Mental Health Awareness week

Starting today, it’s Mental Health Awareness week. I wasn’t aware of this until just now. There’s nothing about it on the radio or telly. However, I’m always aware of my mental health. I wonder if, for the next seven days, anything will really change? If I had my way, it would be Mental Health Awareness week every week. Still, let’s be grateful for small mercies. Seven days are better than nothing, aren’t they?

So what shall we expect during the next week? Well, there will be plenty of references to it on social networks and I, for one, will be delighted to see and read them. As I have repeated as nauseam, poor mental health was only recently invented. Prior to that, people were supposed to ‘just snap out of it’ and ‘pull yourself together’. Nowadays, many people, though not all, recognise that poor mental health is actually an illness.

I am always suspicious when people say things are better than they used to be with regard to mental health. There is, we are told, less stigma, people are able to talk more freely about their demons, better treatments are available. The picture is far more complex than that.

I am not blind to the fact that some attitudes are better. Many people are more able to grasp the reality that you cannot wish away an illness like depression by somehow being happier. You cannot cure depression by reading a book about it, by listening to – God help us – a motivational speaker or undergoing hypnotherapy. These are quack ‘cures’, no more useful than homeopathy. You don’t treat cancer with quack ‘cures’, so why pretend they work with mental health? Spoiler alert: they don’t.

I see a very mixed picture, although arguably things are actually worse than they used to be. The NHS, for example, has undergone massive cuts in mental health expenditure. It is now far harder to access treatment than it was a decade ago. If you are unlucky enough to suffer from a severe condition, you could end up being treated hundreds of miles from home. It’s a postcode lottery. If you suffer from minor to middling issues, you can wait upwards of a year to receive therapy. I can think of no other field of medicine where people suffering from ill health have so little treatment available.

GPs are horrendously busy and it’s hard enough to get an appointment. And if you can get one, you end up seeing a doctor chosen at random by the practice. I’ll tell you from personal experience as a lifelong mental case that there is nothing worse than having to explain, over and over again, your illness to a different GP, often a locum who will be here today and gone tomorrow. It’s incredibly stressful and upsetting and I am highly embarrassed to say that I have been reduced to tears in the doctor’s surgery on numerous occasions when having to go through my illness in sometimes minute detail. It is horribly stressful, anxiety inducing and exhausting. And when I have finished seeing the GP, I need a lot of time alone to pull myself together again. People don’t see that bit because we, the great mentally ill unwashed, are good actors and/or are horribly embarrassed. We have to be.

It’s like, as we have said before, the “How are you?” question. “How are you?” Hmm. You’re in the middle of depressive episode so what do you say? “Fine, thanks.” Or, “Good!” A throwaway, albeit well-intentioned, question demands only a throwaway answer. No one wants to hear you say, “Pretty grim, thanks. I can’t sleep properly and when I do it’s full of anxiety dreams. And I feel a complete failure, a let down to my family, dead and alive, who invested so much into me, only to see that investment drain away in an endless fog of depression.” And that’s just for starters. “Fine, thanks,” is so much easier, although I have more recently deflected the question by answering “still breathing” or “been worse”.

I am not entirely sure how Mental Health Awareness week will pan out. My feeling is that it’s another brick in the wall. In the short term, nothing much will change. My hope is that awareness will improve, awareness from everyone including politicians, employers and the woman/man on the Clapham Omnibus. Because we know that by next week, the public’s attention will be focussed on something Katie Price has said and done, or perhaps the activities of an eccentric contestant on Britain’s Got Talent.

For me, it’s as simple and straightforward as it ever was: I just need to get through another day and still be standing at the end of it. I can’t think ahead any further than that. If I could, I’d have achieved so much more in life and wouldn’t hate myself so much.

So, here’s to Mental Health Awareness week. Whatever it brings, and I suspect it will not be very much, it’s probably better to have one than not. Isn’t it?