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?

God, the shame of having a mental health problem back then! Not only would people not talk about their own mental health illnesses, they’d look at anyone who admitted to being mentally unwell like they’d suddenly sprouted 2 heads - which is why people didn’t talk about their own mental health challenges.

I don’t believe people lack resilience these days. I think we are about as resilient as we’ve ever been. Saying people lack resilience these days is just blaming them for not being able to meet all the challenges of living in this current time - there are many.

I pinched this from Twitter. Re resilience:

“'Resilience' is a sneaky neoliberal trope. It frames, as a psychological virtue, painful endurance of circumstances from which others benefit at your expense.”

Gritting your teeth and enduring while other, luckier, people live better - resilience. Finding a way to pull your self up by your bootstraps - literally impossible - resilience. Being told all it takes is to apply yourself more and work harder (while you are working as hard as you can) - resilience.

Who does our ‘resilience’ benefit exactly?

@safari111 if everyone wrote in a dairy about how they felt etc it would be a mix of perspectives

I agree with this. We just 'got on with it' and found ways to cope because we had no other option. Considering the crap life has thrown my way, I think I've benefited from the capacity to just 'get on with it'. I enjoy the simple things in life.

On the other hand, I think my degree of ability to 'get on with it' and deal with myself is probably unnatural. Definitely learned from the school of hard knocks and knowing that no-one was there for me anyway, so I just had to cope however I could.

I was talking to my older children about this and asked them if they thought that all the emotions and feelings support they got when they were younger was helpful or actually not helpful, in terms of whether it interfered with them building resilience. They all think that it was actually helpful to have had that support and understanding of their feelings, unlike what I got when I was just told to stop being silly if I was upset. They think it contributed to their own resilience.

So I don't know what the answer is. Probably the validation is better overall.

My mother had a friend who spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals but I think the idea of mental health diagnosis was for those suffering in much more profound ways than is recognised now. There's more support at lower levels of distress than there was in the past.

One thing I do think is that young adults seem to be much less friendly and kind to each other now. Maybe social media has a role in that. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's what I am observing.

Sorry OP I didn’t answer your question. Yes, your 3 points are correct imo.

My mother was much like your dad in her attitude. She also had extraordinary robust and physical health until she hit her 80s and health issues and an anxiety/panic disorder caught up with her. She told me she didn’t realise how hard it could be to have a chronic physical health illness and/or mental health issues - despite having a son with both who ended his own life. That’s how nutty and batshit it all was. Still is, in many ways.

I also agree with your points, OP.

My gma, born 1920s, always maintained a stiff upper lip. But I know she’d had a terribly hard life. She had a stillborn baby boy, then lost a second son to meningitis. There was no therapy, support groups, and I expect she did just press on with other children to look after. But she told me she lost all her hair, and wore a wig for a decade following her losses. Holding it in like she was expected to took a terrible toll.

My Gran had a baby that weighed only 2lb exactly. The doctor delivered him at home and told her he's a runt, put him at the bottom of the bed and I'll come around to you tomorrow. Gran fed him every 2-3 hours and cuddled him in bed with her. The doctor called the next lunch time and saw Gran feeding him and told her she was making life hard for herself because he was a runt and too small to survive and She shouldn't feed him. This was said in front of my Auntie who was 8. Gran ignored the doctor and that baby grew up to be my Dad. He had 5 Dad's. He served in the war and lived until he was 74. Expectations were very different then.

Looking at my family history:
Great great grandfather committed suicide 1860s
At the inquest it was said his sister had problems
His wife's youngest brother was a paranoid schizophrenic and spent years in an asylum. In better conditions than being an inpatient these days. Other folk in the record book of the asylum seem to have been admitted with mania, and left again after 6 weeks. This is about the same as these days, but with no medication.
A female relative the 1950s was hospitalised with what now seems to have been post-partum depression coupled with grief at the loss of her DF. She was treated with insulin therapy - basically being put in a coma for a week. Some who remember her think she became more "docile" after this.
A great uncle by marriage had a lobotomy for severe depression, possibly brought on by his wife's repeated miscarriages. They never had children in the end, and she had to be the breadwinner. I met him a few times - something seemed to have been lost. 1960s.
Another great grandfather drowned himself in the Thames, 1910s.
A friend of a family member killed herself with an overdose, 1970s.

Stigma used to be reserved for those with TB, cancer, or MH issues. Now, it seems to be applied mainly to MH issues, and is still real, despite all the anti-stigma stuff that's been going round the last couple of decades.

Human nature doesn't change that much over time.

Of course, I have many other ancestors who did not have MH issues, or none that are recorded or remembered. I expect everyone has a similar mix in their past.

"My mother had a friend who spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals but I think the idea of mental health diagnosis was for those suffering in much more profound ways than is recognised now. There's more support at lower levels of distress than there was in the past."

I agree with this. People with lower levels of distress may have talked to the Vicar or his wife, but most just got on with it. What other choice did they have?
People who received treatment were mainly quite seriously ill - although there were also those young women committed for having abortions or being a lesbian.

Similarly to others, there’s a lot of tragedy in my family including DV, institutionalisation, alcoholism and extreme poverty. My great grandmother and her sister were forced into prostitution just to feed themselves and their younger siblings in the 1890s after their father left the family with another woman after their mother died. There was no government help, just bits from the church or the community so people didn’t have a choice but to get on and do what they had to do.

Trauma existed so MH issues existed, of course they did. They just weren’t spoken about. People had an ‘eccentric aunt’ or a cousin who was ‘just a bit of an oddbod’ and that’s all that was said. People went into institutions never to be heard of again. The shame and stigma was enough for families to just pretend they were dead.

Life was harder, people were harder and they didn’t expect as much out of life as we do now. We have it way better. Thankfully psychology, sociology and science has also moved on and we can understand, diagnose and appropriately treat MH struggles now.

My dgm suffered with depression her whole life. Her mother died when she was young, and she had to work and raise her younger siblings. She married my dgf, fell pregnant and he went off to war. She wouldn't hear from him for weeks/months at a time, and didn't know if he was coming back. She raised her child alone for the first few years. After the war, luckily my dgf came home. They had a total of 5 children. It's no wonder she had problems after all the trauma she'd been through, but was expected to just crack on. When she did go for treatment, it was things like electric shock therapy. People had mental health problems, it just wasn't understood or supported like it is now.

This is true. I grew up in the 60's - my parents lived through the Blitz in London and had to go and identify neighbors who had been killed in their houses overnight. Mum said they really didn't expect to survive - every day was a blessing . They didn't have time to feel sorry for themselves.

Mum had a stillborn baby during the War, and like other comments here, she was told she had time to have more babies and she should just move on. Which she did - she only told me about it once when I was pregnant.

Something I notice now which was unknown when I was growing up , was "school avoidance" . We went to school and that was that - big classes, my school photos show about 40 kids in a class. I never knew of kids getting to avoid school or be home schooled, even though everyone's mother was at home . It just didn't happen. You were expected to get on with it .

I don't think we have rose coloured glasses on about the past - it wasn't all sweetness and light - but people really were expected to get on with life.

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

This. I also think people accepted some things like illness & the death of the elderly as part of life.

A lot of people i know nowadays seem to dissolve into an extended state of utterly broken bereavement after their frail parent aged 90+ dies. It is of course very sad but people seem to expect we can live forever and avoid ever getting bugs & viruses.

Children/teens seem to have far poorer mental health in particular. All this anxiety just would have been ignored. I sometimes wonder if by overacknowledging it we affirm it unhelpfully and also send an unconscious message to young people that we agree that a) there is a reason to be anxious and b) we don't trust/believe they can cope.

"My mother had a friend who spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals but I think the idea of mental health diagnosis was for those suffering in much more profound ways than is recognised now. There's more support at lower levels of distress than there was in the past."

This. Our family doctor tried to suggest my grandparent was "depressed" a month following death of spouse they had been with since teenage years, its not depression to grieve.

I know i'll get slaughtered for saying this but I also think there's more support & acknowledgement (in life & education settings) for less profound degrees of neurodiversity. The changes to diagnostic criteria after DSM 3, including those to ICD 10, massively increased the scope of what was classified as a clinicial condition. A lot of people diagnosed now simply didnt meet diagnostic criteria in the 80s and were left to get on with life. There were a bucket of people who didn't love school, so they left it at 16 and went into work or college.

This is exactly it. People accepted that life didn't always go according to plan, and didn't constantly look at others and wish they had their lives/money/luck whatever. Everything is such a drama these days, whereas people used to just get on with their lives. I see it in a lot of threads on MN, people who can't seem to work out how to deal with the most simple issue.

Of course they were. And for your information @pinguins I, and all of my family, and all of my friends are not at all "mentally fragile", we all deal with reality - and some have had a lot to deal with, and are still dealing with it, and I imagine all of us would say that the majority of people were fine back then (when exactly is "back then" btw?). We just happen to come from a generation which doesn't spend every waking hour obsessing over every thing in life which doesn't go according to plan, and are mature enough to know that no-one is entitled to a life free of problems.

I think people were less unhappy because their expectations were lower. They were happy with their lot.
People now expect perfection, compare themselves and their lives to others and also expect to be happy. A lot of people expect everything to be fixable and that life must be fair.

There's a lot to be said for acceptance and realising what you have.

As always one example doesn't necessarily apply to all. My father left school at 14 because the schools were closed due to polio and he thought he might as well be earning money instead of sitting at home. I left school at 16 (just) because I was sick of it and wanted to be earning money. Others in my class left at 15 because they wanted to be earning money. Young people in those days were not babied as much as many are now, they were ready to be independent and live their own lives.

I'm younger than you but yes, school avoidance just wasn't a thing. You went to school whether you wanted to or not and there was no discussion. I'd probably have been a school avoider if I could have got away with it.

There were a few home schoolers but it was so much less common then.

My Nan was my role model. Poor as a church mouse. Never complained, found joy in small things. Loved a competition in later life and won some pretty random shit. But she had plenty she could’ve been melancholy about, but just kept buggering on. My GF deserted her after the war (not that he served) and left her with 5 kids under 7. There was no social security at that time. No family to support her. Lovely woman, always put the thoughts of others above herself. Raised all kids single handedly and worked her fingers to the bone. Ride a bike everywhere. My dad inherited her cheerful, kind upbringing even though he was shipped off to boarding school because of the above but contented to have a nice house, new cars, steady job and a family. My mother was an awful woman but he would never leave because of the experience of his own single parent household, plus he probably couldn’t afford to.

My own mother had a pretty unfortunate upbringing, also ended up at boarding school but ended up with a chip on her shoulder and was a massive narcissist. Instead of concentrating on her luck at having a lovely husband, well behaved kids (we were too scared to be anything else) never had to work, never lifted a finger around the house, always complaining, dissatisfied with her lot all of the time.

I think happiness/contentment is partly innate and partly resilience to life’s challenges. So no, I don’t think previous generations were happier, but they certainly had more to worry about.

I think technology has brought new/different stresses to life that people struggle to switch off from. Social media has created a new way to bully/taunt/bragg that lasts 24 hours a day. Throw in higher expectations within society re achievements, rising living costs,so many rules and regulations around how everyone lives their lives. I'd say life is pretty stressful for most people.

I grew up in the 80/90's not that long ago but it was much slower paced I think people were happier or didn't know better

Interesting thread. I think it revolves a lot around what we expect in order to be happy these days. People are dissatisfied because they don't have a certain 'thing' or feel they should be living the same life as someone else. We're a society surrounded by marketing, social media and a general message that validation comes from owning x and y. In the past I'm not sure that existed to the same extent. It's something I'm actively trying to 'opt out' of ie being happy with what I have, not unhappy with what I don't have.

There's definitely two extremes - rose tinted glasses, but also there's those who like to remind us how they walked 12 miles, barefoot, in a blizzard, to school every day.

I think a lot more was expected of children, much less emotional support. There were definitely elements that were much harder and like walking 12 miles in snow to school. My husband used to walk an hour to school a long a busy main road when he was six. Then home again. That was okay then. These days you'd probably get a knock on the door from social services if you allowed that.

But things were easier in some ways too. We could get away from school, bullies couldn't follow us home via technology. Life was simpler in many ways, which meant there was more quiet in life.

I'm actually glad I had my childhood before screens and the internet.

And ate coal for breakfast….