As has been stated, to say that someone committed suicide merely because of a test is simply wrong, and demonizing people under that misconception is not helping the problem. Depression is a serious issue that a lot of people are frankly insensitive about and don't understand (ex "can't you just pull yourself out of it?" "you're doing this to yourself" "think positive, it's just a phase"). A lot of people attribute one single thing to a suicide - "he did it because he couldn't get over the break-up" or "she couldn't stand losing her job," but there's never one single thing to blame. Depression is not that simple.
We need more awareness around mental health, and easier access to treatment, especially for the more vulnerable members of society (such as people of lower socioeconomic classes). It's also something we need to demystify so it's no longer such a taboo subject, which will also make it easier for people to get help.
~Psychic
I wonder now if increasing awareness around mental health comes with some costs in spite of the benefits.
1) With increasing awareness, I feel there is a real drive to medicalize mental health. I think there are definite negatives to this. I think most people are aware that putting people through the "medical system" can be an alienating and not the most effective experience, but treating mental disorders as diseases will increase the association between mental disorders and traditional medical interventions - i.e. see a professional, heed their advice, take medication - to the detriment of a more holistic approach that includes engaging and creating social bonds. Going through the medical system and shoring up your "social healing network", so to speak, are by no means mutually exclusive, but I fear that people will increasingly see mental health as something that you exclusively have to go through the medical system to fix because that's the association they make.
2) I also fear how this awareness might affect people's sense of agency. I fear that people might come to see it as just a disease, as something that "happens" to you, that because it has a physiological basis, they'll treat it as if it was 100% physiological and there's nothing they can personally do except seek professional advice. I fear how this might impact those who already have weakened senses of agency and push them closer to mental disorder.
This is of course not to say that we should not increase awareness and society's readiness to improve mental health. But every action that an individual or a society takes has the potential for negative and unintended consequences. Even though it's insensitive for people to say "can't you just pull yourself out of it?", "you're doing this to yourself", "think positive, it's just a phase", each of those phrases are true in a very fundamental way. If you overcome a mental disorder, then, yes, you have in some way pulled yourself out of it. If you overcome a mental disorder, then, yes, you will look back and realize that it was just a phase. If you're currently going through a mental disorder - I don't enjoy saying this, but - it's plausible that some of your actions and thoughts contribute to the problem.
Mental health is already a complex issue in itself, and addressing and fixing it on a individual or societal level is more complex still. I think this demonstrates how important it is to be mindful of everything: not just of individuals and their lived experience, but also of the potential harms that our approaches and solutions might create and as well those nuggets of truth, even in things we don't like to hear. If there's anything I can say that we must do, it's that in our efforts to "demystify" and increase awareness and most importantly understanding, that we don't oversimplify and boil down what needs to be understood to the point that "increasing awareness" becomes counter-productive.
