TOBY SAMSON
<Contributor>
On Monday, October 28th, Osgoode will kick off its second annual Mental Health Awareness Week. The Mental Health Law Society and Legal and Lit’s Equity Officer, Ebony Rose, have been working hard with the support of Melanie Banka Goela, Osgoode’s Student Success and Wellness Counsellor, to plan a diverse set of events. This year, MHAW aims to strike a balance between promoting student wellness and contextualizing mental health more generally.
I know what you’re thinking: “Mental Health Awareness Week? Does that mean there will be…puppies!?!”
Yes, there will be puppies.
But there will be more than puppies. There must more than puppies, a lot more than puppies, to even begin to change the culture around mental health at Osgoode. The therapy dogs that were part of MHAW last year did help student’s de-stress (that, and other, less obvious, benefits are why we are bringing them back). However, it seems that many people walked away from last year’s inaugural MHAW with the message that “puppies + acknowledging the existence of stress = a solid mental health approach”.
It doesn’t. Although Osgoode has recently made a tangible commitment to improving mental health for our students, embodied by Melanie’s presence and that MHAW exists at all, I find the conversation about mental health incredibly lacking. We continue to frame mental health issues as either anxiety-or-depression-related-to-being-a-law-student or serious-scary-pathology. This is an unfounded, stigmatizing dichotomy. It nudges us towards “ranking” the severity of mental health problems based on what we name them, rather than how they impact an individual. It also reiterates that either the problem lies in our environment, or it lies in someone’s brain chemistry.
Both environmental and chemical/pathological factors may play into someone’s mental health. But by assigning the “blame” to these factors, we refuse to acknowledge our own agency in how they are mediated. When we apply this viewpoint to others’ mental health, we are then denying those individuals the agency to choose what the best mental space for them is, and how to get there. Whether applied to ourselves or to other students, to our clients or to strangers, we need to move towards a more productive understanding of mental health.
Currently, the reigning Osgoode perspective interferes with our shared goal of getting a legal education. We need to be able to discuss our own mental health choices in a space that acknowledges factors we cannot control while directing our attention to ones that we can. Think about this: for all of the mental health discussion as Osgoode, how often do we talk about the fact that we are entering a profession with extreme rates of alcoholism? Do we ever talk about just how much love we show the JCR bar, and connect the two? I am not proposing that a bigger commitment to mental health would mean closing the bar and sending students who frequent it to rehab. That could be just as harmful. Rather, I am suggesting that a meaningful conversation about mental health would necessarily include, not just a discussion about alcohol, but an encouragement to think about our decision when we order another drink, or when we judge someone else for ordering another one themselves.
Last week, a friend of mine made an excellent observation about the zeitgeist at Osgoode: “mental health is something I do so I can perform optimally.” Any time we approach a mental health conversation, it seems we are doing so as a means to an end. Rather than ask “how can taking care of my mental health help me be a better law student;” the question should be “how is being a law student contributing to my mental health?” You decided to come to law school for a reason, and hopefully you chose law because you found some aspect of it interesting, or important, or fulfilling. In other words, hopefully you came here in part because you thought the study of law could have a positive impact on you.
Obviously, when we think of law school, the words “good for you” don’t come to mind. And law school is probably never going to quite be “good for you.” However, it doesn’t have to be this bad for you. As dire as things seem to me, I am also hopeful. I have no problem initiating conversations about mental health, and I have been truly surprised by how open many of my fellow students have been. After informally speaking with other Osgoode students, it is apparent to me that there is an appetite to be more reflective and more critical around our mental health culture, but students seem to feel that there is no clear way of getting there.
In part, these students are correct. There is no clear way of “getting there”, because there is no absolute goal. Mental health is not a tidy category; I do not think it will ever be. Mental health is too varied to be treated as a monolithic “issue” with specific “solutions.” In fact, mental health isn’t actually an “issue.” It is something each of us, as law students, as professionals, as partners and parents and friends, are constantly managing. If you are among the very few of us who have never had a mental health issue, it doesn’t mean you haven’t handled mental health. It just means you’ve managed to stay in charge (and good for you!). However, even having a handle on your own mental health doesn’t mean that you’ve come to terms with the totality of mental health in the world. As students training in a profession that is supposed to work for the public good, we have an obligation to try to understand mental health as it impacts ourselves and our clients.
So, although I do not think we can articulate a final goal, I think we could set a few interim ones. First, we need to strive to situate mental health as valuable in and of itself. Ideally, performing optimally at your job would be a reflection of your mental health, not the other way around. Since the law interacts with mental health at an extremely high rate (for example, over 70% of prisoners in Canadian federal penitentiaries ended up there for reasons associated with mental health), understanding mental health is all the more pressing. To that end, a second goal is to confront our views of what mental health is and what it can be, beyond the Osgoode binary. We will need to challenge ourselves intellectually and emotionally to use and create different models through which to view mental health.
What is the first step towards either of these goals? I can’t answer that for you. But if you’re ready to find some answers for yourself, this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week will get you started. Join us for:
- Student Open Forum – Monday, October 28th in Room 1004 from 12:30 – 2.
- Therapeutic Paws of Canada – Tuesday, October 29th in the Atrium from 12:30 – 2:30.
- Mental Health and Justice Panel with Lucy Costa and Alex Procope – Wednesday, October 30th in the ADR Room/Helliwell Centre from 12:30 – 2:30.
- OSPC De-Stress Event – Thursday, October 31st in Gowlings Hall at 12:30.
- NCR: Not Criminally Responsible Film Screening & Panel Discussions hosted by Professor Jamie Cameron – November 1st, 2013 in ADR Room from 9:45 – 3:30