Author: Rachel Brown, PhD candidate, Department of Psychology, Assisting Living and Learning member and Research Assistant, Edward M. Kennedy Institute, Maynooth University.
The world appears to be becoming more hostile. You’d want to take a deep breath before turning on the news. War, political and civil unrest, climate change, and economic instability seem to be affecting more people globally than ever before. Throw that on top of the daily trials and tribulations of modern life, and threats seem to come at us from every angle. How are we to cope with all this adversity? Well, we’re just gonna have to be more resilient. Or are we, and more importantly, should we?
Resilience, once a concept originating from the natural sciences and engineering, has been adapted to psychology and refers to the human ability to mitigate the effects of adversity through positive adaptation and coping strategies, limiting its impact on mental health and well-being. It is viewed as a valuable attribute of individuals, relationships, communities, cultures, and even entire nations. An entire industry has sprung up to provide resilience training to everyone to overcome a multitude of resilient demands. This suggests that resilience is an acquired ability where strategies can be taught. However, resilience is believed to be developed as a result of previous coping, suggesting resilience is built from adverse experiences. We see this logic applied to populations who experience significant adversity, such as those of Gaza and Ukraine, as well as marginalised populations such as low-socioeconomic status groups.
In my PhD, I explored accounts of mental health from people of various socioeconomic backgrounds, and I found something very interesting when they spoke about resilience. Not surprisingly, resilience was highly valued, allowing them to deal with everything from trauma to navigating daily life’s stresses. When there was significant adversity, such as loss or financial hardship, performing resilience enabled them to mitigate this distress and continue on with life responsibilities, such as work and caring for family. While resilience practices varied and depended on class-related social norms and associated socioeconomic contexts, common resilience strategies focused on stoicism and emotional suppression, rather than addressing the effects of adversity. For others, it was a performance of aspired to mental health and resilience norms that indicated to others, as well as themselves, that they were being resilient. In these accounts, adopting the label of resilience was more valued than a strategy that had any protective effects for their mental health or well-being.
Instead, the word “resilience” had power, or what is known in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, as a master signifier. A master signifier can be understood as a word that functions with power within discourse. While its meaning is elusive and transient, it can have powerful effects for those who use it and receive it. For example, other master signifiers may be “freedom”, “God”, “survivor” or “real man/woman”. Here, the signifier “resilience” and the associated sociocultural meanings shaped practices often in ways that did not benefit mental health, despite the practices that were performed to meet with resilient norms. Often, these efforts were mentally costly for the participants in my study, and eventually, the capacity to perform “resilience” was exhausted, with significant implications for their well-being and quality of life.
We can draw from these findings from my PhD that resilience is an arbitrary yet powerful signifier that shapes resilient practices to meet mental health and societal norms. But why is this a problem? If resilient practices enable people to cope with adversity and fit in with society, isn’t that a good thing? In many ways, yes, having psychological skills of adaptation, stress management and emotional regulation are valuable for negotiating personal and social challenges. But it is when resilient demands come from an inequality of adversity that it is no longer about an individual coping with distress, but a social justice and human rights issue. This is because “resilience” as a master signifier absolves the adversity that originates from inequality or conflict. When entire marginalised populations or ethnic groups are framed as resilient, it dehumanises them by justifying their suffering by framing it as a characteristic of the individual rather than a consequence of inequality, marginalisation and exploitation. But it is not just marginalised groups that bear the label of “resilience”. Within the context of neoliberal capitalism, even affluent populations are required to perform more, work longer hours and silence their distress with the signifier “resilience”. Neoliberal capitalism can be understood as the social and political practices that focus on free markets and free trade, commodification, individual freedom and responsibility not only in terms of shaping global economies, but also societies and cultures. It is often criticised for its damaging effects on the environment, indigenous populations, but also human well-being and mental health. Those unable to practice resilience or perform what is required to live within the social context of neoliberalism can be framed as suffering from mental health conditions that are pathologies of the individual and not the result of the ever-increasing adverse conditions of daily life, where more and more resilience is required to be economically and socially viable.
Now, I’m not saying that resilience, the psychological strategies to mitigate distress, is a bad thing. I myself would be considered a very resilient person, and resilience has enabled me to overcome many challenges and achieve great things in my own life. It is when “resilience”, the master signifier, makes distress out to be an individual failure where suffering is tolerated, and the adversity goes unquestioned. It is when “resilience” as a word, as a label, excuses and absolves the adversity that is derived from inequality and exploitation that it becomes a social justice and human rights issue, and we must question what the cost of all this resilience is. The costs I found in my research related to the unhealthy suppression of emotions, performative resilient practices that did more harm than good, and people so exhausted from resilience that they considered suicide. So how can we balance between resilience that is good for us, and resilience that harms. Well, we should try to consider what is behind the resilient demands. Are they from adversity generated by inequality or to meet social norms that push beyond one’s resilient capacity? Then it is worth questioning the master signifier of resilience. This will not only reduce practices of resilience that are damaging on an individual level, but also create alternative narratives that challenge the inequality of adversity hiding behind the signifier “resilience”.
