Still no word either from Alastair Campbell or from Oliver Kamm in response to Tony Blair's remarks about depression. Nor from Luciana Berger, who also has to account for her ties to Ivor Caplin.
More and more people are saying that Gillick competence, which ought to be called Thatcher competence after the woman who fought for it rather than after the woman who fought against it, has created a culture of sex with children. Some of us have been saying that forever.
See also the recognition that collapsing birth rates were a problem, and the exponential rise of Natural Family Planning, in which only a monogamous couple can engage, instead of the poisoning of women to make them permanently available for the sexual gratification of men. No, those two points are not contradictory. Read up.
The dose of my antidepressant has had to be doubled, and I start cognitive behavioural therapy tomorrow, but there is plenty going on to assist them both. Even in a country and a world with Blair in them.
Blair is not saying depression doesn’t exist but he’s obviously right that we need to stop medicalising the ups and downs of life as if anyone who is unhappy has a medical condition. It suits the pharmaceutical industry and psychology industry to push the notion that there’s a pill or a therapy for everything but sometimes being sad or unhappy is part of life and we need to accept the highs with the lows. Of course some people genuinely need help, but we’ve expanded the definition of “mental health” and “mental illness” so much as to be meaningless.
ReplyDeleteWe have done no such thing. There it is: "There was none of that in my day."
Delete“We have done no such thing”
ReplyDeleteI must assume you’ve been in a coma in recent years. Depression is real and genuine sufferers must be helped but our definitions of mental health and mental illness in general are now so elastic that “addiction” has been expanded to include everyone from habitual video gamers to serial philanderers (“sex addicts”), we have invented supposed disorders such as “ADHD” out of thin air, and every form of sadness is now on a spectrum of “depression” from mild to major.
Our HR team made us do a “mental health First Aid” training session in which everything from feeling you were underachieving at work to feeling lonely when working from home was deemed a “mental health issue.”
Tony Blair is basically critiquing the snowflake society.
Utter rubbish.
DeleteAnonymous, you are grossly irresponsible. This post is right, where are the Blair allies who have spoken out about mental health in the past?
DeleteWhere, indeed?
Delete“Anonymous, you are grossly irresponsible“
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary, the ridiculous expansion of the definition of mental illness-and depression-deprives genuine sufferers of the help they need while medicalising the ups and downs of everyday life. As even The Guardian recently reported, the Mental Health Foundation says fully a quarter of the entire UK population suffers from “anxiety”-which sounds absurd until you read their definition and realise that it includes almost every aspect of everyday life including nerves before a job interview.
Even the likes of Tony Blair and The Guardian are now cottoning onto how the snowflake society has coalesced with Big Pharma and the therapeutic industries to medicalise everyday human experience.
You are grossly irresponsible.
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