Bell Let’s Talk – Counterpoint

#BellLetsNationalizeYou
My view has not changed from last year, regarding this cynical “Bell Let’s Talk” campaign, which is nothing more than the commodification of mental health by a parasitic private telecom company practicing its grotesque capitalistic function. If anything, I am now even more just thoroughly disgusted by it. Proper access to mental health care is a cause that activists everywhere are working every single day to try to achieve. So, no – Bell Canada doesn’t get any credit for essentially making money off of something activists are doing every single day for free. Caring about mental health shouldn’t be – and it isn’t – confined to some time period defined by a marketing gimmick deployed by a private corporation.

The only thing this “campaign” does is convince me, year after year that “oh yeah. It’s that time of year to really hammer home the notion that we need to nationalize not just this parasitic corporation, but telecommunications in Canada, in general”. It isn’t about mental health care at all, as most of us think about improving mental health care access every single day. So, let’s use Bell Canada’s attempt to profit off of human suffering as, instead, a rallying cry to keep trying to nationalize them.

Just to be clear: this is not at all directed at the well-meaning people who are passing around the #BellLetsTalk message. You people are beautiful people who clearly only want to be part of the solution:

I am honestly in absolute awe at the fact that we have to rely on a corporation sloganeering & using mental health as a marketing gimmick rather than just pursuing the most OBVIOUS solution and just effing FUNDING and legislating mental health care and making actual access easier.
This corporatization of action and progress on mental health care is fetishizing it to the point where it has become meaninglessly ritualistic, year after year.

Heck, a part of properly funding mental health care and breaking down barriers and stigma involves not just spending on the actual point-of-use facets of mental health care, but spending our collective tax dollars on education and outreach campaigns that exist for no other reason than to change the narratives and prevailing attitudes out there regarding mental health (I.E: breaking down barriers and stigma..etc).
In tandem, we simply cannot pretend that mental health exists in a vacuum and is divorced from poverty.

Inequality, economic precariousness and the resulting isolation and desperation are major factors that – if left unaddressed – will leave us in a self-perpetuating cycle of trying to deal with the symptoms of the issue while ignoring deeper reasons for why it’s happening. These aforementioned factors, by the way, are ALL things that Bell is complicit in. Don’t believe me? Just look at how they treat their own employees (firing them for asking for, no joke, MENTAL HEALTH LEAVE along with the general awful labour practices and behaviour that are characteristic of corporations everywhere).

But nooooo, let’s just leave it up to a corporation, whose actual motivation and raison d’être is not mental health care, but profitability.