We're All Mad Here - Mental Health: The Elephant in the Room

As I'm more or a travel writer but I'm not doing much travelling right now, so I thought I'd try to write about a topic that is close to my heart. I was prompted to write this article after reading a widely publicised story about an office worker in Michigan who wrote the following email to her team.

'Hey Team,

I'm taking today and tomorrow to focus on my mental health. Hopefully, I'll be back next week refreshed and back to 100%.'

Thankfully her boss was not only receptive to this but held her up as an example for other employees. And as he should. There seems to be a widely held stigma that talking about your illnesses to colleagues, mental or otherwise, is somehow a weakness and likely career suicide. And I should know, I've been guilty of this kind of behaviour for over a decade. 

I've been very fortunate to have never suffered any serous or non-serious disease. All I've ever get are silly ones that inflate my face to the size of a watermelon. See exhibits No 1. and 2. below.

I was in an ambulance about thirty minutes after the bottom one was taken. 

The lone semi-chronic illness I've had to put up with is a rare nerve disease, cheerily titled Dysautonomia. It's a malfunction of your sympathetic nervous system. The part of the nervous system likely protected many of yours and my ancestors from being eaten by saber toothed tigers or falling off cliffs, so we should be eternally grateful for it. unfortunately it can decide to go haywire in spectacular fashion with symptoms varying wildly by individual. 

In my case it can gift me a kind of weird superpower of perspiring more than any human should do in situations that don't necessarily warrant it. When it's bad it throws in some severe anxiety for good measure- although it's really more just sweating/flushing/overheating that tends to be its party trick. I have absolutely zero control over when the symptoms will be more severe. It can vary from day to day or week to week. All I can do is manage them.

If this is news to you then it's because I've always been managing the symptoms in various ways. In twelve years I've seen numerous specialists, tried botox, three medications with unbearable side effects, industrial strength antiperspirants, acupuncture and other more weird and wonderful treatments. None of which have had any real measure of success. It has, and still does occasionally cause me a fair amount of emotional distress. I rarely talk about it though, probably as a result of going to an all boys boarding school where revealing any glimmer of weakness was akin to running through the streets naked, wailing and flagellating yourself with a bull whip. 

The truth is I'm extremely lucky to have this as my only long-term disorder. And I always remind myself that there are 1001 things that would be more debilitating than living with this curio of a disease, both physical mental illnesses. Over many years I've spoken with friends and family about their struggles with various bouts of depression and anxiety and have been astonished at the proportion of people I knew who were suffering from them.

Worldwide, roughly 1 in 5 people will experience some kind of mental illness during their lifetime. the vast bulk of which are anxiety and depression. Although this instance is likely to be higher as many go unreported. A third of people who self-identified as having mental illness have never been officially diagnosed. This also varies widely through combinations of economic background, race and other external circumstances. As is sadly always the case, the poorer you are the less likely you are to be diagnosed or ever treated. 

Levels of depression, anxiety, bipolar and schitzophrenic disorders are higher than they have ever been and it's getting worse. Much of this rise seems to be from a combination of demographic changes and more accurate diagnosis. Many more people live in cities, away from the comfort of a familial construct. Expectations of working hours are higher as is the level of competition for good, well paid work. The cost of living has also risen much faster in relation to average salaries. Chuck all that together and cities more than ever feel more like a hulking vampire squid that sucks the life force out of every human soul, spitting out an empty husk. 

Cities like London and New York seem especially preoccupied by how much money you're making as opposed to how happy you are and how satisfied you are with the life you have built around yourself. That and the constant sense that you are somehow missing out on fun by staying at home and you've got a perfect recipe for misery.

'Is everyone else here suffering from depression?'

'Kind of, yea'

Social media and the internet only seem to exacerbate the issue. Despite bringing us closer together as a species, we now have access to a much greater resource of supposedly happy and wealthy people whom we can constantly measure ourselves against. We too easily forget that all forms of social media are really just a veneer of real life. A sort of 'best of' reel that very rarely delves into a person's internal struggles, anxieties and traumas. It's something no one should ever take very seriously but unfortunately a lot of people do and it often makes them feel like shit. Especially after a crap day at work, a depressing date or whatever other lump of excrement life enjoys throwing at you. 

Fuck, that girl Becky I went to primary school with has some lit holiday photos from Ibiza. 

I hope that the stigma around depression and mental illness in general is finally beginning to fall away and we can actually talk about it a little more. Corporations at least appear to be tuning their human resources departments towards its recognition and providing resources towards managing it in the very workplace that has probably contributed to it. But very few people would still admit to suffering from it for fear of losing their jobs.

On the other end of the scale, there also seems to be very little recognition that mental illness reinforces poverty in developed nations. In fact the US tends to cut mental health funding first when its feeling frugal. Despite it being one of the most prevalent diseases on earth and one that leads to a costlier raft of socio-economic issues down the line. There's nothing it seems that governments like more than storing up trouble for future generations. In fact many insurance plans have absolutely no provision for mental health treatments so the average time between the onset of symptoms in America and seeking treatment is 8-10 years. That's a long time to suffer through depression. We're a bit spoilt in the UK as you can even get Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as well as a raft of other treatments free on the NHS for anyone who needs them. 

As a society if we can make some small improvements then the positive impacts down the line could be huge. Removing the stigma around it means that people are more likely to be open to friends and family, seek the right treatment and recover much faster than they normally would. Right now it feels like the elephant in the room but one, I hope, that we can all take steps to manage and understand better. I can only hope that I can do my best to communicate my feelings best when I'm going through hard times and help others as best as I can when they are.