10th October is World Mental Health Day and Friday 10th October 2025 will be no exception. The Mental Health Foundation charity describes the day as follows: ‘It’s a reminder of the importance of good mental health and the need to prioritise and invest in good mental health.’ Or, as I would put it, stating the bleeding obvious. And the bleeding obvious needs stating, over and over again because at the moment it feels like we are pissing in the wind when it comes to improving ‘good mental health‘.
Throughout the year, there are numerous mental health days and weeks and what happens is this. If social media algorithms and AI are doing their jobs properly, we might get to hear about it. A politician or a royal will endorse World Mental Health Day and – I am sorry to be so blunt and negative about this – say how important it is for people to talk about their issues. We will nod vigorously but by Saturday 11th October it won’t be World Mental Health Day anymore, we can carry on with our mundane lives and, above all, nothing will change.
The best thing about the various mental health charities is that they raise awareness and provide advice. They do not pretend that they are a cure-all for mental health conditions and it is important we bear that in mind. But we should be grateful that at least someone is fighting our corner, even if it is only a charity.
I use the words ‘even if it is only a charity’ advisedly because having worked for various charities, since escaping full-time work, in my case specifically the British Red Cross and the brain injury charity Headway, I have become deeply concerned about how some charities operate. My experience is that many charities exist not so much as to benefit the people who use its services as those who work for them. They all seem to have highly paid CEOs and numerous senior managers – the Mental Health Foundation is no exception, as you can see here: the CEO Mark Rowland trousers a mere £170,000 per annum, which works at just over £3200 a month. Doubtless, Mr Rowland richly deserves his bulging pay packet, as do his Chief Operating Officer, Director of Fundraising and Communications, Director of Research and Lived Experience and his Director of Policy and Influencing – not to mention, except that I have mentioned, his five person leadership team. As I said, without them, us mental people have nothing, but they don’t cost nothing. With record numbers of people going through mental health crises, I question the effectiveness of mental health charities, as much as I question their effectiveness.
Perhaps, I should have a quiet word with the Director of Research and Lived Experience at the Mental Health Foundation, one Lee Knifton, and explain to him that my lived experience, a term I absolutely hate, of poor mental health has been relentlessly grim, ever since I was diagnosed with various conditions towards the end of the swinging sixties. Among other things, Lee manages ‘a great senior team who cover research policy and programmes functions and maintaining strategic relationships with Governments.’ It may be that I am a bit of a simpleton – it has been said – but to me this is just business-speak, the sort of boardroom nonsense that operates as an alternative to actually doing anything. As soon as you start using terms like ‘senior team’, ‘programmes functions’ and ‘strategic relationships’, you’ve pretty well lost me. I sincerely hope charities like the Mental Health Foundation aren’t like that, but all the ones I have worked for definitely are.
It feels like the mental health days we get every year represent nothing more than going through the motions. What we really need is a commitment from government that they regard mental health as importantly as they regard physical health. The new Labour government has made a good start in rebuilding the NHS after 14 years of the Tories taking a wrecking ball to it, but they need to do much more.
To repeat my mantra: there is help available for those with minor, hopefully short term, mental health issues and there is help for those going through life-threatening crises, but most of us are somewhere in a very large middle and there is, quite literally, nothing for us apart from drugs. No government would ever treat those with physical conditions in the same way they allow mental health conditions to go largely untreated.
And there’s money in it for governments improving our mental health. The Centre for Mental Health (I know, I know) says that ‘the total cost of mental ill health in England in 2022 was £300 billion.’ Yes, £300 billion, not million. That’s £100 billion more than the cost of the whole NHS. If that isn’t a good enough reason for improving mental health treatment, I don’t know what is (apart from wanting to make people happier and healthier).
I’ll be marking World Mental Health Day by popping more antidepressants and preparing for my upcoming mental health assessment (more on that later) and hoping against hope that things will one day get better. I fear they won’t, though, because just as it was when I was a kid, mental health to many is just feeling a bit low ‘and we all feel like that sometimes’. If you are saying mental illness isn’t a stigma any more, you could have fooled me.
