That for Bangladeshi liberals, “the culture” and “the people” are boogeymen that shield capitalism and the state from any criticism, becomes the most ironic when the topic is mental health, and the impulse of these people is to blame mentally ill people for not seeking help.
The most obvious irony is that many mental health issues themselves make it more difficult to seek help, or make seeking help seem unreasonable even when it might not be. But this still does not address the elephant in the room. The elephant is that, often, “seeking help” is made unreasonable. Rather than looking into how that is, the impulse of these comfortable people is often to blame those very people who might not be able to “seek help”, or if they nominally can, how it might still not be actual “help” rather than what is only labeled “help”.
“Bangladeshi people are just crazy/dumb/R-slur/etc, which is why 90+% of us don’t seek any professional help for their mental health issues”. Congratulations, you have just responded to a statistic about mentally ill people with ableism. Such brilliance.
More relevantly, you have managed to obscure:
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how little of the national budget is allocated for mental health, a large portion of which is already swallowed by asylums (i.e. prisons for mentally ill people the state fails to accommodate and rehabilitate)
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how few mental health professionals there even are in this country
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how expensive they are
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how people often have to go through expensive travel just to find one who isn’t laundering their own aesthetic biases as mental health issues you have to “fix” (this gets particularly interesting since a lot of the people using this kind of rhetoric are themselves queer and neurodivergent)
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the reality of medical invalidation
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those few professionals themselves often not being held accountable for knowingly messing up or pushing an agenda
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how psychiatry and therapy under capitalism often reduces to putting individual band-aids on systemic issues even the symptoms of which aren’t “fixed” by those band-aids by people crushed most by the system, even when the most realistic expectation is at least being able to manage the symptoms in the long-run to survive capitalism
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the prevalence of exploitative faith healers who capture a lot of people disillusioned with the medical establishment due to all points above, which is rather convenient for the narrative of some of the “secularists” among these people who conveniently will ignore everything above and conclude the issue is predominantly a religious one (all while not having the guts to say anything against religious figures publicly, and maybe even actively discouraging it)
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how the system actively produces severe mental health issues and beyond, for both the ordinary working masses and disproportionately for people who have to endure hyper-exploitation, homelessness, and being left only with prostitution for survival, who likely aren’t even accounted for in these statistics (which is often the fate of disabled and/or visibly queer people)
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etc
The system does the mental health equivalent of breaking someone’s leg. They get handed pain meds to “manage” it, perhaps alongside being told that some of their neutral characteristics are “against human nature” or “just how people are” and get made to erase them. They are reminded that the best they can expect is management rather than systemic solutions to remove the conditions that led to their legs getting broken. But then go back to the real world and another leg breaks and they can’t even manage it in the long-run.
When most people can’t even access any actual “help” due to issues outside of their individual (though not necessarily collective) control, blaming individual mindsets, ironically often through ableist and pseudoscientific Bengali genetic essentialism, is merely an act of positioning yourself as superior and absolving yourself of your own passivity, and possibly of guilt that comes from your own position wherein you might still benefit from the status quo.
Beyond absolving systemic mechanisms that both produce mental health issues and restrict effective mental healthcare, the only thing this kind of folk “genetics” and ableism does is making you feel informed, empathetic and superior not because you are those things, but because you are too insulated to see the actual baseline reality of most Bangladeshi people. You seemingly have a socioeconomic position wherein those systemic barriers to actual “help” don’t exist, or can be overcome with money and social networks. And due to that insulation, if someone does not “seek help”, then just a little amount of willful ignorance and class contempt can go a long way in making it look like a mindset problem.
Absurd is that the articles that recently brought that statistic to light themselves aren’t restricted to lamenting on social stigma and ignorance. Also to be noted is the fact that these are about how many people get treatment, it’s not about “seeking help”. They can fail to give you appropriate treatment even when you do “seek help”, and even when it is still counted as treatment by these statistics (refer back to medical invalidation and poor protection from malpractice). And yet this is only when you can even access even those faux-treatments to begin with. It’s as if these people just look at headlines and share it without reading anything, and then use it as material for their own bullshittery when what they’re sharing itself won’t fully support them.
For instance, in Who listens when mental health struggles disrupt daily life? (10 October 2026), which is another way to say “when mental health issues are disabling as per functioning” (ironic given the liberal ableism and genetic essentialism), the Daily Star author writes:
“WHO recommends workplace adjustments such as flexible hours, modified assignments and time for health appointments, alongside support for returning to work. These are ways of keeping someone in working life while recognising their needs. They require an employer who treats distress as a reason to consider support, rather than simply a performance problem.”
“Bangladesh has changed its legal language. The Mental Health Act, 2018 repealed the colonial Lunacy Act, 1912; Section 6 addresses rights including health, dignity and education, which is significant. But a person from a remote rural area or from a lower-middle-class group cannot take a statutory promise to a consultation. They need to know where to go, what it will cost, and whether they can return for the next appointment.”
But alas, while not fully comprehensive (e.g. ignoring how the system manufactures mental illness and worse for minorities), these require looking more at what’s actually happening rather than uniformly being able to treat “mental health advocacy” as a consumer lifestyle. Somehow, even the bougie news outlet, which also has one article saying that disabled people are a massive loss to national GDP as if that’s the sole reason to “include” disabled people in the workplace (while overlooking more significant but workable changes that would allow such “inclusion”, as well as how some disabled people just can’t be expected work to survive with workable reforms anytime soon under capitalism), did better than these “progressives” and “egalitarian” liberals. Maybe at least read what you are talking about before weaponizing it for once in a while. Otherwise, your shtick gets a bit too transparent.