Letters: Rod Liddle is on the side of experts

Work to do

Sir: I agree with Kate Andrews’s diagnosis: the nation’s mental health is appalling and a major barrier to our economic prosperity (‘Sick list’, 24 February). I agree with her criticism of the treatment offered by the health service: we are failing to restore people to working health.

Antidepressants are handed out like sweets while provision of talking therapy falls woefully short. What is missing from her otherwise excellent analysis is a consideration of aetiology. The pandemic unmasked, so to speak, but did not itself cause, a dearth of interpersonal connection in our society. We must all take responsibility for landing ourselves in this mess, and for finding a way out of it.

Dr Richard Thomson

Morpeth, Northumberland

Temple of delights

Sir: Charles Moore (Notes, 17 February) applauds the variety of the 1924 Exhibition’s pavilions, citing among other examples Burma’s temple. In the 1950s, when I was a teenager, the temple was in our garden in Hampshire, where my parents had started a school, and it regularly formed an unusual backdrop to school plays and other activities.

Apparently the then chairman of Burmah Oil had bought the temple, conveniently prefabricated, after the exhibition closed, and had it re-erected and glazed, to serve as a summerhouse in the garden of Stanbridge Earls, his country house near Romsey. The school folded a decade or so ago, after my parents’ deaths, and the house has since become the nucleus of a ‘retirement village’. I hope the temple is still there, something strange and exotic, in the garden.

Richard Thomas

Citizens’ smokescreen

Sir: Citizens’ assemblies are not always a terrible idea (‘No focus’, 24 February). However, as well as the risk that those setting them up manipulate them to elicit the response they want, there is also the risk that they are used to justify the policy they want, even if the citizens’ assembly said something very different.