World Mental Health Day

While we worry about the cost of living crises and how to pay for rising fuel bills, there is a real danger that the stress caused by the deteriorating economic situation rises significantly. This will only add to the underlying mental health problems that many people suffer from. Monday 10th October is the World Mental Health Day, yet outside some highlights on television we have by and large ignored it. Figures suggest that 28% of us will suffer from some form of mental health problems during our lives. That is a high figure, yet the amount of time and effort devoted by the NHS and others is small compared to the demand. The promises to treat mental illness the same way as physical illness have not been kept. If you have a broken leg, you do not have to wait for months for treatment. The situation is unlikely to improve as resources in the NHS are sucked into dealing with the more immediate crises it is facing. At first sight, it appears that we as a society can do little. I would argue that mental health illness, from a pragmatic perspective, costs us a lot and that it would be economically worthwhile to spend money to fix or mitigate its effects. Furthermore, there is a strong moral imperative. We would benefit from treating all our citizens with compassion and humanity. We as individuals live in communities and we have a duty to live in accordance with those liberal and religious values which celebrate our humanity. Any activity political or otherwise should seek to bring us together and not fuel inequality.