The word ‘health’ is in ‘mental health’, prime minister

In June 2019 then prime minister Theresa May sought to move the subject of mental health up the political agenda, saying that, “Tackling this burning injustice has always been a personal priority for me.” How tragic that her successor, Boris Johnson, has plunged the country into its worst ever mental health crisis, which will only worsen in the coming months. 

Our government appears to only be interested in focusing on physical health, not mental. Actually, scratch that. They appear to be only interested in one aspect of physical health, Covid, rather than cancer, heart disease, strokes and many other ailments, the death tolls of which continue to mount.

With just 307 healthy people under the age of 60 dying from Covid in the UK this seems a strange, myopic, nay murderous, policy. While it is clearly unpleasant and sometimes fatal for the very ill, very old or morbidly obese, the truth is that of those who catch this virus, 99.97% will live to tell the tale. Coronavirus victims currently account for merely 2% of all deaths in this country.

What is a very real and demonstrably destructive health issue affecting a large section of the population is mental health, with depression and suicide on the rise. But in the same way that the government is ignoring the coming horrendous financial consequences of their actions on the economy, they have also done so with health. Their new diktats of the last few weeks have been hammer blows to the head, and Whitty and Vallance’s graph of doom was the absolute height of irresponsibility. In combination with this, NHS services dealing with mental health issues have been curtailed - this is a scandal simply off the scale, and it is to the shame of journalists that so few have investigated it.

Some have. Janet Daley recently wrote: “One of the cruellest tricks that a sadistic jailer can play on political prisoners is to hint that they are about to be released, to wave the keys to their cells before their eyes – and then, at the last moment, to snatch away the promise of freedom. That is pretty much what the government has done to the entire population over the past week.” Indeed. Let’s look at some of those measures and what they are doing to minds.

Firstly, the length of the new restrictions. Six months. Half a year. Over winter. Putting aside that this decision was arrived at by spurious methodology, the dumb inflexibility of the lengthy term (new data arrives by the week, by the day) and its spirit-crushing nature cannot be exaggerated. Winter is grim, but there is light in the dark provided by festivals such as Halloween, Guy Fawkes night and Christmas (indeed, it’s pretty much why these festivals were invented) and they will be as good as cancelled, or greatly dimmed. (Lest we forget, these announcements came on top of the absurd ‘rule of six’ which was not long enough in place to have its effects measured in any case - not that there would have been any to measure.) What is the point of living if it is just merely existing?

There was the inevitable extension of mandatory masks and higher fines for not wearing them. As I have written before, once this was introduced, it would only go in one direction. Never mind that study after study has failed to find compelling evidence for masks’ efficacy (the conclusion of Dr Colleen Huber’s summary reads: “The foregoing data show that masks serve more as instruments of obstruction of normal breathing, rather than as effective barriers to pathogens. Therefore, masks should not be used by the general public”) or that a Harvard study highlighted the damage to children’s mental health from mask wearing, think of the hospitality and retail workers (and taxi drivers) who now have to mask up. Their breathing is constricted for seven or eight hours a day, or more, all while many of them know or suspect that their job will soon be terminated by this government’s destruction of the high street and city centres. It’s a recipe for pure mental hell that could not have been more expertly constructed by an officer of the SS.

There is also a great deal of evidence that the wearing of masks increases aggression, and that in particular it makes men more aggressive and licentious towards women. When you next wear one, take a moment to watch your mind: observe how you feel psychologically altered by the experience. Mass mask-wearing may turn out to be one of the biggest ever behavioural alterations in society. To not wear one when most are brings huge mental pressure to bear on the non-wearer, and there are disturbing stories of disabled people being abused for not wearing them. Mandatory masks are a sure-fire road to hell and severely damage mental health, and the directive should be ditched immediately.

Also, a curfew of 10pm was introduced for bars and restaurants. Again, this has virtually zero effect on the virus’ spread. Again, it grinds thousands more businesses to dust. And the affect on mental health is deleterious, not just for the workers who will lose their jobs because of it, but because it reduces ordinary people’s time to communicate with one another and to relax - and curfews feel oppressive by their very existence. Curfews and curtailments of public discourse have, throughout history, been in the toolboxes of dictators and despots, because they fear what people will say about them. This suppression of free minds and free speech is extremely unhealthy, it does not aid mental well-being: sometimes you need to ‘get it out’.

There is great societal pressure not to speak out against these sorts of diktats (although disdain is thankfully, finally, growing) because they are imbued with great moral weight by the government and complicit media and tech giants. This pressure build-up in the brain is, again, terrible for negotiating everyday living. As the admirable organisation CALM reports and campaigns on, men in particular are much less likely to discuss their fears and worries at the best of times, leading to severe mental distress. The state propaganda we are fed on a daily basis, and are not meant to dispute, will only exacerbate this tragedy.

It is impossible to over-emphasise the terrible effects on society for many, many years of this government’s actions. The initial lockdown decision was mistaken (although you could make a case that it was a forgivable mistake), but it has been compounded by all they have done since. The knock on effects of diktats have had knock on effects which in turn will have knock on effects which will have knock on effects - and so on. I realise other countries have done similar or worse than the UK, but that’s of little comfort. My blissful trip to Latvia in August showed me a relaxed, angst-free, extremely pleasant environment. Yes, they had very few Covid-related deaths, but then so did countries like Sri Lanka (13 at current count) and that didn’t stop the Sri Lankan government imposing draconian and harmful measures. It’s all about how your government chooses to present its information, and the UK government’s reaction to Covid is creating far more hell than it is suppressing, and this is especially evident in the area of mental health. 

Think of the way the airline industry has been obliterated in large part by this government’s bird-brained travel quarantines, making going to a foreign destination either impossible or horribly stressful (and will there be any airlines around soon to take us anywhere?). People need holidays as a psychological break, in the same sort of way we need sleep. They are vital to mental well-being.

More broadly, we can make very few plans for anything because of fear of future restrictions. We struggle to find a point to life when we cannot aim at targets or have no chance of achieving our ambitions. Bel Mooney recently wrote: “When people live in constant fear, whether from actual physical dangers or perceived threats, they can become incapacitated, because fear interrupts thought processes in the brain that allow us to regulate our emotions and process information. Being told what to do and obeying can almost be a relief.” Six months of scaremongering has reduced us to shadows of our former selves. What the government should have done is treated people like adults, presented the full facts, given perspective, offered the strongest advice possible for elderly and vulnerable to take care, and let everyone else get on with their lives.

But national politicians are not normal people. They are very strange people. They are egotistical, they are arrogant, they are driven, they are usually charismatic: they have to be all of these things, because of the often vile personal abuse they suffer in public and on social media. Who’d be a politician? But this distance from most of the voters they represent means that they often fashion policies that are detrimental to mental health. Historically, when were there ever insights into what the psychological effects of many policies would be? Was there a single thought for the mental health of citizens in our demographically transformed towns and cities over the last 70 years? What about the mass unemployment of the 1980s? Were the psychological needs of those people ever given much consideration at government levels? It’s doubtful, and so it is now, as the government persists with the most relentless and debilitating campaign of psychological warfare ever conducted against the people of this country.

Spare a thought for the lonely; spare a thought for those in care homes who haven’t had a family visit in months; spare a thought for those in the creative industries who have had the soul ripped out of them, their reason for being. I am surprised - and pleased - that we have not seen more suicides in this community, although I know depression is rife. Drink, drugs (pharmaceutical or other) or unconsciousness are the only way for millions to get through this. Shakespeare’s line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream has rarely felt more apt:

“Sleep, that sometimes seals up sorrow’s eye, steal me a while from mine own company.”

It’s not so bad for those making these hateful rules, the strong-minded scientists and politicians, with their families and their big houses and their big gardens and their big salaries and their big pensions. It’s the little people that suffer; one can’t help but rile at the elitism of all this. When hugs become state-mandated… well, this is a hell undreamt of even by the Soviets. The mental health of students trapped in their rooms (particularly in Stasi-like Scotland), or of some workers forced to work from home, perhaps a lonely or disagreeable home, is deteriorating at an alarming rate; the government gives the impression of not giving a damn.

These lockdowns and restrictions will play on many people’s psyches for perhaps the remainder of their lives. A previously maltreated dog will always flinch when a stranger goes to stroke it. Now that governments are prepared to take these measures in the face of an illness, what’s to stop them doing it again in the future? In the same way that this will stifle business start-ups for decades to come, it will mentally enervate those in fear of the jackboot coming down again. Knock on effects of knock on effects.

We are social animals, and lack of social contact is deadly to us. In the last six months, the viewing of online pornography has rocketed past its previous high levels - it’s a matter of debate, but how will that affect young men’s ability to talk to and meet women in the future, and form relationships and make families? Again, knock on effects of knock on effects. 

A friend, who lives with his [lawyer] wife and young child, texted the other day to say he was desperate for “mate company”, “before they shut the pubs again”. “It’s been far too many hours of tax law talk and baa baa black sheep.” But even if we went to the pub, the chatter would be engulfed by talk of this bloody virus. That’s almost all we can talk about nowadays, and that is, in itself, mentally destructive. Because things like sport and entertainment and travel have been wrecked or minimised, we don’t have the distractions from the plains of existence that we had before. Again, this is terrible for our brains.

Think once again of the elderly. I know of one lady in her seventies who has been housebound for almost the entire last six months because she is too scared to venture out. I also know of a couple in their eighties who loathe these regulations, because it makes them feel “caged”, and they have had to endure the following:

• Their family celebration in July at a country hotel for their diamond wedding anniversary being cancelled. It has been rearranged for next March, but now even that is in doubt. 
• The wife not been able to go to her sister’s funeral.
• A new grandson is due in November, but they have no idea when or where they will see him (they will live about 100 miles apart).
• Having to cancel going to their granddaughter’s wedding in December because of the number of guests allowed, before it was cancelled altogether when rules tightened yet further.
• Now under local lockdown, they are unable to see any of their friends, which was one of their few remaining pleasures. The wife’s art class is no longer running.

They are in despair: “We don’t have that long left, we want to still do things.” When hope is extinguished, the light in our brains dims. Also, when we are confronted with barriers and excessive pressure it can feel like having an angry wasp inside the cranium. I know of people who hardly go out any more, not because they have any fear of the virus, but because they recoil from the people stepping out the way, Covid officials, the forms to fill in, the one-way systems, the hand sanitisers, the masks and all the other ‘anti-virus’ measures. 

Despicably, the prime minister actually blamed the public for the imposition of new controls, rather than taking responsibility for his own government’s catastrophic failures. Again, think of the possible psychological impact this will have on people. Some people might actually feel guilt because of what he said, and guilt can be crippling. Others will go along with what he said, and chastise those they agree are responsible, thereby creating yet more division in a society that is not short of it already. This all feeds the unpleasant madhouse atmosphere, which contributes to further still decline in mental health. And giving the whole nation OCD is not conducive to better day-to-day living - and yet that is exactly what the woeful Sage committee committed themselves to. It’s shocking what this administration has done, and unforgivable.

(As an aside, it’s interesting to posit the following: Boris Johnson has been in large part responsible for four years of mental turmoil in the UK. Why? Because, arguably, Leave won the 2016 referendum because of him, which then led to three years of agonising political and social rowing, as the establishment tried to overturn the result. He offered a very brief period of calm with his 2019 election victory, but in 2020 has become the torturer-in-chief of British minds.)

Muddled and heavy-handed, Johnson is perpetually demoralising us - as a friend recently said to me, “It’s beginning to feel like people are being robbed of memories.” Utopia (in this case a zero-Covid utopia) is always dressed in compassion: the road to it can be a hellscape. The last six months have been bad enough, but for those of us with minds that might not be strong enough to cope, it feels like a desperately arduous and potentially shattering journey ahead.