Tomorrow, Monday 10th October 2022, it’s World Mental Health Day. The theme this year is ‘Sunday scaries’. There are some nice words about it on the government’s own website with the unhealthy health secretary, Thérèse Coffey, saying this: “My focus is on making sure people can get the care they need, when they need it – and that includes for their mental wellbeing. The Every Mind Matters tool is a great way to build your mental resilience and help ward off the anxiety many of us feel on a Sunday.” I call bullshit. It’s just meaningless bollocks, weasel words. They don’t give a shit.
I know this because I have been locked in the system, such as it is, for well over 50 years and today I am no better off mentally than I was when my mum was taking me to a psychiatrist every Tuesday afternoon. The only thing that’s changed in the intervening years is that there are no psychiatrists you can see these days, unless you have been sectioned or you have lots of money.
The Every Mind Matters tool – if you can find it through this link – may help some people, so I recommend it, if you think it might help you. For me, it’s as much use as an ashtray on a motorcycle. I have so many issues that a simple ‘tool’ isn’t going to help me much. In fact, I’m at the stage where I am resigned to never getting treatment for my depression, anxiety and panic attacks. (I have only just worked out that I suffer them, as I did in my teenage years. I just didn’t realise what they were. What a mess.) All they can offer me is drugs, followed by “Do get in touch with the surgery if you need help, although you know full well there isn’t any. NEXT PATIENT.” I may have made the last bit up.
I’m resigned to my demons being around forever and I have given up hoping that I’ll ever be seen by the NHS for an adult ADHD test. Instead, I have dumped all over my own principles by going private to get one because I am so desperate. The good news is that I will be seen in four months time because that’s the waiting list for a parasitical run-for-profit health mental health provider, which is longer than the NHS waiting list before Covid. That’s why Ms Coffey, the new Ann Widdecombe with added beer and cigars, can do one. She’s going through the motions, being seen to apparently do something when in reality she’s doing nothing.
Self-help, as suggested by Every Mind Matters, doesn’t work for me because my mind doesn’t work properly to start with. Stuff like taking more exercise to feel better mentally: if you find it a struggle some days to stand up from your chair, then how does that work? It’s not a cure. It’s a suggestion. If it was that easy, don’t you think the millions of us who are mental cases might have tried that by now?
I’m sick of these special mental health days. They are regarded by politicians as a tick in the box, something that will be here today and gone tomorrow. And by Tuesday, it will all be forgotten and we will continue to be told there’s nothing for us.
Every mind matters? If only.
