In a fascinating article about NEETS (young people not in education, employment or training), the excellent John Harris, who appears to be the only Guardian journalist who has any understanding of how ordinary people live their lives, makes an excellent point about the Daily Mail’s loathing of young people. Of the close to a million 16- to 24-year-olds who are so-called NEETS, many suffer from a variety of mental health conditions. The government is carrying out yet another a review into the growing number of young people not in education, employment or training but one prime reason for there being so many NEETS is met with dripping contempt by The Mail. Here’s a recent headline: “Sicknote youths to dodge clampdown: Pledge to stop benefits for the workshy won’t include those with anxiety”. Read and weep.
Let’s break down what this guttural rag is saying. Many young people not in education, employment or training are, in the eyes of the Mail, “sicknote youths”. Moreover, they are “workshy” and anyway those people with anxiety won’t have their benefits stopped. Where to begin?
It is not clear just how many of the estimated 946,000 NEETS are on benefits. Approximately 45/50% are thought to be on benefits, although no one seems to know for sure, and a somehow more specific 44% do not engage with the benefits system at all. The Mail says they are “sicknote youths”, allowing the reader to create an image of an entire generation which is trying to con a GP into signing them off work on the basis of them being “workshy”. My contention, on the basis of a lifetime of public service for a major government department that deals specifically with benefits and a post ‘career’ life in the third sector dealing directly with many of those abandoned by society, is that this is a generation that doesn’t exist. The words used are inflammatory, essentially hate speech.
The belittling of mental illness is something we have gotten used to in this country, but let us be quite clear about one thing: anxiety disorder is the most common mental illness of them all. While my own mental illness, not of choice, is clinical depression, I have had anxiety disorder off and on for over 50 years. I can justifiably be accused of many things, but I was never a “sicknote youth”, nor “workshy” and I am quite sure that the vast minority of NEETS come under neither of these insulting categories.
The scumbag Mel Stride, who was Work and Pensions secretary in the last, wretched Conservative government, paved the way for attacks on the mentally unwell when he described the mental health culture as having “gone too far”. adding that too many people pathologise the “normal anxieties of life.” Those with only mild mental health issues should be looking for work. Only those with “very severe” mental health conditions would be exempt. It is unmistakeable what Stride meant. People with anxiety, and presumably other mental health conditions are swinging the lead. They are not really ill. Anxiety is a normal part of life. Most people just get on with it.
No one ever says that the cancer culture has gone too far, that those with only minor cancer should be looking for work and only those with very severe cancer would be exempt. People with cancer are not really ill. Cancer is a normal part of life. Get on your bicycle and look for work. No one says this because it would be unbearably savage, cruel and just plain wrong. But if you have a mental health condition, you are fair game for here today, gone tomorrow politicians and the gutter press. No wonder that mental health remains such a stigma in the UK – and let’s be blunt about this: there still is a massive stigma – when ministers and the sections of the media promote the lie that mental illness isn’t an illness at all.
Unless you have walked the road of mental illness, or know or are related to someone who has, it is possible you may have doubts about it. You may see the statistics about NEETS and the rising numbers of those with mental health conditions and then read what the actual government and the media is saying about them, that people are swinging the lead, living the life of Riley at the expense of the poor bloody taxpayer. Well, that’s what cynical politicians and their media mouthpieces want you to think. They’re lying to you.
Anxiety, I know from the struggles of close friends, is very real. For some it is utterly crippling and not just for the young. I can completely understand why more people are suffering from anxiety for all manner of reasons, not least increasing poverty, an inability to find somewhere to live, no alternative to low paid, miserable work, the relentless rise of technology and AI which will slash many jobs. All these things can create feelings of hopelessness and failure, causing anxiety and depression. Like cigarettes cause cancer, so these feelings cause mental illness. Using a headline like, “Sicknote youths to dodge clampdown: Pledge to stop benefits for the workshy won’t include those with anxiety” helps no one, except I suppose the Mail’s gammon readership. I find it utterly repulsive.
There is no grand design to being a NEET. NEETS exist because governments have failed them. They are actually real people, many of whom live shit lives with no prospects and they’ve given up. They’ve given up on getting decent, well-paid secure work, of owning or even renting their own homes, of never enjoying the so-called good things in life.
We’re abandoning a whole generation, writing them off, making out that their problems were self-inflicted and that they want something for nothing. Hating NEETS and pretending mental illness isn’t a form of illness feels like a war on the poor and the sick to me. Sometimes, I wonder if the haters are the sickest people of the lot? I can’t think of another explanation.
