(wo)mentalitee

A post involving two admissions of ignorance.

1. Until recently (more on which below), to my shame I was unaware of the history / herstory conversation.

If you too are not familiar with it, herstory is a term for history written from a feminist perspective and emphasising the role of women, or told from a woman’s point of view. It’s a play on words: ‘history’ has its roots in the Latin phrase historia (which in turn comes from a Greek word meaning ‘knowledge maintained by enquiry’), rather than the possessive pronoun ‘his’. But sit down and think about it – as I did – and it’s hard to disagree with Martha Beck when she writes,

‘Most of our historical focus is reserved for famous men, and the growing but still disproportionately small number of women who have managed to successfully compete against men in fields we see as significant.’

So regardless of how or why history came to be named as such, the backdrop of maleness is there, and suggesting we consider herstory calls that out. Beck, in the remainder of her wonderful blog post, goes on to suggest we should forget neither ‘his’ nor ‘her’ story and tell ‘our’ story. Yet while we move (I hope) towards that, I’ll be keeping a healthy eye out for bias in what’s been written so far.

2. AKA ‘How I Arrived at Admission 1’.

Shortly after our most recent social event, I was talking with a friend about how great the turnout had been, the positive interactions and relationship-building we’d seen, and what kind feedback we’d had. The only thing that could have made me happier, I told her, was a bit more gender diversity among the attendees.

There followed a pause, then an awkward smile, then finally “I’d…always kind of assumed the ‘men’ in ‘mentalitee’…meant you were targeting the service at blokes?” This comment I would have taken seriously from anyone, but said friend is a small business coach and expert on social media content creation, so it really hit home. I then relayed the story to my wife, who agreed the name could well be planting an unintended seed in the minds of some non-male potential users.

Time to tell Houston about the problem – Houston being my friend Steve at Spaced Digital and Launch Pack , who’s been incredibly generous to mentalitee with his time on this website, and forgotten twice as much as I’ll ever know about marketing and messaging. And it was he who suggested we were having our herstory moment: regardless of the ‘men’ in mentalitee not being an intentional masculine signal, if people are making an association, then it needs addressing.

And so I will.

As stated in the Myths and concerns section of our About mentalitee page, mental health challenges don’t discriminate: they affect people from all sectors of society.

mentalitee is here for all of us.

A group of people banding together to push the mental health conversation forward would be amazing. But if there were voices in there from across the human spectrum…well that really would be something.

It’s what mentalitee intended at the start, and will continue to strive for.

(…and in case you’re interested: the ‘men’ in ‘mental’ results from the word evolving from the late Latin mentalis, which has roots even further back in the earlier Latin mens or ment, meaning ‘mind’.)