Bryony GORDON

Today is World Mental Health Day, an important event that is in danger of becoming completely meaningless due to the increasing number of companies that have come to see it as a marketing opportunity.

This is, of course, the danger with all awareness days… they are introduced for all the right reasons, and then they are hijacked by corporates for all the wrong ones.

This week my inbox has been filled with press releases from companies wanting to “highlight” their commitment to good mental health practice. It has taken all the skills I have learnt through years of therapy to delete each message, instead of sitting down in a rage and replying to them all with the following note: “Dear [insert name of brand here], you don’t need to ‘highlight’ your commitment to good mental health practice. You just have to commit to it. And if you spent as much time lobbying the Government about the importance of this as you have me via my inbox, the world sure would be a better place! Kind regards, Bryony.”

Forgive me for being cranky, but I think I have hit yet another wall in the endless ultramarathon that is this coronavirus pandemic. This year, our brains have had to normalise so much that is abnormal, and I wanted to focus on that this World Mental Health Day, because I really worry about how this normalisation of dysfunctional behaviour is affecting our heads, without us even realising it.

Indeed, it was only this week, when I went to my first inperson “12 Step” meeting for more than six months, that I realised how much I needed this face-to-face connection with people.

I thought I had been fine with Zoom meetings, but as I sat in a church hall with others in recovery, I remembered that being fine is not the same as being well. Not by a long shot.

And it got me thinking: have we, at any point, actually processed what has happened this year? Should we use today as an opportunity to acknowledge what we have all been through?

Did we watch as other developed countries ran out of intensive care facilities, and doctors were forced to choose who got treatment and who didn’t?

Did we all worry that the same thing would happen here?

Did we imagine what it would feel like to be suffocated slowly by an unknown virus? Did we lock ourselves in our homes for 15 weeks, only leaving once a day for state-sanctioned exercise, and then once a week to clap for key workers?

Did the Prime Minister nearly die?

Did we genuinely worry about whether or not we would be able to get hold of essentials like bathroom tissue, and food?

Did our children not go to school for 171 days (not that I was counting…)?

Did we anxiously, obsessively, monitor the space between ourselves and other people, and avoid each other, if you will pardon the pun, like the plague?

Did we attack people for sitting on the grass in parks?

Did we discover that the world is very much not our oyster, and that the furthest we will probably be allowed to travel before 2022 is the supermarket?

Did it become normal to cover up half your face every time you left the house?

Have you not seen your grandchildren for six months? Do you have a grandchild you’ve never met at all?

Were we told that everything would be back to normal by the summer, and then by Christmas, and are now realising that it probably won’t be until the end of next year, by which point it will be damn near impossible for anything like “normal” to be returned to at all?

This World Mental Health Day, I think it’s important that we all sit down for a moment – just a moment – and blow off some steam about the intense weirdness of this year.

True, nobody has had to go off and fight the Nazis. But we shouldn’t have to swallow what has happened mutely just because at other points in history, people have had it worse than us.

It is perfectly fine if you are finding this hard. It is perfectly fine if you want to scream at the top of your lungs in rage. In fact, it might even be good for you to do this, especially if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people who are about to be told to stay indoors and away from others for the remainder of the winter months. That is not normal. That is not healthy, for anyone.

And this World Mental Health Day, the most important thing any of us can do is remember what good mental health looks like.

Unfortunately, it is nothing like this.

‘I thought I was fine – then this week I went to my first AA meeting in months…’