Are austerity measures breaking our minds?

I live in West London, which isn’t nearly as posh as it sounds – Like most districts in the capital mine has its ‘yummy mummy’ streets, full of artisan café’s and organic pilates studios, existing practically nose-to-nose with the pound and betting shops that surround the local estates. My flat is somewhere in the middle, on a road consisting mainly of Polski skleps, newsagents and kebab shops (handy for hummus), but during the half-mile walk from the tube station to my home I see both affluence and poverty – a daily reminder of the growing gap between rich and poor in British society.

There is a lady I have become acquainted with, let’s call her Sarah. She is, I would guess, in her 40s but weathered for her age, petite in stature with an Irish lilt. About once a month, Sarah materialises in front of the Tesco Metro as I am walking past and waves at me. I hand her a basket and she goes into the shop and fills it with food. We meet at the checkout and I pay for whatever she has chosen.

This routine started about a year ago, when she stopped me on the pavement and explained to me that she was homeless and asked me to buy her a pint of milk. The next time she asked for milk and bread. Now, I usually buy her a selection of frozen food, which I’ve learned she stores at a friends’ house a few streets away. This friend allows her to cook and bathe there, but Sarah has to sleep in a shelter overnight.

The last time I saw Sarah, she told me how much she hated having to rely on me for her groceries. She said she found it humiliating, having to beg and that she wasn’t always like this. I told her not to worry, that I didn’t judge her and was happy to help.

And then Sarah told me she wanted to kill herself.

Has anyone ever told you they were thinking of ending their life? Until I did Mental Health First Aid training it was a scenario I always feared – After I delivered our Self-Esteem Team classes on anxiety, exam stress, self-harm and body image in schools, teenagers would queue to talk to me about their lives and I would think ‘please, be anything but suicidal’. I didn’t think I would be able to handle the guilt and uncertainty of having had that type of conversation with someone who might eventually go on to take their own life.

Now, I know the most helpful thing is to establish whether that person has made an actual plan – ie devised the way they will take their own life – or whether they are simply feeling that they would be ‘better off dead’. Both are cause for acute concern and intervention is required, but the former is slightly more urgent. Sarah hadn’t made a plan, she was just tired of living – Tired of relying on the kindness of strangers to scrape by, tired of moving from place to place with no stability and most of all tired of feeling as though she was a burden to others.

My question to you, reader, is this – Are CBT, antidepressants or mindfulness going to help Sarah? Because I don’t think so. Received wisdom tells us anxiety worries about the future, depression dwells on the past and it is only in the moment we can achieve contentment. But what if the ‘moment’ you’re living in is what you’re trying to escape from?

I don’t believe Sarah is mentally ill. I believe she is depressed, but that her depression is completely understandable, given her circumstances. And depression that has an obvious reason isn’t an illness, it’s simply a human response to a life event. What Sarah actually needs is a job and a home and a sense of purpose.

I mention the above because it is the link between socio-economic circumstances and mental health which is, in my experience, what our government absolutely refuses to acknowledge. They cannot see that austerity measures, the ruthless slashing of public services and growing poverty are a huge part of the poor mental health of our nation and it is absolutely infuriating.

Quality of life has dramatically reduced during the past twenty years or so. A ‘normal’ job is no longer enough to live a normal life. The time has long passed when the average wage was enough to secure a mortgage on a modest property, run a car and perhaps go to the pub once a week. For many, it’s not even enough to rent a bedsit, use public transport and drown your sorrows with a bottle of cheap cider on a Friday night.

Before they even begin work, university students graduate with an average of £40,000 of debt. In 2014, 817,000 English people aged 16-25 were unemployed, a figure which magically and almost immediately reduced from a steady 1 million when ‘zero hours contracts’ – basically a legal way to exploit your workforce without affording them any employment rights – were introduced. As I type, one million British families are relying on food banks to survive. There are no official statistics for how many people are homeless in the UK, but we do know 112,330 households applied to their local authority for homelessness assistance in 2015 in England alone, a 26% increase since 2010. The proportion of children living in poverty is forecast to increase by 20% by 2020.

The most recent report on by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission concludes that Britain is in danger of becoming ‘permanently divided’, as the gap between rich and poor widens.

We are not meant to live like this – working every hour, having no time for relaxation and play, worrying constantly about our finances and our futures – no wonder anxiety and depression have reached epidemic levels.

If I were Prime Minister, the first thing I would do is stop squeezing money out of society’s poorest to balance the country’s books. It’s not only immoral, it’s short sighted – since those who grow up in poverty are far less likely to become tax payers and far more likely to require extensive care from the NHS. If the government wants to address mental illness, it needs first to address poverty.

Having said all of that, poor mental health doesn’t only affect the poor. In my next blog I will talk about modern life and the education system.