Few do hate like the Daily Mail. The increasingly unhinged Telegraph, Express and Sun are eager competitors in the hate stakes, but as ‘Mad’ Nadine Dorries confirms, the Mail is in a class of its own. Her column today is essentially a follow-up from the last Conservative government’s attacks on the mentally ill, when Rishi Sunak talked about “the risk of over-medicalising the everyday challenges and worries of life” when it came to paying benefits to people with mental health conditions. Sunak’s health secretary Mel Stride said at roughly the same time, Britain’s approach to mental health has “gone too far” and “normal anxieties of life” are being labelled as an illness. Dorries’s column is mostly behind a paywall and I would rather shit on my hands and clap than pay the Mail any money, but the gist of the story is in the first paragraph:
“When I was a minister with responsibility for mental health, I fought hard to prevent mental health charities – which receive a vast amount of taxpayers’ cash – categorising normal, emotional responses to stressful life situations as ‘mental health issues’. I saw it often in my own constituency surgeries, when too many conversations concluded with the statement: ‘It’s affecting my mental health.’ It was as if these words alone made an individual a special case and would magic up a solution. Citing their ‘mental health’ seems to exonerate some people from taking responsibility for challenging situations – be it family or work issues – instead of trying to face their problem head-on and deal with it, as many millions of us do.”
When you have been writing about mental health for as long as I have, it is hard to come up with something new and original to say about it, so if what follows includes a significant element of “I’ve heard all that before” I can only plead guilty because if I am repeating myself then so are politicians and they need to be challenged, yet again.
The first thing to say is that conditions like depression and anxiety is that they are forms of illness. I know to my cost – and I am sorry if that comes across as all self-pitying and pathetic – how debilitating how clinical depression is and can be. I know the human cost of mental illness on friends and acquaintances, too. Life destroying, sometimes life-ending. Yet here today, gone tomorrow politicians like Dorries put it all down to people “exonerating” themselves “form taking responsibility for challenging situations … instead of trying to face their problem head-on and deal with it AS MANY MILLIONS OF US DO.” (My capitals.) For someone who was minister for mental health, these comments even by her standards, are breathtakingly ignorant. Of course, certain situations in life can exacerbate conditions like depression and anxiety, but to suggest, as Dorries does, that the mentally ill are only mentally ill because they don’t face their problems and don’t deal with them represents not just ignorance, but sheer stupidity. That, to be fair, is Nadine Dorries’s specialist subject.
We go back to the same tired old debate, which to be fair is my specialist subject, in that no one would talk about physical illness the way they talk about mental illness. Dorries does not, to the best of my knowledge, possess qualifications in order to assess, diagnose and treat mental illness, but talks about it as if its the fault of the person with poor mental health. It’s from the “snap out of it” school of idiocy, the “pull yourself together“, “stop feeling sorry for yourself” nonsense I recall from my childhood and teenage years.
This sort of language, especially when promoted by the most popular newspaper in the land, is damaging, if not downright dangerous, especially if readers believe the nonsense within its covers. For instance, Dorries (or more likely her ‘ghost’) argues that as a minister she “fought hard to prevent mental health charities – which receive a vast amount of taxpayers’ cash – categorising normal, emotional responses to stressful life situations as ‘mental health issues’. Where is the evidence for that? There isn’t any, obviously. But let’s deal with another aspect she raises. Why do “mental health charities … receive a vast amount of taxpayers’ money“? Well, do they? There are some 3400 mental health charities in the UK, many of which carry out government commissioned therapy and counselling, but it is virtually impossible to work out, just by trawling the internet, just how “vast” this funding is. The previous government’s blog is full of numbers but very little detail on what is spent and how. Let’s address another of her points, the idea that people just turn up at their therapist or counsellor, or even their MP, and blame the normal “normal anxieties of life” as being an illness.
From my personal experience, and learning from the experiences of others, I very much doubt that this is a thing. I had little to no idea what depression really was when I was diagnosed with it. I don’t recall complaining about the “normal anxieties of life“, whatever the fuck that means, and indeed I was shocked with the consultant at Southmead Hospital – yes, and actual Mr – informed me that I had (I hate to use the term) “suffered from” severe clinical depression. In fact, I spontaneously and, I felt, embarrassingly burst into tears at the diagnosis. One thing he definitely didn’t say was that I should take “responsibility for challenging situations – be it family or work issues – instead of trying to face their problem head-on and deal with it, as many millions of us do.”
Call me gullible, call me naive, but I am quite sure that all the mentally ill folk I have come across, and still come across, in life are not “swinging the lead“, as they call it in nautical circles. On the contrary, Ms Dorries’s inexpertly written Mail column is a disgrace and an insult to everyone who has, at some time, suffered from (sorry) a mental health condition.
Sunak and Stride’s motives in trying to belittle those with mental illness were quite cynical. Theirs was a desire to cut or even remove state benefits from sick people by accusing people as being malingerers. Dorries, who is on another level of stupid, may be saying the same thing, or more likely is trying to make angry Mail readers even angrier by feeding them what is, frankly, a pack of lies.
The headline “It’s time people stopped using their mental health as an excuse – and learnt how to deal with life’s ups and downs” says it all. People – Dorries doesn’t explain which people, of course – don’t do that at all, but explaining that their poor mental health prevents them functioning properly, well, what’s wrong with that? When my mental health is particularly poor, I have difficulty in functioning at all.
What we have here is a simpleton trying to simplify a very complex set of circumstances with predictable consequences. Literacy for the illiterate and, yes, stupidity for the terminally stupid. Because if you really find yourself nodding along with Dorris, you are probably the sort of person who believes that people with no legs should stand on their own two feet and saying something like “It’s time people stopped using their cancer as an excuse.” No one actually says that, I hope, but just remember Nadine Dorries has another column to write next week and there is a small army who swear by her every word. If ignorance really is bliss, they like her must be the happiest people in the world. When they’re not feigning anger, obviously.
