Check The System, And Your Friends: Thoughts on Mental Health for World Suicide Prevention Day

Today’s World Suicide Prevention Day and I can’t overstate how important this day is. Every year as it comes around my social media timelines get flooded with “Check on your friends” messages and while I believe checking on your friends goes a long way in creating a culture in which we care for each other, I think more of us need to be thinking about mental health in more systemic terms. I’m never gonna stop talking about the ways society destroys us physically but also mentally. All around me I see people being neglected, essential jobs being underpaid, essential services underfunded, interventions concentrated in urban areas while people in rural areas are left further behind and then we wonder why so many people opt out. They are being pushed to the edge in so many ways. Systemic challenges require system-wide action to create system change. So, while I will be checking on my friends, for sure, I’m gonna keep educating myself on mental health, amplifying the voices of youth on these issues, supporting anyone making a difference and calling for more attention and more action in any way I can.

For example, about a month ago I was invited to speak about mental health for a UNFPA Caribbean Youth Conference, which was great timing because I had just wrapped up producing a Talk Up Radio series of episodes on Youth and Mental Health, collaborating with the Jamaica Mental Health Advocacy Network and Think Mental Health JA. We started back in March with an episode with Jhanille Brooks of JAMHAN where we looked at how Covid 19 pressures could impact mental health and highlighted ways to support children and youth during this time. We then linked up with Think Mental Health and JAMHAN again in June, at the request of the youth in our community, to follow up on that episode, then we ended with another episode with JAMHAN where Stephen Francis, one of our Core Team members spoke to young workers in the Tourism sector on how their mental health was being affected by Covid 19 disruptions to the industry.

I’d like to share my remarks from the conference because as I made clear in the very first paragraph, they’re not just my views, these remarks are the result of years of listening to Jamaican young people talking about how they are personally affected by mental health issues and brainstorm solutions that would benefit them and watching them consistently advocate for change, while building their own solutions and supporting each other. From Talk Up Yout auditions and episodes on mental health, to Talk Up Radio guests, to students engaged through Talk Up Yout school tours, to U-Report data, to the news, to forums by youth organizations, religious and civil society organizations covering just about every angle, demographic and interest group you can think of, PLUS, so many individual young people talking up on their own platforms with their friends and family even. The list of ways young people have called for action is endless. All I could add to that in that conference was to ask people to listen, and to act now.

As for me, I just want to see us thrive. Even under perfect conditions life is hard, but you and I know much of the suffering we endure and see around the world is there by design. It’s there because of hundreds of years of slavery, because colonizers broke our people and our countries and still profit from the brokenness, because we continue to behave like whole countries and people are disposable as opposed to inherently and inestimably valuable, because we think our walls will save us, or our guns, or our money or our power. I could go on writing about this for hours but this is getting long and I think you get the point by now. I just want to see all of us thrive without having to destroy someone else for it. Anyway, please if you check out this fact sheet from the International Association of Suicide Prevention (IASP) to see the gravity of the situation, then read some more about your local conditions (Loop has a quick 2019 article for us in Jamaica), then follow and support some Mental Health organizations like the two I listed above and then press your government to do more. But also, take care of your mental health and keep checking on your friends, it’s not everyday fight and advocate, or as Tolly T from The Receipts Podcast says, you “cannot come and die” trying to save the world friend. Take care of yourself.

Art by Roza Nozari @yallaroza on Instagram

REMARKS (watch on INSTAGRAM here)

Thank you for that introduction and for passing the mic to me. I am Kristeena Monteith and I make media that amplifies the voices of young people. Today I want to talk about us, because the story of youth and mental health is the story of us. Every one of us is, has been, or will be a young person at some point in our lives and for those of us who are or have been there, the thing we all remember experiencing is the feeling of being misunderstood, voiceless, overlooked and underestimated. Some of us remember how minor issues we faced were overwhelming at the time and major issues were unbearable. 

In addition to the vagaries of everyday life and the usual youth issues, today’s young people are being overwhelmed by multiple, simultaneous global crises including covid-19, which poses its own unique challenges to mental health. It’s disrupted life paths, plunged millions of people into grief and poverty, increased unemployment and led to increased loneliness, stress and anxiety. But it’s also exacerbated long standing issues, increasing family violence and gender based attacks on young people and shrunk their ability to access mental health support services. These are not easy issues to fix. It will require global multi-stakeholder partnerships, massive investments of time and money and bold action, but it begins with listening to young people.

We can draw upon the collective knowledge of millions of young people and truly hear them when across the Caribbean and around the world, they call for greater attention to mental health. They are asking for increased access to affordable counseling and therapy, for more public health campaigns, increasing awareness of and reducing stigma and discrimination around mental health. We can truly commit to doing the work of achieving society-wide, culture-deep, systemic change that ensures that consideration for mental health becomes so ingrained into everything we do, that when we consider if anything is safe, or just or decent for humans physically and we also mean safe, just and decent mentally. 

But the good thing is young people are ready to work with us and are already creating the change they want to see, we just need to listen to them, support them and guide them where necessary. We have seen a proliferation of young people creating and using platforms to advocate for kindness, mindfulness and awareness of mental health to change the culture that keeps us silently suffering. In their peer groups, young people are sharing their own mental health journeys and research-backed healthy coping mechanisms to build community and solidarity so their peers feel less alone. We have seen unprecedented willingness to work with governments, agencies and mental health professionals to make change, and bold challenges to the ways we have built our societies on systems that force people to choose between their mental health and financial well-being.

Young people are championing mental health because we know that the alternative is to continue to subject generation after generation to an increasingly mentally challenging world. The alternative is to continue to lose young people before they’ve even had a chance to really live. It is to miss out on their ideas, input, their creative energy which we desperately need in order to address the global challenges we all face. We are missing out on the full experience of us. Covid-19 has done a lot of harm but it’s also shown us how interconnected we all are, and how urgently we need to scale up action on mental health and there has never been this level of support for mental health work. The time to make a difference is now. Young people are asking the world to join us in building back better, together, so that the new normal is a world where all people can live lives that are mentally safe, mentally just and mentally decent. Thank you.