Once again, it’s time to dust-off my old joke about Mental Health Awareness Week. This year, I wasn’t aware of it. BABOOM TISH! The week runs from 12th May to 18th May, so according to my calculations, today, 18th May 2025, is the last day of this year’s effort. Or to put it another way, this year’s lack of effort. Finding out about it today – the last day, and on a Sunday to boot – is, I humbly suggest, just a little late.
I thought at first that the fact we are away at the moment meant that we were out-of-touch with events at home, that everywhere across the UK there were special street parties and gatherings, supporting those suffering with mental illness. I saw nothing about it in the admittedly limited news I have been accessing, but maybe for our gutter press, mental health is just a matter of people being snowflakes and not facing up to the normal ups and downs of life? Well, that’s what pint-sized loser Rishi Sunak said mental health was all about.
Maybe I just imagined the tragic stories of people I knew and knew of who took their own lives last year because of severe mental health difficulties and the small army of friends who, like me, depend upon prescription antidepressants to get through the day? Maybe we should just pull ourselves together?
I do know from personal experience that progress in restoring our mental health services is being made, even if it is happening at glacial speed. I can cite 14 years of Conservative/Lib Dem spending cuts that rendered much of our mental health services virtually non-existent but in truth they were never that great anyway. At least when things were terrible for me, I got to see a consultant psychiatrist at Southmead Hospital. When I suffered my mental breakdown at the hands of the evil British Red Cross – never give them any money: bastards – I managed eventually to see a GP who offered me the double-whammy solution of more antidepressants and “you could go private”. As I had no money to go private – and frankly regard private health providers as being among the lowest forms of life – I was stuck with drugs and “mind how you go”. Luckily, I got through it all, as I have, luckily, always managed to do so far. Not everyone is so lucky.
I am currently reading a book called In Perfect Harmony – singalong pop in ’70s Britain by Will Hodgkinson and Slade guitar player Dave Hill talked about his mother who suffered from what today would be known as “clinical depression”. Hill pointed out that “these sort of things were not talked about then”, then being the 1950s and 1960s, but I am not sure they are talked about much these days, either, other when people say “things are so much better nowadays”. Only people who don’t use NHS facilities say things like that.
I commend the mental health charities for holding things like Mental Health Awareness Week, Mental Health Awareness Day and any other type of Mental Health Awareness event you can think about. Because, for what little use they are, something is always better than nothing and if just one person has what could be a life-saving encounter with a GP or even Samaritans, that’s a result.
Meanwhile, we now move onto Mental Health Unawareness Weeks for the foreseeable future. And we hope that those of us with conditions, some undiagnosed, are still here to talk about it when the next event comes along. And maybe, just maybe, one day mental health will be talked about in the same way as physical health. I suspect I’ll be dead long before that happens but while I am still here I’ll bang on about it.
Happy Mental Health Awareness Week to you all.
