The mental health façade

The mental health trend is also all bark and no bite – that is, the problem is laid bare for all to see, but no solutions are put forward.

‘Hey mental health, nice to see you again buddy. Haven’t seen you for nearly two years, how’ve you been? Stuck in quarantine, no doubt. Haven’t we all?’

Societal rhetoric surrounding the issue of mental health is like an anti-war Democrat: it invades and occupies the cultural centre and captures the media’s full attention while the topic is hip and trendy, then falls off the face of the earth when it’s needed most, and the message becomes rather inconvenient for those who had peddled it.

When former President Barack Obama was sworn into office in 2009, and then didn’t bring the troops home nor shut Guantanamo Bay, America’s established anti-war movement – always an appendage of the Democratic party – immediately fell silent. An estimated 2,000 drone strikes were carried out under his administration, and not a peep was uttered.

Similarly, when the pandemic struck the western world in 2020, all the big-gun talk about mental health was launched into the abyss. In the world before Covid, discussing one’s feelings and ‘breaking the stigma’ around mental health, particularly men’s mental health, was as in vogue as it could be. The tremors caught the upper echelons of the state, as the Government summoned a ‘Minister for Loneliness.’

Then when ‘stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’ became the aim of the game, mental health was exterminated by silence. Connecting with another human being in what future historians and sociologists will term the ‘physical realm’ became culpable to murder; meeting with a group too numerically large became grounds for arrest.

To make matters worse, social atomisation, the root and branch of Britain’s mental health crisis, was wed to financial catastrophe. Reduced income, job losses, and economic uncertainty fuelled population-wide feelings of hopelessness and anxiety. A double-barrel shotgun was placed to poor mental health’s temple, and both bullets were fired simultaneously.

There has been an unprecedented 21 per cent increase in alcoholic related liver deaths in the UK since the start of the pandemic. Prescriptions for anti-depressants and calls to mental health charities reached an all-time high. Whitehall and the wider culture, having been so adamant about addressing the issue before, turned a blind eye to the disaster.

Now the issue of mental health has returned, sparked by US gymnast Simone Biles’s sudden withdrawal from the Tokyo Olympic games for mental health reasons. Now I’m not going to elaborate on this individual case, or criticise or support her decision, but the move by the legacy media and mainstream culture to pounce on the issue of mental health as if they were vultures diving onto an animal carcass has made me very cynical about the whole situation.

Mental health is a trend in public debate, and nothing more. Divulging the self-declared dire state of one’s own mental health becomes a grievance badge, and connects oneself to the cultural in-crowd; rather ironically, for all the discourse about ‘revealing your own true feelings’, humans are far too biologically hard-wired to conform to the prevailing winds of time and circumstance to be completely trusted.

The mental health trend is also all bark and no bite – that is, the problem is laid bare for all to see, but no solutions are put forward, besides of course, talking about how bad the problem is. That is because the real solutions are somewhat anti-establishment, going against the grain of everything else mass culture claims is in vogue.

Mental health issues aren’t just the emotion one possesses in the moment, otherwise hangovers will be on the same list as depression. Like how ninety per cent of an iceberg is below water, mental health issues are the aftershocks of other, more substantial problems; there is a deep, underlying cause as to why these mental health issues arise.

Humans are not machines, but we have to ensure that our body is properly maintained and in working order, otherwise its chemistry becomes diseased and inefficient. Throwing a spanner into this apparatus of flesh and blood is a key cause of mental health issues. Lack of sleep and consuming unhealthy food contributes to depression, as does addiction itself, because the brain becomes desensitised to wider stimuli (an addict enjoys life less).

In addition, humans are social creatures, and, as I said before, the root and branch of this nation’s mental health crisis is largely down to atomisation. Social media has played a big part in this, ensnaring the youth to lust over likes rather than building relationships with someone who isn’t made of pixels. An increase in youth depression and suicide can all be correlated with the rising universality of social media.

Even in the real world, relationships aren’t built to last or have any meaning, depriving the individual of that much needed security and companionship. This can be seen with hook-up culture and its digital enablers (Tinder and the like). When the fun ends, sadness, regret, and abandonment seeps in.

I likely witnessed the greatest contradiction displayed by the dominant culture’s mental health mercenaries the other day when I stumbled into the living room where my family was watching some mid-week television. Before the most depraved and IQ-destroying show in living memory – I am of course referring to Love Island – was on an advertisement break, one advert stressed the importance of mental health. Talk about no smoke without fire. One presenter and two contestants committing suicide makes you wonder: why was Jeremy Kyle booted off the air instead?

To solve this mental health crisis, our hero is going to need to rain brimstone and fire upon this materialist regime. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon; no incisions will be made against the enemies of good mental health. In fact, the current cultural trajectory says this villain will grow in strength, even as wishy-washy mental health ‘stigma-breaking’ becomes more prominent.