Mental Health: Whose Responsibility Is It Really?

We’re quick to categorise someone’s mental health experience as their own responsibility.

We call it their depression, their anxiety, their psychosis. We talk about resilience, self-care, personal responsibility. All useful concepts, but notice how the frame shifts the entire weight of healing onto the individual.

But here’s the harder truth: if we, as a society, workplaces, and communities, are going to be so poorly behaved and so unconscious that we break people, then surely the responsibility can’t rest solely on those who are already struggling.

Think about it.

• When a workplace normalises overwork, bullying, or gossip, and someone burns out—was that really just their burnout?

• When families shame rather than listen, when schools dismiss rather than nurture—are we really going to say that the fallout is simply an individual failure to cope?

• When governments underfund services and then tell people to “reach out for help”—whose responsibility is that?

We like the individualised frame because it keeps us comfortable. It keeps us from having to look at how our collective behaviour—our unconscious cruelty, our inability to hold space for difference, our addiction to speed and productivity—creates the very conditions that push people into crisis.

Mental health is not a solo sport.

It’s relational, cultural, systemic. It’s about the field we all co-create together.

If someone breaks under the weight of all this, that’s not an individual collapse—it’s a signal that something in the collective has gone terribly wrong.

So maybe the question isn’t: How do we get this person to take responsibility for their recovery?

Maybe the question is: How do we take collective responsibility for the way we live, work, and treat one another—so that fewer people are broken in the first place?

Because if we’re going to keep breaking people, the very least we can do is admit it’s not just their responsibility to mend