Mental health

CN: Mental health (obviously), suicide reference

Today is the last day of Mental Health Awareness Week here in the UK.  Since I’ve been involved in a couple of events in my Department connected to the week over the week, I thought it might be an idea to write about it here.  Particularly as I have a lot of thoughts about mental health, especially in a time like this.

Some of the official and semi-official advice floating around connected to dealing with the lockdown really pisses me off.  “It will help to try and see it as a different period of time in your life, and not necessarily a bad one, even if you didn’t choose it..”  No, fork off.  There is no sense in which a global pandemic is not a bad event in my life.  If you gave me the choice to flick a switch that killed off the virus, I would—even if only entirely selfish considerations came into play, ignoring the countless lives that would save.

And gratitude training: well, yeah, that’s useful, and in fact there’s research to back that up.  (Be careful if you Google it: the top results, at least for me, are related to a Florida-based organisation that was involved in a lawsuit back in 2017.)  But at the moment it can be hard to feel grateful for anything, especially when it’s counting what you have left after you’ve lost so much, not enumerating your gains.  Maybe there have been some positive side-effects: say you’ve bonded further with your housemates or your partner due to all the time you’ve spent together; maybe you’ve finally had time to finish that project you’ve been working on, or been given the opportunity of the spur to discover something you now love.  That’s great: if you have those things, hold onto them.  But you might not have, and you need to know that’s okay too.

Anyway, I thought I’d have a go at writing the advice I’d want to read.  This may not be helpful to you.  I can’t even guarantee it would have been helpful to me, had I not written it myself.  But hopefully, at least, it’s not as patronising as some of the stuff I’ve seen.

So: I think the thought that’s helped most for me is this: it’s now been eight weeks since the lockdown started, and I’ve got through it.  That was pretty unimaginable two months ago.  I’ve adapted far better than I could have thought to living most of my life within the same four walls.  It’s been awful at times, true—but I’m still here.

And you’re still here too.  Your mental health might have taken a huge hit; so might your physical health, for that matter.  You might be tired; you might be lonely; you might be frightened.  You may have practical difficulties to face, in accessing healthcare, shops or money.  I wish I could make all this go away, for myself and for you.  And nothing I say here is to diminish any of that.  But, nevertheless, you are still here.  And that’s a huge achievement.

Seriously, think about it.  The last two months, for readers in the UK and other “developed” countries, have been the most challenging most people alive have ever faced, and indeed the hardest for anyone in about 75 years (as the recent anniversary of VE Day conveniently reminds us).  And, however much you might think you dealt with it badly, still you dealt with it.  You lived through that.  And if you’re anything like me, a year ago, you would have found that completely unimaginable.

(Time, incidentally, for another caveat.  Some of you reading this may have lost loved ones to COVID-19, or to mental health problems.  While I talk about success in living through this, it is not to say that they failed.  Far from it.)

What’s the message here?  That you can keep doing it.  If you’ve lived with it so far, you can live with it in the future.  And that’s important, because, while we can hope the worst is over, we can’t hope the end is in sight.  Believe me, I want to: I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve Googled “when will Coronavirus end”.  But the truth is no-one knows, except that it’s not yet.  A goal-orientated approach to this—focussing on the end date, like a prisoner counting down the days until release—just doesn’t work, because we don’t have one.

So we need to say to ourselves: we’ve done it so far, and we can keep doing it.  There will be small joys along the way, and potentially great despairings.  And one day this will be over, and we can resume our lives as we’d hoped them to be, and all this will have been worth it.  But, though it may not seem that way, you are strong enough not to need to know how long it will take to get there.  You can manage the waiting.  After all, you’ve managed so far.

That’s all I have to say, I think.  And you should know that I wrote much of the above at one o’clock on Tuesday morning when I couldn’t sleep, so I can’t guarantee that any of it made much sense.  In any case, stay safe, and stay well, both physically and mentally.  And I’ll be back next week, with hopefully something cheerier to talk about.

If you need advice on dealing with Coronavirus and mental health, one of the best pages I’ve found is from Mind, the mental health charity.  If you need someone to talk to urgently and you’re in the UK, you can call Samaritans free on 116 123; Suicide.org has a list of similar hotlines covering many other countries.  If you feel your life is in danger, call 999 (UK) or your local emergency services.