“How are you?” asked a kindly acquaintance I bumped into in Sainsbury’s last week. At first, hesitation, which felt like an age but was probably little more than a split second. “Yeah, good thanks,” I replied. “You?” I was glad to add the ‘You?’ bit because it transferred attention from me to them. Ice broken, we had a nice chat before I headed off to the fresh fruits and veg. Honest. The pause was there for a reason. How was I? It was complicated.
Like many, I am not always ‘good’. On the contrary, I’m often very bad. However, 50 years or so of this mental health malarkey has taught me, somehow, to deal with it, of a fashion. In plain speaking, I know how to get by when things are bad. That’s a mixed blessing in some ways because being able to just about cope means there is little by way of assistance from the NHS. If you are at the beginning of a poor mental health journey, there is stuff, as we experts call it, and if you are in full meltdown mode there is stuff, too. If you are somewhere in between the extremes, good luck with that one.
Going back to my supermarket adventure, what if I told the truth? “How are you?” I am not sure my acquaintance would be overly impressed if I launched off into a lengthy diatribe of where my clinical depression was at any given moment. “Thanks for asking. I’m not too good, thanks. I don’t have the drive or enthusiasm to go out and do anything. I don’t want to spend too long away from my Man Cave. My creative juices aren’t flowing particularly well. I’m deeply disillusioned. I feel like – no, I am – a failure. I can’t sleep properly at night which often means I am too tired to do anything during the day. I don’t feel suicidal today and I don’t feel like harming myself. Other than that, yeah, good thanks. Now I excuse me why I head off to the bakery department to buy some fruitcake! Ha ha. See what I did there?” So, in that split second, I’ve decided to tell a white lie, leaving out everything except “Yeah, good thanks.”
“It’s okay to not be okay,” says the advertising blurb, but, as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, it is okay to not be okay in certain circumstances. With sympathetic, empathetic work colleagues and managers, it is unquestionably okay. But you have to qualify this stuff. The fact that mental health campaigns are still needed means we are not all on the same page with mental health. Much of my working life, at least until my latter years in the civil service, was in a ‘one size fits all’ environment. The Jack of all trades was the ideal staff member, not those with strengths in some aspects and weaknesses in others. I had, have, terrible weaknesses in some areas, like for example, taking on board information, which means I have to ask over and over again for people to repeat once I have forgotten. This was certainly down to my clinical depression and assorted forms of anxiety, along with the possibility that I have always lived with undiagnosed ADHD, for which I await a full diagnosis, hopefully before I grow too old. ADHD, I imagine, wouldn’t be okay to many people. “Don’t call us.”
It’s doubly weird to find a chance encounter in a supermarket too powerful and lasting in my psyche. I shouldn’t be thinking about it nearly a week on, but I do and I do because it happens all the time. When you ask if someone’s all right, the last thing you expect is for them not only to tell you they are not all right but also why not, certainly not if you’ve only popped in briefly to buy some tea bags. And anyway, who wants to hear some rambling old codger wallowing in a pool of self-pity, something I have always wondered if that’s what it sounded like after my woodwork teacher at Brislington School told me just that. Strange how these things stay not at the back of your mind, but right at the front. Since he said it, I’ve built what I consider to be an impressive defence mechanism to ensure people do not think there is anything not okay about me.
The COVID-19 pandemic will have played havoc worldwide with people’s mental health, not least those people who have never before suffered from poor mental health. The arrival of the virus has brought with it little but suffering and death, with only the odd good story – and here I am thinking about Captain Sir Tom Moore – to help see us navigate the all-consuming gloom. And this gloom has intensified in the spring and summer months, when all is sweetness and light, before the long, dark days of winter when many people suffer a hit to their mood. The deaths, the economic disaster that is about to hit the UK like an almighty storm, the like of which we have never seen, the lack of any effective treatment for the virus, the fact that a second wave could hit at any time, that we have a government which has messed-up big time at the cost of tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and the likelihood that the virus is going to be with us for, to quote Chris Whitty, “a very long time”, suggesting years, not months – these are all factors that fuck with people’s heads. And for all the media and government chatter, little or nothing is happening with the next epidemic: a huge crisis in mental health.
“How are you?” Hmm. About the same as yesterday and the day before. Tomorrow? That might be better, but then again it might not. Whether it’s okay to not be okay is a vexed question because right now if you are not okay, then there’s sod all you can do about it, short of calling your doctor and getting some drugs prescribed. I’m not sure if mine work anymore, but what if they do? Then, I could be in even worse shape than I thought I was.
In almost everywhere, despite the fancy words, mental health is still treated as less important than physical health. It isn’t and the gulf between the two, in the COVID-19 era, is wider than ever.
Keep asking “How are you?” because it shows you care. But don’t think, for all the right reasons, the answer will be as honest as you want it to be. It’s much easier to say. “Yeah, good thanks.” And I’ll still be glad you asked.
