DOI: 10.1111/1467-9752.

12642

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Mental health, resilience and existential literature

Alison M. Brady

UCL Institute of Education, London, UK Abstract

Correspondence
In this paper, I will begin by charting some of the concep-
Alison M. Brady, UCL Institute of Education, 20 tions of mental health in young people today, paying particu-
Bedford Way, London WC1H0AL, UK.
Email: alison.brady.14@ucl.ac.uk
lar attention to recent mental health education policies in Eng-
land. I will focus on the concept of ‘resilience’ as central to
these policies, and how this represents an impoverished under-
standing of mental health, what it means to ‘overcome’ mental
health issues, and what, in fact, might constitute an ‘appropri-
ate’ response to the world we (now) live in. In order to explore
an alternative conception of mental health in light of this, I
turn to an example from existentialist literature—Dostoevsky’s
Notes from underground. On the surface, this novel appears to be
an account of a man suffering from a mental breakdown. Ulti-
mately, however, I argue that texts such as this enable us to
explore more fully what it is to experience mental health issues,
and that also point us to the fundamental vulnerabilities and
uncertainties that are an intimate part of being human.

KEYWORDS
anxiety, existentialism, mental health education, resilience

MENTAL HEALTH AND YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY

Mental health concerns amongst young people in the UK and elsewhere have been increasingly spotlighted, both in
wider public discourses and in the area of education. There is a widespread belief that young people are experiencing
more mental health concerns than in previous generations, and the statistics are often quite shocking. In every class-
room across England, for instance, it is thought that at least three children are suffering from a diagnosable condition
(Brown & Carr, 2019; Thorley, 2016).

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2 BRADY

But why is this? One explanation often raised relates to young people’s increased exposure to social media, and
their seeming inability to distinguish between online spaces and the ‘real world’ (DfES, 2020). These platforms are cas-
tigated for endorsing unrealistic body images, for promoting a vapid ‘influencer culture’ that feeds on this, as well as
creating a space in which it is fair game to judge another person with wanton cruelty (e.g. Betton & Wollard, 2019;
Kelly et al., 2018). But of course, it is not social media alone that contributes to the ‘mental health crisis’ among young
people. Theirs is also a generation characterised by the ‘gig economy’ and increasing precarity in the job market. Rid-
dled with student debt, they receive ‘diminished economic returns’ for their education (Bracke et al., 2014). This is not
to mention the intense visibility of social, economic and political injustices along with the rise of right-wing populism.
And of course, all of this is amidst the continuing existential threat of environmental destruction. In the wake of the
COVID-19 pandemic, concerns for the mental health of young people have been amplified even further (Gloster et al.,
2020; OECD, 2021). With restricted movements, isolation, an increased amount of time spent online, unpredictable
education and unpredictable futures—not to mention the looming presence of disease and destruction—is it any won-
der that one in four young people today are experiencing some form of ongoing mental distress (MIND, 2017)?
In a world that seems to be increasingly characterised by uncertainty—economic, political and existential—
education is often promoted as a remedy of sorts. Through education, young people are thought to acquire the knowl-
edge and skills needed to navigate the complex world, where educational institutions can cultivate the capacity in
young people to recognise mental health problems in themselves and others, and to seek treatment where necessary
(e.g. Harris et al., 2011). With this also comes the onus on schools and teachers to diagnose mental health problems
and to enact school-based interventions that help mitigate them. This seems sensible, given the amount of time young
people spend at school. Indeed, schools have become not only the place in which young people are taught about mental
health disorders. They are also key in recognising (potential) mental ill-health, in part through observing the behaviour
of students, as well as acting as a ‘protective factor’ that reduces the likelihood of developing more serious disorders
(e.g. DfES, 2016).
Undoubtedly, recognising the importance of and engaging in discussions about mental health is important, particu-
larly where the alternative has sometimes been to simply ignore these issues altogether. And yet, how accurate is this
picture of the mental health ‘crisis’ in the first place? Might we question whether there has actually been an increase in
mental health conditions, or simply a ‘narrowing of how we diagnose, describe and respond to experiences of distress’
(Farrell & Mahon, 2021, p. 38)? As Brown and Carr (2019) note, ‘medicine has become part of the fabric of schooling’.
What is important, then, is to think about how mental health is understood in educational policies, including the ways
in which an individual suffering from ill-health is diagnosed and treated, and the factors that are thought to cause or
prevent those issues from occurring in the first place.

RESILIENCE AS A MENTAL HEALTH STRATEGY

Since as early as New Labour’s ‘Every Child Matters’ policy in 2003, along with its associated SEAL programme, schools
are considered to be key forces in the early intervention of mental health. Through programmes such as SEAL, schools
are equipped with new ways of measuring children’s social and emotional competence, allowing them to more effi-
ciently ‘screen, profile, improve upon and monitor’ issues in part to ensure positive student behaviour and academic
attainment (DfES, 2010). This push towards school-based interventions echoes wider global movements in response
to the ‘mental health crisis’ in young people, and whereas mental health was traditionally confined within the remit of
psychiatry, recent policies see the school as a key player in the prevention of mental health issues (Brown & Carr, 2019;
Harris et al., 2011).
For Brown and Dixon (2020), this shift towards school-based interventions represents a general refocusing in public
policy, based on the relatively intuitive assumption that adequate social goods such as housing, education and health-
care decrease the chances of socio-economic inequality, one of the leading factors in mental ill-health. But whereas
organisations such as the WHO (2012, 2014) explicitly recognise the connection between mental health and wider
MENTAL HEALTH, RESILIENCE AND EXISTENTIAL LITERATURE 3

social structures, this does not appear to translate directly into the current approaches to mental health education
in England. Rather, these policies suggest that the ultimate source of and responsibility for addressing mental health
issues is the individual student. Whilst the school can create the environment necessary for mental wellbeing to flour-
ish, it is ultimately the student who must confront challenges, and who must therefore learn to deal with them in the
best possible way. Hence, the school and the individual student are co-responsible—the school as that which creates
the necessary conditions for the student to do ‘well’, and the students as those who should take advantage of the oppor-
tunities their education provides—including the opportunity to develop resilience.
Resilience—best achieved through ‘the knowledge and attitudes [that] will support their own, and others’ wellbeing
and attainment’—is defined as

the pupils’ ability to believe that they can achieve goals, both academic and personal; to stick to tasks
that will help them achieve those goals, even when the reward may be distant or uncertain; and to
recover from knocks and challenging periods in their lives.

In a recent policy released by the Department for Education (2016) outlining the connection between mental health
and behaviour, various ‘risk’ and ‘protective’ factors are discussed in relation to the cultivation of resilience. According
to this policy (2016, p. 5), having a ‘structured school environment with clear expectations of behaviour, well commu-
nicated social norms and routines. . . reinforced by highly consistent consequence systems’ are just some of the ways
that the school can create an environment in which mental resilience is promoted:

There are things that schools can do for all pupils, as well as those at risk of developing mental
health problems, to intervene early to create a safe and calm educational environment and strengthen
resilience before serious mental health problems occur (DfES, 2016, p. 5).

Other examples of risk factors include seemingly ‘unchangeable’ facts about the individual child’s physical and men-
tal makeup, such as ‘genetic influences’, ‘low IQ and learning disabilities’ and ‘specific development delay and neuro-
diversity’. There are also risk factors that the school can reverse, including ‘low self-esteem’, ‘academic failure’ and ‘com-
munication difficulties’. Protective factors, too, may be outside the remit of the school, like the student’s ‘temperament’
and ‘secure attachment experience’. They also include things like ‘being a planner and having a belief in control’, having
the ‘capacity to reflect’ and experiencing ‘success and achievement’. On top of this, there are also specific areas of the
school culture that are thought to increase risk or protective factors, including a culture of bullying, ‘[deviant] peer
influences’ and ‘[poor] pupil to teacher/school relationships’, some of which can be mitigated by having ‘clear policies
on behaviour’ and ‘positive classroom management’. Interestingly, there appears to be a policy shift here, where what
was once a ‘pathological’ approach to mental wellbeing (i.e. a focus primarily on diagnosing disorders) is now ‘saluto-
genic’, where the school can focus on factors that support wellbeing, rather than on the causes of ill-health (Weare,
2010).
In short, creating a ‘safe and calm’ environment (i.e. one that is not ‘hostile, aggressive, chaotic or unpredictable’)
provides the opportunity for students to develop resilience in facing the normal stresses and strains of their everyday
life. This should be considered not only as aspirations for the school but as part of their core responsibilities (DfES,
2016). Of course, building student resilience in the face of challenges or perceived failure does not deny the fact that
strength of character alone is not enough when it comes to more serious mental health concerns, such as those that
require specialist attention and support. But where students are experiencing levels of anxiety that go beyond the
ability to cope with the ‘normal stresses of life’ (DfES, 2016; WHO, 2012, 2014), or where their emotions fall outside
the remit of the ‘normal range (e.g. happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, nervousness)’ (DfES, 2020, p. 32), then
resilience can allow students to not only confront these challenges but succeed in spite of them.
Resilience also pays a key role in the newly minted Relationships and Sex Education policy (RSE) (DfES, 2020).1
Importantly, the aims of this policy are broader than mental wellbeing and include, for example, ways in which to help
4 BRADY

students recognise and maintain healthy relationships (whether intimate or otherwise). But mental wellbeing is nev-
ertheless a central aspect here because healthy relationships ‘protect’ against mental ill-health. From the outset, the
policy claims that mental wellbeing is ultimately connected to children’s happiness—and who could argue with that?
This concern with children’s happiness is a concern not simply for the individual child but also for wider society, as a
happy child will most likely become a productive citizen later in life. And again, the guidance here helps schools to fos-
ter not only an environment conducive to this, but also resilience and character in the individual student, given that
resilience is also ‘fundamental to pupils being happy, successful and productive members of society’ (DfES, 2020, p. 5).
All of this seems sensible, perhaps. In many ways, the building of resilience is not so far removed from one of the
central features of schooling today. If we think about it, the school as an institution is structured in such a way that, by
its very nature, some students will inevitably fail. Without failure, that meritocratic ingredient of competition would
make little sense. And so, if we accept failure as an essential part of schooling, then a school should also accept its
responsibility in ensuring its students can manage this —both within the schooling setting and beyond it.
And yet, by endorsing the view that mental wellbeing can be achieved through resilience, one is by extension
endorsing the view that mental ill-health is caused by a lack of resilience—in other words, a ‘weakness’ in the student
that needs to be overcome. As Farrell and Mahon (2021, p. 43) recently remarked, mental health is conceptualised in
terms of ‘vocabularies of deficit’, a language that serves to ‘pathologise or medicalise the individual’ and, in doing so,
‘radically simplifies a broad array of emotional and behavioural challenges’. Indeed, isn’t the simple ‘weighing up’ of risk
and protective factors a bit too easy? Are mental health disorders amenable to a narrow ‘problem-solution’ complex?
What about those who appear to have all of the protective factors in place—a stable home life, a good academic record,
a network of caring relationships, an ability to express oneself. Is that enough to ensure that they do not experience
mental health disorders in their lives?
Less innocuously, perhaps, these protective factors also imply what Brown and Carr (2019, p. 242) note are the
‘cultural expectations of middle-class schooling’, where the diagnostic evaluation of disorders not only reflect dubious
conceptions of the ‘ideal learner’—(pro)active, visibly engaged, sociable, coming from a ‘good family’. They also actively
perpetuate these constructs by virtue of the expectations placed on schools and teachers, who must respond to per-
ceived disorders in accordance with what the policies dictate are ‘(ab)normal’ or ‘(ir)rational’ reactions. This, in turn,
pathologises behaviours that may, in fact, be appropriate given the situation young people now face, even if, from the
state’s perspective, these reactions are not desirable. If it is the case that the solution is to simply find other protective
factors that help young people overcome their difficulties, then what else would these need to include? Future assur-
ance for young people that the world will not be utterly devastated in their lifetime, that they can look forward to a
sense of social and economic stability in their lives, that injustices will be made right? It seems, indeed, that anxiety is a
perfectly healthy response to the world we now live in.
One could argue, however, that living our lives in some kind of anxious stupor is not the best use of our time, and so
the focus on managing our mental health makes sense. This is often the line that policymakers take—how to efficiently
strategise about mental health to ensure academic attainment and, ultimately, the ability to fruitfully contribute to
society. Mental health disorders are not only individual issues, after all. They are also ‘social problems’ that pose a
threat to the stability of society. As Brown and Carr (2019) convincingly argue, the ‘managerialist’ approach to mental
health is intimately connected to the need to perpetuate neoliberal society. Resilience is not only facilitated by an
increase in academic attainment, but also allows for continued academic success, thus serving to perpetuate a society
that sees the main ‘value’ of human beings in terms of their performance and ‘[economic] competitiveness’ (Brown &
Dixon, 2020, p. 385).
In the context of RSE, the tone is one of ‘empowerment’—empowering students to ‘identify when relation-
ships are unhealthy. . . that can have a lasting, negative impact on their mental wellbeing’, for example (DfES, 2020,
p. 25). Empowerment is about creating the capacity for students to make ‘good decisions about their own health and
wellbeing’, enabling them to recognise what counts as ‘normal’ behaviour in themselves and in others, and to seek
out necessary treatment when something is not. Empowerment also comes from developing specific strategies that
allow students to ‘calmly and rationally’ manage situations that are challenging in some way, including skills such as
MENTAL HEALTH, RESILIENCE AND EXISTENTIAL LITERATURE 5

‘self-control’, which gives students the confidence to ‘achieve well’ and to ‘persevere’. By managing one’s mental health
in this way, there is a tendency to suggest that seemingly irrational responses to situations can be avoided altogether.
I don’t want to suggest here that the school has no role to play in discussing or dealing with mental health. I’m also
not suggesting that serious mental health concerns shouldn’t be met with specialist or targeted treatment. At the same
time, however, I think it’s important to get a clearer sense of what it means to experience something like ‘anxiety’, and
to consider it as a potentially appropriate response but also as a condition for being human. There are ways to do this
that avoid characterising mental ill-health as a ‘weakness’ of sorts, or a deficit that needs to be overcome or managed in
some way. A ‘belief in control’ might be seen as a protective factor against something like anxiety. And yet, confronting
the fundamental unpredictability of being human in the world seems, to me, to be something we must all face up to at
some point. Not only will a ‘belief in certainty’ fail to prepare us for those moments, but it also seems to be at best naïve,
at worst a form of bad faith. I might add that, ironically, ‘avoidant behaviour’ is also seen as a sign of mental ill-health.
But in not avoiding it, perhaps there is a better message to send young people than to simply ‘get over it’, or to strive
to attain something that, for all intents and purposes, seems so meaningless in the context of what human beings now
face.
With this in mind, I would like to suggest another way of discussing mental health, in the hope that this, too, might
be used by practitioners tasked with ensuring the wellbeing of their students. In my mind, mental health is often best
represented not in abstract theories or in reductive, mantra-like policies, but in concrete literary depictions of charac-
ters who appear to be experiencing mental health disorders, and who can therefore provide a point of resonance that
allows us to explore such experiences more fully. Existentialist literature is a prime example of this and thus, in order
to explore this further, let’s turn to Dostoevsky’s Notes from underground.

EXPLORING MENTAL HEALTH THROUGH LITERATURE: NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

Notes from underground is often regarded as one of the first existential novels (Frank, 2010; Scanlon, 1999)—novels that
attempt to account for the confused, paradoxical and often disorienting experiences of being in the world with others,
particularly from the perspective of individuals who are trying to make sense of the apparent meaninglessness that
characterises their existence. In doing so, existentialist literature does not shy away from this messiness of lived expe-
riences, but instead embraces the entire gamut of human (inter)actions, whether anti-heroic, revolting, irrational or
absurd. Existential novels often begin and end with the inner life of the individual, and like Notes, they raise important
questions about what it means to be an individual within times of upheaval and crises. Fundamentally, existentialist
literature demonstrates how, in spite of the thoughts and actions that any reasonable person might pursue, the indi-
vidual need not be reasonable. Instead, one is ultimately free to act irrationally, as they are ‘condemned to construct
[the] road’ that ‘turns out to be going nowhere in particular’ (Dostoevsky, 2010, p. 30).
On the surface, Notes from underground appears to offer a portrait of a man suffering the effects of a mental break-
down. As with many of Dostoevsky’s novels, it is told entirely from a first-person perspective. As such, it consists solely
in the inner life of the unnamed character, generally referred to as the Underground Man—‘his moods, anxieties, his
delusions’ (Kaufmann, 1989, p. 13). The novel is divided into two parts. The first part is thought to occur in the present,
when the Underground Man is around 40 years of age and is living in isolation under the floorboards. The second part
consists of a retelling of the series of events that led up to this moment, starting some 16 years previously. Since the
story is told from the perspective of one person, it is not exactly reliable, however, particularly as this person appears
to be ‘mentally unstable’.
Indeed, the Underground Man represents a ‘tangled mess of tensions and contradictions’ (Roberts, 2012, p. 218).
He is narcissistic but with an acute awareness of others. He is arrogant though extremely insecure. He lacks empa-
thy and yet is also highly oversensitive. He refers to himself as ‘civilised’ but is also irrational in much of his thought
and behaviour. He consistently proclaims his superior intelligence and yet hates his outward behaviour—and, indeed,
his own body—for betraying this. It appears that the Underground Man is unhealthily obsessed with the minutiae of
6 BRADY

conversations and of situations he is affected by, and he is often tormented by suspicions about what they (both his
readers and other characters in the book) think of him. He spirals into dreams of revenge towards others, often for the
slightest misdemeanours. At the same time, he is persistent in his attempts to ‘prove’ himself to others, and thus very
rarely enacts the revenge he so often fantasises about.
When, in the second part of the novel, he makes a fool of himself in front of some old school friends who then leave
him alone in a bar, such contradictions appear throughout his train of thought:

These oafs think it was a great honour for me to have a seat at their table, and don’t understand that I
am honouring them. That it’s I, I that’s honouring them and not the other way around! ‘How thin! Your
clothes!’ Oh! Those damn trousers. Zverkov noticed the yellow stain on my knee straight away. . . and
all the rest of it! Now, at once, this very minute, I must get up from the table, take my hat and simply
leave—without saying a word. . . to show my contempt! And tomorrow anything, even a duel. Bastards.
As if I cared. . . They may for all I know think. . . Damn it all! I don’t care. . . I’m leaving, this minute!. . . Of
course, I stayed (Dostoevsky, 2010, p. 69).

It is highly unlikely that these old friends of his are thinking any of this at all—they barely even notice him, in fact,
which the Underground Man also seems to be aware of. Importantly, these apparent paradoxes in the inner life of the
Underground Man mean that, as a character, he is difficult to gauge. Is he the way that others see him? Is he projecting
onto others what he thinks of himself? Is the mockery or indifference of others what drives him to live a life escaping
from the wider world? To what extent are these projections accurate? Do they capture what people really think about
him? And does this even matter in the context of his own self-understanding?
Another example of his tumultuous relationship with others appears in the second part of the novel. Whilst out
walking, the Underground Man enviously witnesses someone being thrown out of the window of a tavern. He then
enters with the hope of provoking the same reaction, perhaps as a way to test whether he can, in fact, elicit an emo-
tional response from another person. There, he sees an officer, and, standing in his way, waits for the final blow. Ulti-
mately, however, he recounts a very different outcome:

. . . he picked me up by the shoulders and, without a word, without warning—and without explanation—
transferred me from the place where I was standing to somewhere else and went on as though he hadn’t
noticed me (Dostoevsky, 2010, p. 48).

The Underground Man is furiously insulted:

I would have forgiven him if he had beaten me, but I simply could not forgive him for having so defini-
tively transferred me without even noticing.

He thinks about standing up to the officer, to confront him for his ‘treating him like a fly’. Instead, he cowers away, and
carries a grudge with him that will last for years. The hatred he feels towards the officer (who, by most standards, would
have simply forgotten the brief encounter by now) continues to fester as he contemplates absurd acts of revenge that
he never carries out—following the officer to his home, caricaturing him in a story and planning (but failing) to send
it to him, challenging him to a duel. Finally, he decides on his plan of attack that will ‘work’. He makes sure to dress
for the occasion, something he agnosies over for quite some time. Eventually, he follows the officer to the port, and,
walking in the opposite direction to him, attempts to either make the officer ‘side-step’ out of his way or to collide
with him. Ultimately, he loses his nerve, side-stepping in time to allow the officer to leave without noticing him. Later
that night, he becomes ill and feverish at the thought of his failure, but decides that this was, in fact, the best possible
outcome. Indeed, in his efforts to convince his readers that the officer was merely pretending not to notice him, he is
also attempting to convince himself that this pretence indicates the two are on an equal footing.
MENTAL HEALTH, RESILIENCE AND EXISTENTIAL LITERATURE 7

This, of course, is clearly an over-the-top and unhealthy reaction to what is otherwise a meaningless encounter. If
the Underground Man could simply understand or acknowledge this, if he could simply learn to manage his thoughts,
perhaps he could be more resilient in the face of his failures, and thus less tortured by what are insignificant events
in the grand scheme of things. Many critics of Notes have taken to analysing his psychological state in this regard. For
example, the Underground Man has been interpreted as emblematic of adolescence, demonstrating the qualities of
someone who has not quite reached the age of maturity—egocentric, exaggerative, consistently projecting the ambiva-
lence he feels about himself onto others (e.g. Anderson, 1990; Bakhtin, 1984). By ‘pathologising’ his behaviour, he is
shown to be ‘abnormal’ in his transgressions, and in turn, suggestions for how one might ‘treat’ an individual in a similar
state can be developed.
But rather than pointing to where we might ‘use’ a character like the Underground Man in order to demonstrate
why something like resilience is important, perhaps we can instead engage with the story to reconceptualise what
resilience actually means, or indeed, to question the extent to which we can ever engage with ourselves in line with the
rationalistic demands of mental health policies. Arguably, the Underground Man does show resilience in the ways in
which he reinterprets events such that they correspond to a more favourable narrative for his self-identity. Indeed,
such reinterpretations allow him to ‘overcome’ his feelings of inadequacy and failure, and isn’t this precisely what
resilience is all about? And whilst it may be easy to dismiss the Underground Man’s inner musings as pure irrationality
or as pathological, isn’t there an element of what he does here that is true of all of us in some way? How often do we
think, embarrassed, about how we have behaved in the past? How often do we try to ‘reinterpret’ what happened in
order to quash this sense of shame? To what extent does that shame and the way we have responded to those events—
in both the moment itself and retrospectively—become part of our own self-understanding?
For philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, shame is something we only experience in the presence of others. It arrives
not on the basis of ‘rational’ reflections on situations, but rather as an ‘immediate shudder that runs through me from
head to toe, without any discursive preparation’ (Sartre, 2018, p. 308). Whether a person is actually present to witness
my moment of shame, or whether they in fact even care about what we did—in short, whether or not the reason for our
shame is rationally justified—we can often not help but feel ashamed. And often, for Sartre, the only way out of this is to
‘objectify’ the other: to deride them, to dismiss their ideas about me as being a ‘false portrait’ that fails to capture who
I really am, as the Underground Man attempts to do with the officer. Such avoidance is momentary, however, as for
Sartre, we are inescapably as the Other sees us. Thus, any attempt to quash these feelings of shame, in which we come
to know ourselves through the eyes of others, is a form of bad faith. Might we also say this of the avoidance tactics
inherent in the resilience agenda?
Perhaps what the Underground Man enables us, then, is not only the means to explore experiences such as shame
and anxiety in all their complexity, but also the idea that no human being is ever ‘one thing’—neither simply rational
nor irrational, but rather something in between or even beyond these binaries. As Roberts (2012, p. 216) remarks, the
Underground Man serves to ‘[unsettle] us as reasoning being’, challenging our most cherished assumptions about why
we react to situations in the way we do. In doing so, he demonstrates the limits of a purely rationalistic understand-
ing of humankind, an understanding that underpins concepts such as ‘resilience’, where, as we saw above, one can be
taught to ‘calmly and rationally’ deal with their emotions in a more appropriate way. But experiences such as shame
and anxiety are ‘pre-reflective’ in a sense—they occur not on the basis of our thoughts about what is ‘appropriate’ or
not, but are already there in the very moments of encounter with others in the world.
Throughout the novel, the Underground Man constantly oscillates between a person deserving of our pity, to some-
one unpleasant and narcissistic. But as Roberts (2018, p. 9) notes elsewhere, the Underground Man is also someone
deserving of our compassion. What this would involve is moving beyond the purely psychological interpretations of
his character in order to attend to him as a particular ‘flesh and blood human being’, someone that can never be fully
grasped or understood. Indeed, the tensions and contradictions he embodies—between himself and others, between
rationality and irrationality and between reason, will and emotion—signal the fundamental pluralism of being human
(Bakhtin, 1984) that is ill-appreciated in the policies on mental health. Like human beings, there is always some-
thing about the Underground Man that remains unrevealed: an inner life not immediately public, a person constantly
8 BRADY

redefining himself through redefining those events that ‘made him’ who he is, but also, through his turmoiled relation-
ship with others. Individuals, too, are a tangled mess of sometimes contradictory thoughts—about themselves, about
the world and about others. Novels such as Notes reflect not only the suffering that is an intimate part of our relation-
ship with others, whether self-fabricated or not. For Dostoevsky, there is a profound value in such suffering, since it
pushes us ‘into unfamiliar, sometimes frightening, experiential and cognitive territory’ (Roberts, 2012, p. 210).2 In one
sense, the Underground Man’s choice to occupy dark spaces represents a revolt against an overly rationalistic under-
standing of ourselves, of the world and of others, and an overly rationalistic understanding of how we respond to these.
And like all good satirical novels, it encourages us to confront ourselves with the same level of devastating rigour.

THE VALUE OF LITERATURE FOR MENTAL HEALTH

What is the value of Notes from underground for something like mental health education? Isn’t there a danger of fatalism
here—that by showcasing such extreme examples of mental ill-health, we are shirking our responsibility in teaching
children to manage such experiences, to move past them and to get on with their lives? In one way, the Underground
Man has found a way to escape mental health illness—through his resilient reinterpretations of events in line with the
fallacies of his success, and through living a life that avoids the interference of others. And yet, why is it that he remains
so distressed? By exploring such questions in a collective educational setting, perhaps something more than the mere
management-driven response to mental health can ensue.
Indeed, I want to argue that, ultimately, dwelling on such experiences is valuable, even if only momentarily. With the
race to always move forward, to progress, to succeed, to continually develop, to commit to lifelong learning, to become
increasingly competitive, to become instrumental for the growth of society, the economy, the planet—isn’t there a
time and a place for us to be attuned to experiences of disquiet? And that, I argue, points to one of the unique tasks
for philosophy and for literature, not to mention the wider domain of the arts and humanities, where more sensitive,
realistic, but also uneasy, destabilising and confronting portrayals of mental health exist. I want to argue that these
portrayals are valuable, not only in the sense that they expose us to accounts of mental health that are not solely
focused on overcoming them, nor do they succumb to heroic feats of resilience that suggest all other responses are
inadequate. They can also provide a means for students to account for their own experiences of mental health in more
existentially sensitive ways, where the value of such accounts lies in not only what such experiences can do, or what
we can do with those experiences, but what, in fact, they say—about our collective vulnerabilities and uncertainties,
and about the risk and ambiguity that is an intimate part of being human. Ultimately, the suggestion that overcoming
mental health issues, such as anxiety and vulnerability towards others, by simply being more ‘resilient’ or by increasing
the number of ‘protective factors’ in our environment fundamentally denies this part of the human experience, and
thus represents not only a wilfully naïve response to the world we now live in, but also an impoverished—and, in some
ways, non-human—account of what it means to exist in the world with others.

ORCID
Alison M. Brady https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1410-2572

ENDNOTES
1
This policy was implemented not without controversy (Whittaker, 2019), but its controversy is not directly related to its
focus on mental health.
2
In Roberts (2018), the importance of suffering is discussed in relation to The brothers Karamazov and the concepts of ‘active
love’ in Dostoevsky and ‘attention’ in Iris Murdoch, the latter of which is defined as a ‘just and loving gaze upon an individual
reality’ where we encounter others not abstractly but as particular human beings. Our relationship with others is infinitely
perfectible in this sense and can also be embodied through our relationship with fictional characters such as the Underground
Man. See Roberts and Saeverot (2018).
MENTAL HEALTH, RESILIENCE AND EXISTENTIAL LITERATURE 9

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How to cite this article: Brady, A.M. (2022) Mental health, resilience and existential literature. Journal of
Philosophy of Education, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12642