18/05/2025
Many of us would have failed to have noticed the plethora of green badges, t-shirts and celebrity posts promoting the past few days known as ‘mental health awareness week’. “So brave”, “thank you for caring”, “my door is always open” are often the comments seen below a lot of the posts reminding us to “take it easy”, “don’t be afraid to ask for help”, or the somewhat worn out “it’s ok to not be ok”. But what is really happening behind the curtain here, is MHAW nothing more than a genuine, albeit clumsy, attempt at inclusiveness and destigmatization, or is the wider picture something that reveals another more sinister element?
Does raising awareness of emotional distress really help individuals already struggling to cope come forward? And what help is there when many services are already overstretched and underfunded? “Every time we have a mental health awareness week my spirits sink,” says Simons Wessely, who in July 2017 became the first psychiatrist to be president of the Royal Society of Medicine. “We don’t need people to be more aware. We can’t deal with the ones who already are aware.”
NHS services have been underfunded for decades, with mental health often regarded as the poor relation. Whilst outcries from those representing mainstream mental health services may not go unheard, responses have been lacking, and charities have had to pick up the ever growing slack, many of their services having already taken huge hits post 2020.
The approach to mental health has been crying out for an overhaul for too long. Some headway has been achieved such as the Finnish Open Dialogue model being piloted by several NHS Trusts, and debates around the efficacy of antidepressants from Professor Joanna Moncreiff have gained some media traction of late, but things are not moving fast enough. The medical model remains the arena, and diagnosis the matador. So mine, along with Simon’s heart, sinks when I am encouraged to wear green to show my support, not just because I know that availability is stretched and access is often conditional, but because the support is restricted, flawed and at times harmful, sometimes lethal.
Attempts to provide a ‘trauma informed’ service has bastardised the term with services saying they are trauma informed whilst overprescribing, overruling autonomy and liberty, and victim blaming with diagnoses that often feel like nothing more than shorthand to aid communication between professionals.
So just stop. Stop gaslighting us all with your green badges and “my door is always open” memes, I would personally rather walk through the gates of hell than ask for support from a service that uses a week of the year to remind us all that we are firmly under the thumb of a society that hasn’t got the balls to openly admit it’s hurting people, and then laughs in our faces with an annual week long celebration we are encouraged to join in with, with grinning enthusiasm.
A Survivor (to date).
