The 2020s have seen an explosion in rhetoric about mental health – about the importance of monitoring it, tending to it, talking about it. Public discourse had already been trending steadily in this direction for years, with celebrities increasingly sharing their own struggles with mental illness, and the number of Americans using psychological services rising steadily since at least 2010. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, phrases like ‘Everybody has mental health’ and ‘It’s OK not to be OK’ have started to feel less like platitudes and more like indispensable parts of the new normal. Driven by the rise of telehealth and a massive spike in anxiety and depression since 2020, there has been an increase in demand for behavioural health services across the board.

In recent years, the concept of a ‘mental health day’ has entered the popular lexicon, usually referring to a self-granted day off from work, school or other day-to-day responsibilities. This clues us in to the fact that, for significant parts of the world, ‘mental health’ is no longer simply defined in the negative – ie, as the absence of mental illness. It now also includes positive ideas about general wellbeing, emotional intelligence and self-knowledge, and a harmonious work-life balance. It is an idiom we use to understand, critique and evaluate the basic conditions of everyday life.

The tools and theories of mental health professionals have also made their way into the ordinary language that we use to understand many aspects of our lives. For example, it is now common to turn to therapy-inflected language to make sense of our relationships: the concepts of trauma and toxicity have become powerful explanatory tools for interpersonal conflict. A raft of psychiatric diagnoses – OCD, bipolar, BPD and ADHD, especially – are commonly used as self-descriptors with varying degrees of seriousness.

A bus stop advertisement in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. Photo supplied by the author

Corporations, nonprofits and government agencies now endorse good mental health in their promotional materials and public service announcements. We see mental health-themed advertising campaigns and sponsored nights at sporting events, billboards encouraging us to ‘fight the stigma’ or lend an ear to a friend who might be struggling privately. This trend becomes especially noticeable during each year’s Mental Health Awareness Day/Week/Month (the exact timing of which varies somewhat by country and organisation), in which some of the most recognisable brands participate. Walmart, Marks & Spencer, the All Blacks, Google and the Royal Bank of Canada have all created their own mental health charity partnerships and awareness campaigns for the occasion.

In 2021, the American football league (NFL) marked Mental Health Awareness Month by posting a series of short video testimonials in which players talk about the importance of maintaining both physical and psychological wellbeing (as Joey Bosa, a linebacker for the Los Angeles Chargers, said: ‘Your brain is a muscle, too’). In 2023, Starbucks published brief interviews with some of its employees who were most passionate about keeping mental health a top priority in the workplace (Kirsty, a store manager, said: ‘I lost a friend because of ill mental health. Having a support network inside of work [where] you feel safe is crucial’). This is typical of the way mental health discourse helps major organisations publicly affirm their commitment to kindness, neurodiversity and progressive social values.

Countless celebrities, musicians and athletes have shared their psychiatric diagnoses, becoming positive role models

In January 2024, the children’s TV show Sesame Street made headlines when its most famous spokesman enquired about the public’s mental health. The X post, which went viral, read: ‘Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?’ Elmo’s social media post racked up hundreds of millions of views and tens of thousands of replies from seemingly desperate and frightened people. Amid the top responses to this bit of light engagement bait were serious expressions of economic anxiety, climate doom, intense loneliness and general political despair. In March, possibly in response to this high-profile display of public distress, the show’s parent organisation Sesame Workshop launched a partnership with the Ad Council to provide a host of emotional wellbeing resources for children and families.

The attention generated by these campaigns may or may not translate into concrete mental health resources, as it did in the case of Sesame Street. Often, their splashiness seems to eclipse the underlying message. An illustrative example here is Burger King’s #FeelYourWay campaign from May 2019. Tying into the theme of authentically expressing one’s feelings, customers were encouraged to order a ‘Real Meal’, that is, a Whopper in special packaging decorated to match the consumer’s mood at that time. In the words of the press release: ‘Burger King restaurants understands that no one is happy all the time.’ In contrast to their rival McDonald’s well-known ‘Happy Meal’, the campaign included options like ‘Pissed’, ‘Blue’, ‘DGAF’ (for ‘don’t give a fuck’), ‘Salty’ and ‘Yaaas’. Understandably, Burger King faced some criticism for this rather dubious connection to Mental Health Awareness Month.

Still, paying attention to these campaigns can tell us something important about our present moment. They all subscribe to the same, basically sound internal logic:

In Canada, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Aotearoa/New Zealand, these tenets help form the basis of a (nominal) public consensus in polite society: that mental health is an indelible part of human health in total.

There are good reasons to celebrate these campaigns. They reflect the welcome reality that ‘psychic wellbeing matters’ is now a mainstream,........

© Aeon