Mental health: ‘Resilience is not the opposite of crying’

The Freedom of Mind festival recently concluded its first year and I hope it’s the first of many more to come – mental health being discusses openly across Bristol can only be a good thing.

At their event, The Political Mind, the concept of resilience was on the lips of several prominent local politicians and seemed to come up in almost every other event I was able to attend. 

But what does resilience mean? “It means not giving up no matter what,” is what a young person recently told me when I asked them what resilience is and it’s something I’ve heard many times before.

Schools, colleges, universities, and national and local government are increasingly introducing young people to the idea of resilience. In a recent article the Bristol Cable revealed that in May 2016 the government announced a new “funding boost for schools helping pupils develop character”, with £2 million earmarked for projects with “a military ethos” that would “instill resilience in children”.  

I’ve seen first-hand that what a lot of young people understand to be resilience isn’t actually what we practice at the Resilience Lab and may not be helpful to their mental health and wellbeing, and in fact may be harmful.

This misunderstanding of resilience is something that worries me greatly. The danger is that with people in positions of authority using the term resilience as a nicer, trendier or more acceptable way to encourage young people to “just get on with it” and ignoring their wellbeing or difficulties they may be facing.

An example of this would be from work I’ve done in the past where I’ve seen students in tears be told to “be more resilient” with no support on how to do this or what resilience is (other than it being implied that it’s the opposite of crying).

The issue with this is that I worry young people may be developing unhelpful or harmful habits and thinking that these are in fact how we are supposed to deal with difficulties in life or with our mental wellbeing. Another worry is that resilience becomes a sticking plaster over the reality of the genuine disadvantage that is at the roots of a lot of young people’s distress.

Research suggests that resilience is a learnable skill and that young people become more resilient not by persevering no matter what but by learning skills to help them deal with difficult times. If young people aren’t being taught these skills or think that keeping going with something that isn’t working makes them a better or healthier people then this will have huge impacts on how they approach both learning and work.

This also has wider implications for the funding of services and the responsibilities of authorities who talk about resilience. If authorities are using the concept of resilience to encourage young people to get over their emotional distress there is a real danger that support services could be cut or neglected in pursuit of a resilience culture that potentially emphasises harmful, unhelpful or damaging behaviour.  

What do we do at Off the Record’s Resilience Lab? Well, when we talk about resilience at Resilience Lab we first must understand that life can have periods where everything is great but that sometimes life will be tough, terrible or taxing.

Good times don’t always last, but we make it clear that by the same logic neither do bad times and it’s how we deal with those bad times and bounce back from them that makes us resilient.

With this in place we understand that resilience comes from flexibility and adaptability and we support young people to become more resilient. Importantly we support young people to identify how they already are resilient and how to use their skills and strengths to support themselves emotionally.

Over five sessions that young people can attend in any order we deal with what stresses us out and how to make friends with stress. We go over some techniques to help us deal with the pressures of life, build bridges and reach out for support, tackle negative thoughts and discover some of our strengths.

We look at what people like Angie Hart who say: “Resilience is overcoming adversity, whilst also potentially subtly or even dramatically transforming (aspects of) that adversity”.

What we do differs from what I’ve criticised others for doing. Instead of saying “keep going no matter what” we would encourage young people to look at why they are struggling and know that it’s OK to change their approach or stop what they are doing if it is causing them real emotional distress.  

Research suggests that resilience is a learnable skill and that it can protect you from developing some mental health difficulties. For more information please visit the Resilience Lab here.

Will Anderson is a Resilience Lab facilitator at Off the Record, he is writing in a personal capacity

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