Owen O’Kane, I read on a BBC Maestro clickbait post on Facebook, is a psychotherapist, former palliative care specialist, and ex-NHS clinical lead for mental health. He’s an expert on anxiety, too, and the post says, ‘Anxiety is not your enemy’. All you need to do, presumably to cure your anxiety, is to listen to his online course, for a mere £79, and you will:
- Understand why you feel anxious
- Work with, not against, your anxiety
- Interrupt overthinking spirals
- Build habits for lasting change
Okay, then. Let’s give Mr O’Kane the benefit of doubt, assume that he knows what he is talking about and, moreover, his course does improve people’s anxiety. Then, £79, assuming you have £79 hanging about down the back of the sofa, will be money well spent. Whether it works or not, terms like ‘Anxiety is not your enemy’ are guaranteed to raise my hackles.
Being far cleverer than me, Mr O’Kane will be able to explain in more depth than I can muster that how his methods work, but I take issue with the header: ‘Anxiety is not your enemy’.
I have known many people who have suffered greatly from anxiety. Some still do and, I fear, always will. I know and know of people who have taken their own lives because of anxiety. I am pretty sure that those poor people and the people they left behind do not see anxiety as anything other than the enemy.
Having had my own life ravaged by clinical depression and, I discovered far too late in life, ADHD, I see neither as friends. My aforementioned hackles are raised when people say things like: ‘ADHD is my superpower’. Fucking hell: a lifelong inability to focus, concentrate and even learn. That’s a superpower? How so? Actually, if you do happen to have examples of the superpower aspect to ADHD, other neurological conditions and mental illnesses, please do not waste my time with them. My own evidence-free feelings on the matter suggest that they are not life-enhancing but life wrecking.
Please, if you have some kind of anxiety issue, do not just leave it. While 14 years of an austerity-obsessed Tory government, in which from 2010 to 2015 some Lib Dems took jobs (to their eternal shame), all but destroyed NHS psychiatry and support for those with neurological conditions, I’d strongly urge folk to see their GP. Even if all can get is a limited period of counselling or even drugs, these things are better than nothing. And if Owen O’Kane’s online course is the kind of thing that floats your boat, then launch that boat.
Better by far to use the services of medically qualified professionals and not quack practitioners like hypnotherapists and, the lowest of the low, inspirational speakers whose methods, if they actually worked, would surely be mainstream across the medical professions. The fact that they aren’t tells its own story.
If anxiety is not your enemy and your neurological condition of choice is your superpower, then lucky you. Both sound totally mad statements to me, but I suppose it takes all sorts. No one ever says ‘cancer is not your enemy’ or ‘Parkinson’s is your superpower’ but we regard the brain as an afterthought. It’s just like the days when us mental folk were just told to ‘snap out of it’ and ‘stop feeling sorry for (ourselves)’.
In any event, online and video ‘treatment’ doesn’t work for me. Certainly in terms of my mental health needs, I need to be in the same room as someone who knows what they are doing and talking about. If they do work for you, then great. Just don’t do nothing.
