We need to talk about mental health
After experiencing issues of his own, Afghanistan veteran turned MP Johnny Mercer says it’s time to tackle the illness
HIS MAIDEN speech to the House of Commons silenced the normally rowdy chamber with the power and clarity of its message about the importance of mental health provision. And now three years after Johnny Mercer was elected as a Conservative MP he has followed it up with a deeply personal insight. He was, he admits, “a pretty disturbed young man”.
The former commando’s commitment to the cause comes not only from the cases he witnessed among his comrades while serving three tours of Afghanistan but also from his first-hand experience.
In a candid interview the 36-year-old former Army officer has revealed that he had suffered from mental health problems before joining the Royal Artillery after passing out from Sandhurst in June 2003. His childhood struggle with a “very nasty case of OCD” continued throughout his 20s when he would spend hours switching lights on and off and constantly washing his hands. He also recited prayers.
But at that time, he says, there was little public talk about mental health and he had never heard of obsessive compulsive disorder. “I just thought I was mad,” admits the MP for Plymouth Moor View. Tending to his obsessions, in particular praying many times a day, left him exhausted.
The lack of sleep is what “really starts to bite”. Religion dominated his upbringing in a devout Baptist family in Dartford, Kent when he and his seven siblings went to church three times on Sundays. No longer a practising Christian he has spoken of the connection between his troubles and his family background as a “delicate matter”. But its legacy has given the father-oftwo, who is married to Felicity, whom he has known since school, an understanding of how it feels to have a mental illness.
“One of the things that really annoys me is when someone says ‘I’m a bit OCD because I like my Cokes to line up in the fridge’,” he says. “It’s like they want to wear this OCD badge. Those of us who have genuine OCD know it is one of the most debilitating illnesses.”
JOINING the Army helped Mercer to overcome a mental disorder which is associated with an increased risk of suicide. He was prescribed antidepressant fluoxetine at an Army mental health hospital and underwent cognitive behavioural therapy. But the greatest catalyst for recovery came in Afghanistan where he served with 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery.
Holding a fallen comrade as he lay dying having been shot in the face ultimately enabled him to “press the reset button” on his own issues. “From those moments you think, ‘Well, what is the point in me wasting my life doing this stuff?’” he said of his OCD symptoms. “The overloading of senses you get at war drove it out of me,” he insists, referring to this as “posttraumatic growth” [PTG].
War, he asserts, is “terrible at the time but it can be lifeenhancing”. Although PTG is commonplace among a lot of soldiers it is rarely discussed – an oversight which he believes is due to the emphasis placed on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by some veterans’ charities as a means of raising funds.
This, he believes, is a problem because it is “specifically advocating” a narrative that “veterans are mad, bad and dangerous” and results in an inaccurate public perception of recovering servicemen: “You’re either a hero or you’re broken. Ninety-five per cent of us are in the middle.”
However he says that a “culture of victimhood” has been created in which veterans are encouraged to diagnose themselves with PTSD, even if such a diagnosis is incorrect. He believes this behaviour is “disingenuous to those who genuinely have problems” and urges the importance of preserving mental health resources for those who “genuinely have problems”.
Although his friendship group from Afghanistan was “ripped apart by mental illness” he believes that the mental health provision on offer at the time they served was “tokenistic” and failed to properly identify vulnerable officers.
These issues weighed heavily on his mind and propelled him to stand as an MP in 2015, despite never having voted in his life. And they have resulted in a mission. Now he wants to change the name of the Mental Health Act to the Mental Illness Act – suggesting that this rebranding will help to differentiate every day mental health issues from clinical cases of mental illness. “I want people to think very carefully about what mental health actually is. When we want to treat our mental health we take time out, we make sure we sleep properly. Mental illness is fundamentally different. You go see a psychiatrist, you get treated by the state.” His view is informed by the breakdown suffered by a military policeman in Afghanistan with whom he worked closely on “grisly” tasks in 2012.
“My job was to sort of kill them and his job was to take swabs and identify the bodies,” he explains, adding that a neardeath experience left his colleague looking “like he’d had a lobotomy – a total mental collapse”.
“There is no point standing at the bottom of a mountain and thinking, ‘Wow that is a big mountain’. You have to think, ‘How are we going to get up there?’” he insists.