Yesterday, Thursday 10 October 2013, was World Mental Health Day. Following an article published yesterday for Exeposé Comment here, Online Features Editor Imogen Watson talks about the wider problems surrounding mental health.
Thankfully, I have never been unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with a serious mental health problem.
I have, however, struggled through what I would finally find out – two years later – was minor depression. And that was enough to change life as I knew it. The first year of university was probably the worst of my short life so far; I hated approximately ninety-five per cent of everything around me. I tried to fit in as I thought I ought to and felt like a fraud and a failure at the same time which only made matters worse. Second year was an improvement: I kept myself busy almost all of the time and spent hundreds of pounds and hundreds of hours driving up and down the M5 motorway home to see my group of best friends and, despite the exhaustion from making solo six-hour round trips in twenty-hour periods, I felt happy.
The summer of 2012 was a different matter. One overly drunken night led me back into a state of paranoia – that I was being ignored, left out, discussed and hated by my friends – for the next two months. I burst into tears incredibly easily and it was this fairly obvious change in character that led to heart-to-hearts with a wiser adult than me, one whom I trusted and for whom I had a lot of respect, and ultimately, a trip to the doctor’s.
My experience was, as I say, minor, although it did not feel as such at the time. I have come out of it well, too. But the problems occured there nonetheless. There was a lot of upset, both subtle and blazingly obvious. Among those apparent friends of mine, one of them was kind enough to tell me to “man up”, and that I had “chosen to act like this”. I only wish I were joking. By the end of the summer, I had lost a seven-strong group of friends; although I cannot comment on the attitudes towards mental health of every member of the group, the qualities the group exhibited in following like sheep was rooted in at least one person’s complete lack of regard for an illness that cannot always be seen.
Mental health has any number of triggers and manifests itself in a great number of ways. But, as Henry Sawdon-Smith said in Exeposé Comment’s aforementioned article, can you imagine a world in which people looked at you funnily, or rejected you for a job, because you broke a bone? Can you imagine a world in which there were adverts on the radio telling you it was “time to talk” about our hip replacements or twisted knees? You might tell someone you met recently about the time you fell down the stairs if it came up in conversation, but the time you felt so low you couldn’t ever see it getting better? Maybe not. The fact that we cannot see something makes it incredibly easy to ignore, and this is evident throughout the world: electoral problems in Zimbabwe, food shortages in Mozambique, natural disasters in Japan or Haiti or Bangladesh. Maybe we care for a short period of time, and then it is a case of out of sight, out of mind – if you will excuse the pun.
This inability to see a health problem makes it no less severe and no less common. The Time to Change campaign states that one in four of us will be affected in some way or another by mental health complaints, and that this type of illness accounts for a third of all illnesses; the likelihood is quite high, therefore, that you do already know somebody who has experienced difficulties, even if they haven’t shared them with you.
It is also incredibly easy to joke about. Some people, having suffered with these problems, enjoy the joke and it makes them feel “normal” (if such a thing exists). Asda recently was criticised for having sold a Hallowe’en costume of a white strait jacket, complete with fake blood and fake weapons under the name “Mental Patient Costume”. Tesco quickly followed suit in withdrawing their similar item. This perpetuation of nineteenth-century attitudes is what our society needs to stamp out. Perhaps a joke to one person, but to the weakest member of society it could be the final straw – this should be our consideration when we decide upon our standards.
These are not the only issues that comes with mental health problems. Currently, the NHS is strained to breaking point, and that includes their provisions for people with mental health problems. Thirty-four of fifty-one local authorities reported to BBC’s Newsbeat that they had cut funding for mental health services since 2010, with Derby City Council seeing a drop of forty-one per cent. A report for the Department of Health in August of last year also uncovered that after a decade of increasing spending, real-term spending on mental health, that is, once inflation has been accounted for, dropped for the first time since 2001, and by £150 million in England alone. Written complaints specifically about mental health services rose from 9,587 in the period 2009-10 to 11,749 in 2012-13 – an increase of almost twenty-eight per cent.
This is a dangerous concern as in an era of governmental austerity measures one can expect to see a massive boost in people needing their help. People lose their jobs, their homes, their families, and increasingly are trying to find ways to make ends meet. Charitable donations are often the first thing to go when personal savings have to be made, and organisations such as the Samaritans rely on them to stay open. It is not just members of the working world who experience difficulty; students too are prone to suffering with their mental health. Figures vary, although the Association for University and College Counselling estimates that between three and ten per cent of students will have some contact with them during their university career.
Amidst the doom and gloom, it is worth noting that attitudes towards mental health are, at least in my subsequent experiences with friends, improving. Considering how many of us go through such times, it is also worth noting the ridiculousness of keeping mental health a taboo subject – it is really helping no one. If you might permit me to speak as my first- and second-year self for a moment, take a moment to look around you, and among your friends. You could make a very big difference.
Imogen Watson, Online Features Editor
Contact Voice on (01392) 724000, or e-mail them at
voicemail@exetervoice.co.uk between 8pm and 8am; contact the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90, twenty-four hours a day.
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