Mental Health in a Political Hellscape

It’s really easy to feel as though we’re living in an age of global political and social futility. I mean, this is awful isn't it? After the financial crash, an international shift to the right was written in the stars. That’s almost a decade long lurch we’ve been heaved through. The politics of fear is easier than the politics of hope. It’s easier to make people scared than it is to make them trust.

For me, engaging politically as someone who suffers from depression and panic disorder and often sees the world through a grey and murky veil adds to the feeling that everything is totally hopeless. The world sometimes feels unfathomable and beyond redemption. It’s so huge and I’m so small. Politics is nasty, people are fundamentally selfish and fear has won. I don’t actually believe these things- the best version of me believes that people are fundamentally good and kind. It’s just tough to remain hopeful sometimes at the wrong end of a decade of austerity, during which I have done two research based degrees based on the socio-political climate, bumbled my way through the mental healthcare system and seen the economic deterioration of the places I have spend any significant amount of time in. All those things work in tandem to give me a sense that everything’s in a downward spiral. All deteriorations- economic, social, personal- weave together.

I want to talk a bit about how I would suggest trudging your way through the current political climate when you have a mental health condition and it’s already easier to be scared than hopeful. A constant sense of futility is always scratching away at the back of my head anyway and the globally disastrous, nationally grim political landscape is often something I want to disengage from entirely in favour of just trying to enjoy stuff. But how can I possibly expect solidarity and ask people to stand in my corner if I don’t know what I need from them?

I'm going to take you through how I think trust in politics can be navigated, how engaging in the issues you care about is crucial when showing and asking for solidarity, and how disengagement does not work when you have a vested interest in social change.

Trust

Trust in 2019’s political and social climate, I think, should be read through macro and micro filters. There’s trust for party politics and social structures, and there’s trust in other people. Staying mentally afloat in the midst of a General Election campaign means I absolutely have to look at the socio-political climate through both of these lenses. While the broader picture of political and media machines is mostly hideous, the actions of people and movements is something to be admired and engaged in.

The view through the macro trust lens is not a particularly cheerful one. Earlier I talked a bit about a global shift to the right- the US, the UK, France, Brazil, Turkey, Australia, India and Italy have recently seen surges in right wing party allegiance. In conjunction with this, we have seen internet giants allow misinformation, hate and propaganda to be spread unchecked. With Trump and Johnson in arguably the most powerful offices in the world, the notion of trust in politics is mostly laughable.

I was in my last year of college during the 2010 election- the first year I could vote. Most of my friends voted Lib Dem, so we didn’t exactly start our politically engaged lives with the sturdiest example of integrity at the helm of the country. By all rights, this should have spelled the decimation of my generation’s trust in politics. It didn’t though, did it? 63% of registered voters aged 25-29 voted Labour in the 2017 General Election. This year, 25-34 year olds are the second highest represented age group and we saw a surge of 200,000 registrations for under-35s on National Voter Registration Day last week. I am under absolutely no illusion that we are going to wake up on 13th December to anything but a Conservative majority, but it’s clear that those who will benefit most from an end to their premiership aren’t planning to let that happen unchecked. Perhaps you could accuse me of living in an echo chamber, but from where I’m standing I see people ready to vote, march and galvanise even in the face of what looks like a complete wipe out of their core beliefs.

The only thing that quite matches the defilement of truth and integrity in what Sacha Baron Cohen recently called “the greatest propaganda machine in history” is the solidarity and community that can be found on those very same social media platforms. The places where political mistruths are tossed around are the very same places where communities have easily been able to organise effectively. The machine itself may be rotten to the core, but we will weaponize it to generate change. Trust in people is very different to trust in the machine.

Solidarity

Trust in people is much easier to drum up than trust in terrifying political and social powers. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t pay attention to wider social and political events- of course we should- but looking to community based organisations, individual politicians you may admire, friends and family who go round door knocking or volunteering at a food bank that has no business being open in one of the richest countries in the world- these are the things I find are best to hone in on.

However, I know I can take it personally when I feel people close to me have not considered the impact of their voting choices on their loved ones’ ability to access treatment. I never thought I’d live in a country where I’d be genuinely scared about whether I will have access to my medication. I wish I wouldn’t, but I do take it personally when people that love me vote to leave the trading bloc in which my medication is produced and they vote for parties who vocally champion a privatised health service. If these things happen, we might as well start talking about the illness I suffer from as terminal. That’s how serious it is.

This may all sound selfish and privileged, as though I have no concept of other people’s political priorities. I’m hoping that, instead of this coming off as a partisan and selfish, this is read as a humanisation of a staggeringly widespread problem. There are four million of me: long term users of medication for mental health conditions. We talk a lot about how much we need to repair and maintain our NHS for the sake of those in desperate need of care for a litany of health problems - I’m asking you to start counting mental health as one of them. We need our medication- often produced in the EU- and we need access to care. There is a strong socioeconomic gradient in mental health, with children and adults living in the lowest 20% income bracket up to three times more likely to develop a mental health condition than those in the highest, while people living in areas with high economic deprivation are more at risk of suicide. It is the poorest that are more likely to need free at the point of use mental healthcare.

Detachment vs engagement

I write today as someone who relies on a health service to keep me furnished with lovely medicine and often un-lovely therapy. I have enjoyed and endured the mental healthcare system (which we are lucky to have, although it is in desperate need of upheaval) and I think I need to stay engaged in political discourse to ensure that these things remain accessible to me and people who experience the same problems as I do. Of course, I have a much wider view of social and political engagement that breaks beyond healthcare and mental health and there are other things I fight for and against- this just happens to be a piece about mental health and politics.

Avoidance is certainly a way to ensure that you’re not drawn into a seemingly hopeless social and political news cycle. “I don’t watch the news, it’s always horrible” is a common attitude to take, and I don’t particularly blame anyone for it. It is pretty grim at the moment. Particularly in the midst of a General Election campaign, it can be easy to be sucked into a vortex of gaffes, trivialisations of serious issues, horrific statistics of the impact of austerity and Jo Swinson being a thing.

If, like me, you want to ensure that you can maintain access to the medication you need and keep the door open to therapy on the NHS, we all need to understand that we are up against insidious opposition, anti-intellectualism and social media sanctioned propaganda. We need to be careful when approaching this, looking after ourselves and understanding that politics can get nasty. Set boundaries and choose your battles. Sometimes logging off Twitter for the evening and ending the 2 hour online war you’ve been having with Gary from Wigan about privatisation is a good way to ensure that you still want to be an active participant in political and social discourse. Work with groups you can healthily engage with and who can effectively come together to make change, or even just show solidarity. Stay informed. You cannot ask someone to stand with you if you don’t know what you stand for.