It really isn't supposed to be this hard
Don't let politicians tell you a mental health crisis is just part of life
Here in the UK, we’re in a mental health crisis. Yet our politicians are busy insisting that we’re all just a bunch of snowflakes - because it’s easier to blame the victims of your broken system than it is to bother fixing the system.
I Am Happy is now The Gathering.
I’ve rebranded to focus on what really matters to me - bringing us all together. I want to create a space for the misfits, the outsiders, the rebels and the daring thinkers to feel heard and valued. A place where you can come to understand and appreciate your unique and precious self, and where you can find your voice to share your message with the world. By making space for different voices, we build meaningful communities. And by understanding and valuing ourselves, we are better able to understand and value others.
There’s a place for you in The Gathering - want to join us?
I don’t normally get political on here, but I’ve not screamed at the radio like I did today in a long while, so I guess today’s the day I’m gonna. All of life is political, anyway - whether you think you “get involved with politics” or not, every aspect of your existence is impacted by political choices, and whether you engage or not is still a political choice. When we try to avoid engaging, we should remember that not everyone has the privilege to ignore politics because their very right to walk freely on this Earth is at the mercy of political manoeuverings. But anyway, I digress.
The point is, I’m really pissed off the with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
In this country, more than 1.8 million people are currently on the waiting list for mental health treatment, with some people waiting more than a year. The Royal College of Psychiatrists has reported that many people are trapped on “hidden waiting lists” (where patients have had an initial referral appointment, to tick the box for having been seen, but are still waiting for treatment to start - these patients aren’t recorded in official waiting list figures), and that 78% of these people have had to resort to emergency services or a crisis line. Yet, in his infinite wisdom, Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride declared that we’re simply labelling as mental illness the normal ups and downs of life.
It would be easy to dismiss this statement as idiotic, but it’s actually a carefully calculated move. “There’s not actually a crisis, it’s just that young people today can’t hack real life” is a brazen attempt by the government to avoid taking responsibility for the absolute shit show they’ve made of our mental health services. Life is just tough and you should just deal with that and stop complaining is a line that should belong in dystopian fiction, yet we hear it time and time again, and, somehow, we mostly swallow it.
This is just how it is
My day job is working with businesses to help them create more inclusive and collaborative environments for their teams. I hear a LOT of resistance to suggestions around making work more positive. Work’s not supposed to be fun, young people these days are afraid of hard work, everyone just wants to sit at home in their pyjamas instead of coming into the office.
I think what people really mean when they say these things is: I have had years of exhausting myself for my job, I don’t see why anyone else should have it easier, and I don’t want to be told that I didn’t need to be this miserable.
It’s scary to contemplate that maybe you’ve put yourself through a lot of pain and suffering that wasn’t necessary. That perhaps your hardship wasn’t noble or virtuous, but actually you’ve just been a mug this whole time. It’s much easier to simply frame those who are demanding better for themselves as lazy and entitled.
It isn’t just in a work context that this happens. School isn’t supposed to be fun. Parenting isn’t supposed to be easy. We’ve started hearing a lot of you’re not entitled to own your own home. Now we’re getting, life isn’t supposed to be happy.
When did we start accepting this shit? Are we really just going to nod along and say, “oh, ok, we’re meant to be miserable, let’s carry on then”?!
It could be so much better, though
It wasn’t actually Mel Stride I was shouting at when I heard this story on the radio. It was BBC Radio 2 presenter Jeremy Vine, who suggested that, since suicide rates haven’t risen much in the last 24 years, perhaps that’s indicative of the fact Stride is right and there hasn’t really been a rise in mental health issues. That all this labelling is pathologising normal experience. I can’t believe it hasn’t occurred to Vine, who’s a perfectly intelligent man, that the reason suicide rates haven’t risen is because we have got better at diagnosing (and therefore treating) mental health conditions. Given how much more understanding we now have, we should all be deeply shocked that suicide rates haven’t gone down. Arguing over whether more people should be feeling life isn’t worth living if they were really that unwell is a new low, even for the right-wing media.
The fact that any one person feels that life is too hard is a tragedy. But the fact is that most of us feel life is unbearably hard a lot of the time, and yet we just keep carrying on. And, because so many of us find it difficult, we accept the idea that life is meant to be difficult. Life is currently difficult, life always has been difficult, but surely our aim as a society should be to make it less difficult?
Life is hard, but it could be so much better.
The fact is, it doesn’t need to be this way. There are solutions to many of the mental health issues we face, but they require investment from politicians who prefer spending money on things that will benefit them. And they manipulate us into thinking that we want them to. Worse still, they manipulate us into thinking it’s our fault that we need help. That our struggles are our failings rather than theirs. It’s a lie.
Life isn’t supposed to be this hard, and it doesn’t have to be. Life can be beautiful, and magical, and free, and spacious and relaxed. All that’s missing is enough will from enough people. If enough of us say “no more”, we can enable a different way of being. We can open up opportunities for healing and joy and connection.
The system benefits from us all feeling a bit broken. That way, we don’t have the energy to go against it, or even to question it. We just keep on serving it. If anyone dares to step outside the boxes that have been created for us, or to ask if there might be another option, the powers that be will mock or vilify them, because they don’t want anyone else to get the idea to join them. They want us kept in line, obediently staying firmly within the lines.
Don’t believe this bullshit. It’s not your fault if you’re finding life tough right now, because life has been made unreasonably hard. But life is not supposed to be this hard and you don’t have to put up with this crap. We can, and should, all demand better. And if they won’t give it to us, we can create it for ourselves.
There is a better way that’s possible.
Oh my. How I completely agree with everything you say here x
🥹😔🥰