Mary McCarthy: If everybody seeks help for mild anxiety, those who are most in need mentally will lose out.
The drive to raise awareness of mental health is good in principle because it encourages people who need help to seek it, but I’ve been having conversations that make me feel it has gone too far.
Well-known people are talking about common disorders like anxiety and depression, about how their adult ADHD diagnosis changed their lives. But we all go through pain and suffering and trauma. We all have a cross to bear. Aren’t we all anxious some times? Some of us lead ramshackle lives – we’re ramshackle people. It’s not a medical issue to solve, it’s our personality.
Less attention is paid to conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – if you know someone suffering from these, you will know their need for intervention is undeniable.
With mental-health services under such pressure, is there a risk we have too many people seeking professional help who actually would be better off just focusing on the basics to improve their lives – to get out and talk to people, to be part of something, to take better care of themselves, to get enough sleep?
A GP told me she has adults saying they are not happy with life, with their marriage, and they think they’re depressed. She wants to put up that Samuel Beckett quote over her desk, “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on”, and explain that life is tricky.
Some do need help, and medication can see people through a tough time, but for most there is no real mental health disorder there. And the number of parents bringing their children –with school refusal, with anxiety – has gone to another level.
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When I left school in 1995, we didn’t even have the language to describe well-being, but the GP told me she has children as young as 12 listing off the symptoms for anxiety disorder or ADHD and telling her they’re convinced they have it. They saw it on TikTok.
When I read that anxiety has doubled in young people in the last decade, or that parents are becoming increasingly unhappy, it makes me question the flood of mental-health information.
It worries me because a lot of life is pretty crappy, but the truth is you can be so happy and sad all in the same day.
To be clear, the people suffering serious mental illness need urgent help. And also the social drivers of mental illness such as deprivation and childhood adversity need to be better tackled. But what’s to be gained by people putting a label on normal levels of anxiety?
The real harm of having people taking up resources who don’t need them is that it is taking away resources from those who urgently do.
Apparently, up to a fifth of young people now suffer from anxiety. Is it helpful to label this as a disorder? A lecturer told me that since the pandemic, he has never had so many parents contacting him to say their adult children are suffering from anxiety and can’t finish an assignment. He believes that for most of them the problem is they can’t deal with the pressure of deadlines.
In our day you just went to the library and stayed there until you had the essay done. It had to be done. Were some of us struggling with undiagnosed mental health difficulties? Some were. Most of us were just putting off the work to the last minute. But because we didn’t have the tools to diagnose ourselves with anxiety, we didn’t. Maybe some needed help.
However, by not focusing on how we felt the whole time, on “our well-being”, we were better able to navigate the world.
We need to spend more than the approximate 5pc of our budget on mental health. We don’t compare well with most other northern European countries. There are long waiting lists to access HSE mental health services, which is why it’s crucial the system isn’t clogged up with those who don’t need to be there.
More than 4,000 children are on waiting lists for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs), yet Camhs is a specialist clinical service for people under 18 with moderate to severe mental health difficulties.
In a response given to this paper for an article last year, Camhs said around 30pc of referrals received are inappropriate for the service and do not meet the criteria set out in the guidelines. There are people who need medical help and who are reliant on intervention, and it is important they get the help they need, but there’s also a range of normal anxiety we all have to manage.
There’s a lot of anxiety among kids and adults, and we drive that by the way we’re setting high expectations for performance and happiness. It starts at school with the pressure to do well in exams. Then, when you have kids, you need to be creating the perfect life for them.
I’m pleased my kids know more about mental health than I did at their age, but talking about it so much has its pros and cons at both the individual and societal level, and it runs the risk of making people feel worse with the real risk those who do not need help take away resources from those who urgently do.
The drive to raise awareness of mental health is good in principle because it encourages people who need help to seek it, but I’ve been having conversations that make me feel it has gone too far.
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