Contrary to neoliberal institutions that seek to liberate individuals from their pathologies only to the point where they can participate in the realm of economic necessity, the left must offer a vision of freedom that treats our needs and vulnerabilities as challenges to be collectively grappled with.

I’ve been churned, perhaps you’ve been churned, too. Maybe in the future someone you care dearly for will be churned. Churning is a tactic employed by employment services and employers, specifically in the disability sector, to extract the most amount of energy and time from an employee before they burn out and return either to hospital, unemployment, or both. On a strategic level, churning keeps the working class subdued, tired, hungry, doubting, sick.

Even in its sensible bid to ask, listen and encourage action, R U OK? Day obscures a more complex and uncomfortable reality: that appropriate professional support is not always readily available, and that many individuals most at risk of depression, self-harm and suicide are those whose repeated efforts to take action have already been frustrated by demoralising interactions with the healthcare system.

Increasingly, the story of mental illness and neurodivergence is told by people in the unusual position of being able to leverage it to some advantage. To get away with dodgy business practices, to avoid difficult consequences – hard questions and job losses. All of this is incredibly galling for those for whom compassion, or the benefit of the doubt, or basic rights have been revoked in the wake of disclosure.

The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System handed down its mammoth final report in March. Some of its sixty-five recommendations are positive, but many reproduce the power structures and denial of self-determination the current system depends on.

In its depoliticised form, ‘mental health’ can be used to explain just about anything. Most recently, New Zealand MP Andrew Falloon was caught sending pornographic images to several young women and invoked his grief at his friends’ suicides as the cause. Perhaps unusually, this time the excuse failed to work.

Stead left Sydney in 1928, and had lived in Europe for almost six years when Seven Poor men of Sydney was published. The novel's vision of the antipodes is as much a view of interwar Europe as of Australia; it  finds in Sydney's errors the greater failings of the unstable phenomenon of 'Western civilisation' which tears the bodies of earth, water, and flesh that constitute it. Through that century and into this.

What a turn to conversation and confession as solutions to men’s mental health overlooks is that men’s unhappiness is depoliticised when it is individualised. That men might then turn to each other with this framing in mind robs this situation of its potential to suggest the political reform of the society that almost certainly played a part in the creation of that unhappiness.

Popular culture and dialogue doesn't often touch on dissociative identity disorder, but when it does, it's often in the same vein as the way mainstream media tends to treat mental illnesses in general – incorrectly and with a tendency to both glamourise and to indulge in stereotypes.

Blaming madness for inexplicable crimes is representative of an international trend which is increasingly putting all members of society, regardless of mental health, at risk of institutional violence.

A discourse that divorces suicide from society is the only one that can imagine a nation without suicide with one breath, then assess the threat of loneliness primarily in terms of economic productivity with the next.

Australians are bombarded with a deficit view of Aboriginal people, so much so that we often become complacent, and doubt that solutions can be found. Rarely do we listen to the solutions that Aboriginal people find for themselves.

Due to the extensive list of creative geniuses whose deaths were either caused or speculated to have been caused by the dreaded infection, syphilis acquired twisted positive connotations within European artistic circles during the Victorian era.

We need to reframe the way we think of mental health – not just in terms of mutated genes, dysfunctional cells, misfiring neurons, and individual memories of an unhappy childhood, but also as an extension of public life. The mind is both a personal and politicised space.

Mental health care is in crisis in Australia. It would be almost impossible to find someone who didn’t hold that view. And there are, obviously, many organisations working hard to change that, including R U OK? Day, which happens to be today.

However, the very existence of this regularly run tour raises serious concerns about ‘dark tourism’ and the need to respectfully handle a historical site’s devastating past. No matter how tastefully it is done, can a ghost tour of a former asylum ever be an appropriate method of generating greater interest in local history?