To think the people have a romanticised view of the last few generations?

[safari111]

Whenever I bring up my mental health with my dad or husband, especially since having kids, instead of support or understanding I receive a speech on how my grandma or my husband's grandma "coped with so much, had so little, and were SO HAPPY. Everyone was happy, blah blah blah" that's all I get. That no one had the mental health issues and neurological problems that people have today and all of that. It enrages me that 1. My mental health is invalidated. 2. Everyone else's mental health problems are invalidated and 3. Everyone romanticises the fact that people were absolutely happier a generation or 2 ago, despite poverty, war, poor health etc.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you experienced similar?

I never thought people were happier but people were expected to just get on with it and not talk about their problems. It seems as though because life was a lot harder, there was less sympathy but I might be wrong. I never lived then.

After my baby died, I learned that my own grandmother lost a baby and doctors said to her: just get pregnant again and forget about him at the time and she told me that she'd never forgotten about him. This was 60 years ago but she's also never talked about it as it was just expected to get on with it.

People do put on the old rose tinted glasses far too much
Not everyone was happy all the time. Ridiculous to think they were

I guess he is right in that society was less supportive of those with MH issues so they would have put on a brave face, got committed to an asylum or just died. People were more used to trauma through childhood mortality, war, illness and possibly there was a greater community if people going through similar things that may have helped in being supportive but I can't imagine how those things wouldn't have trigger depression

But people certainly didn't not have MH struggles they just didn't have them diagnosed. Watching the Lucy Worsley programme about the Blitz, there is no way that the people who survived that didn't have some sort of PTSD not to mention dealing with their family members lost in the war and probably having dealt with the loss of family members in WW1 too

I think people these days spend too much time overthinking and over complicating every aspect of everything, not sure it is any better these days

I agree. My grandmother lost her mother to eclampsia (at home) as a child, then was later bombed out of two homes and lost her brother in the war. A fairly normal back story for then I suppose. She was very depressed generally until she died. The fact that nobody ever assessed her and suggested medication to help her cope makes me feel quite sad now.

Oh and then one of her babies was stillborn too 🙁

I think that people recognise mental illness more and are more accepting of it, which is obviously a good thing, but so many people now seem unable to make the easiest decisions or cope with the most basic parts of being an adult. I think people seem to be getting softer, definitely.

There was not nearly so
much navel gazing in the past. I had a miscarriage over forty years ago - at the time it was just one of those things. I was sad, obviously, as we'd been trying for a long time, but I put it behind me and got on with it.

Certainly in years gone by there was less awareness of mental health, and it's good to have all aspects of physical and mental health supported.

But I do also agree that people these days are much less resilient. I wonder if that is in part caused by the fact that we are constantly distracting our minds, and when we need to use them they aren't ready. We have television, so many channels and streaming services, we have music whenever we want, we have social media to mindlessly scroll through even when we are sitting in the toilet, we have the internet to think for us. We can write with predictive text. Our brains have become lazy. So when I compare myself to my grandmother, I agree that she could have (and did) cope with a lot more and just gone on with things compared to myself. Her brain was healthy and ready to be used to think and cope, my brain is saturated with mindless data and is a bit numb.

I had a great uncle who fought in the war. He never ever talked about what he experienced as he just didn't want to have to remember about it - talking about it brought the traumatic memories and coped fine with life afterwards as long as it was all kept buried away in his head.

So the really bad things that happened to people, I think a lot of people coped by just not talking about it. Same with losing babies in infancy as happened more then. If it happened then yes they were terribly upset, but generally they had to get on with life so just buried it at the back of their minds.

I think people were more community-minded. And many people didn't move far from families at all. My mum's extended family members all lived in streets nearby. Popped in and out each other's houses etc. Saw each other much more regularly than modern life allows for. I believe that if you were in a good family then that literal closeness probably brought happiness with it. And you were able to support each other through hard times, lending each other money, food, a babysitter, hand me downs, giving each other advice, just generally helping each other out, having regular in person chats etc in a way that just doesn't seem easy now for many families where they are spread far and wide and very busy with both parents in full time work.

It's a shame as it's the little things like regular close connections with other humans that bring true happiness and contentment. Some people are lucky enough to find that with their work colleagues and but for most people they are just people we happen to share a workplace with.

I don’t necessarily think people were happier then, but their expectations were certainly a lot different and a lot lower, and from personal experience, you were just supposed to get on with it, whatever your problems were at the time.
People still felt overwhelmed with life at times…but the expectations were that someone else was having a worse time, worse problems etc so just stop whinging and carry on.
Things we’re not openly discussed in as much detail as nowadays and you expected life to be hard or difficult, not easy.
Perhaps there’s a way forward where life can be difficult at times, but have better support systems for when people need help. Unfortunately, I can’t see that happening any time soon.
We may need to build more resilience in ourselves and our children, and not expect life to go the way we expect it to.

My mum and gran used to talk in hushed tones about a couple of relatives (who you’d nowadays say had a near breakdown/ongoing MH issues): ‘he’s got problems with his nerves’.

My mum has her first baby stillborn when she was just 21. The dr said "you have got lots of time to have as many babies as you like". Even worse, afterwards they put her on the maternity ward surrounded by new mums and babies. She never even got to see him and has never forgotten. Such cruel, uncaring attitudes back then but I guess they actually thought it was the right thing to do.

I’m sure people felt bad about some things just as much as we do, but they just didn’t talk about it as much. My granddad died when my dad was a teenager, DGM had to support her kids on her own in the days before there were benefits etc. This must have been difficult for them all but Dad has spoken to me about it precisely once!

DGM used to tell a story about her own grandmother who lost a daughter as a toddler. She was elderly by the time DGM knew her, but she’d kept the girl’s little dress in the back of her wardrobe and would sometimes get it out to look at, about 50 years later. There must be millions of stories like that which never get recorded but surely not everyone was happy all the time.

Maybe there was less fear of missing out because people didn’t know as much about what was happening outside their own area. Obviously they had the news etc but not wall to wall influencers and celebrities etc.

People were not happier, but they did not expect to be. Contentment was the goal.
There did seem to be less major mental health problems e.g. school avoidance, unable to work due to depression and anxiety. Some people did have this, but it seems far less than now.

So my mother was born during the war. That generation were told to be grateful for enough food and peace in their country. Expectations were much lower.

I don’t believe that people were necessarily happy but they certainly seemed to be better at coping with bad things happening in their lives.

Yanbu. Aparrently they all worked so much harder and never committed any crimes either.

I have an autistic child. My own mother made comments about there being a lot of autism about these days (like it was the cold) and that people didn't have it in her day. When my child was diagnosed she told me that was a shame.

My mum has never been diagnosed with anything. But she has glaringly obvious traits of autism and OCD. Anxiety and trying to control situations. Meltdowns when she doesn't get her way or things don't go as she expected. Ritualistic hand washing, locking and unlocking doors and flicking light switches. The empathy and emotional intelligence of a shoe.

People might not have been diagnosed in her day. But she is still probably autistic.

My great grandad was depressed and shot himself. Of course poor mental heath (and PTSD) were a thing years ago but people were often too busy trying to survive (my Nan would go hungry to feed her family) to give their mental health much consideration. Also other folk would just shrug and keep going, stiff upper lip and all that. I don’t think they were any happier than people are now.

Their struggles were different to ours

I think you just were not in the circles. 2 in my father’s family at least were alcoholics. My mother worked in a voluntary service for children with disabilities.

The children, a lot of them, were hidden out at home or institutionalised and if at home mothers were just to get on with it, absolutely zero education.

People carpet swept and denied significant issues.

I remember reading magazines in the seventies - Punch (it had cartoons), Woman's Weekly and so on, as well as Reader's Digest - and one of the things I quite clearly remember is the number of adverts for Sanatogen Tonic.

I got the distinct impression that this was something vast swathes of the housekeeping population were chugging daily.

As this sign shows, the recommendation was three glasses a day...

It’s a combination of denial of MH problems and rose tinted glasses. I read one of the SM posts the other day about ‘if yiu grew up in the 80s’ and how amazing it was.
I remember a lot of poverty and people being deeply unhappy- things like DA and addiction were hidden behind closed doors and everyone pretended everything was fine when it really wasn’t

DD is diagnosed with autism she manages at school with various coping strategies.
My Dbro has lots of autistic traits had an awful time at school and was a school refuser.
My DDad has lots of autistic traits had a bad time at school, easily influenced into undesirable behaviour left school at 15 no qualifications, has worked isolated jobs as an adult or cared for DBro when a school refuser and DGP when they had cancer has been out of the work place supported by my mum for 20 years.
My DGDad had autistic traits left school at 12 as was normal in rura Ireland in the 40s, worked the family farm before moving to the UK and doing a physical and repetitive job.

Life was harder in the past but also less demanding and less navel gazing, people at least the poor were kept physically busy this would have benefited some people's MH or kept their mind busy. Modern living is too stimulating for most people and we don't even know it and far too much comparison available instead of just comparing your life with the same people you lived near which was similar ,we are ofcourse animals and we are so far removed from the lives that we should naturally lead that it's no wonder MH issues are increasing

The widespread availability of highly visual news footage surely must add to people's "worry load" for want of a better term. It's a bit different seeing really disturbing footage very regularly of global suffering etc than reading a written report in a newspaper or even listening to a voice on the radio. I'm not sure what that is doing to our brains and stress levels. We must be absorbing and retaining those traumatic images in some way.