A word on Mental Health Awareness Week

This week, if you don’t already know, is ‘Mental Health Awareness Week’. The annual campaign to get people thinking about their mental health and how to look after it, as well as encouraging us to open up and increase understanding around it. This year the focus is on movement and taking more exercise. It is well known that this improves our psychological wellbeing which is no surprise as it also helps our physical health. The two interact, after all.

Mental health does not exist in a vacuum…

This is a welcome step in the right direction (no pun intended). Mental health does not exist in a vacuum; if we are not physically well we often feel emotionally ‘under the weather’. But if we can acknowledge this, then surely it isn’t much of a stretch to see that everything is relevant. The food we eat, the relationships we have, our financial circumstances, the workplace, our spiritual health – it all adds up. It is not just a question of taking medication and expecting everything to fall into place.

Medicines are, at best, a bandage to paper over the cracks of the real issues that affect our mental health. Given that the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of mental illness has been debunked, it is easy to see why exercise may in some cases be more helpful than antidepressants in treating depression. A cynic (or a realist) might note that going for a walk does not in itself make a profit; pharmaceutical treatments do.

Modern life is bad for your health

While it is easier to put all the onus on the individual, there are wider problems at play when it comes to people’s wellbeing. Yes, exercise and eat healthily if possible, take medication if prescribed and choose your friends and other relationships carefully. These are all things within the individual’s locus of control. There is a separate issue regarding prescribed medications such as antipsychotics which cause obesity and encourage overeating. People may be forced to take them as part of a Compulsory Treatment Order, but this is a different conversation. But things like workplace relationships and ‘meaningless’ jobs, financial burdens, the rising cost of living, problems with housing and neighbours, and being a victim of crime, are not.

Even accessing professional help for your mental health can be a struggle. Given these circumstances, it is perhaps no surprise that services are overstretched. To paraphrase a famous rock band, modern life truly can be rubbish for many people.

Perhaps one of the reasons we as a society stop short of acknowledging the importance of a more ‘holistic’ approach to mental health is that you can only change yourself, rather than your wider circumstances. Social problems affect us all and are often outside of our control. But it is also true that those who can change the way society is run choose not to, so it makes sense that they prefer to place the responsibility of recovery from poor mental health purely on the individual experiencing it.

Whether this is the most helpful approach is questionable, but it is the best we have got under the current socioeconomic system. It is inevitable that an individualistic capitalist society breeds an attitude of personal responsibility and sees making a profit as a priority. Therefore, one has to ‘work on oneself’ to improve one’s mental health, and taking medication is often the perceived primary way of retaining stability. Mental health problems are billed as incurable in the same way as conditions like diabetes are. They are seen as lifelong illnesses needing lifelong treatment, usually revolving around medicines. In the process, those with societal power escape any accountability and drug companies make billions if not trillions in profit.

An awareness of the bigger picture

None of this changes the fact that while everyone’s personal circumstances are different, we all live in the same broken world and each of us is affected by it, albeit in unique ways. Taking more exercise is just a very small way in which we can improve our wellbeing, and for people with severe mental health problems, it is often a big achievement in itself, when motivation is poor. On its own it does not cure serious illnesses. But even for those with reasonably good mental health, it is only a piece in a bigger puzzle, which is much harder to solve, and we can’t do it on our own. Struggling NHS services are another piece, if one can access them. Ultimately, a broken world is bound to lead to broken people, and our political system does not seem to be capable of fixing it, whether through choice or inadequacy.

The least it can do, in that case, is provide fully funded comprehensive mental health services, free at the point of use, which acknowledge that there are some things we as individuals can’t control, and that is ok. These things are not our responsibility to fix, and we should not burden ourselves with self-condemnation at our inability to recover when so many outside forces influence our everyday lives.

We should not enforce targets on mental health departments, when recovery is hampered by the reality of wider society. If people do not recover, it is not necessarily their fault, and even if they do not improve, they still need some form of professional care. A mental health system that considers everything in our life as relevant to recovery – diet, exercise, physical health, relationships, past traumas, work situation, finances, spiritual health, our living circumstances and how much control we have over our lives – is what we should be aiming for. Anything else falls short.

Taking more exercise in itself is almost always a good thing. But this week, as we are encouraged to think more about our mental wellbeing, it is worth considering how having an extra morning walk is only the tip of the iceberg and, while helpful, it does not resolve the wider problems we all face which are unavoidable, in a world run by those unwilling to fix them. Perhaps it is time we stopped taking on the full burden of ‘recovery’ and expecting good health in an inherently unhealthy society.