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Mental health awareness enables class consciousness. Please don't do this.
I think the thing being advocated here is using context, not stopping talking about issues.
Like instead of saying "you are not alone with burnout, it is something most people experience from time to time", say " you're not alone with burnout, it is the result of the alienation from your work and the incentive structure of our society".
After a certain point being aware just means you keep reaching the lucky 10,000 instead of actually doing anything to address the problems.
It's like all the charities that are doing all kinds of stuff to raise awareness for whatever problem they're championing, but hardly ever make a dent in furthering the goal of actually fixing what they're championing.
Yes keeping people informed about mental health problems is important but the solution to the rise of the mental health crisis is "fix what's causing so much unnecessary stress on people." But instead we get more money dedicated for researching medicines and therapy to fix what shouldn't have been broken in the first place.
"Raisin awareness" more often than not helps that Charity in terms of Marketing, which in turn leads to more funding.
(Finding a human interest subject, linking your company to it and taking it all the the Press as a nice pre-package piece of "today's news" is quite a common PR strategy)
When it comes to modern Charities, generally fixing what they're championing is at best a secondary priority to their own self-preservation as an entity.
“Deaths of despair” is a powerful concept which deserves whatever shove into the mainstream that it can be given, regardless of purity tests. Occupy had problems, but it still got people to take on the concept of “the 1%.”
Can you expand your sentences a bit? I don't think I understand it quite yet.
Glad to. I think the more valuable story to tell people is about the thread connecting deaths of despair, and it’s the story that will be resisted. Shitty liberal tendencies will tend to tell the easier story as a way to obscure the hard one, and they’ll tell it louder if you call them out on their hypocrisy. This is not to say mental health awareness is an easier conversation at all, but the wider concept of “deaths of despair” touches it and ties it to something bigger, and is the more potent thought to leave people with.
The Occupy Wall Street movement had problems with staying on message and not making concrete demands, among other critiques folks to their left might make. However, they introduced the powerful concept that 1% of Americans control more than a third of American wealth, and the idea of “the 1%” does tremendous good and will long outlive the other conversations within that movement.
A major value of online discourse is to teach ourselves to perceive deeper threads in situations like what I’ve mentioned, and to obliterate our own blind spots when they stand in the way. That is what I was trying to say, and thank you sincerely for being an engaged discussion partner!