A little less conversation
Those halcyon days are now but a memory. Booze-filled nights, chocolate-centred hangovers; the halls decked full of holly, your riddled liver tested to its very limit. Caring not about the future, living only for merriment, presents and good times.
But, despite your best efforts, night has followed day, Christmas has morphed into the New Year and here you are, back at work, far, far away from turkey dinners and paper hats. It’s incredibly unfair, terribly unjust, but there’s nothing to be done, you’re just going to have to get on with it.
It will get better though, you’ll find something nice in the sales, the Six Nations will start; a mysterious admirer might even send you a card on Valentine’s Day. And, eventually, these early January days will be forgotten about, an unseemly blip in an otherwise peaceful existence.
For some people though, every day is like the middle of January. Each and every morning is a struggle, that horrible sense of emptiness a constant companion. Their existence is far from peaceful, they can but hope things will get better.
Thankfully, mercifully, there are more supports in place for people suffering from mental illness than at any other time in the history of the State. It’s still not enough, not by a long stretch, but progress has been made and we have finally begun to tackle an issue that, for years, we refused to acknowledge.
I’m not about to reflect on the merits of our mental health services, or even to highlight the vast number of people who choose to take their own lives having been let down by the system.
Instead I want to head down a less populist route.
Over the past eighteen months, a worrying trend has emerged in this country, one which few would dare to highlight, at least publicly, for fear of being labelled heartless, uncaring, cruel or worse.
We see it at least once a week, hear it almost every day, have it rammed down our proverbial throats on a constant basis, and yet no one thinks to complain, knowing that to do so would see them ostracised, expelled from society, a local pariah for evermore.
Al Porter, Devon Murray, Brent Pope, Maurice Shanahan, Elaine Crowley. What have these celebrities got in common? They have all, at some stage in the past eighteen months, ‘opened up’ about their battles with mental illness. And more power to them.
Accompanying these headliners are thousands of others, some moderately famous, most completely unheralded, but all doing the same thing; sharing their story for the benefit of the nation.
Our national media has become a group therapy of sorts, a place where the depressed, anxious and bereft can unburden themselves on the biggest stage of all.
Now before I continue, I should state that my issue isn’t with those sharing their stories. As someone who has struggled with mental illness for the majority of my adult life, I understand how liberating it is to discuss your problems, to put into words that which threatens to overwhelm you.
The problem lies in the coverage this issue gets, and how much of it there is.
You could argue that there can never be enough coverage when it comes to mental health, that we must to continue to speak, converse and share, so that we may heighten awareness and remove the stigma surrounding these issues.
I would respond by saying that we have reached peak awareness, that we cannot possibly be any more aware.
I would venture that the stigma surrounding depression and mental illness no longer exists, that we have overcome that particular battle, that it’s time to move on, on to the next step in this fight which we may never win.
We simply don’t need to hear these stories, not all of them anyway, not every day. But we do, and it’s not just celebrities, it’s everyone, and it’s all the time.
Our newspapers, our radio stations, our television channels provide wall-to-wall coverage of this terrifying sickness, believing, erroneously, that they’re doing us a service, believing that the only way to address this national crisis is to overwhelm us with a deluge of news, to beat us into submission.
And then there’s the terminology. Those who choose to discuss their problems are praised for their bravery, cast as shining examples, someone whom those suffering from mental illness should aspire to be like.
Has anyone stopped to consider how damaging this is?
By lauding those who speak out, championing their bravery, are we not intimating that to remain silent, to not discuss your problems, is to be the opposite of brave, to be a coward?
Rather than putting those who speak on a pedestal, we should be normalising their behaviour.
We don’t need to slap them on the back, tell them how great they are, it’s patronising and serves only to remind those suffer in silence how inferior they are to these brave, honest souls.
Not only that, if you do happen to suffer from a mental illness, whether privately or with the help of others, do you really need to hear it discussed in public every single day? Do you want to be reminded of your own personal struggles all the time? Would a cancer patient, not long in remission, want to read stories about the horrors of chemotherapy every day, for the rest of her life? I think not.
Even more damaging is the impact of this round-the-clock coverage on our young people.
They are now not just being encouraged to discuss their innermost feelings, they are being instructed to do so. We all know how tumultuous the teenage years are, that flurry of emotions, hormones running wild, tears, fears and upset.
It’s a tough time, a roller-coaster ride with little respite.
By reinforcing the notion that mental illness is continually lying in wait, ready to consume us at the first possible opportunity, we are endangering our young people, overburdening them, adding unnecessary complications to an already complicated life, running the risk of sending them scurrying to their GPs at the first sign of trauma.
Ultimately, it will be people far more important than I, social commentators with far more influence than I could ever hope to attain, who will determine how this issue is reported on in our media.
The likelihood is that nothing will change, that lazy journalists, editors, producers and executives will continue to fill any and every available slot with formulaic, derivative features on mental health, features which bring nothing new to the table, add nothing to the argument and serve only to make all those involved feel good about themselves.
Meanwhile, those in the trenches will suffer on, listening to these stories, taking little heed, shaking their heads, wondering when the conversation will come to an end and the action will finally start.
