Tony Blair says we need a national conversation about MH as its costing too much

[B0xes]

Tony Blair said recently on Jimmy's Jobs of the Future Podcast (clip available on youtube) that we need to have a national conversation about mental health. Why are we spending so much on it. Why are people self diagnosing. He believes people are being encouraged to view everyday challenges we all face as mental health issues.

Is he being unreasonable? In one sense, I'm inclined to agree to an extent, in the other, I believe he led the charge for so many of the social changes that have made us less resilient and many of these issues are due to individualism which led to atomisation and loneliness and being encouraged to see the market as the entity that fulfills our needs rather than strong families and robust social networks.

YABU - Blair can do one.

YANBU - He might have a point

Loathe Blair the billionaire, and he should never be allowed back .

We’ve all said this for ages, I worked with a government group who were all saying Mental Health is the new bad back…

They know, it’s just how to deal with it .

I think we do need to have a conversation but I think that conversation should focus on why there is this explosion in mental health issues.

DD has autism and LD and as she has become a teenager she has developed anxiety. Her paediatrician referred her to CAHMS for support and they rejected the referral as it was "just part of her autism". They told me to contact the autism support charities. Their waiting lists are horrendous. In the meantime her life is badly affected and she has developed physical symptoms.

Her paediatric consultant told me that we have basically got until she leaves school to try and sort this as once she leaves there will be nothing to help her. This is a consultant who has worked in the NHS for years.

The system is broken, life is becoming harder and harder and I think that people becoming more inward looking and not wanting to be part of the wider community is not helping.

I have had MH problems with anxiety and panic attacks over the years. Ended up temporarily medicated for them when acute, no counselling was available. Exercise and diet were a huge part of my recovery, I read books from the library (prescribed), did tai chi, tried yoga, joined No More Panic forum and got help there.

I’ve always been surprised how other people I’ve spoken to act as though MH issues such as anxiety are an unchangeable part of their identity and not something that requires work to fix.

People do seem to be waiting to be rescued sometimes, and while some MH conditions preclude helping yourself, many can be helped with positive steps that don’t require expensive help.

I agree with that.

There seems to be a tendency to want to evade normal emotions now. Any thread about recent bereavement and grief will inevitably get an early post recommending counselling. It’s normal to feel dreadful when you’ve lost someone you love, in fact there’d be something badly wrong with you if you didn’t. The only thing that heals grief is time.

But that’s not remotely reasonable . We will get made redundant, we will fail and have to try again. You need resilience when learning to ride a bike, you fail but get up and try again.

Resilience is a key character trait that helps us keep our equilibrium. How the fuck would we set up the world so we didn’t need it?

I think that there are problems with the educatiom system that mean children in schools suffer high levels of stress from a young age, and don’t move enough or play enough - and that is affecting brain development.

This only continues into secondary school, where movement is reduced even more, socialising is forbidden - outside of one 30 minute period when they are trying to fit in eating and bathroom break at the same time - and children and teens are ruled by fear and threat of punishment, because they have to sit still and shut up, more than ever before.

Because they are kept in these conditions that damage and stunt brain development, these children become adults who haven’t developed executive function skills necessarily for adult life, or the ability to regulate their emotions, and who are sometimes completely traumatised just from trying to survive the buildings they were forced, by law, to exist in.

Oh, they are also being supervised and taught by teachers who are mentally ill and exhausted… with high levels of sickness and often on anti-depressants. The system isn’t working for anyone. This isn’t about ‘resilience’ though.

Thing is, I think, that health is, by definition, variable.

If you're talking about physical health, for instance, you might have flu, which means you're not in good health, or you might have MS, which means you're not in good health in a completely different sense.

Similarly, with mental health. If you're facing a current situation that seems crushing, you might suffer from anxiety and stress - which is very real, as flu is real, but it's not the same as, say, long-term depression.

In other words, we bandy about the phrase 'mental health problems' without making the distinction between problems that are just the stuff of life and problems that actually inhibit life.

Both matter, but they're very different things.

He's certainly got a point.
People do not seem to get angry or upset, they have "MH" problems !

he can do one's He created a society where it became absolutely viable to opt out and claim benefits which are more attractive (to many) than working 40 hours a week. He's a big part of the current problem.

He has a point. If I said I had a physical disease that meant weeks off work my employer would want to have my medical records confirm that. But I could get myself signed off for months quite easily with ‘anxiety’ or ‘stress’ without anyone being able to argue that I’m actually ok…
In fact a colleague has done that for almost a year… as I know her quite well I am aware that she has been setting up a side business with holiday lets… she seems okay to do that.
Now it’s up and running ( under her daughter’s name) she’s negotiated a pay off to leave our workplace.
Was she actually so stressed that she couldn’t work? Or did she just want the safety net of a corporate job - that she hated BTW, and hated her boss- while she started something new?
I suspect the latter.

He has a point,they don’t want to deal with life plus social media and cannabis,every single one of my daughters friends have been diagnosed with some kind of mental illness,it’s insane.

He's semi-right. A lot of people with MH issues do not need therapy, counseling or meds because their depression and anxiety is circumstantial. MH issues are a product of the world we are living.

Just as an example, every single of my friends who checks the news daily is suffering from anxiety. It's not coincidence, the news designed to make people anxious

I completely agree with him. Thousands and thousands of otherwise well people who are being paid PIP to not work due to anxiety is completely unsustainable. So many jobs are wfh now and the amount of support employers put in place for staff is huge compared to the past. To an extent we need to encourage people to stop naval gazing and get on with things.

I agree that he created this.

On the flip side I know someone who desperately wants to work,keeps trying to work but their mental health is so bad they cannot cope but are struggling to access any support from the NHS despite pushing and pushing, we need to look at this from both sides.
Person I know does not claim benefits

How?

Amazing how Alzheimer rates have risen by a similar rate to serious mental health issues and no-one says that those people should just accept that being forgetful is normal and they should just get on with life

I'm not sure how old you are or whether you have any understanding of political history but your summaries are completely inaccurate. Individualism was the hallmark of Thatcher politics.

@Letlooseonthedanse yes, but MH issues are invisible and a lot of people suffer in complete silence. How many times how we heard someone commit suicide and the people around them were completely shocked because there was no signs?

You can try to argue that people are not suffering from anxiety and stress, but ultimately there is no way to prove if they are or they aren't.

A lot of self diagnosis is based on lived experience, however. In my case I already have an official diagnosis, but if I didn’t know (I was assessed as a teenager but parents kept the results from me for several years), I’d be self diagnosing with a view to proper assessment now, because it affects executive functioning. Having a full time job and supportive family didn’t erase that.

If Keir Starmer wants to improve the mental health of our young people. he could start by:

Scrapping SATs
Reducing the pressure to go to university and incur vast amounts of debt.
Stop forcing teens to retake exams they have already failed and will fail again.
Providing appropriate schools for those with autism and ADHD
Stop forcing SEN kids into mainstream schools
Supporting schools in dealing with bullying effectively rather than ignoring it.
Crack down on underage use of social media.

Remove the pressure for mums to go back to work before their children are at school UNLESSS they want to.

In other words, allow children to develop their early confidence and lay the foundations of good mental health in a relaxed home environment.

I totally agree with him. Watched the 'Dispatches' documentary the other day about people on the sick claiming benefits and untimely getting stuck on sickness benefits for life...
Most of them had mental health issues... most of them would have benefited from long term, stable, well paid employment.
The system is broken.

PIP isn't paid for people not to work. It is paid for people with disabilities to get extra support with their disabilities (e.g. if they needed a wheelchair or someone to cook meals for them etc etc). Maybe you are thinking of employment support allowance?
I think one of the issues is that since the financial crash the workplace has changed. Employers want more and more productivity and some people with disabilities(I'm mainly talking about neurodiversity here) just can't work at that pace without experiencing burnout, or their disabilities may make them slower and employers want to get rid of them. Its easy to say that more disabled people should work but despite pretending otherwise most employers don't necessarily want the tradeoff which come with employing disabled people. You've only got to read posts on here about employers finding it unacceptable for people to take sick leave to see why disabled people find it hard to hold down a job.

He does have a point, but only to an extent. I’d say about half the young adults I know (through my kids and friends’ kids) have some sort of mental health issue, be it ADHD, OCD, depression or anxiety. Almost exclusively self-diagnosed.

Absolutely this. Without resilience, there is only half a life if you don't live it or spend it crippled by MH. At times in my life, particularly during a relationship break up, selling the house, having nowhere to go, I have been, literally and figuratively, on my knees. I was suicidal and only my dogs stopped me doing it - them and the mantra and belief I live by which is 'things always get better'. You might have to wait a while and push on through, but they do and I hold onto that every time life is shit. I do believe, that for many people (and I work in a school and see it every day) mental health/anxiety is an excuse to not participate in life, and in many young people that's because they are pandered to and excused instead of being given the tools and support to stand up.

Before people jump on me, I have been suicidal - I'm not bashing anyone with true MH issues.