My mental health challenge, not of choice I hasten to add, is depression. I’m a clinical depressive and I don’t care who knows it. Not anymore, anyway. I decided to hide it during my working life because, as my later experiences with the evil British Red Cross confirmed, being open with one’s mental health can lead to some evil bastards, specifically the bullies and abusers of the British Red Cross, taking great joy in trying to make one’s mental health worse. That feels better. Now and then, I need to repeat the still raw hatred I feel for the British Red Cross but today it’s another condition that’s making me ill. Good old fashioned anxiety.
I have diagnosed my latest condition as PEHAS, or to give it its full title Pre Election High Anxiety Syndrome. It occurs roughly every five years and reduces me to a blubbering, stammering insomniac until 10.00 pm on what is known in the business as The Exit Poll. Once the Exit Poll result has been announced, it’s time to reach for the Champagne – that has happened just three times since I became eligible to vote in the 1979 election – or the strychnine, which is what usually happens.
We are a nation of self-harmers. We vote for political parties, which is to say the Conservatives, who routinely lie to us and make us worse off and we vote for Brexit, in order to, again, make us poorer and reduce our influence in the world. And when we are offered hope – to be fair, in both 2017 and 2019 we were offered hopeless in the form of Jeremy ‘Magic Grandpa’ Corbyn – we usually prefer despair. I have plenty of depression to be getting on without the added election of another Conservative government that could be back in Downing Street by the early hours of Friday morning but now comes anxiety and shit loads of it.
At least I think it is PEHAS. My sleep has never been the best since I started getting night terrors and panic attacks when I was 12 and oh what fun that wasn’t. So I am often exhausted, as I am today, following another night’s broken sleep. I kept waking up, wide awake after another insane anxiety dream and later, of course, had to force myself out of bed feeling completely exhausted and, frankly, broken.
Of course, I am having to self-diagnose my condition because thanks to 14 years of the Tories slashing the NHS to ribbons, I can’t even speak to a GP about my mental health, never mind consult with an NHS mental health professional. That’s because pint-sized loser Rish! Sunak tells us that poor mental health is merely a reflection of “the ups and downs of normal life”. Voting for that little shit and so enabling him to hand over what’s left of the NHS to his billionaire pals scares the shit out of me. It should you, too. But my anxiety levels go through the roof when I remember the British people’s aversion to change. Stick with what you know, folk say, even if what you know is killing you.
Time is now passing so slowly and you just knew the Conservatives will get more desperate with their lies and scare stories right up to the last minute. The very people who broke Britain, the puffed-up, entitled little shits, can still win. Everything is at stake. I worry that enough people will believe the lies and give Sunak and his group of liars another chance to fuck us all over.
I’m not even one of those hard left loony tune types who want to nationalise everything, abolish the royal family and all the rest of it. I just want things to be better. I don’t want people to have to wait years to get seen on the NHS, I don’t want to see people queuing at food banks, I want to see the end of knife crime, I want trains to be affordable, I don’t want students to be in massive debt. Above all, I want to end the culture wars. I want a kinder, gentler Britain. And it’s scares the shit out of me that it doesn’t scare the shit out of everyone else. I’ve said it again.
Life will go on after Thursday 4th July in one way or another. It’s the kind of life we will be left with that worries me.