We’re not having the right conversation about mental health

It seems all too convenient to keep up the pretence that mental health is entirely the individual’s problem – something inside them – while closing our eyes to the bigger picture in this country

The current conversation around mental health in Britain is perhaps the most open and candid it has ever been. We have a greater understanding of conditions like anxiety and depression, we duly share supportive social media posts, we engage in hashtags like #BeKind to raise awareness and we praise others for their courage when disclosing mental health struggles.

The benefits of mindfulness apps, yoga, meditation and connecting with nature for improved mental wellbeing are now perfectly ordinary dinner party conversation. The stigma around antidepressant medications is slowly being broken down. This is just the way it should be.

Except... there is one area in which we still fall short, and that is in recognising that a broken economic system and decades of failed policy are keeping our collective mental health in a state of disrepair.

How? Well, research shows us that poverty and mental ill-health have a symbiotic relationship. If you’re poor, you’re more likely to develop mental health problems. In fact, children and adults in the lowest 20 per cent income bracket are two to three times more likely to experience mental ill-health than those in the highest.

Unequal societies have higher overall levels of mental ill health – and nothing screams inequality like the current cost of living crisis.

While oil and gas companies reap obscene profits and pass on billions to their shareholders, the government’s plan to help hard-pressed households comes in the form of a huge, enforced debt that ordinary people will shoulder the burden of for years to come. Rather than funding this assistance via a windfall tax on unearned profits, we will pay the price.

The cost of living crisis will have a serious impact on the mental health of those most affected by it, including children. If your wages don’t cover your rent and bills, if you’re constantly worried about being able to put food on the table for your kids, if you’re forced into debt, living in a cold home, can’t heat up your meals, barely scraping by from one paycheck to the next – this all adds up. Diagnosing the anxiety, sadness and hopelessness it fosters as an individual problem or as a personal “issue” seems woefully short-sighted.

As long as we continue to accept pervasive and entrenched inequality, we will all suffer. If we want to be serious about tackling mental illness, we need to address systemic injustices such as racism, the class system, socioeconomics and harmful ideology that perpetuates the idea that poor people “just don’t work hard enough”.

As I wrote in this week’s Editor’s Letter, I’ve spent a good proportion of my career writing about my own mental health. I hope that it helped at least a couple of people. But I did not explore it in a wider context, and did not consider – in my own case – the impact of poverty, of the benefits system, of austerity, of homophobia or of a culture that victim-blames, disbelieves women and dismisses violence against them.

Mental health feels personal, but it does not exist in a vacuum. And focusing on the individual does nothing to address some of the possible root causes.

Sometimes I feel like trying to look after my mental health under late-stage capitalism, while a cost of living crisis rages for all but the richest 1 per cent, is a losing game.

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It doesn’t matter how many Headspace meditations I do, the reality is that I still can’t buy a house (but I can pay the mortgages of landlords who have so many houses they can’t physically live in them all). It’s a small example, but that feeling of instability – of being unsafe because a no-fault eviction could happen at any time – is real and incredibly relevant to mental health.

I’m not arguing that everything is hopeless, or that we have no individual responsibility for our own health and wellbeing. There is a balance. There is hope, too – but it stems from challenging structural inequality and in advocating for true socioeconomic change. We need to make a decisive swerve from the well-trodden path of unfettered, free market capitalism or in heaping cash into the pockets of the very richest in pursuit of “growth” if we want to make a real difference to people’s lives and wellbeing.

It seems all too convenient to keep up the pretence that mental health is entirely the individual’s problem – something inside them – while closing our eyes to the bigger picture in this country. With people struggling to get by under the biggest squeeze in living standards for a century, it’s disingenous to deny the impact of an economy and a society that only ever appears to benefit those who already have more than enough.