Choosing Strength Over Victimhood

The primacy of an individual’s agency in their own life is arguably the most profound and useful insight in all of psychology, across all ages. It resolves to this:

You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you respond to it.

Today, some ideas about trauma-based disorders and how quickly they can root are inimical to the embrace of personal agency. People lay blame for present day problems at the foot of monuments erected to bygone suffering.

We're in the midst of a cultural overcorrection when it comes to mental health. We’ve gone from a world in which mental health was never discussed and mental illness was shameful to one in which mental health is openly discussed and disclosed, to, more recently, one in which mental illness can serve as a badge of pride and a hallmark of identity.

This is a huge cultural reversal.

Young people are not just disclosing struggles, they are also self-diagnosing en masse. There are many reasons for this, including the desire to reframe experience and language itself–always a drive in the young—as well as the desire to be different and special, plus an abundance of real emotional suffering.

It’s great to be open about one's struggles, but it’s dangerous to derive a disproportionate sense of self from them. No one feature should define anyone, and certainly no feature predicated on one’s inability to cope. There lies a victim mentality.

We can teach that self-acceptance is not akin to embracing a condition, and that most conditions are not, in fact, desirable attributes around which to build an identity.

Here is where it gets tricky. We don’t want to tell anyone that their internal struggle is unimportant. We don’t want to tell anyone that their suffering is not real.

Instead we want to communicate that:

Your condition is important.

But it need not be the cornerstone of your identity.

It may, however, be the cornerstone of something much bigger than you.

We can help young people deep in the tunnel of identity formation to understand that a mental health diagnosis can beget self-discovery and empathy for others, who likely have their own struggles. At the same time, there are many things a diagnosis is not.

No mental health condition should serve as a crutch or a badge. If anything, it is the reverse. A condition is a portal to a better understanding of other human beings. Suffering, shame, and frustration confer on many a degree of empathy for all who struggle with difference and more broadly for all those who struggle in the world, in ways both open and hidden. And isn't that ultimately every single one of us?