Things didn't start off well, when four minutes in one of the panelists suggested that mental illness was down to us all being tired.
When called up on that by a member of the audience, who asked "...do you not think it's more complex than that?..." she gave this response:
"There's an awful lot of people making a nice living out of pretending that it's incredibly complex...being depressed is a natural reaction to life, it's not a giant disease, you know I've been depressed, everyone's been depressed"
NO. Just NO. If you think that, then you most definitely have not been depressed. Depression is not having the energy or motivation to get out of bed, not being able to face the day ahead, being exhausted by tasks that other people don't even notice, like getting a shower. It's losing interest in anything in your life, hating yourself, hurting so much that you would rather just kill yourself than have to bear one more second of it. It's feeling utterly bereft and hopeless and worthless...and then feeling nothing at all.
It is NOT just feeling a little down for a couple of weeks and then getting over it.
I think that it is such a huge problem that illnesses like depression and anxiety often seem to be normalised to the degree that people think everyone experiences them and therefore that people should stop being so over-dramatic about them - it's a different kind of stigma than that of say psychosis; people don't tend to think you are "crazy" or a "freak" as much, but they do think you should just get over it "like everybody else". The whole point of it being an illness is that we don't have control, we can't do that.
And apart from anything else, she completely minimised the experience of mental illness to depression. They are not one and the same thing, depression may be the most common, but there are SO MANY people out there struggling with SO MANY other issues.
She goes on to say that to really help people we should focus on practical solutions to problems like poverty, rather than "pumping yourself up with pills" which we don't know the long term effects of.
Yes she may have a point, but that view is mainly a massive oversimplification of the issue of mental health. Not everyone who is mentally ill is in poverty and for those who are, a lot of the time it is as a result of their mental health issues - ignoring that then is only dealing with the symptoms rather than resolving the problem.
When covering social media opinions, one tweet read "I do sympathise that some people have genuine psychological issues and should receive treatment, but most people who use this issue are either attention seekers or mentally weak. People just need to toughen up"
Thankfully, the debate went on to cover far more sensible and less stigmatising viewpoints and another panelist said that one of the positives about modern life (the question was whether modern life was driving us mad) is that "people are able to speak about mental illness in a more open way and I think that's a positive thing - there's a decrease in the stigmatisation of suffering from a mental illness"
Whilst I think that that is true, the views that some people clearly still hold show that there is still a long way to go and much improvement to be made. This makes me glad of communities like Minds Like Ours, who have come together to fight the stigma together!
www.mindslikeours.co.uk
BBC Free Speech Programme
Has anyone else seen the programme? What are your thoughts?
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