When Words Fail: Why Mental Health Needs More Than Language

When Words Fail: Why Mental Health Needs more Than Language

One of the more peculiar expectations we place on people experiencing psychological distress is that they should be able to explain precisely what is wrong with them. We ask them to describe their feelings, identify their symptoms and provide a coherent account of experiences that may be anything but coherent. Then, when they struggle, we sometimes interpret their silence as reluctance, resistance or an inability to engage.

Yet the difficulty may have very little to do with their willingness to communicate. Sometimes, the experience exists long before the words needed to describe it.

Anxiety can narrow our attention until the world appears to consist entirely of potential threats. Depression can make ordinary thinking feel exhausting. Grief can produce contradictory emotions that refuse to settle into a sensible explanation. Someone can love a person and resent them, miss them and feel relieved by their absence, sometimes within the same afternoon.

Expecting people to explain these experiences neatly is rather like asking someone caught in a storm to give an accurate weather forecast.

When the Experience Comes Before the Explanation

After more than thirty years working as a psychotherapist, I have become familiar with a particular sentence: “I don’t know how to explain it.”

It can arrive accompanied by frustration, embarrassment or an apology, as though the person has somehow failed at the task of being a patient. Often, however, what follows is considerably more revealing than a carefully constructed psychological account.

Consider a composite example drawn from recurring conversations in my private practice. A woman in her forties describes managing a demanding job, relationships, family responsibilities and the countless small obligations that accumulate in everyday life. She knows she is anxious, but struggles to explain why. Nothing is obviously catastrophic. From the outside, everything appears reasonably successful.

Then she finds an image. She describes herself as someone trying to keep a dozen plates spinning, knowing that if she stops concentrating for even a moment, everything will come crashing down.

Suddenly, we have something we can work with.

We can explore who put the plates there, why she believes she must keep them spinning, and what she imagines would happen if she allowed one to fall. The metaphor provides a way into her experience that the word anxiety never quite managed.

Metaphor Is Not Decoration. It Is Thinking.

We use metaphors constantly when describing our psychological lives. We’re brokenhearted. We carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. We walk on eggshells, feel trapped in relationships, hit rock bottom or find ourselves drowning.

Taken literally, these expressions are absurd. Hearts do not break in the manner of crockery, and nobody has to walk on actual eggshells to experience a difficult marriage. Nevertheless, we understand exactly what these expressions mean.

Their usefulness lies in giving invisible experiences shape, weight, movement and location.

Aristotle recognised something important about this more than two thousand years ago. In Poetics, he wrote:

“But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.”

He understood that making connections between apparently unrelated things was central to understanding and communication. Metaphor is not something we add once thinking is complete. Very often, it is the means by which thinking becomes possible.

Research into the use of metaphor in psychotherapy supports its potential value. A 2023 review found that therapists and clients developing metaphors collaboratively was associated with positive engagement during sessions, although the wider evidence remains limited.

The implication is worth considering. Perhaps people struggling to articulate their difficulties do not always need better words. Sometimes they need another way of thinking about what is happening.

What Happens When Metaphor Starts Moving?

This is where animation becomes particularly interesting.

Imagine trying to explain panic disorder to someone who has never experienced a panic attack. We could provide a detailed written explanation of the body’s threat response, complete with descriptions of adrenaline, rapid breathing and catastrophic thinking.

Alternatively, imagine an animation showing someone walking through an ordinary street. Gradually, the buildings close in. Everyday sounds become overwhelming. The pavement seems to narrow, while an internal alarm grows louder until the person feels surrounded by danger.

The animation could then show how bodily sensations, fearful interpretations and avoidance reinforce one another.

Nothing about this requires us to pretend that panic literally changes the architecture of a street. The animation gives form to an internal experience while explaining a psychological process.

For someone who recognises those sensations, the immediate response might be recognition rather than another request for clarification. For a family member, partner or friend, it could provide a glimpse into something previously difficult to comprehend.

Of course, not everybody experiences panic, depression or grief in the same way. A metaphor that illuminates one person’s experience may feel completely wrong to another. Animation should therefore invite understanding rather than claim to offer a universal picture of mental illness.

From Information to Understanding

Healthcare has become extraordinarily sophisticated at collecting and distributing information. We produce websites, leaflets, reports, treatment plans and clinical guidance in enormous quantities.

But distributing information is not the same as communicating it successfully.

A systematic review published in 2025 examined 88 trials of health information animations. Of the trials measuring knowledge, 80% reported positive effects. The researchers also found encouraging results for behaviour, while stressing the need for stronger evidence about longer-term outcomes.

These findings do not establish that animation is psychotherapy, or that watching an animation automatically changes someone’s mental health. They do, however, strengthen the case for taking visual communication seriously.

There is an important distinction between knowing the definition of depression and recognising its effect on somebody’s life. Similarly, understanding the mechanics of an anxiety response is not necessarily the same as recognising that response in yourself.

Good mental health communication needs to address both.

Why Artificial Intelligence Changes the Possibilities

Until recently, producing high-quality bespoke animation could be prohibitively expensive for smaller healthcare organisations, schools, charities and community groups.

AI-assisted animation is beginning to change those economics. It can reduce some of the time and cost involved in creating visual material, making it more realistic to develop resources for specific conditions, audiences and circumstances.

Imagine a charity producing a collection of short animations about bereavement, anxiety, eating disorders or addiction. Each could illustrate a different psychological experience using carefully chosen metaphors, helping people recognise patterns that might otherwise remain difficult to articulate.

The technology is not the clinical expertise. Any responsible production still requires psychological understanding, creative judgement, appropriate safeguarding and input from people with lived experience. AI can help make the work more accessible, but it cannot determine whether a particular representation is sensitive, accurate or helpful.

The opportunity is not simply to produce more content. It is to communicate important ideas more effectively.

Being Understood Is Where Change Can Begin

The psychologist Carl Rogers observed:

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

In psychotherapy, recognition and acceptance are often essential starting points. Before we can begin to reconsider our responses to difficult experiences, we may need some way of recognising what those experiences actually are.

That is one of the possibilities animation offers. It can take an experience that feels private, confusing or even shameful and make it visible enough to examine and discuss.

I am not suggesting that animation should replace conversation, psychotherapy or the relationship between a patient and a clinician. Quite the opposite. Its greatest potential may be in making those conversations easier to begin and more productive once they have started.

We have spent centuries developing increasingly sophisticated language to describe the human mind. Yet people continue to sit in consulting rooms, bedrooms, classrooms and doctors’ surgeries struggling to express how they feel.

Perhaps the answer is not always to find more words.

Sometimes, we need to find a way of showing what we mean.