What's going on with nations MH? *[Content warning: concerns suicide]

[Nuggetss]

Another one of my friends when I was at school ended their lives yesterday. This is the third person in 2 years we are in our late 20s. AIBU to think the government need to invest more money in MH. 3 people with their whole lives ahead of them gone. It's very sad one leaving behind DC . Is suicide becoming more common after COVID ? I'm absolutely devastated.

Our NHS is so stretched that even when someone attempts to take their life there is very little or inadequate support.
You are bandaged up and sent home, for the overstretched community teams.
Put on a referral list for therapy which has a 6 month minimum wait and basically left to it unless you can afford private therapy which even at low cost is ££ or go to a charity who tend to have volunteers who aren't necessarily qualified or experienced enough to get to the why.
They lean on and signpost the Samaritans who run a truly fab service but who really aren't trained to get to the bottom of the problem, it's like putting a plaster over a broken leg.
So that leads to the lack of hope, which as others have said becomes so overwhelming they feel that they are a burden to family/ lost in their pain and hopeless.
It is bloody awful.

My thoughts.

The nation's mental health has been declining long before COVID 19/ cost of living/ Vladimir Putin.

I think these things contribute:
*Lack of career options.

• There is mental health awareness, but seems that it's okay to be open about it as long as it's acceptable. For example, the Time to Talk Facebook campaign only seemed to feature attractive intelligent 20 something women's experience with depression . *Lack of job security *Difficulty in making friends during adulthood
• Contradictory religious dogma.
• Uneven gender ratio. There is a surplus of men. Involuntary celibacy and hopelessness add to mental health problems.
• Being healthy in general isn't always attainable (time to cook healthily, exercise or meditation. Accessing aGP)

It’s because while you’re in the middle of something traumatic your adrenaline levels are high and this keeps you going. Once you relax the depression starts but I’m not sure how this works on a chemical level.

It’s a bit like when you get a weekend off and end up with a huge migraine because your body has relaxed.

MH issues should by no means be taboo. However, I think the more 'open' we've become about MH has encouraged people to dwell on their issues and exist in echo chambers online which only exacerbates their MH issues. I personally know several people who fit this description

I’m not sure about the pressure to look a certain way. There has always been that pressure for females, always. My mum was constantly dieting, both her and her sister. She has always been slim a size 8 when I was a teenager which would be a size 6 in todays clothing. I remember her writing down the calorific value of everything she ate, she kept a book and wrote in it daily. She walked a lot (as everyone did) then she bought exercise equipment and did home workouts as soon as she got in from work. I remember her refusing to eat gravy at one point. I also went on diets with her, I was still at school. I remember eating cottage cheese and grapefruit which I hated but I didn’t want to ‘get fat’. I hated being tall and had to work hard to be skinny. I wanted blue eyes too. Nowadays it’s so much easier to mould yourself. Hair extensions, fake tan, fake eyelashes. I’m not saying it’s a good thing but I can say without any doubt that the ‘thin’ of yesteryear was much thinner than the ‘thin’ of today.

Because in the middle of a crisis we are too busy surviving - it is only when we have time to reflect on how awful it was, and the implications going forward that we have time and space to feel the impact of it.

^^
And also throughout the troubles there was a huge sense of community (within individual communities). People stuck together, looked out for each other. There was a Sense of connection and purpose. A lot of those things are absent in modern times. The worlds more dog eat dog. There also wasn't the drug issues that there is now.

It's absolutely a lack of hope and a loss of control over your life. Low wages, debt insecure employment, bullying culture, lack of opportunities and no prospect of change for yourself or your children.
Much of the joy of life has disappeared, cutting council services back to the bone...
The ongoing lack of mental health services only exacerbates the problem.
There's only so much that people can take, add relationship problems in and you've got a perfect storm.

On line echo chambers I'm sure play a part. Young people always seem to need a 'thing' to validate themselves. It used to be that your tribe followed a particular music genre, sport, hobby etc but now it seems to be far more likely to be around sexuality, mental health, and because so much of their lives are lived on line it's easy to be swept up in dangerous communities. Young people see these communities as providing them with validation but have to ramp up their issues to maintain 'spectator's' interest and continue to be relevant. It's scary stuff. These communities then egg each other on to reveal more extreme thoughts and actions and it can spiral out of control.

Where I come from has one of the highest suicide rates in the UK. You will find that there's spates of suicides, then it reduces then it happens again in numbers. It's a social contagion. One person taking their own life sends out messages to other people feeling similar that it is a viable option, especially within small communities and friendship groups/ school cohorts. I have worked with young people with mh and one of the things that stuck with me was a girl that said- 'x (friend) was amazing. I don't know why she did it because she was smarter and prettier than me. If its good enough for them then it's good enough for me'. So sad.

Funding for counsellors to be paid might help. For my therapy training I was counselling suicidal clients, during and between lockdowns. Clients with difficult life experiences often can't afford private therapy, so are sent to trainees with very little training in suicide or other major distress.

I am so sorry. Life is hard, with no glimmer of light at the end and news just getting more and more depressing.
Algorithms constantly feeding the beast really do not help. There are charities trying to support and fight that with add ons, ripple is one I know of. The way we live our lives online now doesn’t help.

I feel that although lots of people say they are there for others and say be kind in reality when people have mental health struggles it’s quite often treated with remarks such as ‘we all have problems ‘ or that it could be worse attitude. I would say with a lot of young men in my area it’s a combination of drug debt from cocaine use gambling issues and a very deprived hard faced culture where no one really seems to care about each other .

Aren't there more women than men and hasn't this almost always been the case? There have always been more involuntary or otherwise celibate women than men.

As an aside, although more men die by suicide, more women attempt suicide. (This is thought to be due to gender stereotypes socialising different sexes towards different methods.)

This^

Thé nation is an absolute shambles,there's barely anything available MH help wise where I live;thé wait for counselling on the NHS is at least a year long;for many people it's too long.

The pressure we're under is immense.

I think MH services were ground into dust by years of conservative budget cuts as a low priority.

Then there was a significant event (Covid) and since then the decline (as MH conditions such as anxiety tend to take time to spiral) and now the country is in a deep crisis with few services, few "lay" people with capacity to support others, and more people coming up against problems due to that spiralling. To think this is nothing to do with an event like Covid Is blinkered. Most people push through initial events but then get hit with repressed problems. Add in the general decline in supportive communities. Everyone is on their own now, thats very obvious from sites like this.

The covid restrictions perhaps didn’t damage the closest friendships, but it did push apart people who saw each other regularly and took emotional support from each other but who drifted apart during lockdowns and never reconnected. My social circle got way way smaller and I’m much more disconnected from my family too. I think this must be true for a lot of people.

The pandemic also made people spend way more time of social media, which has been proven to be very bad for mental health.

Throw in the Ukraine war, cost of living crisis, recession and scare-mongering media who only print increasingly graphic tales of misery etc etc. (Plus 5 yrs ago holidays were cheap and easy to organise and now they’re expensive and complicated.)

I don’t think the government should throw money at mental health - a lot of that gets burned up in seminars and pointless ‘wellbeing’ handouts at schools - but I do think the government and schools should constantly ask themselves ‘is this bad for mental health’ before issuing instructions. At DD’s school for example she has a compulsory ‘uniform’ PE bag the size of a shoe bag, and she has uniform for PE lessons which is supposed to go in the bag, but it simply doesn’t fit in. So she has to leave things hanging out and gets told off and stressed and anxious about PE. So avoidable if she could just use a bigger bag! Just a random example of a stupid policy that makes a child anxious every week. Like how attendance certificates ritually humiliate the least healthy children every term. We need less stupid policies.

This doesn’t tally with the figures though

Highest suicide is for women, those aged 45 to 49 years had the highest age-specific suicide rate at 7.8 per 100,000 in 2021. Among men, those aged 50 to 54 years had the highest age-specific suicide rate at 22.7 per 100,000

So if there’s a correlation between low resilience and suicide it’s not higher for young people. Although I doubt it’s about that.

I was unable to answer questions in class despite being very clever. It wasn't lack of resilience or parenting, it was undiagnosed autism and processing issues.
Supportive parents are not to blame for the MH crisis. If you read the Complete Guide to Aspergers it will educate you on ASD and will explain that parents huge support is often the only thing enabling their child to cope with school.
Maybe some of your students have ASD or other undiagnosed conditions rather than being the snowflakes you suggest.

I remember when there was a report that came out shortly after lockdowns ended that stated that suicide rates had not increased. People on social media who had been calling for Chinese style lockdowns were positively gleeful because they felt it meant they could dismiss anyone that claimed that lockdown would have an impact on mental health.

Except mental health doesn't work like that. People don't generally experience a difficult event and immediately turn to suicide. I think it's only now that we are starting to see the impact, like a delayed reaction.

I think the wider world is often very scary and depressing (worries about the recession we're not in yet, hearing about horrible crimes, reports from the war, climate change). The things that keep us happy are often those things that are very mundane and close to us (listening to music, sitting in the sun, eating something you like, having a good catch up with a family member or a friend, putting a picture on the wall, walking along a favourite place and looking at the river/sea/hills/shops and so on).

I think the way we live now means that the wider world stuff is always able to come at us, and we feel the need to know about it and be aware of the sufferings of others. We feel selfish or lazy sometimes if we do the smallscale close things that keep us happy, and the way our working lives are here in the UK a lot of us are expected to work crazy hours with no breaks or be available all the time. People used to work all hours but they often had a hope of a life after death where things would be better.

And then as a PP said we feel there is no hope in sight, because of the horrible things we're always hearing about, and because we have no time for or can't afford or don't allow ourselves small happinesses. It makes for a toxic cocktail for many.

Sorry I think we are in the recession now, I guess I mean the constant feeling that "the worst is yet to come".

I work in MH. I am overwhelmed with the amount of work and level of risk.

Plus reporting was delayed which is part of the dip

It’s all on ONS btw if anyone wants to see ages etc

It’s very much down from the 80s say so more is going on than just social media. Unemployment is likely a factor

I think in terms of Covid, it's a bit limiting just to look at it as "you had to spend some time locked down watching DVDs, and now it's over." The restrictions showed how quickly our normal way of life can be totally disrupted, and we all saw previously unthinkable things like people dying alone in care homes without being allowed visitors, grandparents having to stand in the garden to see their grandchildren through windows in winter, and so on. That's disconcerting on a deep level. The way that most people seemed to retreat into their little family bubbles and pull up the drawbridge then showed that in a lot of places, we don't have a community backup we can rely on if we were to need support; the culture in the UK seems to be by and large "look after me and mine", and that was both brought into sharp relief and probably also intensified by Covid.

Aside from that, the continuing financial impact of Covid/Brexit/the war in Ukraine means that other things we previously counted on as part of the fabric of our usual day-to-day lives, like local businesses, cafes, pubs, etc., are on precarious footing or already gone, and that's depressing to see day after day. Even if someone's not personally struggling, we all know that life is getting very hard for a lot of people, many of whom were already struggling and vulnerable and had just taken a kicking from Covid - it would take a hard heart not to be affected by that. So I don't think we should limit the impact of Covid on the nation's mental health by just looking at it in terms of numbers of deaths/cases. It did a lot of damage that we didn't have time to recover from before the war in Ukraine and the effects of Brexit started to bite.