Beyond Words: Part 1 – The Problem With How We Talk About Mental Health

Beyond Words: Part 1 – The Problem With How We Talk About Mental Health

By Quint Boa | UKCP Psychotherapist and Founder of Synima

We have never talked so much about mental health. And yet, I wonder whether we have ever been quite so confused by it.

We have a growing vocabulary for our difficulties. Anxiety, trauma, attachment, ADHD, narcissism and emotional dysregulation have become part of everyday conversation. Concepts that once belonged almost exclusively to consulting rooms now appear in newspapers, workplaces, classrooms and social media feeds.

Much of this is welcome. People are more willing to discuss experiences that previous generations were encouraged to hide. Stigma has diminished in some areas, and psychological suffering is increasingly recognised as part of ordinary human life.

But something rather peculiar has happened along the way. As our language for describing distress has expanded, our ability to understand it doesn’t always seem to have kept pace.

We have become better at naming our problems. I’m less convinced we have become better at communicating what they feel like.

This is the central question behind Part One of my book, Beyond Words: A Manifesto for Animation, AI and the Future of Mental Health Communication. And it is where the accompanying podcast series begins.

The Difference Between Information and Understanding

Imagine someone explaining a panic attack to a person who has never experienced one.

They might describe the physical symptoms. A racing heart, shortness of breath, dizziness, sweating and an overwhelming sense of danger. They could explain the body’s fight-or-flight response, the role of adrenaline and why the experience, although frightening, is not necessarily dangerous.

All of this information might be accurate.

But does it communicate the experience?

Does it explain what happens when your own body suddenly becomes somewhere you no longer feel safe? Or the strange humiliation of knowing, intellectually, that you are not in danger while every instinct insists otherwise?

There is a difference between knowing what something is and understanding what it means to live through it.

Psychotherapy has wrestled with this distinction for decades. A patient may understand precisely why they behave in a particular way and still find themselves repeating the same behaviour.

Insight is valuable. But insight, by itself, does not always produce change.

Something else has to happen.

When Psychological Language Becomes a Substitute for Curiosity

One of the unintended consequences of our growing psychological vocabulary is that we can sometimes use it to close down curiosity rather than encourage it.

We describe someone as avoidant, narcissistic or emotionally unavailable. We identify ourselves as anxious, traumatised or dysregulated.

These descriptions may contain useful truths. The problem begins when a label becomes the end of the conversation rather than its beginning.

A diagnosis can provide relief, particularly for someone who has spent years feeling misunderstood. It can also create access to appropriate treatment and support. None of that should be underestimated.

But a diagnosis is not a biography.

Two people with the same diagnosis may have entirely different experiences of themselves, their relationships and the world.

The language of psychology offers us a map. It cannot give us the whole landscape.

In therapy, I am often more interested in what a person means when they use a particular word than in the word itself.

When someone says they feel abandoned, what does abandonment mean to them? What does it remind them of? Where do they feel it? What happens in the moments before that feeling becomes unbearable?

Those questions can lead somewhere interesting.

Simply agreeing that someone has abandonment issues may not.

Why Words Are Sometimes Not Enough

Much of our mental health communication still relies on a fairly straightforward assumption: if we explain something clearly enough, people will understand it.

We write longer articles, produce more guidance, commission reports and distribute educational materials. We assume that the principal obstacle is a shortage of information.

Sometimes it is.

But emotional experience does not arrive in our lives as a neatly organised collection of facts.

Grief can make an ordinary room feel unfamiliar. Shame can alter the meaning of a perfectly innocent remark. Anxiety can turn a short silence into apparent evidence that something terrible is about to happen.

These experiences are difficult to communicate because they involve much more than conscious thought.

They involve memory, sensation, anticipation, association and the meanings we have attached to previous experiences.

Language is extraordinarily useful, but it is not the only way human beings make sense of the world.

We understand through images, movement, sound, metaphor and stories. Long before we can explain something about ourselves, we may already have a vivid sense of what it feels like.

A person might struggle to describe their depression but immediately recognise it in the image of someone moving through a crowded city while feeling completely separate from everyone around them.

The image does not replace an explanation.

It makes a different kind of understanding possible.

What Thirty Years in Psychotherapy Has Taught Me

Over nearly thirty years of working as a psychotherapist, I have become increasingly aware of the limits of explanation.

People rarely arrive in therapy because nobody has supplied them with the correct information.

Many know perfectly well that their drinking is destructive, that their relationships follow familiar patterns or that their fears are disproportionate to the situations they face.

Some understand their difficulties with remarkable sophistication.

And yet they remain stuck.

This is not because they are unwilling to change. It is partly because our emotional lives are not organised according to the rules of rational argument.

We can understand something intellectually while continuing to experience it emotionally in an entirely different way.

In my experience, meaningful therapeutic change often involves finding a new relationship with something familiar, rather than discovering an entirely new fact.

A person begins to see an old pattern differently. Something that previously felt inevitable becomes understandable. A feeling that seemed overwhelming becomes possible to tolerate.

This can happen through conversation, of course. But it can also happen through a story, an image or a moment of recognition that is difficult to put into words.

Which raises a question.

If our aim is to help people understand emotional experience, why do we rely so heavily on language alone?

The Problem With Mental Health Communication

There is another difficulty, particularly in public health communication.

We often confuse the successful delivery of information with successful communication.

An organisation publishes an awareness campaign. A company delivers mental health training. A healthcare provider distributes an educational resource.

The information is accurate. The terminology has been approved. The campaign reaches its intended audience.

These things matter.

But they tell us relatively little about whether someone has understood, remembered or connected emotionally with what they have encountered.

A person can read a perfectly written explanation of addiction without gaining much sense of why someone continues drinking despite the consequences.

A teenager can be taught the symptoms of anxiety without recognising their own experience.

A family member can learn the clinical definition of depression while remaining bewildered by the behaviour of someone they love.

The difficulty is not necessarily with the quality of the information.

It may be with the medium through which we expect that information to become meaningful.

Could Visual Storytelling Change That?

My other professional life has been spent working in film and animation.

For a long time, I regarded psychotherapy and animation as two relatively separate careers. One concerned itself with emotional experience, the other with visual communication.

Increasingly, I have come to think they are concerned with much the same question.

How do we help another person understand something that is difficult to communicate?

Animation has a particular advantage here. It can represent experiences that cannot easily be filmed, and which may be equally difficult to describe.

Anxiety can become a room whose walls gradually close in. Addiction can appear as a repeated journey towards something that promises relief but delivers the opposite. A difficult relationship can be shown through two people continually moving towards and away from each other.

These are metaphors, not literal descriptions of psychological conditions. But metaphors have always been important to the way we understand ourselves.

A visual representation can provide enough distance from an experience for someone to recognise it without feeling overwhelmed by it.

That possibility interests me enormously.

Not because animation is somehow superior to words, or because every psychological difficulty needs a visual explanation.

It is because different forms of communication reach us in different ways.

And we may be overlooking some of the most useful ones.

Where Artificial Intelligence Enters the Picture

Artificial intelligence introduces another dimension to this discussion.

Until recently, sophisticated animation was expensive and time-consuming to produce. The cost limited who could commission it and how widely it could be used.

AI-assisted production is beginning to change that.

It is becoming possible to create visual material more quickly, adapt it for different audiences and explore ideas that might once have been prohibitively expensive.

That could have important implications for charities, healthcare organisations, schools and mental health professionals.

But I am wary of the idea that technology alone will solve a communication problem.

AI can generate an extraordinary amount of content. It cannot guarantee that the content is useful, sensitive or psychologically meaningful.

Indeed, there is a danger that it simply accelerates the production of material that nobody particularly needs.

The important question is not how much more content we can create.

It is whether we can use these new tools to communicate something worth understanding.

That requires human judgement, psychological knowledge, creativity and a willingness to think carefully about the people we are trying to reach.

We Don’t Necessarily Need More Explanations

Perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility is that our difficulty with mental health communication is not primarily a lack of information.

It is our tendency to assume that understanding follows automatically from explanation.

We have become remarkably efficient at producing psychological knowledge. We can describe conditions, list symptoms, identify behaviours and offer evidence-based advice.

All of this is valuable.

But human beings are not simply containers waiting to be filled with accurate information.

We interpret what we encounter through our personal histories, fears, relationships and expectations. The same message can mean very different things to different people.

Communicating well therefore requires more than getting the facts right.

It requires some appreciation of what it is like to be the person receiving them.

This sounds obvious. Yet much of our public communication still appears to be organised around what institutions want to say rather than what people might actually experience when they hear it.

A Final Reflection: Beyond Words

Part One of Beyond Words is called The Problem because I believe we need to reconsider some of our assumptions about psychological communication before becoming too enthusiastic about new solutions.

The issue is not that words have failed us.

Words remain central to psychotherapy, relationships and the way we make sense of our lives. I have spent much of my working life listening to them, and I have no intention of abandoning them.

But they have limits.

Sometimes the most significant part of an experience is precisely the part we cannot easily explain.

We recognise this in everyday life. We say that something is beyond words, that we cannot find the words, or that someone needs to have been there to understand.

Perhaps we should take those expressions more seriously.

Because if the purpose of mental health communication is to help people feel understood, rather than merely informed, then we may need to become rather more imaginative about how we communicate.

And that is where the rest of the book begins.