Quality | 2010.01.17
The taboo is fading, but still mental illness is misunderstood | Lynsey Hanley
Palliatives for the troubled brain are welcome. But it is blinkered to consider depression in isolation from the social universe
If only knowing how depressed everyone else is was enough to stop one feeling depressed. The novelist Marian Keyes is depressed; Bill Oddie has been depressed but feels better now; and the First Lady of Northern Ireland, Iris Robinson , is receiving treatment for suicidal feelings. "Depression isn\'t really mental illness," a doctor told Alan Bennett in 1966, hoping to comfort the writer as his mother was admitted into psychiatric care. "I see it all the time."
Being mentally ill, then, is nothing new, and neither is it any longer taboo, if the refreshing openness and honesty with which Keyes, writing on her blog , and Oddie, talking to his local paper, is anything to go by. Neither feels the need to glide over the details, describing a living landscape of black despair, vigilant yet fuzzy wakefulness, and paralysing fear.
About three years ago, like Keyes, I ceased to be able to sleep. Looking for quiet, I moved out of London, where I\'d lived my entire adult life and which I\'d never planned to leave. We moved to a town where we knew no one, because it looked nice and had a nice university. Surrounded by nice quiet things and an utter absence of familiarity, I went up the wall.
Now, it\'s obvious that it wasn\'t London that stopped me sleeping. The racket I\'d attempted to flee was in my head, and I\'d taken it with me – as tends to happen when your head is attached to your body – to a place that was even less likely to give me succour. The world which made sense to me, in spite of its apparent chaos, was 250 miles away.
In a way this sums up the very ordinariness of madness; which is not, I must impress, to say that it\'s banal. Bennett\'s mother fell into depression after moving from urban west Yorkshire, where she had always lived, to a quiet village on the edge of the moors; the edge of nowhere, it must have seemed.
Mental illness is terrifying, yes, but it is a part of – a possibility of – human experience, and therefore impossible to immunise oneself against. The best we can do is to be together in it. The psychologist Richard Bentall\'s excellent recent book Doctoring the Mind contains one of the most lucid sentences yet written on the subject of mental illness: "A troubled brain cannot be considered in isolation from the social universe."
Yet it\'s the tendency to consider mental ill-health in isolation from the injustices and iniquities – never mind the consolations – of life that has caused the medical profession to focus largely on palliatives for the troubled brain, as opposed to reform in the social universe. As a child, while absently eavesdropping on adult conversations, you would hear of all the women (and some men) who were "on tablets for their nerves". They were called tranquillisers then, as though taking them made frightening things – poverty, violence and ignorance among them completely disappear.
Which brings me to David Cameron, who, in his speech this week on parenting and character , described parents who raise healthy and productive children as "confident and able", regardless of their social position. To be confident and able requires a fair amount of evidence that you can do things well and receive due reward for having done so.
As Bentall notes, there is roughly twice the incidence of mental illness in individuals from the poorer and less skilled social groups than from richer groups. Cameron\'s assumption that levels of self-confidence and ability are unrelated to social status is exactly the sort of thing that drives people off their tiny nuts in the first place. To translate: You see that thing there? Well, you can\'t see it, but it\'s the thing that influences pretty much every moment of your life in the world, convinces you that you\'ve no right to take up space on the planet, and causes well-meaning people to ignore you except when they need a saint or a bigot to illustrate a point? Yes, class; that\'s the big one. Figment of your imagination, mate.
Depression is but one corollary of this gap between what is said to be true and what you experience as true. In my experience, to be depressed means being marooned in your own mind because things in the world have ceased to make sense to you.
It would be easy to argue that social class has little bearing on Marian Keyes, a millionaire author, or Bill Oddie, whose local paper happens to be the Hampstead & Highgate Express. Depression does not respect individuals\' social standing when it does its nasty work. But listen to what the mentally ill are saying: it is unbearable to be alone, isolated, unconsoled. That they – we – respond to the sense of being alone by withdrawing even further is only another sign of what is being communicated.
I\'m not sure the world is changing any faster now than it has done in the past, or, indeed, whether we were once capable of providing better solace to those whose faith in the present and future is shattered. Sometimes the easiest thing to forget is not how easy it is for a stressed and tired mind to become chaotic, but how hard it is for order and peace to be restored there once disrupted. To be always confident, and always able, is a fine thing.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]-cameron-parents-mental-health
