Signs of Mental Health: Agency and Autonomy
Agency refers to your capacity to act with intention: to make decisions, initiate change, and influence the direction of your life. When this is present, you experience yourself as an active participant in your own life. When it is lacking, life can feel as though it is simply happening to you.
What Is Agency?
If you feel unable to make decisions, find yourself going along with what others want, or notice that major life events seem to “just happen,” this may point to difficulties with agency.
In clinical work, issues of agency and autonomy are often central, even if they are not immediately recognised. It is not uncommon to ask someone why they made a significant life decision, such as entering a relationship or choosing a career, and hear the response, “I don’t know.”
With further exploration, it often becomes clear that many important moments did not feel like decisions at all. Instead, they unfolded passively, as though the person was observing rather than participating.
Agency and Mental Health
The psychologist Jon Allen defines agency as “the capacity to initiate action for a purpose.”
In this sense, even reading and reflecting on your mental health is an act of agency. It involves choosing to engage, to learn, and to potentially do something differently.
Allen places disruptions in agency at the centre of many psychological difficulties, particularly depression. When someone is depressed, even small actions can feel effortful or impossible. This can lead not only to inactivity, but also to self-blame. This then creates a painful cycle where the inability to act becomes another source of distress.
When Life Feels Out of Your Control
A diminished sense of agency often shows up as a feeling of powerlessness.
Life may feel dictated by external circumstances, by other people, or by internal states that seem impossible to shift. Over time, this can lead to a sense of disconnection from one’s own desires, preferences, and intentions.
At the same time, it is important to recognise that agency is never absolute. Our ability to act is always shaped by real constraints. They can be personal, social, or structural. Factors
such as illness, trauma, addiction, poverty, or discrimination can all limit the choices available to us.
Mental wellbeing is not about having complete control. Rather, it involves maintaining some sense of autonomy within the realities of one’s life.
A powerful illustration of this comes from Viktor Frankl.
While imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, Frankl was subjected to extreme and dehumanising conditions, with almost all external freedoms removed. Yet he observed that even in these circumstances, there remained a form of internal freedom, the ability to choose one’s attitude and response.
This idea does not minimise suffering or constraint. Instead, it highlights that even when external control is limited, some degree of internal agency can remain.
Finding the Balance
Problems with agency can emerge at both ends of a spectrum.
At one end, there is a sense of having no control. This shows up as feeling passive, stuck, or unable to act. At the other, there can be an excessive need for control, where flexibility is lost and uncertainty becomes intolerable.
Both can be distressing and both can limit a person’s ability to respond to life in an adaptive way.
Healthy agency sits somewhere in between. It involves the capacity to make choices and take action, while also tolerating the fact that not everything can be controlled.
Developing a stronger sense of agency often begins with small, intentional actions.
This might involve noticing your own preferences, making decisions in everyday situations, or reflecting on what you want rather than what is expected of you. Over time, these small acts can accumulate into a greater sense of authorship over your life.
In psychotherapy, part of the work is helping clients reconnect with this capacity and to move from feeling like a passive observer to becoming an active participant in their own experience.
Agency and autonomy are central to mental health because they shape how you relate to your own life.
When you feel able to act, choose, and respond, even in limited ways, life becomes something you participate in rather than something that simply happens to you.
In the next post, we will explore another sign of mental health: realistic and reliable self-esteem.
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Do you need mental health support in Warrnambool?
Start feeling like yourself again. Contact Us Today!
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