I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health – Society’s understanding of mental health issues locates the problem inside the person – and ignores the politics of their distress

24 comments

  4. This aligns very closely with my own experience. I suspect a lot of people suffering from mental health issues are really just suffering from having a miserable existance.

    I started having debilitating mental heath issues around the time I had to move to a shit town into horrible insecure accomodation with a poorly paid job run by hostile tyrants, and my relationship with my partner wasn’t very healthy.

    I went on anti-anxiety medication and did CBT to no avail. Eventually saw a therapist who helped me make drastic changes in my life. Turns out there wasn’t anything wrong with my my brain chemistry, it was just reacting to being trapped indefinately in a shit life. Depression and anxiety are pretty effective ways to keep you in bed and away from harm.

    Funnily enough, now I have money and a house I own and a nice partner and a job with decent human beings, my “mental health issues” have evaporated.

    The article put it brilliantly when it said:

    *If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through.*

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    So while there are plenty of people with pathological and inappropriate chemical imbalances in their brain, in my case my brain was working perfectly and my environment needed changing. My anxiety wasn’t something I had to “overcome”, it was something natural I had to listen to instead.

    I suspect the drastic increases in mental health problems and suicides since the ’08 crisis are caused by increasing poverty, inequality and not enough individual or employment rights. People are trapped in shit towns, in shit jobs, in shit flats with shit prospects, getting ripped off and neglected everywhere they turn.

    My dad was able to support a stay-at-home wife, three kids, a mortgage and a car on his salary. Nowadays the same job would have him working 100 hours a week and still unable to afford rent.

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    It’s terrifying because without an integrated and coordinated effort to fundementally turn our society around, then I suspect mental illness (and all the lost wealth, productivity, suffering, child abuse, murders and suicides that go with it) will continue to skyrocket.

    I suspect this winter will make millions more mentally ill, and it’ll create a cycle of illness that will affect generations to come.

  5. Definitely. Can’t medicate poverty, loneliness, lack of opportunities, and a sense of impending doom. You can however gaslight a nation into believing a natural response to a shit environment is unnatural, or a type of “maladjustment” and convince sufferers they’re the problem. Or that all they need to do is pop some pills.

    My mum took her own life three years ago and her psychologist called the next day to apologise. He said his team had dropped the ball. Missed the signs because they were stripped to the bone as a service and struggling immensely. He was freaking out I’d pursue a case and he’d lose his job. Terrible situation.

    What we’re seeing is many many years of a profits first ideology coming home to roost and a government that is the recipient of said profits through vested interests (and so actively perpetuates it). It’s a game to see how much exploitation and neglect we can tolerate as a society. It’s fucked up.

  6. Someone posted this the other day which makes basically the same point – [https://mforum.com.au/joke-turns-terribly-serious-sls-shit-life-syndrome/](https://mforum.com.au/joke-turns-terribly-serious-sls-shit-life-syndrome/)

    Its kind of wild its not exactly a secret that poverty and the stresses that come with that are major contributors to a whole host of physical and mental health problems yet we just shrug and pretend there’s nothing that can be done about it.

  7. This is so true. I’ve never had anxiety or depression when I was younger, first cropped up during very stressful exams and coursework at uni (fair enough). But now nearly a decade out of uni it’s so much worse. Constant anxiety about money drives you insane. In the short periods of financial stability I’ve found myself so much happier and relaxed and confident.

    Working full time and being one mistake away from being homeless is enough to drive anyone mad.

  8. “violence is never the answer” is the cause of most mental health issues in the uk.

    the promise of specifically directed violent retribution was the foundation for every bit of civil liberty people have. or, had.

    now people are divided and gas lit into blaming themselves for decades of deliberate economic mismanagement by a government that is culturally opposed to the premise of a society of equals, equal opportunity, and ‘rights’ for anyone not chosen by them.

    funny how a lifetime of abusive environments causes problems.

  9. You don’t even need to rewrite the rulebook. For example one of the elements of low-level difficulties with mood is looking at what you can control. If there was widespread acknowledgement of the validity of looking at the role the government has in a person’s life, and actions they can take (e.g. voting, speaking to MP, campaigning), it could definitely fit into a CBT framework. Obviously there’s difficulty around political bias but it’s just so weird to leave political aspects completely unmentioned.

  10. Therapists have a phrase for this, ‘Shit life syndrome’. So many people’s mental illhealth is from having a miserable life. Miserable life leading to feeling miserable, it’s actually the mind behaving predictably in reaction to its situation.

  11. I agree with this. Politics is one thing but I really hate how we are becoming more removed from nature and the sort of communities we evolved to be in, as well as the rush of modern life. I’m not after a return to medieval times or the stone age but I hate how we are expected to be constantly plugged in and to live to work. People would be a lot happier in general if society was more equal and we were free to do more than struggle for a meagre existence.

  12. An actually decent article! Love to see well-written pieces like this.

    We’ve pathologised so many human experiences that it’s causing more harm than good.

    This is anecdotal, but…

    Staff in one hospital have had midwives bring a distraught woman to them for being “ridiculous and throwing a tantrum”, when she threw herself on the ground crying after being told her unborn child had more than a 50% chance of dying.

    Another man was brought in after saying he wanted to put his affairs in order, go on holiday and kill himself because he had just been told he had less than six months to live with bowel cancer. He didn’t want to suffer or put his children and grandchildren through the experience.

    In both of these cases, the staff did not want to accept that mental health services could do nothing for these people because both are *normal human reactions*. You can’t just medicate away death, family problems, illness, loss of livelihood, or money struggles.

    We’re going to have huge increases in anxiety and depression that is going to be caused by life experience rather than anything physical, and so many developmental issues once the current cohort of kids reaches adulthood, and we’re going to be putting strain on services trying to medicate what can’t be medicated.

  13. I’ve been saying this (and being shouted down) for years now.

    So much of ‘psychology’ is a soft science at best. Claims of ‘chemical imbalances’ are common explanations of why mental illness occurs, with the assertion that this is just something that ‘happens’, and isn’t influenced by outside factors.

  14. So, are we saying people are more stressed now than when poverty was even worse?

    Granted inequality has increased (slightly) recently, but the statisticians have to use ‘relative poverty’ as a measure, because living standards are wayyyyy better than they were 100 years ago.

    Removal of hierarchies is communism; the most evil of all political and economic systems. They’re advocating the sort of society that led to the gulags. Cannot believe you guys are lapping this up.

  16. I also think we have stopped looking for biological underpinnings of a lot of conditions and blamed them on personal failures in thinking. I suspect in time a lot of these conditions will be determined to have biological underpinnings and are treatable properly. That isn’t to say Shit Life Syndrome isn’t the cause of some of it, but its not all of it and we just aren’t putting in enough research to understand a lot of complex conditions that are probably more to do with toxic air, additives in water and food and a host of changes to our environments, or perhaps infections or other things we just haven’t looked at. There is so much we don’t know about the biological underpinnings of well known diseases its premature to assign psychological or other mechanisms and what it does is stop real work being done to understand them fully and completely.

  17. In other words, feeling depressed is an appropriate reaction to the current state of things right now

  19. Yeah! I agree! Let’s take away all personal responsibility from everyone, and blame all their personal mental problems on external factors beyond their control!

    Got OCD? No, no, it’s not your fault at all, it’s them damn Tories what makes you like that!

    What’s that, young girl, you’re self-harming all the time? Blame the folks in Westminster, they may as well be holding the scissors you cut yourself with for you!

    Oh no, you’re suffering from both bulimia and anorexia?! When will the Foreign Secretary learn! She’s really the one who’s stopping you from having a healthy relationship with food!

  20. Yeah the whole place is about ego death and breaking people so they’ll do all the hard work and think they don’t deserve more. Culture. Cult. There’s enough for everyone but the dragons can only sleep on piles of gold etc.

  22. Pretty much yeah, a lot of our efforts revolve around supporting mental health crisis without noting our society is driving people nuts.

  23. This is something I’ve been thinking about for some time now. Is poor mental health / depression / anxiety a ‘disease process’ – a pathophysiological disorder, or is it in many cases the expected, normal behaviour of the brain when subjected to the stressors we face?

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    It’s something that boils my piss. As an emergency services worker, I deal with both acute and chronic stress. Sometimes it’s the acute stress of a particularly upsetting job, but in my experience I find that ‘easier’ to deal with. The chronic stress is the real killer for me. The constantly being kept late (as though a 12 hour shift isn’t long enough – the longest I’ve worked in a single shift was 18 hours with a 25 minute break), constantly not getting meal breaks until 10 hours into a shift, changing my body clock quickly from being awake during the day, to being awake all night, and back again. Lack of senior management understanding or support. The feeling of being nothing more than a ‘bum on a seat’.

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    The grand solution to this, as I am reminded every so often in emails from the ‘boss’ of the service I work for, is for me to take charge of my own mental health, to try some yoga, drink less alcohol, go for a spa day. Is doing a bit of mindfulness or some yoga going to do anything to deal with the root-cause of why my career sees people suffering PTSD at rates twice that of deployed soldiers? Why 89% of staff report being ‘fatigued’ at work? 91% say they do not feel valued? 79% say they have – or are – considering leaving the service?

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    This is part of a wider pattern of corporate deceit. It’s the same as ‘greenwashing’. Putting up an ‘R U OK’ poster and reminding staff that their mental health is up to them to manage isn’t just patronising, it’s fundamentally dishonest in that it puts all the onus on the individual, who is unable to control the events that lead to them having poor mental health in the first place. The people who have the ability to actually make meaningful change are the exact same people saying it’s your own fault if you can’t ‘hack it’ anymore.

  24. Love that this is being more mainstream. Clicked this article and it wasn’t written by Johann Hari OR Jessica Taylor, but someone else is saying it!

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