The mental health industry rewards a cult of victimhood
Who would have expected Tony Blair to be the truth sayer, the straight shooter, upfront and on the level? Very few of those praising him, yesterday, for his burst of honesty on the subject of mental health.
Speaking to former Downing Street adviser, Jimmy McLoughlin, on his Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future podcast, 71-year-old Sir Tony declared: “I think we have become very, very focused on mental health and with people self-diagnosing. We’re spending vastly more on mental health now than we did a few years ago. And it’s hard to see what the objective reasons for that are.”
Not content to leave his comments there – safely open-ended, as politicians are inclined to do – the former PM decided to double down. “Life has its ups and downs and everybody experiences those. And you’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life.”
“Some sort of condition”? That’s brave. You can’t belittle peoples’ ailments, Tony. The mental health fraudsters out there have honed those conditions. They’ve worked hard to pathologise perfectly normal “challenges”, as you say, and setbacks, and if they can’t find a mental health professional to rubber stamp their afflictions, they’ve diligently self-diagnosed themselves from the ever-growing smorgasbord of mental health disorders on offer.
We do have to remember that not everyone caught up in this is a cynical fraudster. There are also the many who – again as Sir Tony says – have been “encouraged” to consider themselves impeded in some way, persuaded and convinced that they are not occasionally sad but “depressed”, not worried about naturally worrying things but “suffering from anxiety”.
Not to be cowed, the former PM made one final point: “We need a proper conversation about this, because you really cannot afford to be spending the amount of money we’re spending on mental health.” We’ve needed “a proper conversation about this” for years. And by “proper”, I mean for influential figures – who are not actors of over 70 ‘telling it like it is’, much as I love that demographic – to admit to what is going on publicly. We need those people to call out the over-medicalisation of life as the damaging force that it is, call out the scammers alongside the victim culture that has so many yearning to have a medical condition, and most importantly explain how the very worst part of this phenomenon is that it undermines true mental illness. Undermines all the progress made and the taboos busted. God knows we’ve all been having those conversations in private.
People have been getting more vocal on the issue, it’s true. You may remember Rishi Sunak’s keynote speech on welfare reform in April, when he outraged the Left and appalled mental health campaigners by using the words “growing trend” to describe the plethora of “mental health conditions” affecting what was then 53 per cent of the 2.8 million economically inactive Brits. And imagine how much those figures will already have risen? Nevertheless, he stopped short of doing what Blair has just done in effectively describing this “trend” as an industry feeding off public coffers to an extent that is untenable – unaffordable.
Nothing opens up a conversation – or shuts it down? – quite like money. All those woke cordoning-offs, all those whispers of “you can’t say that!”. None of it means a thing once someone says: “we can’t afford to go on like this.” Once you consider that one in five children and young people (aged between 8 to 25) have a “probable mental disorder”, that 200,000 children in England are currently being referred for specialist anxiety treatment (that’s 4,000 every week), and that very soon those young people will be adults, joining the one in four already suffering from mental health problems.
I’ll reiterate that true mental illness should never be undermined, and that money should be spent on helping those who suffer from it. Obviously, I also accept that social media, the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis will have pushed the numbers up. But I don’t believe the figures above, I don’t believe in encouraging people to think themselves unwell, and I know for absolute certain that in doing so, we’ve done them and the country the biggest disservice.