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

Can I get PIP for (eg) arachnophobia”

And usually the replies are yes you can, I did

It’s a positive thing that people no longer minimise their mental health and it’s recognised that people need help. A stoic keep calm and carry on attitude is not helpful in the long run.

On the other side of that, it sucks that you have to phrase your words a certain way in order to be taken seriously. I have been on the other side of that where I phrased my answers incorrectly and it's so dehumanizing how you get treated like you're lying just because you didn't say the correct things. It's exactly the sort of thing that will damage your mental health even more.

ADHD is not a mental health disorder.

People with ADHD can also have mental health problems of course but ADHD itself is a neurodevelopmental disorder.

It's my stepdaughter not my niece. I got diagnosed with ADHD at 24 and I wish I'd had support earlier. It absolutely ruined my childhood and early adulthood. That's why it was me that fought for her to get diagnosed when I could see clear symptoms, when she was about 9. Her Mum was against it because she said she'd use it as an excuse and she just needed to behave better.

In most ways, it's been positive, because she has medication and is doing really well at school. We're fortunate that she likes school and hobbies. But it's still an issue that if she doesn't like something, she just says, "I don't like doing that," and that's the end of the conversation. Any further attempt to make her do it just results in her turning up the volume on her headphones.

The rising tide of mental illness-labelling everyone from a naughty child to an adult anxious about work as mentally ill- means that those children and adults with real mental health problems don't get the treatment they deserve and need.

Apparently, there are lists years long to see a mental health professional.

Why is this a surprise? If half the population think normal anxiety and bad behaviour needs a diagnosis then they will be years long. A good amount of people in those queues are not mentally ill.

Unless we are going to train every other person to become a mental health professional then those queues will get ever longer and those who do need help will get lost in them.

For those scratching their head and pretending that they don't know what "resilience" and "discipline " mean, they are either in dire need of a dictionary or have fallen so far down the rabbit hole that they cannot acknowledge attitudes that were once common and stopped everyone thinking they were mentally ill.

Get rid of that attitude. Separate the wheat from the chaff and let those who need help get it and the rest can stop clogging up the services available.

The burgeoning mental ill health industry is harming the very ones who need it.
"Has he a diagnosis" as a reply to every bad behaviour is one response that needs to be drowned.

Agree with this. How does anyone genuinely tell the difference between them? It also doesn't help that the younger generation today all have to have a label. Anxiety, social anxiety, ADHD, Autism, ND, depression - if you don't have one you're seen as odd, and your friends will diagnose you until you're convinced you too have a label.

What kind of source is that? Well, these sources:

— The Political Economy of New Labour: Labouring under False Pretences? by Colin Hay (Manchester University Press, 1999)
— New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain, by Richard Heffernan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)
— New Labour, New Language? by Norman Fairclough (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)
— Transforming Local Governance: From Thatcherism to New Labour, by Gerry Stoker (Palgrave, 2003)
— A Brief History of Neoliberalism, by David Harvey (Oxford University Press, 2005)
— Thatcher And Sons: A Revolution In Three Acts, by Simon Jenkins (Penguin, 2007)
— The Thatcherite Offensive: A Neo-Poulantzasian Analysis, by Alexander Gallas (Brill, 2015)

What would be more admissible in your mind?

What politicians say, and what they do - are very different things. Did you make it as far as Machiavelli?

I don't think the current model of society in Britain is great for humans.

If you were making a zoo with people as the subject, you wouldn't design one with a long commute, long hours, poor diet and few chances to meet that weren't on screens or involved drinking to excess.

You'd probably make a nice large enclosure with work options of about six hours daily, in the fresh air with lots of physical labour and creative time, working with close social bonds. Like a medieval village without the pestilence and feudalism.

I don't think it's the fault of humans that modern life is quite bad at meeting our basic needs. I have however experienced genuine burnout and GAD, and it really feels to me that we're not setting people up to cope with things well with the current lip service paid to MH management.

Was one of his suggestions to send some young people to their deaths by entering a phoney war.

Whatever his thoughts he should be in prison

No, you cannot. But we can work on skills and activities to gradually develop resilience, especially in children.

But lots of kids don’t like doing things and will say the same ‘I don’t like doing that’- I’m confused, that’s ADHD then? My parents wouldn’t have given me the option, maybe that’s the difference

I went through a period of depression between 2018 and 2020 - my worst year was 2019. I certainly feel it was due to the particular unit and team I was on at the time. Then Covid came along in 2020 and we were forced to work from home. I came off anti depressants in 2021, and when I changed jobs I attended the office sometimes. Although due to my physical health working from home is now accepted by my current manager. I certainly feel the self referring is good though - it can prevent further self harming and suicide episodes.

You also wouldn’t have 70+ million people sharing a small island but 🤷🏼‍♀️

Something needs to change across how society handles mental health, SEN, chronic conditions, and social care. The cost of accepting an enabling holding pattern is going to reach a point it's unaffordable.

Blair/Brown, a divisive era - but they did introduce Sure Start and that level of early intervention is the beginning of what's needed, but that has a fifteen year lead time before the results start to reach their potential.

I was resilient when i helped to care for my grandma and granddad. I stayed strong when they died to support my mum. Looking back i think that i was too resilient. I am on my knees now.

It worked fine for thousands of years up until the last decade or so. It’s clearly not recognised that people need help because it appears that the people who need it most aren’t getting it.

Blair is coming from a position of enormous privilege.

He's never had to go to a food bank or sat shivering because he can't afford to put the heating on.

All he demonstrates is a lack of understanding of the issues, many of which he helped cause.

And @Georgyporky .

Its my belief, based on lived experience at the time and my own observations, that the entire modern mental health industry was set up at the time as part and parcel of the endless gaslighting we endured to make us all swallow Blair’s change to a rentier society without too much hassle. It was specifically designed to make us think that legitimate anger and complaints were irrational and just part of ‘mental health’ rather than any anger with the system; it internalised social issues, along with the ‘choicey-choice’ mantras of the time and made them the responsibility and problems of individuals, not the society that restricted our “choices” at the time. The young now would not remember nor believe the crap we got from the baby boomers, who were then in control of work, at the time. I personally was sent on change management courses and spoken to about my lack of change-positivity when I got vocal about the next few hierarchical levels of my profession being sacked and not replaced, and being told I should be happy about doing their jobs on the same wages.
It was all smoke and mirrors in Blair’s time, gilt painting over the cracks and lies as democracy was replaced by the shift to the authoritarianism of inheritance.
I wish I could pull up some fancy references to prove it beyond the general socio-economic material I read at the time - all sounding out alarms. I hope I’ve expressed my observations well enough!

It still isn't an out of work benefit.

Call me old fashioned, but I won't be lectured by a war mongering creature who has the blood of our service men and women, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqui civilians on his hands.

Exactly. When your child refuses to do a sport/hobby/trip/attend school because they don’t want to or are anxious, you coach and push them to overcome this. It will be hard but it will be worthwhile.

A friends daughter is a case in point. My friend never said no to her DD, post covid previously fine DD developed anxiety which led to school refusal. Friend didn’t deal with this, instead petted DD because of her ‘anxiety’ The DD is now out of mainstream schooling, diagnosed with autism and retreating into a kind of half life where she only does the things she likes. It’s really really sad

It wasn’t under Blair’s auspices that the number of food banks increased from 35 (2010) to 2,300 now.

So you have cut and paste the references for the article that you linked from a completely unknown writer. The writer has made a claim and supported that claim, that is literally what an Academic argument is, you do know that such positions can be scrutinised don't you!

Makes no difference to what we’re talking about. Out of 3.3 million claimants only 1 in 6 of them do any kind of paid work. That’s just the facts