If you have been inundated today with people on Facebook, Twitter and daytime television imploring you to discuss mental health, that is because it is Time to Talk day. Mired in politeness and caution, people with mental health difficulties across the UK have gently requested kindness and understanding. Perhaps you’ve made the right noises and nodded sympathetically. You’ll probably feel you did the right thing, but unfortunately your compassion will not be enough to change anything.
In his novel Things Can Only Get Better, John O’Farrell recalls having the Jamaican poet Michael Smith as a guest at an early 80s university radical poetry evening. Afterwards Smith was turned away from a club for being black. Back at a student house Smith exclaimed: “I want justice!” to be answered by a young woman saying “I can’t give you justice but I can give you a hug.” This is where we’re at with mental health in the UK.
Anyone can endorse nice sentiments. Theresa May raised the issue of the importance of such conversations just last month. But the fact is that people with mental health difficulties often experience shorter, poorer, unhappier lives. In the UK, people diagnosed with schizophrenia run the risk of dying 20 years earlier than the average British person. Those who have psychological problems during childhood earn 25% less than those who didn’t by the age of 50.
Experiencing mental health issues often leads to exclusion. You either take yourself away from others or others take themselves away from you. Suddenly relationships you thought you were driving career into the central reservation at high speed in a tangle of steel and glass. Work, school or college might go wrong. But none of these things cause exclusion. How society treats and stigmatises a person when that happens is what causes exclusion.
If you care about people with mental health difficulties then you have to be prepared to make changes, not just to your attitude but in the way you want your country to work. As a starting point, it would be wise to stop telling people to seek help and support that you know isn’t there. Austerity has gutted our communities of organisations that can make life liveable with mental health issues. Admit that it is not mental ill health that plunges people into crisis, it is the lack of support, protection and assistance that does that.
Mental health treatment is underfunded, so society needs to start paying for it. If people have to leave work because they are in distress do not punish them by forcing them into poverty and then make them beg for the tiniest crumbs of financial support in the form of benefits.
The country we live in does not give second chances and is unlikely to do so without pressure. Opportunities for education, opportunities to find a comfortable place to live, opportunities to progress: all take investment and the political will to pay for them instead of something else. If you really care about people with mental health difficulties think about what you would be prepared to give up in return for their safety, their security and for them to thrive.
We talk about fighting cuts but the money to achieve equality for people with mental health difficulties has never been there. We need to be fighting for a future where supporting and protecting the lives of those experiencing mental distress is not an optional act of kindness but an obligation hard-wired into all of structures and thinking. The man on the street might say that sounds like special treatment, like whining instead of pulling your socks up. But the man on the street will keep saying that until we seize the political initiative. Or until his brain flips over one night and he can’t trust his own thoughts and feelings and suddenly he discovers the world doesn’t work for him any more.
Being in distress hurts. Finding you are treated unequally at such a time even more so. So it’s understandable that people will try to end the pain of exclusion by asking politely to be let back into “normal life” without any fuss. The imbalance of power remains when a dominant majority thinks it is doing a favour by bestowing benevolent and charitable understanding upon an insecure minority. But until that majority is prepared to alter structures, laws and practices that they benefit in favour of those they discriminate against, all we have is warm sentiments.
On this Time to Talk day, fight the rosy glow you’ll feel at having listened to someone’s hard life and remember it is possible to be a lovely person in a discriminatory system. Reflect on what you have heard then think about what must change. Because while your sympathy is welcome, your solidarity and political voice as part of the dominant majority will go further.
On Time to Talk day, solidarity on mental health would be better than sympathy | Mark Brown
