My brain is always quite addled by this time on a Monday afternoon. I’m just back from weekly psychotherapy for my depression and mentally speaking I had nothing left in the tank, until I read an article on the Guardian website by ITV newscaster Mark Austin. Then I got sad and I got angry. It looks like as though I am one of the lucky ones.
As my loyal reader will be well aware, I long ago came out with my own demons and I really don’t care what anyone thinks about it anymore. I spent much of my life pretending to all and sundry, including my family, to be “normal”, whatever normal is, and what good did it do me? Life, right from the start, has been a muddle, a struggle: I’ve made it up as I went along, often under the spell of the black dog. I know I am one of the lucky ones when I read Austin’s sad article, in which he describes the suicide of a friend, a woman with two young daughters. One daughter, aged just 15, said this of her mother at the funeral service: “We know there was a darker side to her. And nobody has to become wholly dark for them to be tipped over the edge. Of course we can never be sure where mum’s personality stopped and mental illness began, yet I am certain that the side which was truly dreadful was not her at all but in fact her demons.”
Now I have been diagnosed as suffering from severe clinical depression, but what on earth was the level of depression suffered by this poor woman that drove her to take her own life? Note that I do not say, “How on earth could she end her own life when she had so much to live for?” because it doesn’t work like that when you are depressed. I know just how lucky I am with my family, my children and my life in general but the idea that my good fortune improves my mental well-being is to misunderstand mental illness. You’d never hear someone say how having a nice family helps someone’s cancer because you know how to separate the two. Well, depression is an illness. It is not about being happy and sad.
Reading the words of the woman’s daughter made me sad and angry. I have lost friends to suicide, more than I care to remember, and I have come to believe that each suicide reflects a failing in our society. Of course, every suicide cannot be prevented, but our attitudes to mental illness do not help. And it’s what we spend that matters too. We are spending less and less.
My own experience tells me that many instances of mental ill health begin before adulthood. Mine started before I was even a teenager. It was addressed in my teenage years and I have often wondered what might have happened if it hadn’t been. Could I have been another statistic with RIP before my name? I’ll never know and I am glad I won’t, but I suspect those years with the child psychiatrist were very important.
But last year, £35 million was cut from youth mental health services and £80 million in the four years before. Children – children, for god’s sake – are ending up in adult wards because there is no provision for them, others have been known to have slept in police cells. Have you ever been in the cells of a police station? I have, many times (in the course of my work, you understand), and the experience does not leave you. The people you see in police cells are criminals guarded by police officers. It is totally unacceptable that a young, vulnerable person ends up in a police cell because there were no beds available in a psychiatric unit. In fact, it shames our society.
It turns my stomach when the likes of Iain Duncan Smith say we are moving to a “low welfare, low tax” society because whilst the former may seem appealing, abandoning the weak and vulnerable is not something I am comfortable with. I do not mind paying tax to ensure sick people get better and I include in that the mentally ill.
Mark Austin’s story was a tale of a society that appears to have lost control of its senses. None of us choose to be depressed any more than we choose to have a heart attack. It just happens. Some of us have worse demons than others – as my therapist said today, everyone’s depression is different and personal – but two million of us sought help last year. How many more didn’t?
I thank Mark Austin for making me angry again. I like to do angry at the state of mental health services in Britain. Governments of all colours have regarded it as a Cinderella service, a kind of notional add-on to the NHS, but the evidence of the effects of mental illness reach far and wide. And guess what? It costs the country many billions of pounds every year, so money spent on the problem counts as an investment.
More than anything, how many more children will see their parents take their own lives and how many more parents will see their children take their own lives? We are talking real people, not politics. Is there a politician out there big enough to take the issue seriously?
