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Resilience frameworks blame individuals with anxiety instead of the systems that cause their distress.

You cannot beat an anxiety disorder by toughing it out—that is the entire point of the diagnosis.

Widespread anxiety in institutions (such as higher ed) signals institutional failure, not individual weakness.

"Resilience" has become one of the most popular words in mental health discourse. It sounds empowering—like something we should all aspire to. The basic definition seems fine: "the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties." Who wouldn't want that?

But among mental health professionals and researchers, the word has a different reputation. Some researchers call it a "weasel word." And they're right. Resilience, as a framework for thinking about anxiety, is neoliberal, boot-strappy nonsense that blames the individual for their suffering.

When we tell someone struggling with anxiety to "be resilient," we are telling them to get over it. We are telling them they are too weak to handle what everyone else can handle. We are putting the problem on the person rather than on the troublesome conditions that produced their distress. And that is not only unhelpful—it is harmful.

Resilience Blames the Person, Not the Problem

Viewing resilience as a positive character trait is deeply problematic. As psychology researchers Fisher and Jones argued, when we view resilience as an individual trait, we put the blame on individuals rather than on the powerful social and political forces shaping their lives. As they note, when mental strength is viewed as originating within an individual, any external sources of oppression or suffering are excused or disregarded.

Think about what “resilience,” when viewed in this way, means in practice.

Take higher education, where some people have excellent job security, and some even have excellent salaries; meanwhile, there is an underclass of contingent (or adjunct) faculty members who are underpaid and overworked, with contracts that could evaporate at any time.

If a worker under these conditions develops an anxiety disorder, the resilience framework says the problem is that they aren't mentally tough enough to handle adjunct work.

A framework that takes into account the forces that are really at play shows that the working conditions are to blame, as psychological research into this exact subject has shown.

It means that when students arrive at college, leaving behind every support system they've ever known, and then they begin to struggle, we complain that students these days aren’t resilient enough.

Administrators offer them workshops on building “grit” rather than looking at our institutions and seeing if we’re the problem. (We are.)

In short, “resilience” displaces blame for anxiety onto the individual, ignoring any factors contributing to mental health challenges that are outside someone's control. It lets institutions off the hook.

As I write in my book A Light in the Tower, "When it comes to mental disability, it is easy to blame the individual for their symptoms or diagnosis."

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But, I write, "One can rarely, if ever, beat anxiety by toughing it out. The entire point is that it is difficult to control." To those unfamiliar with anxiety, it can seem that a person living with it is unable to manage something that should be easily managed—"that they are just too weak to get a grip on ordinary fears. Those outsiders are wrong."

Anxiety Is a Signal, Not a Shortcoming

As I write in the book, "When a problem [such as anxiety] is everywhere, it can appear to be nowhere. When a problem becomes prevalent, it stops being a problem and starts being the norm." The normalization of suffering is the trap.

Systemic anxiety and burnout become "hard to notice even when they are in our classrooms, in our advising offices, in our libraries, and among our colleagues." We cannot allow debilitating anxiety among faculty and students to become a norm that we accept simply because it is prevalent.

Workers, parents, faculty, students, and all others among whom anxiety is on the rise do not need to build resilience. Instead, the rise in anxiety disorders should be a sign to us, as a society, that we're doing it wrong.

Listing the things that need fixing is beyond the scope of this piece. But every system of oppression you can imagine contributes to the deterioration of a person’s mental health. Poverty. Racism. Sexism. Ableism. The constant systemic battles are not just exhausting; they cause mental health struggles.

If you ever feel tempted to prescribe resilience to someone who is struggling with anxiety, stop. Ask instead what their suffering is telling you about the environment you are both a part of.

The person in front of you is not broken, but the system around you both might be. Resilience asks the wrong party to change. It is time we asked the institutions to change instead.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, A Light in the Tower: A New Reckoning with Mental Health in Higher Education (University Press of Kansas, 2024), alightinthetower.com

Jane Fisher and Emma Jones, “The Problem with Resilience,” International Journal of Mental Health Nursing 33, no. 1 (2024): 185–88, doi.org/10.1111/inm.13220

Amita Chatterjee, “Adjunct Professors Face a ‘Constant Struggle to Not Give Up,’ Report Says,” News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 26, 2023,chronicle.com/article/adjunct-professors-face-a-constant-struggle-to-not-give-up-report-says.

Gretchen M. Reevy and Grace Deason, “Predictors of Depression, Stress, and Anxiety Among Non-Tenure Track Faculty,” Frontiers in Psychology 5.701 (July 2014): 1–17, doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00701

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