ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Good morning.

There are some league tables where you really don’t want to find yourself near the top. According to the Mental Health Foundation, the UK has one of the highest rates for self-harm in the Europe – one of a series of dismal statistics which were assembled to support a cross-party campaign launched on Monday. calling for an increase in funding for mental health services. Those with mental health problems can face a long wait for treatment for their mental health issues. But they also face a longer wait for the treatment of straightforwardly physical conditions, such as by hip replacement, than does the average patient. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that life expectancy for people with mental health problems is said to be 20 years lower than for the general population.

As well as assembling a series of dismal statistics, however, the campaign also assembled an array of celebrities to support the drive for better provision. Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman, Frank Skinner and Graham Norton – just some of the names amongst 200 stars lining up in support.

You might think that the dreary statistics alone would be enough to launch the campaign, but it was probably a sensible move to give the case additional celebrity backing. The relative neglect of mental health provision arises in part, of course, from a certain stigma which still attaches to mental health problems. When I was growing up my parents would talk of the local psychiatric hospital in hushed tones, as a place where you went if you had ‘bad nerves’. Even today it takes guts to say plainly and clearly ‘I have suffered from depression’, or ‘I have a bipolar disorder’, or whatever it might be, just because mental illness is still treated by some as if it were shameful or as a source of disgrace. Perhaps celebrity is needed to function as an antidote to stigma – as if the glamour of the famous might just counteract or dispel the aversion to mental illness which leads us to overlook and neglect it.

It is curious that while our age rather prides itself on having overcome any radical distinction between body and mind in how we think of what it is to be human, we continue to distinguish the ailments of the one from the ailments of the other in how we act –the evidence suggests that we behave as if what we think of as primarily mental disease is somehow less deserving of understanding and attention than what we classify as physical illness. In Jesus’s ministry there is no such distinction. We read in the Gospels that he attracted equally those sick in body or in mind, described himself on one occasion as ‘sorrowful even to the point of death’ (which sounds quite a lot like depression), and responded to all those in distress with an equality of regard and care. In the end, of course, we shouldn’t need to rely on celebrity glamour to overcome our discomfort with mental illness and our inclination to avert our eyes; as Christ’s ministry suggests, the facts of suffering and the demands of compassion should speak for themselves.

Show less