Is there a culture of trauma in Canada? I would imagine that this depends on to whom the question is being directed. If you're a heterosexual white male, it isn't likely, though there might be some surprises lurking beneath the surface of this little generalization, such as having been raised in poverty, or having been raised in a dysfunctional or abusive household. For everyone else? How about half the human population, which is to say, women? Having spent much of the tens of thousands of years that our species has been around having to cope with male oppression, violence and sexual exploitation has probably done more to traumatize an entire human population (being women) than anything else: a very large and very silent elephant in the living room, this. Of course I needn't omit mention of First Nations Peoples, racial minorities, GBLTQ people, people with disabilities, people with mental illness and the poor.
First I will tackle the already obvious. By and large straight white males have always had it pretty good. They still are the most likely to be elected to high political office and they still occupy the highest paid positions in the land. Canada still remains a straight rich white man's world, despite much of the progress made in advancing equal rights for women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, people with mental illness and racial minorities as well as First Nations People. Have I omitted anyone? The poor? But really, absolutely zero progress has been made in this country to eradicate poverty and the poor, especially the extremely poor and homeless now are more stigmatized than ever. This is changing and some straight rich white guys are panicking, or should I say, they are pathologically neurotic about having to share power.
Women have always had a lot to cope with: sexual harassment, discrimination, and internalized self-loathing brought on and reinforced by the fashion and cosmetics industries. Many women are absolutely brainwashed into believing that they have to wear makeup and get their nails done and their hair just so in order to look presentable. And ageing? The worst crime that a woman can seem to commit as far as some are concerned is to look their age, and to proudly look their age. Three years ago when I was still reading the Globe and Mail there was an article by one of their staff writers, a pretty thirty-something woman, who experimented and spent a week coming to work without makeup. She seemed unable to accept that she looks actually better without makeup but insisted that she felt incomplete. A colleague of mine mentions that when she was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward the nurses interpreted her refusal to wear makeup as a symptom of illness. However, she had never been in the habit of wearing makeup and has since made a spectacular mental health recovery. And she still doesn't wear makeup.
So, yes, I would say that women are very much victimized by collective trauma. They also have to live in perpetual fear of sexual harassment and assault and are everywhere presented with unrealistic and degrading images of themselves as objects of male desire.
Children have a rough go here as well. I can't say they are traumatized so much as conditioned and brainwashed into becoming mindless consumers thanks to the relentless messages from advertising that manipulates them into wanting cereals and other junk food with zero nutritional value, brand name clothing, toys and electronic gadgets. Unless their parents and educators are able to successfully counter this collective mental assault with teaching and reinforcing in them good values and solid ethics there is going to be much cause for concern for their long term development.
Have I also mentioned our culture of violence? We are saturated with it. From war movies and graphic violence in TV programs, computer games and movies to ultimate fighting championships and mixed martial arts, we are absolutely soaked and spattered in blood. It is not just the prevalence of violence but our cavalier, blasé insouciance about it. Many, especially values challenged young men, think absolutely nothing about spending an afternoon or evening watching two almost naked young men beating the crap out of each other. But if these same two men suddenly began making love? Oh, the horror! The absolute horror! Because there remains in our culture, especially among young men, an entrenched homophobia that is part and parcel to this whole glorification of violence.
I would like to conclude by mentioning another elephant in the living room: Unrestrained global market capitalism. The stress that our governments' worship of the economy god and their enacting policies that curb the most humanistic and humane legislations to abet the free flow of capital has put us under is extreme, to say the least. More than ever middle class parents fight and compete to see that their children can get into good universities and they prepare them ruthlessly for this by depriving them of childhood and farming them out to more activities and education enhancement programs than they are able to cope with. The pressure and competition of training for a job, of finding a job, keeping a job, and of finding a new if not better job because the old one hasn't worked out has placed almost everyone in the same hamster cage, running the same hamster wheel to death by exhaustion. Meanwhile, because the market must be given free reign, costs and expenses, especially for housing, are skyrocketing, putting us under more stress than ever. And I will not mention debt.
Is it any surprise then that mental health diagnoses are already going through the roof? And should there be any surprise that the majority of these diagnoses are going to involve depression, anxiety and trauma? What I find to be almost intolerably stupid is the wilful blindness of our governments. They are bleating all kinds of meaningful noises about improving our mental health services and making them more accessible and removing stigma and Baa-Baa-Baa-Baa, but they are doing absolute squat about addressing the real cause for our growing national mental health crisis: brutal Darwinist market capitalism.
It is not here to stay and it cannot be here to stay. Sooner or later the market will run out of steam and those of us who have survived its damages can then get to work at healing ourselves, each other and our nation.
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