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The ICCM Journal | Autumn 2020 | V88 No. 3
talk about it Mental health A factual look at mental health issues is relevant to people’s lives, however, when preparing this article it seemed more useful to have someone with issues describing things to give another perspective. This article, therefore, has my own take on the facts and my male friend's view on how it has and is affecting him. Seems fair to me – that’s me the friend February 2020 once again highlighted an issue that is talked about, but frequently misunderstood, the impact of people’s lives from mental health problems, with the death of Caroline Flack.
Image - Sky News 2020
Whatever your own view on her, she was only 40 years old and her public image may have ultimately been an unfortunate factor in her early death. The UK life expectancy for women is 82 (ONS 2019 data). A half life is a life too short. September 2017, a combination of family matters going on for a long time, being a parent and working a full time job, without asking for support finally took its toll. I knew I was behaving differently and my family had started to pick up on things. I wasn’t sleeping well, wasn’t enjoying things in life, I was getting annoyed easily and slowly losing who I was. An incident then sparked a personal breakdown, months of therapy and trying to rebuild myself. Unfortunately, Caroline joined a long list of famous suicides, mostly due to mental illness, that includes Robin Williams, Chester Bennington, Chris Cornell and a Wikipedia list of 21st Century names that is sadly impressive and not all male. What makes a connection with all of these people and non-celebrities to make it relevant? Well, for the most part a lot of the sadly departed were intelligent, successful people. It isn’t a simple case of them
being celebrities past the point of their own success, Kurt Cobain a more famous name from the past to fit the list. In fact (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ bad-news-for-the-highly-intelligent/) a 2017 scientific survey found a worrying link between very high IQ, the top 2% and mental illnesses. It’s also noticeable how many of the famous suicides were creative people or musicians. Heading back to the more mundane aspects of life, we’re all aware that life just doesn’t put pressure on the rich/ poor/famous/ordinary person. It is more apparent though that a famous death carries more media coverage then most of the bereaved we deal with each day. Does that matter? Of course not, what matters is how we get to that point. Foolishly, I believed that having had an episode and time passing that the guidance and help I had received then meant I was fine for the future. Talking therapies are the first starting point medically that doctors use for stress/ anxiety/depression and talking about your problems and how you got there is revealing and initially they hurt, but over time they help. Unfortunately, knowing what you need and describing it is difficult. What I hadn’t realised is that an episode isn’t just cured in most cases, and that mental illness is more of a disease/disability then just a short illness. ICCM started work with Annie Raven-Vause on mental health training in 2017. The idea of ICCM leading courses was initially viewed strange by some individuals. A better question would have been, why hasn’t more been done in the past? The issue of mental health problems is a silent disease and silent problems. Some sobering facts on mental illness – 1 in 6 workers will experience depression or problems at one point (Mental heath and wellbeing in England – content.digital.nhs.uk) and that in 2018/19 there were 620,000 cases of work related stress/depression in Great Britain (Health and safety executive 2019 study – hse.gov.uk) . Now these figures don’t give a financial affect, however, (https://www. breathehr.com/blog/breathe-reveals-insights-into-2019-uksickness-trends) suggest that “stigma around mental health struggles and burnout costs the UK economy £1.4bn a year through unexplained sick days.” That’s a rather large figure and the HSE study also suggests that 54% of all working days lost due to health issues are mental health related. In 2019, I started to notice that while family issues weren’t as bad as they had been, that I wasn’t feeling brilliant at times, my concentration was slipping from lots of things
