We’re all mental patients now
By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked:
I’m starting to think I’m the only person in Britain who isn’t suffering from mental illness. You can’t so much as peruse social media or skim-read a newspaper these days without being confronted by personal confessions of mental ill-health or scary-sounding reports about how many people are falling victim to some kind of mind turmoil. ‘British mental health is worse than ever’, said a headline this week. Apparently even the ‘one in four’ figure that’s been bandied about for years — ie, one in four Brits has a mental-health problem — is no longer accurate. Today it’s remarkable that ‘anyone [can] enjoy mental health’, given we live in an era of ‘high stress’, says a writer for the Independent. So it’s got to the point where those of us who enjoy mental health are seen as the weirdos. I’m not mentally ill — what is wrong with me?
We’re all mental patients now. Or at least that is what some in officialdom seem to want us to believe. The political class’s interest in the issue of mental health has exploded in recent months. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has created the position of shadow minister for mental health. The future queen, the Duchess of Cambridge, this week guest-edited the Huffington Post to raise awareness about an alleged epidemic of mental-health problems among children. Parents must get better at ‘admitting when our children need emotional or psychiatric help’, she decreed. Also this week, NHS England launched its Stalinist-sounding ‘Five-Year Forward View for Mental Health’, which offers a ‘brave new vision’ — authoritarian, much? — for expanding mental-health services to cover more of the population.
Prime minister David Cameron is also mad about promoting mental health. Last month he promised a ‘revolution in mental-health treatment’. (Remember when revolutions where about people seizing power, not being treated as mental patients by those in power?) He’s pumping a billion pounds into services for new mums, teens, children and basically everyone who is at risk of ‘poor mental health’. The PM’s main aim, like Duchess Kate’s, is to ‘take on the taboo of poor mental health’ and ensure that everyone stops ‘sweeping mental-health issues under the carpet’.
Taboo? What? This is a claim often made by the new warriors for mental health: that for too long people have been afraid to talk about being emotionally off. In which case why can’t you swing a tote bag in a bookshop without hitting 20 books about ‘My Struggle with Bipolar’? Why has virtually every broadsheet in Britain at some point published an eating-disorder column?
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