I have to say I was reeling in shock when I saw the following headline:

It’s official: the Government don’t care about the nation’s mental health

I know, I know. Anyone in the mental health system, whether patient or professional, could have told you that. What is more surprising is that it’s in the Daily Telegraph.

Last week, the Royal College of Psychiatrists awarded the President’s Medal to eight people for work in mental health. One of the award winners was Bryony Gordon, a journalist with said Telegraph. I am afraid I am not able to link extracts from her article because the Telegraph is behind a paywall and, you may have gathered from my lily-livered, soggy liberal politics I don’t exactly fit in with their rabid right-wing readership, but the headline is, in my experience, palpably true.

In the small extract I can access, Gordon writes: “As one eminent psychiatrist noted, the need for mental-health care has never been greater, while the pot from which to provide that care has never been smaller.” Sadly, any reference to the headline is hidden away from Telegraph refuseniks but my experience, as I have been boring readers with since I started blogging around a decade ago, is that the government definitely doesn’t care.

I fall within a specific group of people for whom there is literally nothing in the NHS. In terms of depression – my specialist subject – those who suffer (I hate using that term about myself but I can’t think of anything better right now) somewhere between mild to middling depression to fully blown severe clinical depression. There is basic counselling for the mildly ill – and if that’s you, reach out and grab it; it’s yours. (Any resemblance to Stiff Little Fingers’ Alternative Ulster in the last line is entirely deliberate.) It can help, it can help nip things in the bud at an early stage. The other group includes those at risk for major self-harm and even suicide. But even there, mental health provision is not fit for purpose.

I’m on the edge of that middle group, which I suggest is many times larger than those on the extremes. I have tried, over an entire lifetime, to acquire long term therapy, and not just a few weeks of counselling, and earlier this year, I just gave up. I don’t think my mood will ever sink into the suicide risk category – although I suppose you never can tell with this mental illness malarkey – and, frankly, the added stress of trying and failing to get help was just making things even worse. When I feel shit – sorry for using a technical term: I hope you know what I mean – I just try to muddle through, like I always did at school and work.

You hear all this bullshit from government how they regard physical and mental health with the same degree of importance when you know full well they don’t. I get frequent reminders about the various failings in my physical health and in the last year alone I’ve been sent off for three lots of scans. By way of contrast, I have not had so much as a text from the local health centre about my mental health and knowing what I know about the NHS, I wasn’t disappointed because it was never going to happen.

I warn you never to get mentally ill because it can ruin your life and there is next to nothing you can do about it. Obviously, take what’s there, but as the headline says, the government don’t care about the nation’s mental health and if the Telegraph is saying it, you’d better believe it’s true.