Toxic Positivity

I’ve read a few good blog posts recently about the phenomenon of “toxic positivity,” so I figured I would weigh in on the subject. In essence this is a follow-up to a post I wrote awhile ago (see Mental Illness and Advice). I didn’t yet have the name for the kinds of mental health advice I was negatively describing, but now I do.

For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase “toxic positivity,” the Psychology Group defines it as “the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations” which “results in the denial, minimization, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience” (see here). Toxic positivity attempts to paper over genuine negative emotions and experiences of mental illness with a facade of happiness. Toxic positivity can be in articulated in many ways. Some speak of “staying positive” in the face of any adversity, “looking on the bright side” of tough situations. Others say that “happiness is a choice” and admonish the mentally ill to “choose happiness” and wellbeing. And still others use the slogans and platitudes that we are undoubtedly all familiar with like: “Stay positive, you got this! / Keep fighting! / Everything happens for a reason / But you have so much to be thankful for” etc.

Another strain of toxic positivity comes in the form of lifestyle advice. If someone suggests to you that you can “cure” you mental illness with a vegan diet or yoga and meditation, they are also suggesting that recovery from mental illness is entirely in your hands. These kind of advisors might suggest you build a better lifestyle so that you can get off your medications. Others might claim that our thoughts make up the contents of our emotional states. We are our thoughts, and our thoughts make up our world, hence if our thoughts are positive ones, then our world will be positive too.

There are many things to critique here. The “stay positive” attitude can be grouped together with the “our thoughts make up our world” suggestion. In this case, staying positive is a choice that we have under our control. Mind over matter. Our thoughts can form our worldview, so if we just stay positive, then that nasty mental illness will evaporate like so much morning fog. The decision to exert this great amount of emotional control is ours, all we have to do is activate it. This sentiment is meant to motivate, but in the end it places blame. If your world is dictated by mental illness, it is not the fault of the mental illness, but yours since you clearly refuse to stay positive and think positive thoughts. The choice of positivity necessarily implies its opposite, the choice of negativity. If we mental illness sufferers actively choose to live in a state negativity, then that is our problem and only we can fix it. If happiness is a choice, then so too is sadness. And we are clearly making the wrong choice for some unexplainable reason.

“Everything happens for a reasons” says next to nothing. If someone is opening their heart to another and telling their story of mental illness, and the response is the unimpressive “everything happens for a reason,” that conversation is now over. This mystical let vague sentiment attempts to put a positive spin on suffering and grief, but ultimately shuts it down by artificially ceasing the conversation, not allowing the sufferer to commiserate effectively. “But you have so much to be thankful for” minimalizes pain and suffering by relativizing it away on a scale of suffering. It suggests that by taking stock in the goodness in your life, by solely focusing on that goodness, any negative elements i.e. mental illness can be nullified. Again, this returns to the “stay positive sentiment”; if you can control and focus your sense of gratitude on the positive, then the negative will disappear. If you choose not to activate your gratitude, then the fault is yours.

Next we have lifestyle positivity. This is advice from the vegans, yoga practitioners and other proponents of a healthy lifestyle. If we could only remove the material toxins from our bodies by way of diet, we could remove the mental illness from us. If we could only practice rigorous sport and mindfulness, we could control our emotions more effectively. In this category we also have some advice from the anti-psychiatry camp, which proposes throwing out all those mind-altering meds in place of diet and exercise. No one would argue that we shouldn’t eat healthy. No one would argue that forms of exercise like yoga aren’t beneficial to our health. That is not up for debate. The matter here is the link between these activities and mental illness. I recently received an forward from a colleague about the supposed link between meat eating and psychological disorders. If I would have stopped eating meat long ago, then I wouldn’t have bipolar disorder now, bad karma I guess. To be sure, I’m a vegetarian and have met other bipolar vegetarians, and yet here we are with our mental disorders perfectly intact.

What keeps the yoga practitioner healthy might not work for the whole of humanity. And again, we are not talking about physical health here. Yoga practitioners cannot presume that their healthy activity keeps mental illness at bay, this is a false syllogism: I have no mental illness, I practice yoga, therefore I have no mental illness because I practice yoga. This is like when Lisa Simpson tells Homer that she has a rock that keeps away tigers. When Homer asks who it works, she says: “Well I don’t see any tigers around.” What is confused here is cause and effect. No one would tell a cancer patient to practice yoga in order to rid themselves of cancer, because everyone knows that the onset of cancer took place in the past. The onset of mental illness has so many factors involved; heredity, family history, life circumstances and trauma, substance abuse etc. But forget these factors. All of this should be in our control. We are in the driver seats of our lives, toxic positivity would have us believe, and if we drive right into a tree, well we must be bad drivers then.

Actually, I like this metaphor, the metaphor of driving. The mentally ill have cars that are a bit worn, older models with less features, maybe it could use a new coat of paint and a functioning left turn signal, but the car works and will travel along down the road. Because the car isn’t in great shape, it is accident prone, and after each accident we have no choice but to fix it as best we can and keep on driving. Maybe we can’t drive too fast without the inside rattling, feeling like the car is going to fall apart, but if we’re careful, we can get to where we need to go. So in drives our toxic positivity friend in a brand new sports car with all the latest safety features. She says if we want to get to our destination, we should just drive fast and straight like her. She assures us that her precision driving has nothing to do with her shiny new sports car. She is the driver, she is in control of this magnificent vehicle, and she only takes it to places she wants to go. She has never had an accident and assumes she never will because she believes in her driving ability. Why can’t we simply drive like her? Do we want to get into accidents? Drive the straight and narrow and be the driver. Believe in being a good driver.

Toxic positivity is here to stay. It’s been around for awhile. If you’d like some proof of it, just go to Facebook and find any support for mental illness; bipolar, borderline, depression, PTSD, you name it. Scroll down and you’ll find it within five minutes. These “good vibes” are well intentioned but disastrous in their effects, serving to delegitimize the individuals’ lived experience. “Staying positive” denies our reality, gas lighting us into believing that everything is indeed okay if we choose it to be. Our mental illnesses are minimalized, reduced to merely a case of “the blues” which we can quickly snap out of it properly motivated. Needless to say, all this is pretty insulting, and I assume you’ve gotten offended at least once while reading this post. Perhaps that is good, for our frustration over toxic positivity can make as more aware of it and perhaps better prepared to confront it when, not if, we encounter it.

So stay strong, stay positive, and you can do it! (If I could figure out how to paste a unicorn sticker here, I would.)