Struggling with Authenticity: A Critical Investigation of Authentic Agency for Mental Health Philosophy

Abstract

In contemporary mental health research, authenticity and mental health are positively associated. Essentially, extant literature suggests that the more authentic you are the better your mental health. This thesis, however, argues that there are likely no principled grounds for thinking that people with mental health problems are less authentic than everyone else. While authenticity is a basic psychological concern in the lived experiences of people with mental health problems, two dominant views on how authentic agency is possible, the self-discovery and self-creation view, associate authenticity with optimal psychological functioning, with agency par excellence, and with ethically ideal behaviour. An authentic existence can only come about when the subject functions at a certain level of excellence. But what is deemed optimal or excellent is merely an idealised reiteration of psychological normality that forms a normative standard of mental health. This thesis argues that these views reiterate and reinforce this standard through the concept of authenticity such that the lived experiences of some people with mental health problems are unfairly pathologised. Accordingly, to be sufficiently flexible and open to the lived experiences of people with mental health problems, we must rework the concept of authenticity without presuming a positive association between authenticity and mental health.