Jeremy Corbyn has appointed a shadow minister of mental health, Luciana Berger, to his shadow cabinet. This is a great move. Mental health, like physical health, is an issue that affects everyone in some way and so a dedicated ministerial department is long overdue.
As someone who has suffered life-threatening bouts of depression and week-long mind-crumbling panic attacks, I value absolutely anything that highlights that mental health problems are as real and serious as any other kind of problem. As stigma exacerbates symptoms of depression by stopping people getting help, steps such as this can help make people feel less alone.
It makes you wonder how much a government could do to improve mental health if it was truly committed to it. Not as a nice touchy-feely soundbitten extra but as a key issue. I would argue that good mental health is, on an individual level, the most important thing there is. If we asked as a country “what will make us happy?” rather than “what will make us rich?” we’d be on the way to getting our priorities right.
Right now, our collective mental health is a national crisis and should be treated as one. One in four of us will face a mental health problem this year. Suicide is now the leading cause of death for men under the age of 50. Not cancer, not heart disease, not road accidents and certainly not terrorism. As a nation we have one of the highest rates of self-harm in Europe, and according to the Mental Health Foundation 1.6 million people in the UK are affected by eating disorders.
We have constructed a society that is increasingly making our minds ill. Mental health problems do not exist in a vacuum, they are integrated into every aspect of life. So we need an education policy that aims to alleviate the pressures on vulnerable teenagers, as half of mental disorders begin before the age of 18.
One of the main places where people feel stigma is at work. We also need an employment minister who will try to help business owners understand the ways our jobs are making us ill, and understand that these illnesses are as real as any other.
That Corbyn cites the example of Scandinavian countries is a promising sign: there a national leader can take time out for depression without an outcry.
We need a government that knows how valuable art can be as therapy and comfort. One that understands how the media still has a long way to go when it comes to alleviating mental health stigma.
We need an economic policy that is in tune with the numerous ways that wealth and health interact, to recognise that poverty can cause depression, but that infinite riches don’t equal happiness, and a greedy and selfish society will always struggle to make us happy. We need state-level awareness that advertising is engineered to make us feel unhappy. It tells us we lack something – a new car, a youthful complexion, a beach body – to convince us that our salvation is something to be purchased. To paraphrase Gandhi, we mustn’t let dirty feet trample though our minds.
We want to look at the stage of capitalism we are now living in, a world where our chief worth is measured in productivity and pound signs. We want a government that intelligently explores how social media is affecting our health.
At the risk of sounding totally utopian, I’d like to see not just a minister for mental health, but the whole government addressing these issues. I’d like a country where the false divisions between mental health and physical health are seen as as daft as the four humours, and where the state of our minds and the state of the nation are seen as one.
We are still in the dark ages when it comes to mental health and one shadow minister, welcome though she is, cannot single-handedly switch on the light. We all need to do that, together. In this age of people power we need to make sure, collectively, that we make the health of our minds – those houses of everything, those makers of the external world – the ultimate aim for government and society.