Toki Pona is not a substitute for professional therapy, medication, medical care, crisis support, or a supportive environment. It should be used in conjunction with therapy from a licensed professional therapist. Therapists learn all sorts of things that go beyond the scope of any hobby, and they know which to apply to which situations. Nevertheless, I do believe that Toki Pona can help people with mental illness. It has certainly helped me.
I have schizoaffective disorder and found Toki Pona incredibly helpful for coping when I was homeless and frequently hospitalized from 2014 to 2015. I wrote haiku in Toki Pona while in the psych ward and painted them in art therapy. I continue to find it extremely helpful today.
Did it solve my problems? No, I don’t think so. But it is a great coping mechanism. It simplifies an extremely difficult world.
For those who are unfamiliar with it, Toki Pona is a minimalist constructed language with a very small basic vocabulary. Instead of having a separate word for every species, profession, political tendency, kitchen utensil, emotional state, and obscure subtype of schizophrenia, speakers combine simple words and rely heavily on context.
This can be frustrating. It can also be useful.
When speaking a language with thousands upon thousands of readily available words, it is easy to reproduce every distinction your mind gives you. You can describe not only that you are afraid, but precisely what kind of fear it is, what caused it, what it might indicate about your personality, how it resembles something that happened twelve years ago, and why the whole thing proves that your future is probably ruined.
In Toki Pona, much of this can be expressed with some difficulty, but it’s often easier to say something like mi pilin ike tan ni…: “I feel bad for this reason…”
The purpose is not to deny complexity. The world is complicated whether or not we have words for all of its complications. A person with a serious problem does not cease to have it merely because they describe it using simple vocabulary. Poverty is not just ijo ike, a bad thing. You can call it mani lili, little money, and this will give you clarity (I’m not a bad person, I just don’t have much money), but it won’t give you what you need. You can describe abuse as jan olin mi li pakala e mi (my partner hurts me) and perhaps arrive at an understanding of the fact that a true jan olin (loving person) wouldn’t do such a thing, but it’s no substitute for removing yourself from the situation and getting help. Political oppression, similarly, cannot be ended by accurately describing it as kulupu lawa li pakala e mi (the government hurts me).
Sometimes I genuinely need to analyze the causes of a problem, understand its history, identify the people responsible, and decide what I am going to do about it. But at other times, I am lying in bed constructing an elaborate conspiracy out of the fact that somebody answered me in a slightly strange tone.
There are only so many times one can redescribe a strange tone using approximately the same handful of words before realizing that perhaps nothing further is being learned.
Toki Pona requires you to be careful and to focus on exactly what you are saying and how to say it. It forces you to ask what you actually mean. More importantly, it forces you to ask which parts of what you mean are relevant.
This resembles a kind of mindfulness. Washing the dishes can be therapy if you do it mindfully, paying attention to everything you are doing instead of thinking about other things. My therapist says any number of things can be therapy when done in that way. Eating chocolate mindfully is therapy.
By “therapy” here, I do not mean that washing a dish or eating a piece of chocolate is equivalent to treatment from a qualified professional. I mean that ordinary activities can be used to practice skills that are also taught in therapy: paying attention to the present moment, observing what you are doing, and interrupting the torrent of thoughts that usually occupies your mind.
Toki Pona can be used in the same way. When I am trying to express something in it, I have to stop and examine the thought. What am I really trying to say? Is this distinction necessary? Am I describing what happened, or am I hiding an assumption inside an abstract word?
Suppose I say that I have failed. Even in English, this is already a suspicious sentence. Failed at what? Did I make one mistake? Did a particular project fail? Did I fail to obtain something I wanted? Or have I somehow become, in my essential nature, a Failed Person?
Languages do not force us to make the last leap, of course. People manage to be perfectly reasonable in English every day. Allegedly. But a large language gives us an enormous supply of categories with which to turn temporary events into permanent identities.
In Toki Pona, I might instead say that something I tried did not work, that I did not reach my goal, or simply that what happened was bad. These statements may still hurt. They do not necessarily transform an event into a metaphysical judgment about my worth.
Toki Pona can also help with dismantling negative core beliefs, as any language can, by requiring you to rephrase them. A statement such as “I am worthless” contains an enormous and rather suspicious claim about the essential nature of a person. What does it actually mean? Does it mean that I did something bad? That somebody rejected me? That I cannot do something I hoped to do? That I feel pain and cannot presently imagine a future in which I do not?
Once the belief is broken into smaller statements, it becomes possible to examine them separately. Some may be true. Some may be exaggerated. Some may be predictions disguised as facts. Some may be the words of another person that I have mistaken for my own judgment.
A person can do this in English. There is nothing mystical about Toki Pona vocabulary. A therapist may ask a person to restate a negative belief, identify the assumptions inside it, or describe the concrete events that seem to support it. Toki Pona is one of the kinds of thing they teach you in therapy, not because the language itself is a therapist, but because using it can require some of the same mental actions.
Depending on your condition, you may not need to learn much more from therapy than mindfulness, reframing, and attention to what is immediately happening. But sometimes you need more, and therapists are trained to know when that is. This is one reason it is important not to confuse a helpful hobby with professional treatment.
A constructed language cannot diagnose an illness. It cannot assess whether someone is in danger. It cannot recognize a medical emergency, prescribe medication, or choose an appropriate treatment for a condition it does not understand. It cannot look back at you and notice that you are not doing as well as you claim.
It is one tool in the box, not to be used alone.
Toki Pona also makes me laugh, and it makes me happy, because it is so small and simple and the words are so cute-sounding. I do not know that other languages do that to the same degree. There are certainly other ways of getting the same sort of joy, but I do think there are specific things about Toki Pona that are good for people experiencing mental-health issues in comparison with other languages.
The word wawa, for example, means strength, power, or energy. It is difficult for me to take a language entirely grimly when one of its words for power sounds like that. Toki Pona often has a quality of levity even when the subject is serious. It makes me smile when I do not take it too seriously.
Laughter, however, is not the best medicine. I need real prescription drugs and therapy along with a supportive environment.
The expression “laughter is the best medicine” is pleasant because it turns a limited truth into a ridiculous absolute. Laughter can help. Joy can help. Art can help. Friendship can help. A language can help. None of these facts implies that a person should stop taking antipsychotics because they learned to say pona.
There is a tendency to treat mental illness as though it were a failure to discover the correct inspirational practice. Somebody recommends meditation, exercise, positive thinking, religion, a particular diet, or going outside and touching grass. Any of these things may help a person. None of them automatically treats every illness, and presenting them that way can become another means of blaming somebody for remaining sick.
Toki Pona is not exempt from this merely because I love it.
What it gave me during periods of homelessness and hospitalization was not a cure. It gave me something small enough to hold onto. I could write a haiku. I could choose a few words. I could paint a tree or a sun with those words next to it. The rest of my life might be chaotic, frightening, or beyond my control, but I could make one small thing and understand every part of it.
That mattered.
Writing poetry in Toki Pona also allowed me to make art without first solving the problem of how to describe the whole world. A poem did not need to explain my diagnosis, my circumstances, the hospital, my history, or every thought that had brought me to that moment. It could describe an image, a feeling, or a small change.
A small language was appropriate to a small space of control.
This is part of what I mean when I say that Toki Pona simplifies an extremely difficult world. It does not make the world itself simple. Homelessness remains complicated. Mental illness remains complicated. Hospitals remain complicated. Other people remain extremely complicated, often for no apparent reason.
But a person cannot attend to all of that complexity at once. Sometimes we need to reduce the world to a size that can be held in the mind without being crushed by it.
When I am overwhelmed, I often do not need a complete theory of myself. I need food. I need water. I need sleep. I need to leave the room. I need to speak to another person. I need to stop reading the news for ten minutes before my brain leaks out through my ears.
Toki Pona is unusually good at returning language to these kinds of essentials. Its vocabulary draws attention to bodies, movement, perception, desire, knowledge, relationships, safety, goodness, pain, and change. It often makes statements sound almost childishly basic. I do not consider this an insult.
Children are frequently better than adults at noticing that a person who has not eaten is hungry, while adults are busy constructing an ideological explanation for why they ought not to be.
There is also a kind of humility involved in speaking simply. In English, I can describe another person with extraordinary precision and still be completely mistaken. I can assign motives, diagnoses, personality types, political tendencies, attachment styles, and moral defects to someone who may simply be tired.
Toki Pona does not make such judgments impossible, but it often makes their speculative nature more visible. Instead of hiding an assumption inside an impressive technical word, I may have to say directly that I think somebody wanted something, feared something, or acted badly. Once the claim is exposed in this simple form, I can ask whether I actually know it.
Perhaps I do. Admittedly, people do sometimes behave badly. I do not believe that every conflict can be dissolved into a cloud of ambiguity. Sometimes a person is lying. Sometimes a person is cruel. Sometimes the obvious explanation is obvious because it is true.
But sometimes I have constructed an entire courtroom in my head without inviting the defendant.
Toki Pona can interrupt this process by making me rebuild the accusation out of smaller pieces. This does not guarantee mercy or accuracy, but it creates an opportunity for both.
The language can also change the scale at which a problem is experienced. A terrible day does not need to become a terrible life. A painful feeling does not need to become an eternal truth.
Last year, I got a Toki Pona tattoo on my arm that says tenpo ale ala la mi pilin e ni, or “I don’t always feel this way,” in sitelen pona. Most people think they are just cute symbols, but to me, they are a reminder.
The sentence does not say that I do not feel this way. It does not tell me that everything is actually fine, nor does it command me to become cheerful. It says that I do not feel this way at all times.
That is a much smaller claim. It is also one I can believe.
When a feeling is severe, it has a way of presenting itself as eternal. The past is reinterpreted as evidence that it has always existed, and the future becomes a blank extension of the present. “I feel this way now” silently becomes “I have always felt this way and always will.”
tenpo ale ala la mi pilin e ni.
Not always.
The words do not end the feeling. They remind me that the feeling has a location in time. It has existed before and ceased before. Even when I cannot imagine its ending, I do not have to mistake my failure of imagination for knowledge of the future.
In this way, creative use of Toki Pona can perhaps help with mental illness recovery. The value is not limited to ordinary conversation. A poem, painting, piece of calligraphy, song, or tattoo can turn a useful thought into something visible and repeatable. It can provide a reminder when the person who created it is no longer in the mental state necessary to create it again.
But simplification has dangers. Some things should not be simplified.
Reducing every emotion to pona or ike, good or bad, can prevent a person from understanding what they are actually experiencing. Fear is not the same as shame. Anger is not the same as grief. Loneliness is not the same as boredom. Sometimes distinguishing between them is not needless intellectual clutter but the beginning of understanding what is wrong.
A person can also use simple language to avoid confronting a difficult situation. “Something bad happened” may feel easier than admitting that a person you trusted deliberately harmed you. “I feel bad” may be less frightening than saying that you are frightened, furious, humiliated, or in danger.
There are situations in which precision is morally necessary. A vague description of abuse may protect the abuser. A vague description of illness may prevent someone from receiving appropriate care. A vague description of politics may erase who has power and who is being harmed.
For this reason, I do not believe that the proper response to every painful thought is to translate it into Toki Pona until it becomes harmless. Sometimes the complexity is real. Sometimes the details matter. Sometimes the proper sentence is not “I hear fake mouth noises and my feelings change powerfully” but “I have schizoaffective disorder,” and vice versa.
Therapeutic simplification should help us face reality, not escape from it.
Nor will Toki Pona affect everyone in the same way. A person whose thoughts are needlessly elaborate may benefit from reducing them to their essential parts. A person who already has difficulty identifying or articulating their emotions may need more distinctions, not fewer. The same restriction can help one person and frustrate another. It can even help the same person at one moment and harm them at another.
This is true of many coping mechanisms. Journaling can produce insight, or it can become repetitive rumination. Meditation can help a person observe their thoughts, or it can become another way to withdraw from the world. Intellectual analysis can clarify an experience, or it can prevent someone from feeling anything at all.
A tool does not cease to be useful because it can be misused, but neither should its usefulness be treated as universal.
Toki Pona is a tool for thought. It can encourage mindfulness, require the rephrasing of negative beliefs, provide material for creative work, make a person laugh, and reduce an overwhelming experience to its essential parts. These are real benefits. They are also not the whole of mental-health treatment.
Again, Toki Pona is one tool in your toolbox. You need as many as you can get. Sometimes you need a microscope, and sometimes you can benefit from a bird’s eye view.
What Toki Pona can offer is a temporary clearing in the forest of language. It can allow a person to set aside some of the labels, theories, predictions, and judgments that accumulate around an experience and look again at what is actually there.
There is pain.
There is fear.
There is another person.
There is a body that needs rest.
There is something I can do now, even if it is small.
Toki Pona did not solve my problems. It helped me cope with them. It gave me poetry to write in the psych ward, paintings to make in art therapy, words that made me smile, and eventually a sentence to carry on my arm.
The world remains complex. Toki Pona does not abolish that complexity, and I would not want it to. But sometimes we need to simplify an extremely difficult world long enough to find what matters inside it.
Toki Pona does not explain everything. It does not cure everything. It does not even have a word for everything.
Sometimes that is the point.