With thanks to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news for the three stories featured in this blog post
As a fully paid up 'loon' who has spent time in Mental Hospitals & Prison for my mental health condition, I would like to write this blog post with a duality of thinking. I will take 3 different stories from today's BBC News website. Here is the first one. We are now hearing on an almost daily basis that there is a Mental Health Crisis in this country and for sake of argument I mean the Dis-United Kingdom. The second story is this one. Here we have an incident where those who look after those in mental and emotional distress have their lives put at risk by the environment that they work in. The third story is from France, from the continent of Europe from whose Union we will be leaving soon. All three are disturbing stories. All three have the toxic environment as a commonality! Pray tell, what does said loon mean by toxic environment? In the last story
"Police sources told local media that the boy had refused to do his homework and was hit with a broom handle".
The eponymous broom handle that is suspended above all of us came down on this nine year old, allegedly wielded by his 19 year old brother with his mother apparently encouraging or condoning the punishment. Was this act possibly carried out as an act of jealousy? Was the brother holding the phone under his chin whilst administering the blows with a blunt instrument.
In this blog post I will argue that the communal society that we live in is tantamount to being hit over the head by a blunt instrument and in the case of the Scottish Hospital and in London on a seemingly daily basis, blunt instruments have turned into sharp instruments designed to kill.
Who is responsible for the Mental Health of a human being? Who is responsible for the Mental Health of the young women and girls in the first story?
Is it the Government? (and this is where my duality of thinking is introduced). However much I would like to blame a government for my mental health especially a Conservative Government I cannot do this. I could implicate Thatcher's Government in the nurturing aspect of it as I became ill at the age of 13 in 1979 when she came to power. What I as an individual was witness to on a nightly basis through the Television screen were images of an uncaring, cruel government. Children know who are the uncaring, cruel ones and who are the kind ones. It was not Thatcher and the Conservative Government that caused my mental health condition although I could argue that they contributed unwittingly to it.
The youngsters of today are surrounded by such a toxic soup of an environment that is it any surprise that they present as unwell?
Bullying of the cyber and in person variety, an exam passing at all cost education system, the pressures of fitting in with the peer group. Disfunctional home lives
often caused by austerity and poverty? Poor choices made by family members, after all are we all not 'human' whatever that means.
Are we all responsible for the mental health of our younger generation?
The answer has to be yes. So instead of beating them for not doing their homework, instead of subjecting them to the most brutal of toxic environments, instead of expecting the impossible from them in terms of academic results can we not just allow them to be young and carefree or do we have to use the blunt object as a stick in the carrot stick encouragement stakes?
Governments are there, I would argue, to administer the money and treasury, not to care. I don't believe the lumbering leviathan that is a government are capable of caring even if there are individual members of it who are kinder and more compassionate than others.
What would our ancestors from the 1970s think of the daily 'Mental Health' hysteria? (interesting choice of word dear loon)
Well I would argue that many of them were dead by their 50s because they were not able to talk about what it was to be human. They were in work and drinking and smoking to deal with emotional issues. Today we are much more advanced in our understanding of Human Psychology and Mental Health BUT I would argue that we are as useless and impotent in knowing how to deal with it as we were back then. Of course we could write a prescription and get the human souls on medication to change the 'alleged' chemical imbalance in the brain or we could all work together with a common goal to change our toxic environment, after all these are your children I am talking about, not mine.
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