The problem with Britain’s mental health

Experts tell us that we are facing a mental health ‘time bomb’ in the UK, partly as a consequence of Covid restrictions and partly because we have a Conservative government which has as its apparent main priority a malevolent desire to see people go insane and, hopefully, kill themselves. I am paraphrasing the experts here, all of whom hate the Tories and want more money spent on their area of expertise, i.e. mental health. In January the Daily Mail quoted still more experts telling us that this mental health time bomb was actually ‘ticking’, in an ominous manner, suggesting to me that this was a very old make of time bomb but — more pertinently — terrifying the population with the notion that very soon this ticking time bomb would detonate with an enormous roaring sound and would spray loonies over us all.

Scarcely a day goes by without some quack, trick cyclist or ‘educator’ insisting that everyone is going mental and we need more money to cope with this largely government-inspired tsunami of madness — while never, of course, using the words ‘mental’ or ‘madness’. (Or ‘tsunami’, for that matter.) During the early days of lockdown in March last year we were told, repeatedly, that our children would go doolally very soon. Missives from my daughter’s state school continually reinforced this scenario, stressing that doing schoolwork was of lowly importance compared with ensuring that she wasn’t about to self-harm. My suspicion back then, borne out by the later complete and utter inactivity of the teaching staff regarding home-schooling, was that this was an attempt to soften up the parents to the prospect of the teachers doing pretty much no work whatsoever for the remainder of the year. But then it wasn’t just the kids who were going to go berserk.