Cure your own mental illness, say the Scroungers

I notice that I haven’t posted anything to this blog since July. Mea culpa, but I just don’t care about ‘Brexit.’ I find it singularly deficient in interest.

However, there is more in the news than Brexit alone, though you might not think so if you don’t look further than the first half-dozen pages of your favourite newspaper. The story that caught my interest in the last few days is New NHS mental health website crashes moments after Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Prince William and Kate Middleton appear in a three-minute TV advert to promote the campaign.

It seems that the voices of the Scroungers, curiously dubbed The Fab Four in the newspaper story, narrated an advertisement (you can watch it here, in MP4 format) for an NHS campaign about mental health, which has at its centre a website called Every Mind Matters. The website is described in what, I guess, is an NHS Press release as, ‘a new NHS resource offering personalised advice for people struggling with stress, depression or poor sleep.’

How a computer can offer personalised advice is beyond me. I guess the word personalised is being used in the same sense as in the personalised apology which the computer in the guard’s van plays when your train falls over a cliff, but let that pass.

The website offers homely guidance for the perplexed. If you are worried about money, it tells you to visit your local debt advice service. If you can’t sleep at night, if offers the uninentionally hilarious advice to ‘turn your phone off.’

As is pretty much usual when any government website is switched on, Every Mind Matters crashed a few seconds after going live. (Mind you, it’s running normally as I write, on 10 October 2019.) Were the producers off school on the day thay showed the kids how to load-test their web sites and how to provide some extra load-sharing capacity during periods when they expect high demand? But I digress.

Here is a photograph of the Scroungers sitting at your expense on cheap plastic chairs in what looks like a television studio and talking about mental health, a highly specialised branch of medicine which they know no more about than you do:

The first point that needs to be made is that being worried about losing your job, being upset because your dog died or losing sleep because you don’t have enough money to pay the electricity bill are not symptoms of mental illness. If anything, they are symptoms of living in a capitalist society where greed is rampant and employment is badly paid and intermittent, while the socialists in Parliament don’t understand that their well-paid jobs have a purpose.

The second point is that if you have a mental illness, talking about it does not cure you. If you suffer from non-reactive depression, schizophrenia, paranoia or bi-polar disorder, that is, if you can see snakes writhing towards you on your carpet, or you can hear the newsreaders on television sneering and telling filthy lies about you, or you can hear voices but you can’t see where they are coming from, you have a serious illness and you need to see a doctor.

The central idea of Every Mind Matters is that mental illness is really nothing to worry about — the best thing to do if you are mentally ill is to visit your local debt counsellor, turn the phone off and talk about your symptoms to a bloke down the pub over a pint of bitter. Expressed in this form, the idea might appear to be complete rubbish, but that’s only because it is complete rubbish.

The National Health Service cannot be excused for adopting this ‘Patient, heal thyself’ approach to treatment.

In a report published in the same newspaper on 10 April 2019 describing the state of specialist mental health services (Teenagers with mental health conditions are being turned away by the NHS unless they have tried suicide, officials warn) the Children’s Commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, describes clinics as ‘struggling to cope with an epidemic of self-harm, anxiety and depression, and … now turning patients away.’ (Ms Longfield, incidentally, ascribes the increasing incidence of mental illness among teenage girls to ‘pressures of social media and increasingly demanding school environments,’ for which ætiology, so far as I know, there is not a shred of evidence. The alternative explanation, that certain recreational drugs cause severe and irreversible brain damage, deserves at least as much credence.)

People who can’t sleep because they worry about buying enough food or keeping the electricity on are certainly victims of a crisis, but it isn’t a crisis of mental health. As I’ve suggested, it is a crisis of low pay and high unemployment. The real crisis in mental health services is similar to the crisis of the NHS generally: it does not have enough money or skilled staff to supply the needs of the public that it serves. The skilled staff will take years to train: if the full student grant were restored tomorrow, that would enable any school leaver with the talent and inclination to become a psychiatrist, but the first newly graduated, publicly funded psychiatrists would only be clocking in at their local clinic in about 2025.

Nevertheless, despite the enormous lead time (which is no longer than the lead time for building a hospital or developing a medicine) the restoration of the full student grant is the only way out of the crisis in mental health provision. Websites advising you to turn your phone off if it wakes you up are, at best, a way of making us laugh and wasting money that ought to have been spent treating ill patients, however many Scroungers sit in front of the cameras promoting them.

Not the end of the Monarchy

The Daily Mail On Line, even if you don’t like its politics, is a very well organised on-line newspaper. It is free. It makes no effort — so far — to prevent its readers running ad blockers. It is well laid out, all the main stories of the day are previewed on its splash page, and every headline clicks through onto the story.

True, the Daily Mail is the object of much ridicule. It has a reputation, not entirely deserved, for comically rabid right wing politics. One day I’ll write about its politics, but today I’m banging on about something else.

The Mail has curious obsessions with house prices, quack medicine and the clothes chosen by certain young women. But the reason I read the Mail is its very generous comment policy. I can write comments on most of its stories and other readers can, and do, post their own comments and reply to mine. You can read every comment I’ve ever written on stories in the Mail if you click on my profile there.

So that’s my interest declared.

On 18 March 2017, the Mail On Line ran a story called “London Bridge Is Down” about the unsurprising, if mawkish, fact that rehearsals for the Queen’s funeral have been held. The article took its headline from a claim, which I suspect is unlikely to happen when the need arises, that various officials will refer to Her Majesty's demise by the cryptic phrase “London Bridge is down.”

It is not surprising that rehearsals of grave events of state take place regularly. The point that interests me, which so far as I know neither I nor the Mail nor anybody else has considered, is whether the end of the present reign would be a good moment to reform the British Monarchy.

I am a monarchist. Nevertheless I have the feeling that many British subjects are tired of the antics of certain members of the Royal Family and the enormous amounts of money, property and privilege lavished on people of limited talent and unlimited wealth who are related to the Queen but have not a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding her.

So here’s why I am in favour of the Monarchy.

The monarchy is the only means I know for the leader of the United Kingdom to be politically neutral. You need an apolitical figure to perform ceremonial duties such as opening Parliament, signing Bills into law, pinning medals onto distinguished soldiers, giving out honours to those whose donations to the political party of government merit them, speaking to assemblages of nonentities in Brussels and generally opening supermarkets and town halls.

The alternative usually canvassed is an elected President. The problem is, unless the elected President can refrain from being a member of any political party, he (she) is a representative of a fraction of the electorate, and can’t possibly represent everybody. If you save your platoon from being incinerated by an enemy daisy-cutter, do you really want to receive your hard earned medal from a member of the political party that sent you into the war in the first place?

The last serious reform of the Monarchy took place in 1649 when Oliver Cromwell ran the country for a while, slaughtering many thousands of civilians and, once established as ‘Lord Protector,’ presiding over a bizarrely intolerant theocratic regime until his death in 1658. After that, much to the relief of your average yeoman, the Monarchy returned and normal service was resumed as soon as possible.

Three and two thirds centuries after the failure of the only revolution that Britain ever had, can we imagine reforms to the monarchy that might keep it going a bit longer? After all, to quote Quentin Hogg, a. k. a. Lord Hailsham, speaking in 1943, ‘If you do not give the people social reform, they will give you social revolution.’

Here are my proposals for reform. I wrote some of these in a comment on the ‘London Bridge is down’ story, which is why I spent so long introducing the story earlier. At the time of writing the comment has 5 votes in favour and 12 against, so I can tell you before you start to read it that you’ll probably think I’m wrong in every point.

Abolish the hereditary principle. Instead, allow any British subject to apply for the job of Monarch by filling in a straightforward form on line or on paper at the local Job Centre. Choose the successful applicant completely at random. The successful applicant shall reign for the rest of his (her) life or until he resigns.

Abolish the Civil List. The incumbent shall receive a salary equivalent to that of an industrial manager and shall have at his disposal a properly audited expense account. Establish conditions of work such that constant drunken skiving will be tolerated, but not paid.

All remaining members of the Royal Family, their husbands, wives, children, girlfriends, boyfriends, friends, relations and hangers-on shall either get a job or be expected to apply for social security, job seekers’ allowance and a Council house.

Palaces to be donated to the National Trust, converted into residential accommodation and used to house purported refugees and recently arrived immigrants. Two exceptions will be granted: one palace in England and one in Scotland shall be rented to the incumbent and will qualify as permitted expenses.

All gifts, favours and trinkets given to the incumbent shall be donated to an appropriate museum or sold at auction and the proceeds given to the poor.

A Royal Train shall be built, maintained and operated by any appropriate train operating company except Branson’s Breakdowns.

A number of Corgis shall be provided by the kennels of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Animals and the incumbent shall provide for their welfare.

The House of Lords shall be replaced by an elected chamber whose members shall not speak for a political party nor for the inhabitants of a particular geographical constituency, but who will state their own opinion, like the people on Question Time who aren’t there to read scripts prepared in advance by their respective Central Offices.

A person shall also become a member of the House of Lords on payment of about £500,000 at 2017 prices to the political party of government, thereby preserving the most remarkable feature of the present system of choosing who governs Britain.

Last and most definitely least, Members of both Houses of Parliament shall wear uniform, just to remind them of the reason we put them there.

That would set us up as a twenty-first century democracy.

25 March 2017. Off topic: Blocked! Today I've been blocked from adding the following comment to a story about Deutsche Bank’s prediction of a further fall in the value of the Pound Sterling, Deutsche Bank predicts the pound will drop by a fifth by the end of the year due to Brexit

Judge for yourself. Here’s the comment.

Germany calling, Germany calling. Achtung! Achtung! All Britisch citizens! Ve know vhy your vainglorious national currency has declined in value to less than two million Reichsmarks to the Pound. Herr Hilter's personal economist calculates that before ze end of zis year, vun egg vill change hands for fifteen schillinks and a loaf of bread for three pounds eighteen and sixpence. The Bank of England is outclassed and outmanoeuvred by the glorious Deutsche Reichsbank viz its vast reserves of looted gold, its well resourced hedge fund managers and its highly trained cashiers, all of whom are dedicated to bringink the financial superiority of the Britisch Empire to an end by nine o'clock on Tuesday. Your rations vill be no more than scraps of meat and crusts of bread, you vill all starve, you will be freezink cold and live in Underground stations etc. etc.