A chance meeting today with an old friend whose life has been ravaged by anxiety and depression. Ravaged and, I have to say, ruined. It got me back to thinking about World Mental Health Day, which passed without incident and with barely any coverage some two days ago, and the comments of the Minister for the Disabled, Justin Tomlinson, which were tweeted by our ever loving, ever caring prime minister. To paraphrase Mr Tomlinson, employers should make provision to accommodate those with mental health problems. He obviously forgot to mention this to DWP Secretary Iain Duncan Smith whose bullying managers decided to sack my friend.
He is no better than he was when in work, but he is financially much worse off. His CV is in tatters thanks to the sacking and he fears for his future employment possibilities. He lives on his own in a small bedsit, his parents are elderly and in declining health, he wonders what is left for him, if anything.
Tomlinson’s weasel words and Cameron’s destructive policies condemn people to a lifetime without prospects and a lifetime without hope. With instances of mental health on the increase, provision is in decline. If you are at the bottom of the pile, requiring therapy and counselling, the waiting list is ballooning and if you are high-risk, there are 20% less mental health beds than there were five years ago and a lot less psychiatric nurses. Contrary to Mr Tomlinson’s supposedly soothing words, things are getting worse.
What goes through the mind of a manager who has in his or her care someone who suffers from a real condition that you can’t see and then decides to throw them onto the scrapheap? Does this person have any kind of conscience, principles or humanity? Do they not try to find solutions for the sick person, to value the contribution they have already made and can make in the future? Or can he or she simply close his or her mind and move on, as if nothing ever happened?
We talked about how things were. He is in ongoing therapy and on twice the medication I need, which must be draining in itself. You might never know he was ill just by talking to him, although I did because I have known him for years and I know and understand where he has been. He’s just a regular man who longs to be free of the black dog, to sleep all night for at least one night in his life and to see a world that doesn’t constantly look grey whatever the weather is like. I am useless as a counsellor in such circumstances, although I am a good listener. I am incapable of offering positive solutions because I am incapable of utilising them myself. The last thing a clinically depressed person wants is another clinically depressed person in the same room, you might think, but you’d be wrong. We empathise.
We agreed that there was comfort in mental illness, which sounds as illogical and indeed as ridiculous as you can get. You might not like the place you inhabit, which is often a dark, dank place, but at least you know it. Like me, he knows when the next episode is coming and he usually, though not quite always, knows how to get through it. In his last job, he did not spot the signs, fell ill and lost his job. Cruel world, cruel people without a shred of decency.
He awoke the other morning, in the darkest hour before the dawn, wondering what on earth the point of life was and then remembered that there was no point to it. There is no deep meaning, there is no master plan, no such thing as fate. We are here for a reason, we agreed, that that reason is because of the accident of our birth, but it doesn’t go beyond that.
It is precisely because there is no reason for us being here other than through the accident of our birth that I find it so utterly offensive that we live in a judgemental society, a kind of unnatural selection, a perverse Darwinsism, where the strong – ie. the better off, the privileged, the powerful – can deny a decent quality of life to everyone else.
My friend is bowed but he is not, yet, broken. He’s hanging on in there, although he doesn’t quite know how or why. He’s brilliantly clever too, with qualifications to university and beyond. Fat lot of good they did him when he got sick.
I still think this is the greatest country on earth but we do, somehow, need to move away from the excesses of Thatcherite Britain, the “what’s in it for me?” culture, where the strong and powerful survive and thrive and the vulnerable can go hang.
We’ve got a long way to go before we achieve a decent, caring society and I fear that we may not get there in my lifetime. That will be all right for the vast majority of people in our country. The trick will be getting them to give a toss about the minority who have been abandoned. I am not optimistic.
