It is mental health awareness week and it’s a peculiar time to be focusing on mental health. A lot of us have spent the past 2 months locked in our houses, theres a deadly virus romping up and down the country and 50,000 more people are dead than the average deaths for this time last year. Anxious? You’re supposed to be. Lonely? Why wouldn’t you be? Sad that anyone you love over the age of 70 is suddenly more delicate than a paper doll in rain storm? That makes sense.
This mental health awareness week comes at a time when there are some very real challenges to our mental health and wellbeing. Despite this, I’m seeing some very mixed reactions to the week circling on social media. Perhaps the traditional reaction is that Mental Health Awareness is something that needs promoting. Chances are the majority of us will experience mental health problems in our lives. We should rid society of any shame in talking about them and feel free to ask for help. This view recognises that mental health services are the poorer cousins to physical health services and that we need to invest more in the wellbeing of our population. Celebrities will tell us that it’s TIME TO TALK and that MENTAL HEALTH MATTERS.
There is another view. It’s somewhat more pessimistic and suggests that there isn’t really anyone to talk to and that when you find the courage to tell someone you need help, they might well tell you that actually you’re wrong. This view will see services as being understaffed with fragmented under resourced teams all fighting passionately and articulately not to work with you. It sees mental health services being held back as a reward for only the most dangerous presentations meaning that to ‘deserve’ care you need to be doing something pretty damaging to yourself. Should you win the lottery and make it into a service based on your level of dangerousness, you’ll be told about the long waiting list to access help. Perversely, once you do get in, you might find it’s pretty hard to get out. If you act in the way that wasn’t deemed important enough to get help in the community, on a ward, you might well find you’re being restrained, the doors are locked and you’re off to a private hospital in the country that you’d seen on Panorama the month before. It makes sense that jolly messages to always keep the kettle on and make time to talk seem like excreting into the wind.
I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the second view. My last years in the NHS saw provision to the people I’d opted to work with slowly decline and come to a juddering stop with the appearance of covid. Services are not good enough. They are too difficult to access and they do not have the resources to offer appropriate care and support to those who need them. I wonder if mental health awareness week can be used for highlighting these issue? The time to talk may have passed. Perhaps it’s time to scream? While “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” might be misconstrued, it’s vital that the public and politicians are aware of the reality of the help that we encourage people to seek. I wonder why we don’t do this more during this time?
This Image is by Rachal Rowan Olive. If you like stuff like this its worth checking out her etsy shop
Perhaps a reason for our reticence is that it’s still too hard to share that you’re struggling. To campaign for better services might mean that you’re tainted by some of stigma that remains around mental health problems. This is where I maintain some sympathy for the traditional Mental Health Awareness messages. If you’re a man, you need to reach the ripe old age of 45 before it’s more likely you’ll die of anything other than suicide. The majority of men who choose this path won’t ask anyone for help. They will experience unbearable feelings of shame, guilt and/or fear and because society has literally beaten the message “big boys don’t cry” into them, too many will feel that a way to avoid the shame that needing help brings is to remove themselves from life. At the time in my life when I felt my social anxiety was so problematic I needed to get help for it I told no one other than my GP. I swallowed hidden tablets with ropey side effects and crept to psychology appointments more stealthily than a grandmaster ninja. On top of the problems that had led to me telling the GP I needed help, I carried the shame that I had failed as a proper man and human being, and a terror that this illicit relationship with a psychologist might be discovered. I didn’t kill myself rather than seek help, but my goodness it crossed my mind.
There was a time a few years after this that things were not going well. There’s some British understatement in there but after some problem solving and decision making, it felt like not being around anymore was probably the way to go. I talked about this with my best friend at the time and after a while, we found something else that might be a bit better. My point in saying all this is that while changes in services, society and political ideology are required, we can do things as individuals to reduce the shame around finding things hard. We can ensure that in our world, struggles with mental health are things that we know everyone experiences rather than being unique to the nutters who are nothing like us. We can create an environment around those we care about where it is ok to talk, to share and to be accepted.
The last time I wrote something similar to this it was suggested that I was being funded by some neoliberal think tank. I’m still waiting for the cheque and while I’m quite vocal about the inadequacy of services, I firmly believe that individually we can make a difference. At some point this week someone with good intentions will tell you that “We all have mental health”. This is utter nonsense. We all have mental health problems. Sometimes to the extent that we feel uncomfortable , sometimes to the extent that we just don’t want to feel anything ever again. If this can’t be talked about, if it can’t be shouted about, then it will be easy to prioritise other issues in society.
Whether you’re critical, supportive or ambivalent, it is #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek