On 6 March 2024 the world’s first Mental Health Strike brought normal life to a near-total stand-still.
One after another, people from many walks of life bridged the deep social divides, by publicly declaring that they could no longer maintain good mental health under contemporary work/life conditions.
The Mental Health Strike initially began as a ‘what if’ thought experiment by the artist-led collective ‘The Retro Bar at the end of this universe’. Their rallying callout ‘M.H.S Sunscreen’, was based on the 1999 hit spoken word track ‘Everyone’s got to wear sunscreen’. Unlike 1999, the future can no longer be sold to us. However, M.H.S Sunscreen begs us to believe that a better tomorrow is still possible, and that its revolutionary potential resides in great advances made in Mental Health Awareness. M.H.S Sunscreen ‘24 re-imagines ‘(Everybody’s Free to Wear) Sunscreen’ as ‘therapy’ based around collective care; therapy for a world trying to get out of free-fall.
One person partaking in the strike said that his mental health hasn’t been great for years, but that the push to go “back to normal” in the wake of the near-total halt to the economy during an era-defining pandemic, pushed him both physically and physically into near-total burn-out. He added that this had been a story he had heard from many friends in many different work roles.
“People just can’t do it anymore, you know, how we used to do things. I think there’s many reasons, but I simply think that even though it is very necessary to work every hour, what with the cost of living, etc, many of us can no longer push to strive and achieve in order to survive…We can’t just can’t do it anymore!”.
“That’s why I joined this strike, anyway. And It’s been amazing to find out that so many people secretly felt just like I did”.
John B Ledger 