The gap between knowledge and help is despair: the future of young people’s mental health
Austerity has destroyed hope. The trust that anyone cares will take decades to win.
The following are short introductory remarks given by Mark Brown as part of a panel discussion on the future of young people’s mental health at Bright Blue’s ‘Fixing the Future’ conference at Guildhall London on July 8th 2019.
We like to talk about young people’s mental health as a kind of trick of prevention, as if young people could be perfected and are a completely different species to adults. But they’re not. We have to both prevent mental ill-health and make life better when people experience it, because young people don’t grow up in glass jars, they grow up in the world.
For me, the question is how we help young people to have hope in the future; security in knowing that help exists; and the support so that they can grow into who they want to be. None of these things are helped by blaming young people for trying to make their way in a world they didn’t make. They world they are growing up in isn’t the one I grew up in. It’s not the world you grew up in, either.
I wrote something for the Guardian about young people and suicide and despair a couple of years ago:
“How we view and understand suicide is shaped by who we think is important. The narrative of suicide as the lost potential of a life yet to be lived is strong because it comforts us even as it fills us with sadness. With the horrible loss of young people, we are confident in our assertion that things could have been better if they had stayed around. With adults, we are less convinced. Young suicides are politically blameless in a way that adult ones are not.
“At present, British society is uncomfortable with making the individual tragedies of suicide into a case for collective change. Considering suicide as a problem of the young allows us to tell ourselves a simplified story where despair is a passing personal crisis rather than an endemic condition. We want suicide to be related to naivety and immaturity and to excessive emotional acting out. We want those who die to be worthy and innocent victims, not imperfect, multifaceted beings negotiating complex personal, social, economic and political factors.”
The same is true of mental health difficulty in general.
“In the UK it can be too easy to run out of options and choices; to find yourself in financial hardship or to feel like a burden for relying on ever-decreasing welfare benefits or the kindness of others. Maintaining relationships with others takes time and effort that precarious work, illness or changes in circumstances can erode. We pressure people to turn their lives around while austerity has removed help that people might be relying on to actually achieve that turnaround. Changing harsh economic policies that cause hopelessness seems too big a task for political leaders.”
Social media always comes up in the discussion of young people’s mental health. This is another proxy discussion where we focus on young people as being a different species:
“Discomforts around young people’s social media use often come coated in nostalgia and prescriptions for a life which for many young people has no chance of existing. Running through fields of wheat and filling an i-spy book with bullfinches and grebes is not on the agenda for many teenagers right now. Young people are growing to adulthood in a country that is different from the country that existed before the arrival of ubiquitous connection via smartphones and social media. Social media went big at the same point that austerity did. We lost our libraries, youth clubs and schools funding but we got smartphones and snapchat instead.”
The world you made your relationships in doesn’t exist anymore. Young people can help make other young people feel OK to be themselves if we help them to find ways of finding each other in the first place.
I think we’re at the point where we have the means to recognise what’s going on but we don’t have the structures or the will to actually do much about it. People know that things aren’t as they should be. But the gap between that knowledge and being able to find help and support is so wide that young people often fall to despair.
As I said at the Kings Fund late last year: “We’re entering the age of demand. Mental health and mental illness and mental distress cannot be made invisible again, and neither can the people who experience inequality and injustice as a result of structures they did not make and which they cannot overcome alone. It feels like we are on the precipice of having to prove that talk isn’t cheap and having to work out what it truly means to accept mental illness and distress as important.
“The risk or the challenge is that mental health, illness and distress becomes a proxy for whatever moral or political judgement or bugbear that commentators and politicians wish to turn it into. Mental illness and mental health difficulty still too often is viewed as a kind of barometer or measure of what is not working in a society, not a clear statement of demand for things to be changed in the here and now.
Still, as in previous years, the experiences of more severe mental distress can feel like tumbling through the canopy of a dark forest, each branch you grab at too rotted or too green or as brittle as cake icing as the ground approaches. Eventually, there are no branches left, just great indifferent trunks with nothing to stop the fall. We still fail too many people, too often and the work of putting right that failure becomes an ever increasing part of the work itself.”
A decade or more of austerity has done something terrible: it has eroded both hope and the trust that anyone might see your difficulties and support you. The job of the next decade, through action not rhetoric, is to win back that trust.
Establishing the social determinants of mental health, the things that people need to have mental health and live better with mental ill-health, might belong to the sciences but doing something about them belongs to people and politics.
@markoneinfour
