I am one of the lucky ones. I’ve had a lifetime of mental illness and I am still here to tell the story. So many others never made it.
Listening to Nicky Campbell’s immensely powerful and moving phone in about the wholly inadequate provision of mental health in the UK on BBC Radio Five Live breaks my heart, not for me personally, but for those whose suffering dwarf my own.
There are people dying through mental illness. The biggest cause of death in men aged under 50 is suicide. Read that again. The biggest cause of death in men aged under 50 is suicide. And try to take it in.
Have you ever known anyone who killed themselves because they were ill? I’m afraid I knew a good number of people, two lads from the same family, as well as others who were known by some as ‘mental’. And of course they were mentally ill, much more so than we ever imagined.
I didn’t even know what depression was until I was finally diagnosed some 20 years late. If you think mental health services are poor now, you should have seen them in the 1970s. There was, quite literally, nothing. You really were told, by doctors as well as ordinary folk in real life, to pull yourself together and sort yourself out. How different is it today? Not that much, really.
I have absolutely no doubt that mental health services are the Cinderella part of the NHS. I have never believed, even today, that it was any different. Let me give you a small example.
The modern day GP surgeries work in a very different way to the ones I grew up with. Then, you always knew which GP you saw. Now, it’s pot luck. It might be a partner, it might be a locum. With a physical ailment, this is probably not all that important. With a mental condition, I find it vital. I like to see one GP because that GP knows my condition. I do not like to have to explain it over and over again. It’s incredibly stressful which is probably not the best thing to go through when you are plagued with anxiety and depression. For years, when I moved house, I didn’t see a doctor at all when I really should have. I’ll bet I’m not the only person who felt like that.
Despite government rhetoric, mental health services have been cut in recent years. That’s a matter of fact. The cynic in me believes that there is a reason for that: there are no votes in it. The government, especially this one, throws money at senior citizens because senior citizens vote at elections and there are a lot of them. Most of them now vote Conservative which suggests to me that most of them are very selfish senior citizens, but that’s another story. Where are the votes in helping people suffering from an unseen illness? Pull yourself together, for God’s sake, man.
But then the BBC reads out a statement from Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt who praises himself to the hilt for the ‘extra money’ the government is spending in this area. And then he descends into pure, naked politics, referring to the ‘seven day’ NHS he is trying to create despite the wreckers of the BMA. He did not actually say that, but he might as well have done.
We need to march on Downing Street. Ruby Wax suggested that just now and I’m with her. The pampered millionaires who can buy their own treatments whilst the rest of us can go hang, some of us, tragically, literally. Let’s have a march of the mentally ill. Perhaps people will look at us and they might think: “Hmm. These people don’t look like looneys at all. They look just like you and me.”
If I knew many years ago what I know now, I’d take my episode to A&E and I’d urge anyone else to do the same. If things really do get that desperate and horrible, then don’t sit on some endless waiting list, pumped full of drugs: you’re an emergency, just like a heart attack or a broken leg.
How many thousands more do we allow to take their lives because of government inaction? How many more millions of lives do we allow to be ruined?
Things never got so bad that I wanted to end it all, but it got very close more than once. The element of self-harm and self-destruction in me never became severe enough to take the ultimate step, but the illness was still life-changing and life-damaging. And for some it is permanent.
I feel I am strong even though the illness has often made me weak. I have crumbled many times but I was never broken, not completely. But I am one of the lucky ones. Mine was a mental pimple, not a tumour. Blighted but not ruined.
One ruined life, one suicide, two too many. Hearing the stories breaks my heart but they doesn’t even get near the heartless politicians who talk in platitudes and riddles, using meaningless figures and making empty promises.
Yes. Enough is enough. Time to march on Downing Street and parliament. They don’t care about us and we are going to have to make them care about us.
