Mental health awareness? Great. Now for some action

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week. Many of you will be sympathetic with the aims of the campaign, to raise awareness of mental health issues. Some of us, unfortunately, don’t need our awareness raised.

I had my own mental health crisis a couple of years ago, during the pandemic - and that’s a sentence that will chime with an awful lot of people. My particular brand of mentalism is depression. A combination of personal and professional stresses tipped me over the edge and I started to mentally spiral into all kinds of dark thoughts and delusions (mostly the latter, thankfully). I was lucky to get an immediate prescription for anti-depressants and then I looked for some therapy.

Ask anyone involved in mental health provision about demand for services and they’ll tell you in a wearied voice that the NHS is absolutely deluged. A councillor involved in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAHMS) told me a few years ago that there’s an epidemic in teenage mental health issues. And that was before the pandemic, when their future plans were stripped away, leaving young people - especially those in exam years - really struggling. The uncertainty led to some real tragedies, including teen suicides. I’m sure those deaths won’t be included in official pandemic statistics, but the pandemic undoubtedly played a factor in many people dying by their own hands, because of mental illness.

I was able to get 12 free therapy sessions, after waiting for five months. After those ended, I continued seeing my therapist privately, every week. I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford it and, to be honest, it’s probably the best money I’ve ever spent - and I have a Belstaff jacket. It (therapy, not my Trailmaster) has helped me see threads running through my life, find connections and understand how I’ve suffered from continuous low mood since I was a teenager (in US psychiatry it’s called dysthemia: in UK psychiatry, I think it’s just called being British). With the help of my therapist, I’ve been able to join dots - some of which I hadn’t previously noticed - and recognise the significance of certain events over the course of my childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve not encountered any real traumas in my life and I’ve generally considered myself to be conventionally ‘happy’. But when you start to get a wider perspective on your life and can start employing some mental health tools to deal with issues, you begin to realise why you haven’t made better decisions, why you feel buffeted by life - and why there’s always been that feeling of disaffection that you’ve long tried to bury, but always seems to rise to the surface when under stress. I’ve had bad patterns and, with therapy, I’ve been able to start to redesign them.

The truth is, we would all benefit from a greater focus on our mental health - and from therapy (yes, I'm now a therapy evangelist). The mere act of talking to someone who won’t judge anything you say is remarkably empowering in itself: if you have some unresolved issues, it’s as vital as getting a Covid vaccination. I’d recommend reading Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is a superb exploration of how therapy (and therapists) can help anyone navigate their course through life.

The chances of us all being able to access the mental health services we need are about the same as Boris Johnson telling us that he didn’t understand Brexit and is sorry. The small state that the Conservatives seek doesn’t include a state health service, so resources for the NHS are carefully being whittled away, often through back-door privatisation, until those who can afford it are forced to give up on it and pay for medical insurance. This systematic shrinking of resources obviously doesn’t include any real expansion of mental health services under the current government.

But isn’t it the job of government to help its citizens maximise their life opportunities? After all, a healthier population is a happier and more productive population. Even if you only care about economic advancement, any fool can see that a population that can harness its full potential will help make a country economically stronger and more efficient. If you also consider the multitude of other benefits that a mentally healthy population will bring, it’s clear that investing in better mental health provision is good for everyone.

So support Mental Health Awareness Week. If you have issues, try to be open and honest about them: not only will you help the national conversation on the subject, but it will also chip away at the remaining stigmas around mental health. A louder national conversation on the issue will also build pressure for extra, much-needed resources.

In the meantime, get some therapy (if you can). It can only do you some good.