In light of World Mental Health day recently, we wanted to take a moment to highlight the importance of advocating against the stigma that surrounds mental health issues as well as educating and increasing awareness around the topic.
Although a couple of days late, these issues should never stop being a priority. We may have come a long way but it’s partly thanks to initiatives like this that there is more openness around mental health than ever before. We can also see with recent days like “national coming out day” and “indigenous peoples day” the need for these days of awareness.
This year’s theme ‘Mental Health in an Unequal World’ especially resonates with us at Untangled. We talk a lot about access to mental health and inequalities in society directly relate to this.
In life we have different ‘axes’ like race, class, gender, age, ability and sexuality. As these axes all intersect in each of us in unique ways, they have consequences for our experience of the world. They can be seen as the axes of privilege we hold because the structures that exist in our society favour these aspects (white, middle-class, cis- male, middle-aged, able-bodied, straight). On the flip side of these axes of privilege, comes all types of institutionalised discrimination that people experience also.
This discrimination mean that the people on the flip side of these axes often acts as a barrier to access to the benefits of the structures themselves! The inequality of access has a huge impact on whether people can get jobs, access to health care, or access to education. You might think this varies mostly between countries but we very much see this inequality within local communities too.
Access to mental health services is no different! That’s what we’d like to talk about today = reducing these inequalities.
Now we know that we won’t dismantle these structures with a single post on inequality… but the hope is that we can open up the discussion of the reality of inequality in mental health. A conversation about the fact that this is the reality for many people! And we really want to highlight how inequality therefore disproportionately affects those on the ‘flip side’ of these axes.
Although these issues are systemic, we want to help reduce these inequalities at Untangled. So we try to offer different price points to make our services more accessible.
What are your thoughts? What are ways you think that we as a society can make mental health services more accessible? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!