If there is anything guaranteed to piss me off more than the Daily Mail, it’s when the Daily Mail writes about mental health. Not my mental health: everyone’s. Because, as with everything else in the mental health department, the Mail doesn’t take it seriously.
My ongoing bugbear is with it’s incessant use of the term ‘happy pills’ when referring to anti-depressants. Now, I do not take an industrial sized prescription of anti-depressants to make me happy. When I want to be happy, I’ll spend time with my family, I’ll listen to some music, I’ll have a glass of wine, I’ll write something. I do not need pills to make me happy. There are no pills which can do this.
No. My medication enables me to function at a very basic level. You might see this apparently happy-go-lucky chap smiling and laughing with the best of them and, if you don’t know anything about depression and anxiety, you might think that I don’t need medication for my depression and anxiety. You might even suggest that I can have my mental illness cured on the spot by, say, a Shaman or a motivational speaker (same thing) who knows fuck all about mental illness but guarantees to be able to cure it. However, it doesn’t make me angry.
The far right Mail doesn’t like the idea that mental illness exists at all. In fact, it probably thinks that it doesn’t, given the constant references to ‘happy pills’. Dacre’s vile organ believes that us mental folk should “snap out of it” and “stop feeling sorry for ourselves”. After all, mental health never hurt anyone much beyond wrecking people’s lives and, in the most tragic circumstances, ending them.
Get a grip, folk. For literally any kind of mental illness, the only assistance you really need is by way of a mental health professional. Happy pills do not exist, you cannot cure yourself of anxiety and, say, OCD, by wishing it away, any more than you can with cancer. And those who say otherwise are little more than vermin.
I’m the happy depressive today, I might not be tomorrow. But don’t fucking patronise me with shit about ‘happy pills’ and motivational speakers. I might come looking for you (but maybe not).
