In the early spring of 2011, I was back in therapy again. My father had just died, I had fallen apart on the way to Ottawa for his funeral and I knew I had lost my way. Again. First, I had bereavement counselling which took the edge off my depression, followed by further depression therapy and later CBT, which didn’t cut it for me. I was struck by how quick and easy it was to get access to NHS treatment. Soon, I was in a kind of remission before the Black Dog returned, as he always does. By 2018, after suffering bullying and abuse from managers at the British Red Cross, I was wanted to get back in therapy again, but by then it was so much harder. The Conservative government of 2010, in which some Liberal Democrats had jobs, embarked on a damaging course of austerity, leading to huge cuts to the NHS. Mental health services were cut to the bone and I had to wait over a year to get therapy. Now, all of a sudden, the current Conservative government seems to have done a 180. Or has it?
There is no doubt that the effect of coronavirus has had a hugely damaging effect on people’s mental health, mine included, something that, at least on the face of it, the same right wing Tories who introduced austerity had finally recognised. One barking mad backbench Tory followed another in the Commons debate about Boris Johnson’s latest lockdown and people like the loathsome Andrea Leadsom and cranks like Iain Duncan Smith and John Redwood were worried about how lockdown would affect the mentally ill. Finally, they’d got it. After years of slashing mental health funding, they had seen the wrong in their ways. But it turned out that they hadn’t at all. They still didn’t care.
The Tory right opposed lockdown not, as they were pretending, to stop people like me becoming very ill, but to use people’s poor mental health as a weapon to not lockdown. In other words, their sole motive was to prevent lockdown because these so called libertarians see it as a threat to our basic freedoms. The very same people who voted consistently to slash funding for mental health services didn’t care at all. How could I have been so naive to imagine otherwise?
Of course, I didn’t really imagine otherwise at all. I could smell a large rat as soon as I heard the anti-lockdown rhetoric begin. I knew what they were up to. Bastards. As if preventing a lockdown would cure people’s anxieties and depression. On the contrary, allowing COVID-19 to run wild throughout the country whilst shielding, that is imprisoning, those of us of a certain age and with various medical conditions, would somehow benefit us.
Indeed, compulsorily locking us up for potentially months, maybe even years – because make no mistake, that is what these so called libertarians want to do – so that society can get back to ‘normal’ would have no negative effects on mental health, would it? These cynical, conniving politicians never tell you that bit, do they? After half a dozen or so speeches, I was not best pleased, to say the least.
Just don’t believe these lying Tories. They don’t care about our mental health, or any other aspects of our health. But they do care about the economy and if millions of us are forced to stay at home, well that’s simply too bad. And the very idea that Iain Fucking Duncan Smith gives a shit about anyone is absurd.
