may look further at the means of responding the movement is responsible for.
When resistance is mentioned in discourse it is juxtaposed with compliance. The two are both implicitly and explicitly espoused. But it’s not quite so cut-and-dry. There are degrees of which the concepts overlap and intersect. For example, “silence is complicity” oversimplifies the relationship with the intent of organizing a grassroots movement. It is a mission statement, of sorts, meant to draw supporters in. It is not absolute in the sense one should risk one’s life at the expense of a minor authoritative power imbalance occurring. What it ought to aim to be is a cultural bridge to confront institutional structures with the goal of reorganizing them for a more just and equal world. Resistance can take place symbolically, materially, and fundamentally, institutionally.
We arrive then at the Mental Health Awareness campaign. It is complex in that it is uniquely institutionally oriented to never actualize within the current order of things. That may sound ridiculous, at first. Looking at it deeper, the interests involved reveal this to be the case, however.
Before beginning, the distinction must be made between mental health and mental illness. It’s key to understanding what’s going on. The former involves the experience of social pressures that impact the mind and body, which are situated by degrees of powerlessness over the environmental setting. By definition, we all ought to be striving for mental wellness, as it is essential for any form navigation through the social world. I’m of the opinion that the more we are aware, the more freedom we may experience through varying degrees of recognized responsivity to others. Mental health, in this sense, does not fit into a substantive revolutionary social movement category, other than its reformative application in social systems, of which to name a few are the workplace and the family. This sounds broadly evasive, but the point is that it is not reforming these types of institutions in fundamental ways. What it is aiming to do is increase the reflexivity of the structure itself. To speak figuratively here, it’s the whisper of the wind . Revolutionary social movements not only challenge the institution, they strategically aim to implement a principled agenda to establish a substantive alternative.
Thinking practically, it’s always important to orient oneself with strategy and approach. A revolution is successful if it breaks an institutional structure, but the health of the result of that fracturing is reached only when the replacing systems are properly integrated into the social fabric. It’s tricky business. In this regard, the easy part is mobilization; the difficult and essential part is what follows the revolution. This is where we must be strategic.
Above I mention the institution of work. So, lets look closer. I am in support of putting power back into the hands of workers, resisting the exploitative practices employers use to coerce the employees into defined roles with objective duties. Giving the employee a tool to fight against the imbalance of power, the Mental Health Awareness campaign leverages employee wellbeing with the labor value extract guiding capital accumulation. Say, the employee is feeling hopelessly exerted, exploited, and mentally unstable in response to pressures they may not be able to identify. The campaign provides a means through which time and resources can be extracted from the hands of the exploiter and placed in the hands of the exploited; they respond to their material conditions by taking a paid mental health day to relieve themselves from work. There’s a reclamation of what is rightfully the producer’s – the means of production.
Two things can be true at once. Mental health provides a way for a struggling person to become aware, to varying degrees of socio-political education, to change their material conditions through healthier shepherding of the mind. It’s reflexive capacity makes it relatively benign to established institutions.
A differing opinion here is taken of mental illness. The Mental Health Awareness campaign, importantly, however, does not just include mental health; to the detriment of the movement, it is often miscategorized and misunderstood to include mental illness, however well intending that is meant to be. How do I see that? As a humanist philosophical approach that is flawed to identify the systematic, dialectical problem it is confronting, the confrontation is between agency and structure; the relation of the determinate to chance; of the emotive with reason. Including mental illness in the campaign for awareness introduces a host of political, economic, and moral issues acting in a limiting capacity for the movement to succeed.
Defining success must be established first before we can proceed. Mental illness has been stigmatized throughout history to varying degrees, with cultural acceptance varying widely depending on location and social organization. Currently in the U.S., it has come to be highly stigmatized in the court of public opinion, in addition to being institutionally confrontational across the board. It is a classification of mental disorders with correspondingly deemed maladaptive behaviors which have been identified as contenders to the established order of society; be it misaligned ethics, morals, laws, expressions and the like. Mental illness is treated as a biological condition with social components, and the authority of the healthcare industry exploits patients by every available method in Western society.
Just one relatable example of the sector’s misguided approach, and there are far too many to provide in this essay, is the treatment of schizophrenia. In the current Western paradigm, individuals are largely resistant to the bio-psycho-social treatment forced upon them. Psychiatry is the arm of the institutional lever of what the paradigm has established as deviant behavior worthy of authoritative ire. I mention deviance because I have come to see that the will is involved in a resistive effort to institutional exertions. Social hierarchy is not natural, nor is the degree to which we institutionalize members of society having come to be identified as problematic to social safety. Sure, living entirely free of institutional influence isn’t possible, but living free from certain ones is a risky venture in today’s world that affords, however much recognized, a liberatory and freeing existence. This type of behavior is outside the boundaries of most properly socialized individuals; hence, the stigma and exertion of power through use of physical, social, and systemic means directs the aberrant to orthodoxy. Jarvis (2025) aptly states, “Culture and context create the language and concepts that determine which of the symptoms and behaviors associated with psychosis are considered salient, important, and worthy of clinical assessment and intervention.”2 Schizophrenia in lesser developed countries has significantly lower rates of reported cases when compared to the more developed ones4. These lesser developed countries have a higher degree of cultural assimilation and thereby a more socially supported integration of certain symptoms of the condition.
The U.S.’s emphasis on mental wellbeing serves a very individualist approach to medicine, contrasting with lesser developed nations with collective approaches to the socially relevant. Recall the emergent levels of reality. Deviant behavior possesses the capacity to upend social relationships, and thereby create unsafe conditions for a healthy democracy. Certain measures must be taken to address abnormalities if society is to exist at in its modernized form. But perhaps it ought not be this way. What is deemed deviant is dependent upon a structured social fabric to relate the behavior to. If the social structure were not so, how would we relate to individuals behaving in ways outside of accepted social relations. We could revolutionarily establish a collectivist, humane social fabric. Society would be so drastically different we would not need to treat mental illness in the presently punitive way.
The Mental Health Awareness campaign aims to reorient society’s members to a highly stigmatized set of behaviors without revolutionizing the very institutions inhibiting such societal acceptance from occurring. What social space does schizophrenia most often inhabit? Jails, psychiatric wards, and mortuaries. In many cases struggling to function in society, psychiatry has identified them as treatment resistant.2
In the United States there exists no institutionally recognized treatment for the condition that does not include prescription anti-psychotics. This is highly indicative of the culture treating the disorder, a representation of values, institutions, and power. Behavioral indicators indicative of Western medicine’s diagnosis of the condition are not so in Eastern culture. A more culturally integrated approach, differing conceptualizations of the behavior, integration and assimilation affect how what in Western medicine would label a mental disorder, it is ascribed to socio-cultural contextually discrete clinical entities2. There is nothing more frightening than the inflicting approach to psychiatric conditions in Western medicine; “Given that most psychiatrists view psychosis as a neurobiological or neurodevelopmental disorder1, for many scholars and clinicians, the role of context in psychotic disorders is superfluous and can be neglected.2” Damage wreaked to the body and mind from an incorrectly sourced cause is irreversible. The stark contrast to alternative approaches, schizophrenia is treated with absolute certainty toward the bio-psycho-social detriment of the patient.
Schizophrenia is fundamentally a 20th/21st century socially influenced set of behaviors. Western psychiatry’s arrogance has led to a harmful relationship between those struggling with the condition and solutions to a sustainable life. Coming to affect us all, we collectively suffer.
The mental health campaign has identified serious mental illness as needed for destigmatization, but it has not actively incorporated conditions like schizophrenia. The condition is deemed too aberrant for equitable representation. It’s repeatedly the case that schizophrenics receive misrepresentation in pop culture, media, and institutional relations. These individuals are characterized as violent and destructive outliers justifying the existing prejudice against them. These mischaracterizations are then lumped into public consciousness of the Awareness campaign, coming to hinder widespread adoption of a reformed opinion. This is simply the outward expression of change. It has no capacity to alter the power imbalance Western psychiatry exerts through healthcare institutions. Patients themselves have even come to see themselves as having moral, bio-psychosociological shortcomings leading them to comply, though majorly only in the short-term, with systematic abuse of power through biological treatment approaches.
It is important to recognize perhaps the most psychopathological component of the condition, auditory hallucinations. Historically the key indicator of “madness,” the phenomenologically relevant component varies in meaning cross-culturally. In the current 2025 scientific literature, Jarvis’ conveys the argument well. Pulled directly from Sage Journals, he states:
[ This may have the effect of making members of secular, psychiatrized societies less likely to report hallucinatory experiences for fear of negative social consequences despite the fact that hallucinations are common in nonclinical populations and their content is often culturally meaningful (Larøi et al., 2014). Several contributions to this thematic issue challenge the supremacy of pathology in the interpretation of auditory–verbal hallucinations and offer other ways to interpret the voice hearing experience. Altman et al. (2025) reports on auditory-verbal hallucinations in the Russian cultural context. As in other studies examining voice hearing in various cultural settings (Luhrmann et al., 2015), the voices described by the study participants had specific cultural content that reflected historic, folkloric, religious, and everyday life themes. Even the form of the reported hallucinations, which involved sounds, visions, and smells appeared to be shaped by local Russian culture. The paper highlights the importance of the environment in the interpretation of experience and the expression of phenomena ultimately produced by the brain but shaped by the pervasive effects of society and culture.
In another example of social-cultural shaping, Ng et al. (2025) explores the voice hearing experience of persons diagnosed with schizophrenia in Shanghai, China. Compared to previous work in the United States, Ghana and India, reported voices in Shanghai were more frequently concerned with politics and religion (men heard more political and women more religious voices), more relational in quality, more benevolent, and participants were more likely to identify who was speaking to them. Religious content may have reflected changes in the post Cultural Revolution era when religious suppression by the state eased somewhat. In addition to content, emotional valence was shaped by context and drew attention again to the powerful role of culture and society in framing hallucinatory and potentially other brain-based phenomena.]2
Again, in the West, it is often observed that individuals with this condition die significantly younger than the average American. Life expectancy of an adult is estimated to be approximately 80 years. Significantly lower, schizophrenics die 15 to 20 years earlier.1 This can be from a variety of indicating risk factors, most impactfully resulting from substance abuse. But consider that treating this condition primarily focuses on the biological basis. Treatment involves prescription medication, often first or second-generation anti-psychotics. These powerful drugs wreak absolute havoc on the biological organism. Predominantly dopamine antagonists, they function to reduce brain hyperactivity in the frontal lobe and associated regions of the brain, often dulling or numbing patients’ experience of social life.
When thinking about social life, the development of social movements often occurs spontaneously, with sustainable movements having strategized just as the wind is to the sail the re-establishment of a new social framework flowing through actualized change. As a societal member having patiently, subtly observed the described elements of the movement, there seems to be no leverage to materialize gains in the social establishment’s exertive power over the direction of treatment or approach. The type of social movement under scrutiny lacks structurally unifying, resistively influencing components to succeed. It is the ant in relation to the human; the former doesn’t concern itself with the latter. Maneuvering cross-culturally presents itself as the primary method to receiving cooperative, human, sustainable care. The way to access social approaches to psychiatric maladaptive behavior is to flee Western society, for a fear of a powerless future is truly experienced by those wrapped up in institutional dominance.
References
- Insel T. R., Quirion R. (2005). Psychiatry as a clinical neuroscience discipline. Journal of the American Medical Association, 294(17), 2221–2224.
- Jarvis GE. Cultural variations in psychosis: Recent research and clinical implications. Transcultural Psychiatry. 2025;62(1):3-10. doi:10.1177/13634615251324088
- Peritogiannis V, Ninou A, Samakouri M. Mortality in Schizophrenia-Spectrum Disorders: Recent Advances in Understanding and Management. Healthcare (Basel). 2022 Nov 25;10(12):2366. doi: 10.3390/healthcare10122366. PMID: 36553890; PMCID: PMC9777663.
- Viswanath B, Chaturvedi SK. Cultural aspects of major mental disorders: a critical review from an Indian perspective. Indian J Psychol Med. 2012 Oct;34(4):306-12. doi: 10.4103/0253-7176.108193. PMID: 23723536; PMCID: PMC3662125.
- Volavka J., Vevera J. Very long- term outcome of schizophrenia. Int. J. Clin. Pract. 2018;72:e13094. doi: 10.1111/ijcp.13094.
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