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?

Oh God yes. People do it to themselves though. To listen to my MiL talk the second world war was just an endless round of pulling together, people supporting each other and drinking cocoa and singing in the Anderson shelter waiting for bombs that never came. My FiL, who grew up in London, who's dad went off to fight and whose grandparents did not own a grocers shop has a slightly different take on it.

I think a lot of it is that people didn't have time to think about these things in the past.

They had more children, more money worries etc.

But their lives were smaller and everyone around them was the same as them. They probably weren't aware they had it bad iyswim which made it easier to cope with maybe?

@Bbq1 I'm so glad things have changed. They put us in to a butterfly suite, baby was with us and we had time to grieve. You'll never forget your baby but even 2 days ago in A&E, I was reminded that I'm still young and I can have more children. I didn't say that this will never replace him or remove my grief but I just didn't think it was a kind thing to say.

I think these days we expect others to care more about our MH, or at least pretend to. Lots of people just don't know how to deal with it, they can't think of anything practical to do so resort to 'others have it worse' or advise you to forget about it and get on with life.

There's no reason why others should act as your counselor and validate your problems, they have their own problems and often just can't see what they can do. If you think they'd like to help you tell them what you want :
To just listen to you?
To agree with you?
To challenge you?
To give advice?
There are genuinely people who value all these approaches, it sounds like you need someone in the one of the first two categories.

I do also think in general people are less resilient, which isn't 'keep calm and carry on' it is that you have developed the tools during your life to allow you to cope in a lot of situations.

I also wonder whether some people are very keen to show how sympathetic and compassionate they are as publicly as possible - usually all over SM, so when you aren't treated the same in real life you feel hard done by.

Family on both sides were working class and very, very poor.

1 grandfather was in WW1 and suffered PTSD his whole life, medicating with alcohol. His wife depressed. 3 of 4 kids’ mental health blighted, with one now psychotic, two have had lifelong major depression.

Other grandfather couldn’t serve. Had depression to the extent of being unable to work for periods. The church fed and clothed the kids during this time. One of his kids developed schizophrenia, another had severe social anxiety. This was termed being ‘funny buggers’.

So yeah, things were shit and people suffered. There just wasn’t any help.

Mental illness was a taboo subject in the past. People didn’t speak about it.

Today, it’s good that mental illness is more recognised, but at the same time people have become less resilient. As someone above said, there’s a lot more overthinking.

I never understand the life was happier thing.
There are so many things about the past that are terrible.

Just to mention that suicide rates are MUCH lower now than they used to be. In the UK peak male suicide rates were in 1905 and 1934.

My great grandmother went into a mental health institution in 1922 and died 30 years later still there. One of her children was institutionalised as a boy after attacking another child, and never came out either.

I would rather live now, with everything that's difficult in modern life, by about a thousand per cent.

I'm so sorry for your loss but I hope you found some comfort in being able to grieve your baby. I'm very glad to hear that things have moved on so much but find it hard to understand why drs still act as if children are almost interchangeable. Especially in this day and age.

Agree with PPs, it’s a mix of the two, of course people had MH issues or were unhappy but there was less navel gazing and for the most part getting on with it was a healthy distraction and meant their issue didn’t take over their lives. We are encouraged to overthink everything now, diagnose ourselves, obsess over every injustice and measure our lives against ‘perfection’. Whereas I think in the past people didn’t expect life to be fair or perfect, were much better at taking the rough with the smooth and knowing one sad incident didn’t stop the world from spinning.

When I grew up in the 70s, no one had 'mental health issues' but a few women, my mum included had 'bad nerves' which typically seemed to involve a prescription for valium and a great deal of discretion as it was embarrassing. I didn't know of a single child or young person who was considered mentally unwell. I remember times in my teens when I was deeply unhappy and anxious, but I put that down to situational things, friendship issues, exam nerves. It wouldn't have entered my head to think of this in terms of mental health. So, I don't know if people were actually happier, or whether if not they would have just put it down to life problems rather than pathologising it. I also don't think we had as much sense that we were entitled to be happy then either so expectations were lower.

I also think that in the past, religion helped people cope, whereas now a lot fewer people believe.

I think there's a tendency towards historical 'slippage,' where people associate 'the last couple of generations' or 'the recent past' with the world wars, Blitz spirit, and so on.

Anyone who was 18 at the start of WWII is over 100 by now - or dead. Anyone who was 18 in 1945 is 96/7. Very, very few of us have living relatives who were adults during the second world war, and yet people talk as if they did.

In the same way, people often talk as if 1950s attitudes applied to the very recent past.

I'm not saying everything is perfect now, or was perfect in the 70s or 80s or whenever. But I think the habit of assuming that the most formative event in 'living memory' is a war that happened a century ago, has a lot to answer for.

At least 3 people have used the phrase navel gazing... Just shows the ignorance out there still about mental health.

Come on, in the 1980s people were eating smash and spam. That's no way to live.

@XmasPartyhat my late dad was born in 1917. i don't really remember him but from descriptions, his special interests (I have his scrapbook and some textbooks that he "edited" with a pen because he disagreed with the author 🤣) and the articles he wrote for his school newspaper as a child id say you don't have to look far to see where the autism is in our family. Two of my DC are diagnosed and i think i have traits too but any suggestion that i was an odd child was brushed off as having an "abnormal" child was a stigma.

The people who cling hardest to the "Everyone was fine back then" myth are often doing it out of desperation because they need to believe it themselves. Don't take it away from them. It's how they cope because they're too mentally fragile to deal with reality. I feel sorry for people who act like this about MH for that reason.

I don't think people were happier (quite the opposite in fact) but they kept a stiff upper lip and didn't tend to talk about mental health problems. My nan had a nervous breakdown caused by the stress of living through the war. Her struggles weren't ever talked about.

I've watched several psychologists online talk about how the general trend towards focussing on our mood and feelings all the time actually makes people unhappier. Plus Jonathan Haidt has detailed at length the terrible impact of social media on mental health, particularly in girls. So there's probably some truth in the idea that people are more miserable now.

My grandad had mental health issues which we think was PTSD from D-Day. Growing up, we never really did the remembrance or poppy day thing because my grandad thought it was all better forgotten. Family members were bombed out of their homes. The impression of the war we got from my grandparents and their siblings was a long way from the romanticised VE day/blitz spirit view of it we sometimes have now.

When we got our eldest assessed, I was politely advised to get an assessment. This was before giving them my family history 😂I have wondered about getting an assessment. But I understand my own behaviour now as a adult, I know what sets me off and when I need to take a step back. I have always been good at masking and hiding a lot of behaviour. I didn't even realise this was a 'thing' until my 30s! So it doesn't serve a purpose for me IYSWIM.

Having a diagnosis helps my son. He is only 10. He's not quite at the stage of recognising or verbalsing something like 'I've spent 6 hours today around a load of noisy kids and now I am just completely overwhelmed and need to be alone to decompress'. A diagnosis acts as a quick and easy way that he is able to explain to adults in his life what is going on with him and how they can help him.

I don’t think everyone was fine but I think they were more resilient to minor/moderate MH issues.

People did - it’s just not on the highlight reel.

For years, I knew my great granduncle was a bit of war “ hero” recently learned that when he came back from 3 years in a WW2 PoW camp, his wife “kept him away from the children for a few years while he settled.” It’s told as “oh the family decided to stay with relatives for a little longer before returning to London.” Whilst he stayed with childless family.

Recently, Great Aunt said that he used to just cry every night when he did come home. But that only came up in a chat about mental health. She didn’t indicate that it got better - just that she grew up and left home. I don’t think he was able to hold a job long after the war either but it was told in the context of closing factories etc.

another person in that generation was institutionalised but as she didn’t have kids her story has faded. I’ve heard her mentioned once.

On my other side great grandfather was abusive. My grandmother battled depression her whole life. She was just a Calvinist about it (more suffering the better the things to come). There was a lot of competitive complaining but never about the real stuff. She confided in my mum when I was a kid and my mum recently told me.

My great grandfather had shell shock from ww1 and left my great grandmother when grandmother was a baby. Learnt recently due to visiting a museum that had an exhibit on.

My grandfather ran into his NDN
house (legally armed) to scare off intruders who, it turned out, had just beheaded his neighbours, untying the kids (not UK). This only came up at his funeral. He was always seen as “really paranoid” about safety.

Basically, people don’t talk about these events as they aren’t what you want to remember.

People went to 1947 olympics or had affairs (family seem to love recounting who got off with whom) but you have to press to get this stuff.

it’ll be the same when we’re 95. Covid will be a time of solidarity. Relatives that are in and out of work /have alcohol problems will be referred to as “never finding what suited them.”

Really interesting thread!

Imho I also don't think people were 'happier' per say but the factors that we now recognise help our mental health were part of everyday life; farming (i.e exercising and being in nature) was one of the main occupations, communities, families very close proximity the list goes on. Life was HARD, but there's so much research to show that poorer people create communities as they need to to survive whereas 'wealthy' i.e have enough to eat/live without huge worries' don't need the network and therefore are more self centred - we still have poverty but not on the scale as we previously had and so there is also alot of psychology involved. I think we make things that should be just part of life into special things now such as 'forest bathing' - like, just go for a walk in the forest!!!! We're so obsessed with making things into an occasion, or showing off that we're doing something special rather than just getting on with life and supporting each other through it.

I do think we pathologise alot of 'normal' human experiences and emotions now whereas previously this was seen as part of life.

There simply wasn’t counselling available years ago. Whatever you were experiencing, you just had to get on with it. Many people today lack that resilience, and fully expect other people to step in and provide support. Unfortunately, there’s never enough money to help everyone.
There wasn’t even bereavement support for children who lost a parent. I know that first hand, and it was in the 70’s. Thankfully, there have been many improvements in that respect.