My thanks are due to Matthew Parris for pointing out the obvious. ADHD, which I was finally diagnosed with last year, doesn’t exist and autism is barely a thing, either. And depression and anxiety? Just “perfectly common responses to circumstance”. And all of us with these made-up conditions and illnesses, well, we’re just benefit scroungers. Someone had to say it, right? Especially someone with extensive medical qualifications. Let’s just check them out:
- Studied law and international relations at two universities
- Worked briefly for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
- Worked for the Conservative party
- Became an MP
- Jumped into the River Thames once to rescue a dog
- Presented TV and radio programmes
- Wrote, mainly for the Times
Yes, you can see that Parris is ideally qualified to diss mental health professionals and neurologists. What do they know?
I can only imagine a small army of elderly Times readers nodding along at his assertion that this is about nothing more than “bad medical science”, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean. It certainly fits in with the narrative of the world in which I grew up where anything to do with mental health was dismissed with a brief “pull yourself together” and “everyone gets a bit fed up sometimes”. Essentially, “there’s nothing wrong with you”.
In the eyes of Parris, am I one of those who is devaluing the afflictions suffered by genuinely sick people or am I one of the genuinely sick people? Unlike the Conservative party to which Parris presumably still belongs, I’m rather inclined to believe the word of experts, whether they are plumbers, electricians or mental health practitioners. And I am more inclined to believe the diagnoses I had for both clinical depression and ADHD.
Parris appears to suggest that poor mental health is simply a matter of people reacting to things that other people cope with easily. Maybe for some people, that’s true, but I would say for the majority of us poor mental health is just that. I didn’t make up panic attacks or night terrors as a child and I didn’t pretend I was depressed from the age of about 16 onwards. Why would I do that? Most of us with mental health and neurological conditions stagger through life and my only association with the benefits system was helping to pay benefits out for the DWP or investigating those who were defrauding the system.
I hope we are not going to enter yet more culture wars where a group of people are attacked and vilified, always by those from the political right by the way, for being ill or living with conditions that make life difficult at times. No one ever talks about cancer like this. “Oh, just pull yourself together” and so on. Why, then, do some people feel the need to denigrate people who are sick in another way?
I have known and known of countless people who suffered from harrowing mental health conditions and went on to kill themselves. They weren’t making up their illnesses. On the contrary, their illnesses were so bad they literally could no longer live them.
Parris is, of course, free to give his opinions and luckily for him he can do so in a national newspaper. I’m free to give mine, too, albeit to a much smaller audience. Unless you have been there, you don’t know how horrible it is to be depressed and anxious or how various neurological conditions affect and sometimes ruin lives. I would had given anything to have lived a life without depression and ADHD and I resent any implication that I may have neither, or that it’s just me reacting to things in a bad way.
It wasn’t that long ago that people kept their mental health issues to themselves. I know I did. More recently, we’ve become more open about it. Suggesting it’s not real could have the effect of people bottling things up again, sometimes with terrible consequences. It is real, it’s horrible and people need help, not inexpert doubters suggesting we’re not sick at all.
