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Have you ever felt like your mental health was something happening to you—something you had no control over? As though your mental health is ‘bad’? What if we stopped seeing ourselves as passive subjects of mental health conditions? What if we stopped viewing ourselves as mere recipients of diagnoses? We could begin to see ourselves as participants in the unfolding of our own minds. We could also consider ourselves healthy in that process.  

Often we are fully subject to – fully exposed and under the thumb of, our own experiences, as though we are entirely how we experience things. But what would you think if I told you this is not a historically ubiquitous experience? What if the way you are experiencing things (like your own experience of things) has no basis in history?

Does that seem like a strange idea? It is.

It is particularly a non-philosophical possibility.

It is this strangeness that I seek to amplify for mental health. The reason why I call for mental health to be rediscovered in this odd way of understanding things is because this kind of experience indeed seems strange. Something about the way such a question might hit a person prompts them to question what they are going through. Not merely what they think about things, but indeed how they are knowing that something is wrong.

agency matters

Definitions of agency are attempts to fix the universe into a real identity. To define agency does something unusual. It places the person in a position relative to the term, and compels one to argue with it.

In our modern times this seems sensible, as we are often a routinely called to intelligence and indeed agency by being told to be critical of things. And this is good overall! However, when it comes to our mental health and the experience of having issues or problems with it, being critical of definitions of mental health as a means toward health often has the result of creating more problems.

This is because by being critical of definitions given to you about your state of mind is really drawing upon the very faculty by which you are understanding your health. This can create a lived experience of what we call a double-bind.

the double-bind of knowing

In short, the double-bind goes like this:

• I come across a term that has something to do with my mental health; for our example, agency.
• In noticing that something is being said about this aspect of my mental health and in so much as it is framed with relevance to mental health and I have been drawn to be interested in it, two thing happen:
• 1. I know what it means.
  • By the fact that I have any recourse whatsoever to feel like the term could have something to do with me, I must necessarily already know what it means. If I did not, I would have no use for it and it would automatically be irrelevant.
    • The very fact of this indicates something very important is occurring in experience, and, as I have talked about elsewhere, is thus inseparable mental health.
• 2. I think I don’t know what it means.
  • Or in other words, I behave as though I need to find out what it “really” means.

If I am referring to definitions to reckon my mental health, then I am in fact participating in a contraction, and as a lived experience, it evidences a double bind in knowing, since I am looking to something outside of me to tell me of that occurring already inside, and without the recognition of this fact.

We do this all the time in reality, in the real world. We have agency over the material of the world, altering it, using it, in such and such a way. Agency of this sort, founded in a problem to be fixed through manipulation of material resources, is not the same agency that we an enacting when we are involved with mental health.

To realize or become aware of something that is empowering, despite definition, in and as an experience, is to have agency. When one steps into one’s agency, ipso facto, the double-bind is being resolved in and as experience. That is, it requires no understanding any philosophical theory of what is going on because what is happening is going on as the experience of agency.

Yet further, to realize or recognize that this is indeed what is occurring is the beginning of understanding one’s agency, and Otherwise a kind of faith is enacted.

you are mattering

Mental health philosophy is accounting of all things mental health, the awareness and acknowledgement of what is happening despite modern reductive argument.