MENTAL HEALTH CRISES?

Every day, we hear news of yet another reason to get worried about our mental health and about whether or not we are suffering from a mental illness without realising it. 

Students are under severe stress at our universities, children are suffering stress from social media, and, according to the iPaper yesterday, the hoarders among us have serious reason to start worrying:

‘Perhaps we’ve watched, fascinated and repulsed, at TV shows such as Britain’s Biggest Hoarders, which feature homes stuffed to the gunwales with, well, stuff...

‘…This week, it was classified as a mental disorder by the World Health Organisation, which explained that “accumulation of possessions results in living spaces becoming cluttered to the point that their use or safety is compromised. The symptoms result in significant distress or significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning.”

This is all very well, but takes me back more than 50 years, when writers like RD Laing and Erving Goffman were writing books that   questioned what were then common definitions of mental health and illness – long before the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and my 1978 book Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social Organization of Sudden Death.

What these had in common was that they not only raised serious questions about the way mental illness and health were defined, but were also critical of psychiatry and the way they treated and managed patients with the illness.

our mental health and about whether or not we are suffering from a mental illness without realising it

Students are under severe stress at our universities, children are suffering stress from social media, and, according to the iPaper yesterday, the hoarders among us have serious reason to start worrying:

‘Perhaps we’ve watched, fascinated and repulsed, at TV shows such as Britain’s Biggest Hoarders, which feature homes stuffed to the gunwales with, well, stuff...

‘…This week, it was classified as a mental disorder by the World Health Organisation, which explained that “accumulation of possessions results in living spaces becoming cluttered to the point that their use or safety is compromised. The symptoms result in significant distress or significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning.”

This is all very well, but takes me back more than 50 years, when writers like RD Laing and Erving Goffman were writing books that   questioned what were then common definitions of mental health and illness – long before 1975, the film One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest