Our mental health is fracturing. Here’s what I wish I’d done...

We are fighting the wrong war. People are suffering from mental distress on a scale perhaps never seen before. They wait months for cursory medical intervention, and have to travel hundreds of miles for a rare inpatient bed. In response, all government does is promise something it can’t and won’t deliver: parity of esteem.

Our mental health is fracturing, here and now. It’s a public health emergency – the numbers are off the charts. Yet the political response is absurd, like fiddling endlessly with a leaky tap while the roof is falling in. Would the hopeless response be the same if the pandemic was a physical illness like cancer? This is why we elect MPs – to fix things that are broken, not break something that was fixed.

That said, we will definitely lose this struggle if we just see it in terms of beds and billions of pounds. Medics often say prevention is better than cure. This is so obviously true of mental illness that it’s shameful how little we strategise about it.

There is no shortage of daily advice for enhancing physical health. Reject bacon!Quit smoking! Take up half-marathons! Eat goji berries and salsify! But where are the programmes, the education, the government advisories and the interventions to help protect our mental health? Every week more than 100 Britons take their own lives. These are preventable deaths but the prevention work has to come early. It has to come at the same stage as the running and goji berries. It has to come before the wheels have fallen off.

Because we don’t really know what causes mental illness, it is hard to know what advice to give people. Standard lists recommend a healthy diet, moderate exercise, regular sleep patterns, and a rejection of recreational drugs. All obvious, unremarkable – and ineffectual.

I have come up with an alternative list – things I wish I’d done before depression picked me out from the crowd with a flick of a bony finger.

1. Stop trying so hard

The mental illness epidemic among our young people can hardly come as a surprise. Grade inflation and hyper-competition have made this the most stressful time to be a teenager.

The message from schools, parents, peers seems to be: get top grades or your life is ruined. Little wonder young people are suffering like never before.

Teachers and parents won’t like me for saying this, but exam grades BBB and a clean bill of health might be preferable to four A-stars and a prescription for antidepressants. “If the homework brings you down then we’ll throw it on the fire and take the car downtown,” Bowie sang to his infant son. That might be taking it too far but a more balanced approach will help stave off burnout.

So stop promising to give 110%. I usually aim for closer to 70%, unless the boss is lurking, when I cunningly step it up. Good enough is good enough.

2. Lower your expectations

Someone cleverer than me once came up with a neat formula that explains so much about our self-imposed anxiety. Satisfaction = achievement/expectation.

By this infernal calculus, in order to feel better, we must either achieve more (and there quickly comes a point where that becomes harder and harder and more and more stressful) – or simply lower our expectations.

We know this to be true: as we attain a higher level of material, professional or athletic accomplishment, we do not rest. Our expectation bobs up, like an overactive ballcock. And so we must outperform again, to advance, to progress. That philosophy, born of the enlightenment and industrial revolution, has become a global religion. And a curse.

Our salaries must go up with our self-importance and our status, our companies and economies must grow year-on-year, our cars and kitchens and computers must get better and better, our leaders, our clothes, our holidays must be impeccable. And yes, our sports teams must win all the time.

What folly. A life is not a linear chart that goes up. It’s a messy scatter graph of moments and experiences, some joyful, others painful. And it’s so improbable in the first place that we should set our expectations to zero. There – infinite satisfaction.

3. Take up something you’re bad at

Perfectionism is a close cousin of mental unease. Shake it off by taking up something that is an end in itself, not just another means to an end.

Fail. Laugh when you do so, whether it is pottery, dancing or fishing. It can be a powerful revelation – and a huge release – to understand that you are not perfect and that it does not matter that you are not.

Of course, this should be something which will not endanger anyone, including yourself – so best to avoid gambling, go-karting or ice dance. It is preferable if it is not a “winning game”. Drawing, singing, walking, yoga, Warhammer, birdwatching.

It’s particularly beneficial if you can induce an adverse remark in the talentless execution of this endeavour, ie “Gosh, you really have a horrid drone for a voice!” Or “What is that squalid little image supposed to be? Can’t make out your brush strokes at all”. Feel the criticism and rejoice in it. You are crap – and it doesn’t matter!

4. Reject the age of the self

Depression is an illness that feeds on isolation. Loneliness and self-absorption are its handmaids. Turn your back on 30 years of individualism, by embracing the communal, the social, the voluntary. Another real human face is an antidepressant. So volunteer. Do something for nothing – and see how it makes you feel. Remarkably, when we volunteer we can get a far greater sense of making a difference than we get from paid-for transactional arrangements.

It goes without saying that rejecting the self means rejecting the selfie. Stop posting for a month and notice the difference. All the great life experiences are offline.

Mark Rice-Oxley is author of the depression memoir ‘Underneath the Lemon Tree’, and speaks in public about clinical depression and how to avoid it

In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org