The Untreated Epidemic of Misery

Imagine if hundreds of thousands of people were wandering our streets dragging a badly broken, untreated leg behind them for years on end or bearing a ghastly wound that was prescribed sticking plasters. We’d expect the person with the untreated leg to be permanently crippled and the person with the wound to get infections, be further damaged and perhaps to die. We’d also be shocked and outraged that such a huge number of people were being treated with contempt and cruelty by the NHS.

That’s the situation we’re in with mental illness.

• Mental illness now accounts for nearly half of all ill health suffered by people in Britain.
  


• A quarter of mentally ill people are receiving treatment. 
  


• One third of families have a member who is currently suffering from a mental illness. 
  


• It accounts for nearly half of absenteeism at work and mental illness accounts for nearly half of people on incapacity benefits.
  


• Two-fifths of patients suffering from anxiety or depression can recover if they are treated.
  


• Proper treatment would cost the NHS little or nothing because it would produce savings in other healthcare areas.
  


• The cost to the NHS of not treating mental illness is at least £10 billion. 
  


• There are 700,000 children in Britain with behavioural problems, anxiety or depression.
  

These are just some of the findings of the LSE research into UK mental health which actually makes good reading. It’s about time that people in power spoke robustly about ‘broken spirits’ and ‘troubled souls’, because this is precisely the issue. Organic mental illness caused by a head injury or chemical imbalance is quite rare, whereas the expectation that you can function like a machine for 80 years has a huge impact on mental wellbeing.  Anxiety and depression are perfectly reasonable responses to being expected to do just that, and increasingly high-pressure circumstances only add to the problem. Poverty is a causal link to many illnesses, including mental illness (no one’s getting richer) while the stress that far too many families are under causes children to go mad, and who can blame them?

An enormous amount of the time I spend with clients is spent in discovering what they actually value. People arrive saying they’re not doing as well as they want to at work, can’t sleep or drink too much and very quickly discover that they’re being bullied at work, hate everyone around them or feel destroyed by disappointment. Soon, from feeling defensive or personally disgusted with themselves, they move to feeling terribly sad and helpless in the face of apparently overwhelming circumstances.

Then they realise that they have more options than they knew. It is perfectly acceptable to go off sick. You are allowed to rest if you’re exhausted, just as you would be if you’d been in a car accident. You are allowed to go onto sickness benefits – it doesn’t make you a scrounging work-dodger: the existence of sickness benefits recognises and respects that if the State pays the interest on your mortgage or your rent for a period of time you are more likely to return to productivity.

Sometimes, people come to understand that there is more to life than productivity, and that there’s a difference between productivity and contribution. Churning out endless bits of paper is, for instance, far less useful and satisfying than giving meaningful support to an elderly neighbour or unhappy child or the local cats home.

A good number of clients relearn that, as Lord Layard has suggested, who we are requires just as much care and attention as how much tax we can pay. That’s now moving from a philosophical premise to a vital economic reality.