Even I now believe that mental health culture has gone too far

After decades of mental illness being shrouded in secrecy and shame, ignored, ridiculed or feared, there has been something of a revolution in the past couple of years. Now we have gone quite the other way. Mental health makes the news almost every day, with not a week going past without some celebrity ‘baring all’ and admitting to having, or having had, a mental health problem.

there are literally hundreds of podcasts, hashtags and facebook pages devoted to the discussion of it all.

this, we are unequivocally told, is A Good thing. It must be, right? After all, we know the silence that used to surround poor mental health compounded people’s distress and feelings of isolation.

talking more openly about mental illness helps to tackle stigma and ignorance, challenges prejudices and misconceptions, and demystifies a group of conditions that have historically been met with suspicion and fear.

Yet speaking recently, the Work and Pensions Secretary, Mel Stride, dared to question this new orthodoxy. Our approach to mental health has gone ‘too far’ in the other direction, he said, with a ‘real risk that we are now labelling the normal ups and downs of human life as medical conditions’. I have to agree. Suddenly mental health is in vogue. for someone like me, who works in this area, the sea change has been quite startling. for years people would pull a face and ask why I’d gone into this area of medicine.

I remember one of my professors at medical school looking at me with a mixture of bewilderment and horror when I explained to him at my graduation ceremony that I intended to specialise in psychiatry.

‘You’ve done so well, why on earth would you want to do that?’, he said, the implication being that mental health was only an area you went into if you had no other choice. No one in his or her right mind would actually want to work in it.

Yet suddenly I am fashionable, and in demand in other areas of medicine. I’ve been asked to talk to dermatologists, endocrinologists and rheumatologists about mental health at their annual conferences. Once dismissed as the Cinderella of medicine, now doctors of all kinds want to learn about it.

You would think that we psychiatrists would welcome this. the more campaigns and awareness-raising the better, surely? But, alas, it’s not that simple.

I know how disingenuous it sounds for a doctor like me, who has spent years writing about and campaigning for better understanding around mental illness, to suddenly perform such a volte face and say, actually, can we please all stop for a moment. But that’s what I’m doing.

Put bluntly, the rise in public understanding around mental health problems has been a doubleedged sword. We are inundated with referrals. More and more people are self-diagnosing.

the epidemic of mental health problems has resulted in people giving up work, with the number of economically inactive rising by 700,000 since the pandemic. Increasingly, we’ve seen normal emotional problems and difficulties – inevitable parts of life – portrayed as some form of disorder or illness. And the fact is, thanks to the huge number of people who now believe they have a mental health problem, services are straining under the pressure.

My concern is that while on the one hand it’s good to get people talking about how they feel and to challenge the taboo that surrounds mental illness, in reality it risks wrongly labelling everyday feelings as abnormal.

I’m far from alone in being wary about the fallout from this sudden surge in interest in mental health. Sir Professor Simon Wessely, former president of the royal College of Psychiatrists, has said ‘every time we have a

‘WINE mums’ who drink daily are more likely to get heart disease, a study has found. I’m no killjoy. Have a glass of wine now and then. But I worry about the rise in women who have normalised daily drinking and don’t realise the health effects.

mental health campaign, my heart sinks’. this was met with bewilderment by those outside the profession, but to those on frontline, it resonated hugely.

the majority of people having a difficult time aren’t mentally ill. they’re just experiencing life. the idea that good mental health means we never suffer any emotional distress at all creates the unrealistic expectation that life should be a bed of roses all the time. And of course it’s not. Life can be difficult, frustrating, disappointing, scary and uncertain.

It’s normal to feel overwhelmed, lost and upset sometimes.

We should be talking about the realities of life and making sure people have the tools to meet them with resilience, not making them think there is something wrong when there isn’t.