Okay, so this is going to be a little bit of a rant, but rest assured I have slept on this one and I have carefully iron out the finer details in my mind so that I have everything in perspective and I am able to fully comprehend the point that I am making.
For those of you that don’t know, I have bipolar disorder and I have had it for around thirty years. I have only been aware of the condition when it was diagnosed all the way back in 2011. Since that fateful day I have done nothing but read up and study mental health in my quest to find answers to living with such a condition. As it happens, I’m doing pretty well. The big, destructive relapses seem to be under control and the smaller, niggly, everyday symptoms are tolerable to the point where I can at least function.
Awareness has always been something of a problem. Trying to explain to people what happens with such a condition and trying to put into words exactly how it feels is difficult at the best of times. There are many individuals that don’t really understand the idea of mental health, and have no comprehension of what it is like to not have control over your brain. Can you imagine it? Your mind is not your own and it can be taken over by an altered perspective at any moment, and it doesn’t happen fast, it slowly infects your mind so that you don’t know the difference between the real world and the fantasy land that has been pulled over your eyes. No, not an easy one to explain and so a lot of people think that it is just an excuse for poor behaviour. There are no excuses, just explanations, just ways of trying to make everybody understand.
There is a forty percent chance that I will not see my fiftieth birthday, and that I will be killed, either by an uncontrolled addiction to drugs or alcohol or by my own hand in the midst of a bipolar depression. It is not a good prognosis by any stretch, but my awareness of this statistic at least means that I can minimise the risks (no drugs or alcohol, eat, sleep, write, repeat.) The problem with alcohol is that it brings down the mind’s defences, sends it into a place where a spontaneous act is far more likely to happen. Did you ever get smashed and sleep with, kiss or offer to marry someone you shouldn’t have? Or perhaps you ate a sweaty, nasty kebab from a retailer that you wouldn’t go anywhere near in the cold light of day. Perspective is a wonderful thing, and it can be altered so easily. Put this one in your thinking cap for a while, you are 120% more likely to take your own life under the influence of alcohol. Think about that the next time you reach for the wine bottle after a bad day.
Suicide, in my opinion, can not be stopped. Reduced? Yes, there is no doubt about that, but there will always be people who are desperately unwell and they can’t find any other way out. I’ve said this many times, depressed people tend to put on a mask when they are out in public. They become experts in the art of lying casually to people who see the dark circles under their eyes. If you think someone is suffering then you have to dig deeper, go to their home, see how they are living, look for any signs of chaos or hypo-orderliness that sometimes occurs when people are either unable to keep their lives in order, or do so to extremes to try and take their mind off things. The signs are there if you look for them.
Men have been specifically targeted by mental health campaigns because they are statistically more likely to die by suicide than females. In 2018 three-quarters of all suicides were male out of a total of 6507 (according to the ONS.) These campaigns aim to get more men talking about their emotional state and to seek out help when things start to come apart. Has it worked? The data for 2019 follows the same trend, although all the data has not been compiled yet due to the Covid epidemic.
The campaigns told that ‘It’s okay not to be okay,’ ‘It’s time to talk,’ etc. Celebrities were awash with television appearances talking about their six-week “battle” with anxiety and social media came alive with variations on the theme of ‘Be nice to each other.’ Mental health awareness week became an empty, hollow time of people sharing such meaningless phrases but doing nothing to try and stem the flow of people who are losing their minds on such a scale. The latest one doing the rounds is a slide that proclaims that Covid deaths were far outstripped by the suicide rate in August of this year and that we need to be nicer to people to try and prevent them from finding a solution to all that ails them at the end of a rope.
That’s when it hit me that these slides do far more harm than good and I tried an experiment to try and prove this was so. I left a comment on one of them, declaring that the slide had no factual evidence in it to try and invoke a discussion. The information in the slide was false, believe me I checked up on it. The suicide rate for August hasn’t even been published yet, and probably won’t be until next year. Even more frustrating is the idea that being nice to someone, to offer them a cheery hello is sufficient to stop someone who has suicide on their mind from going forth with their plans is somewhat foolish to say the least. You really can’t understand the mindset of someone who is in such deep turmoil unless you have walked that path. A cheery greeting will bounce off you like a sparrow going up against a Boeing-747. So, I commented, throwing down the gauntlet, daring someone to come forth and challenge my views (which I welcome, by the way. Discussion and debate bring out the best ideas.) Not a single person offered any comment, challenge, or anything else for that matter. Plenty of people saw the post. Plenty of people liked the post, but debate over it was off the table.
So, I’m left in a state of confusion. It wasn’t the only thing that happened this week that troubled me. The correlation between telling people to talk more and the amount of people willing to listen seems to be way off kilter if you ask me.
But then, you didn’t ask me, did you?