Don’t make the future shit
The future of mental health technology needs a future to aim for
The following is the text of a speech given by Mark Brown at The Future of Mental Health Technology at NESTA in London on October 5th 2017
When I was asked to think about the future of technology for mental health my first thought was: we don’t even have a future for mental health to pitch for at all.
When we think about mental health we cannot even answer the simple question: what would the best future for people with mental health difficulties look like?
We could have anything we wanted for mental health but instead we eat ashes, stuff our ears with soil, bind ourselves in old rope and gag ourselves with rags of half remembered common sense.
At present we are busy trying to make a future from the past, a future that answers the questions of now, rather than a future based on the possibility of transformation, of redefinition, of liberation. It is almost as though we are afraid to dream for fear of being rebuffed, mocked, derided. We have been told that the future of people with mental health difficulties is not a place for dreams, desires and demands. We must take the future we are given.
If some dickheads can invent a robot shop that follows you about then we could have anything we wanted for mental health. Well, we could if we could let ourselves dream. And if others would let us dream. And we don’t let ourselves dream.
It’s like we have neverland made from spreadsheets and tabloid headlines. At our hearts we are scared to let the future come into being because we are still unsure where mental health difficulty fits in and what we might have to change about our expectations of the world for it to do so.
The people who do the dreaming about technology and have the capability to carry it through do not always represent us. They are like medieval princes filled with follies and fervours, living in the land of artisan coffee and never ending golden youth, able to indulge the first idea they come across and able to secure the resources to do so. And their values are not necessarily our values.
Those of us who experience mental health difficulty are more likely to end up dead earlier than our colleagues who do not have mental health difficulty. We are more likely to end up poor. We are more likely to end up in debt. These facts mean that the world of technology and the world of the finance and knowledge to develop it are often closed to those who have the most pressing problems to be solved
The objectives for thinking about a mental health future must be to mix two worlds that are usually separate: the world of the lived experience of people with mental health difficulties and the world of people who have access to the knowledge and expertise to develop technologies. One world is messy, ambiguous, challenging and filled with real practical life-affecting problems. The other is wipe clean, well scrubbed, exists in a kind of ultra space where all things are possible as long as they catch the attention of someone with money and time.
Mental health difficulty is a social experience as well as a personal one
In between those two world are other bodies of knowledge, other practices. There is medical knowledge, sociological knowledge, psychological knowledge. There are laws and structures and social and political conventions. Mental health does not happen in a vacuum because people do not live in a vacuum. Mental health difficulty is a social experience as well as a personal one. Humans act upon our environments and our environments act upon us.
The technological future for mental health must avoid just trying to replicate in a digital form what has already happened. Too much of our mental health and technology thinking is skeuomorphic, trying to design digital versions of things that political and social decisions dictate we can’t afford in meat space real life. Markets respond to incentives and political structures respond to pressure. The actual problems faced by people with mental health difficulties neither come with money nor have the power to push change. The voice of disappointment, despair, frustration and anger is too quiet, too skint.
The key for me in thinking about mental health and technology is opening up the space for the play between people’s expressed needs, desires and wishes and the cool stuff that technology can do and might do in the future. In mental health technology there is no moon shot, just a lot of random poking about in the darkness.
We need three things:
a systematic process of surfacing the problems that people with mental health difficulties actually face;
a systematic process of exploring the implications and applications of existing and emerging technology as they might be applied to those problems; and;
a far-reaching political and social programme to imagine possible futures for those of who experience mental health difficulty and who will do so in the future.
Why? Because if we don’t have a future we’re aiming for we’re all hostage to the pressures of the present. Things in the UK have been getting worse for a lot of people with mental health difficulties. Without visions to aim for we’re either living an eternal painful now if we have mental health difficulties; or we’re just titting about with other people’s problems if we don’t.
There’s lots that excites me about technology and there’s lots that enrages me about the challenges that people with mental health difficulties face.
There’s a big void where the future for people with mental health difficulties should be. Technology must open possibilities; make possible what wasn’t before; must be something that provides ways and means for people with mental health difficulties to do and be what we want and deserve to be. We have to learn how to play seriously.
I want technology to help make a better world for people with mental health difficulties as much as I want technology to make people with mental health difficulties ‘better’.
In a world where people see no future for themselves beyond struggle and sadness and defeat we must make sure that technology makes a better future possible. This will require new partnerships and new ways of being and working together.
People with mental health difficulties already live through awful things. Our question for the future of technology and mental health must be, repeatedly, doggedly, with equal parts pleasure and rage: does this thing we make things less shit?
We need to look at ourselves and ask: will our technology make the world less shit? And who will it make it less shit for?
And I want the answer to be: people who live with mental health difficulties.
@markoneinfour
