Mind your Head

Thanks to all the people who have contacted me after my “Mind Your Head” podcast — both the ‘mad’, the ‘mental’, the ‘depressed’, as well as the professionals who agree with some of my points but could never do so openly.

I think the issue of mental health has become too circular, too unhealthy, too navel-gazing, corrupted and full of perverse incentives and easy social capital. Like many things these days it’s become fetishised: the more we ‘share’, the more ‘empathy’ we express, the more ‘open’ we are, the more we ‘talk’ about our feelings, the worse it seems to become (just look at the stats and the ‘science’).

I’ve never in my life seen so many people whose grasp of themselves — and reality — feels so fractured, so many people showing signs of learned helplessness. I’d say, as a non-health professional, one reason is that we constantly employ dead words and dead ideas, which have all the nutritional value of a pot noodle or a McNugget. It looks like an idea, it sounds like an idea, but you’ll starve to death if you think it will keep you alive.

So much of what we do as humans is role play. Scripted. Instead of getting to grips with issues (which is often simply the issue of being human — whether you’re a single mother or an HRH), we go for faux-empathy, faux-compassion, faux-sharing. It’s like going to confession and doing your Hail Marys, knowing full well you’re going to repeat the same sins.

Sometimes it’s worth going against the flow. To be contrarian. To be counter-narrative. Especially when you see the ‘cure’ leading to an epidemic of depression all around you. To question whether everyone being on pills to get them through life is really how life is meant to be.

Maybe the harder truth is that we’re all damaged. Broken. Depressed at times. Carrying some cognitive handicap or other — diagnosed in a 10-minute visit to the doctor, or self-diagnosed — a neat label for your pain. An excuse for the way we are.

My unprofessional diagnosis?

What pains us most is being human.