Minutes ahead of what will surely be another vacuous Theresa May speech and here I shall try to pick it apart before she makes it. Today, she will not really address the issue of mental health. She intends to “transform” attitudes to mental health and that mental illness has been “dangerously disregarded”. Well, she is certainly right about the last bit because the Tory government in which she served under David Cameron cut mental health spending to the bone and did much to create the crisis we have today. Has the vicar’s daughter had a road to Damascus type experience? Of course not.
May will be announcing the “Shared Society” which her government will create. Don’t worry if you find it hard to understand what she means by that because by the time she sits down, you will be none the wiser. I am expecting a re-run of David Cameron’s “Big Society”, where rich right wing politicians told ordinary folk to volunteer to do things in the community to save government having to pay for it! Whoops! I didn’t mean to say that. I meant that ordinary folk should volunteer to do good things that they didn’t do already, like people who staff lifeboats, work unpaid for charities and becoming school governors. No one had thought of doing these things for free until David Cameron came along.
If charity begins at home (whatever that means), then perhaps so should attitudes to mental health. Visit my old employer, the government. I was very fortunate to have an excellent series of managers, at least in the last 20 years of my “career”, who helped me manage my own condition. Other colleagues were not so lucky. I know of managers who seemed to get a kick out of disciplining and even sacking staff for being ill. Some of these people suffered from mental illness. Imagine suffering from anxiety and depression and then getting a written warning that said you would face the axe if you kept being ill. That must have been such a comfort. Feeling like death? Head in the spin? Feeling damaged and/or broken? Have a written warning. That should make you snap out of it. I say this because a) it’s true and b) May will say that “employers and organisations will be given additional training in supporting staff who need to take time off”. Will that be instead of disciplining them or as well as?
I’ll bet that May’s sudden interest in mental health has more to do with cost than sympathy. At the most conservative estimate, mental health costs the country over £100 billion a year, it’s an epidemic and it’s getting worse. But is she going to do anything meaningful? The young are particularly at risk of mental health and yet which group of society has been dumped on more than any other in recent years? Why, it’s the young, with huge hikes in tuition fees, by escalating house prices, by low paid, zero hour jobs and all the rest of it. And in six years of a Tory government, which for five years had some Lib Dems in it, they slashed mental health funding. May voted for every single cut, just remember that.
Let’s see the colour of your – our – money, Mrs May. How many more people need to suffer, even die, before the mental health epidemic is properly addressed?
Poor mental health ruins lives and I should know. I hope May means business this time, but I am not holding my breath. To date, the new prime minister has dealt solely in empty rhetoric like “Brexit means Brexit” and how she proposes to help the “just about managing” (JAMS). I expect her to say that “something must be done” and leave it at that, or at best start off a few reviews and working parties which will quietly forgotten whilst the government ploughs on with other stuff. This is why so many people are disillusioned with politicians. I remain angrier than disillusioned which I feel is a far better state of mind because I haven’t given up yet.
