Sometimes I wonder why I bother to write about mental health issues, including my own. I long “came out” about my own depression and anxieties because, well, I wanted to and because I wanted people who perhaps hadn’t come out to know that they were not alone in feeling that they weren’t, to almost paraphrase Brian Wilson, made for these times. The much-reviled, with good reason, former Deputy PM Nick Clegg at least belatedly recognised the chronic underspending on mental health on prevention and treatment by the least government, without mentioning his own key role in helping to slash spending on both during his disastrous time in office. I do not buy the Liberal Democrat line about keeping the Tories in the “centre ground” of British politics because in the five years from 2010 they did no such thing and in the case of mental health they presided over a hugely deteriorating and fragmented service.
And this is what we are up against from the government. Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell suffers from depression, often speaking out and writing about it, but the health secretary Jeremy Hunt doesn’t understand how he can be depressed because Campbell has “a great life”. That represents such a threadbare understanding of mental illness, you wonder how on earth Hunt could be put in change of our NHS. He seems to be suggesting that Campbell was merely fed up or sad and that he shouldn’t be because he is successful and comfortably off.
The people who are committing suicide because of severe mental illness are not fed up or sad. Some of these are killing themselves because they are having to wait so long for treatment. Put it into simple financial terms, because that seems to be the only language politicians understand: mental illness is costing the economy some £105 billion a year, which includes £8 billion in sickness absence alone. Add another £15 billion in lower productivity because of mental health amongst workers and you are looking at sums of money that could help to cut the financial deficit politicians keep crowing about. But what did the Tories and Lib Dems do in the five years from 2010 to 2015? They cut mental health spending by 8% in real terms when referrals went up by 20%. Where is the sense in this?
No one would ever talk about cancer patients in this way. Even Jeremy Hunt would surely not say to someone who suffered from cancer that he couldn’t understand why they had it because they’d were successful and comfortably off.
Hunt was criticised about his poor mental health record by Sue Bailey, the former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and his reply was that her comment was “extraordinary”. Well, what could she possibly know? And that was it. The views of such an important group of people was dismissed in one word. This is what we are up against.
The coming welfare cuts, which will be inflicted on us very soon because politicians always do the nasty stuff early in their terms of office, will almost certainly involve further cuts to mental health treatment, probably far more than in the last five years put together.
Before last week’s election, a letter from 442 psychotherapists, counsellors and therapists appeared in a national newspaper calling the state of mental health under the coalition “profoundly disturbing”. For some reason, it did not attract the same sort of attention from the BBC or anywhere else in the media as the Telegraph letter from 100 rich businessmen. And what will Hunt’s response be? Same as it ever was.
If I didn’t understand politicians as well as I do, I would wonder how they can sleep in the full knowledge of what their vicious policies are doing to those of us in the real world. The best I can hope for is that the likes of Hunt just really don’t understand mental illness, but the likelihood is they just don’t care.
