Anyone remember my blog Generation Snowflake, where I railed against the Daily Hate Mail for trivialising mental health, reducing it to a question of so-called ‘snowflakery’? Fair play if you can’t because it was posted a very long time ago, which is to say yesterday, but guess what? The Telegraph is at it today. The Mail having riled it’s middle to old age mainly female readership, the Telegraph runs an article today, albeit not the front page main story, called ‘Generation sick note: the cost of medicalising anxiety’ which I have read, so you don’t have to. I am not providing a helpful link to the article and anyway it’s behind a paywall, which I must point out is not where I read it, but if you can trust me, it’s a re-tread of yesterday’s Mail filth. Positively evil.
Evil. Hmm. That’s a very strong word, isn’t it? Well, yes it is, actually, but in this instance a fair one. Like its ugly sister, this loathsome organ belittles a painful and debilitating illness into not just matters of cost, but by way of truth-twisting, suggesting strongly that actually anxiety isn’t an illness at all.
It’s almost as if there is some kind of right-wing agenda to remove mental illness from the list of what is an illness. Anyone who has ever suffered from mental illness – and I’ll try not to make it all about me this time, honest guv – will know that it’s a bit worse than just feeling a bit low. For many people, it can be existential when life becomes nigh on impossible to live in anything like a so-called ‘normal’ sense.
I am inclined to dismiss the ‘medicalising anxiety’ slur anyway because if it’s not an illness, then how come medics treat the condition, as they treat many other mental health conditions, with drugs; you know, drugs like you get for physical conditions. No doctor ever said, “Well, look. Your depression and anxiety isn’t actually an illness or even a condition. You’re just feeling a little self-pitying, that’s all. Try these tablets and they will take your self-pity away.” Sections of the press go much further than that. They say you are making it all up.
The hate merchants, the client journalists, of Fleet Street act, I would imagine, on the instructions of owners and proprietors who have been tapped-up by friendly politicians to create a different agenda. I know this comes across as all conspiracy theorism but given that the government has slashed mental health provision to the bone, and more recently to the point of amputation of said bones, why else would they make hateful suggestions such as ‘medicalising anxiety’? No one ever talks about medicalising cancer or heart disease but in Broken Britain you get a free hit with mental illness.
If generation sick note is a myth, and given sick notes no longer exist, we know it is, it would be good if we had a government who were prepared to take action to tackle the dramatic increase in poor mental health, something that definitely isn’t a myth. No one is ‘medicalising anxiety’, or for that matter any form of mental illness. They are medical conditions to start with. The nation as a whole suffers when millions are in poor mental health and to try to turn it into a nonsensical debate about ‘snowflakery’ is pathetic.
