"MENTAL HEALTH" is affecting my. . . mental health.

TOM UTLEY: How to beat the blues - award yourself £10 every time you hear the phrase 'mental health' on TV or radio

By Tom Utley for the Daily Mail

Earlier this month I invented a game to cheer myself up through these short, chilly days of January. I’m not claiming it will work for everyone, but readers may care to give it a try.

The rules are simple. All you have to do is award yourself an imaginary £10 every time you hear the words ‘mental health’ uttered on the radio or TV, or read them in the media.

I find that even on a thinnish day I can rake in a comfortable 50 or 60 fantasy quid — while if Prince Harry, a controversial statue or an internet influencer is in the news, I often notch up a sum well into three figures.

Indeed, those who follow the media may be forgiven for thinking most of the population is incapable of expressing annoyance or sadness about anything, from Covid restrictions to rising prices or even sexism in the works of Shakespeare, without complaining about the irritant’s adverse impact on his or her mental health.

Eavesdrop on almost any industrial tribunal these days and you’ll hear a sacked employee complain that the boss showed her too much affection, or too little, and that this was having a devastating effect on her mental health.

Read any report of a criminal trial, and the chances are that the defendant will say that he nicked his dad’s credit card — or drove at 120 mph up the M4, high on cocaine — because he was suffering from mental health issues.

Ask athletes or sports stars to explain a poor performance, and they’ll claim that mental health problems lay at the root of it. It’s an all-purpose, get-out-of-jail-free card. Instant victimhood for anyone looking for an excuse.

God knows, it’s no part of my intention this week to make light of genuine mental illness, because I know there is nothing more debilitating. I have a great friend who was so clinically depressed he couldn’t get out of bed for months on end, and I’ve known others whose despair was so deep that they took their own lives.

I must also declare that I’m extremely proud of the fact that one of my sons has decided to devote his life to the care of seriously disturbed adults. This seems to me to be among the noblest and most selfless careers imaginable.

No, what I object to is the modern habit of labelling every low we experience in the course of our everyday lives as a mental health issue, as if it were a clinical condition beyond our control.

The most obvious offenders are those misguided university students — often indulged or actively egged on by academics who should know better — who demand ‘safe spaces’ to protect their mental health from exposure to ideas with which they’ve been taught to disagree.

Tell them that the British empire wasn’t all bad, for example, or that unrestricted immigration isn’t necessarily an unalloyed good, and they’ll run for cover, complaining that we’re messing with their fragile minds.

Ask students of English literature to read Dickens, Trollope or Walter Scott — all of them riddled, it’s true, with the casual racism and sexism of their time — and they’ll wail that we’re putting their mental health in grave jeopardy.

On that point, it surely doesn’t help when a respected actress suggests, as Juliet Stevenson did this week, that plays such as The Taming Of The Shrew and The Merchant Of Venice should be ‘buried’, since they portray ‘unacceptable’ attitudes. Oh, how I wish actors and actresses would stick to acting, which some are quite good at, instead of spouting the half-baked political opinions apparently shared by almost everyone in their profession.

But this unhealthy obsession with mental health is by no means confined to Left-leaning students, broadcasters and Tweeters. Academics at University College London have even devised a ‘depression index’, which purports to measure the effects of the pandemic on the mental health of the nation, according to a survey of more than 30,000 respondents.

This week, if you’re interested, UCL found that between November 1 and January 3, levels of anxiety and depression in Britain rose by 24 per cent on the scale, from 5.0 to 6.2. That’s a pretty meaningless figure, if you ask me, but then misery-mongering is all the rage these days.

No less gloomy was this week’s announcement by the Oxford University Press that the word chosen by children as their word of the year for 2021 was ‘anxiety’.

This was the finding of a survey of 8,000 pupils, aged between seven and 14, who were asked to select from a shortlist of ten words the one they would use when talking about well-being and health last year (the other contenders were: ‘challenging’, ‘isolate’, ‘well-being’, ‘resilience’, ‘bubble’, ‘kindness’, ‘remote’, ‘cancelled’ and ‘empathy’).

I note, by the way, that the children picked anxiety ‘after discussing the words with their teachers’. Call me an old cynic, but this suggests that in some cases, the teachers may have prompted them to opt for it as their word of the year.

Certainly, I suspect if they had been left to their own devices, they would have chosen a very different shortlist of words to encapsulate their year of disrupted schooling. It would possibly have included ‘smartphone’, ‘Xbox’ and ‘pizza’.

But whatever the truth, I meant it quite literally when I described the modern obsession with mental health as unhealthy. Let’s face it, we all have our ups and downs as we go through life — and I know that many of us have truly dreadful lows from time to time. But I cannot believe it’s good for our well-being to label all such lows as symptoms of mental trouble.

I know it’s a terribly old-fashioned thing to say, but I can’t recall anyone of my parents’ generation complaining about the effects on their mental health of being rained on by Hitler’s bombs, night after night in the Blitz. But ask many of today’s young how they’ve been affected by gentle teasing or other ‘micro-aggressions’, and you’ll never hear the end of their suffering.

Nor do I remember anyone from my own childhood taking time off school because of feelings of stress, depression or anxiety. Measles, mumps or glandular fever, yes. ‘Mental health issues’, no.

Children given to moping or self-pity were told to cheer up, count their blessings, look on the bright side and generally buck up their ideas. I can’t help feeling that even in 2022, there’s something to be said for this approach.

These days, by contrast, I’m told it’s far from unusual for children to cite mental health reasons for taking time off sick.

Yes, I know that in many ways it’s harder for them than it was for us, given the cruelties of social media and other pressures of modern life.

But how can it improve their well-being to bombard them daily with trigger-warnings, helplines to contact if they’ve been ‘affected by any of the issues raised in this programme’ and endless items in the media about the effects of this or that on the nation’s mental health?

It’s almost as if they’re being invited to cast themselves as victims of a mental health pandemic as widespread as Covid.

I haven’t room here to rehearse the many proven ways of banishing minor woes, such as meeting friends, taking up a hobby or just staring out to sea. I will only say that if all else fails, you might try the little game I mentioned above.

The joy of it is that instead of being plunged into gloom every time another story comes up about mental health, you will think: ‘Kerching! That’s another imaginary tenner for me!’

If you’ve got to the end of this article, you may notice that I’ve mentioned the words mental health no fewer than 18 times. That’s £180 already in your fantasy bank. Look on it as a bonus to get you started.

BLOGGER'S LAMENT. I don't often copy and paste, verbatim, something I've read in the UK press, but this guy is making some valid points. He's a little too British for my liking: this "oh, buck up" and "your grandparents lived through the Blitz" attitude doesn't help a depressed person very much. But it's true what he says about mental health. It's everywhere, these days.

This, at a time when I have never EVER seen so much socially-sanctioned mental illness turned loose in the land, nor so much utter contempt for people (whack jobs, nut bars, head cases who should be in the looney bin) who suffer from the real thing.

I suffer from the real thing. I have suffered from the real thing at least from adolescence onward. Though I was never properly diagnosed, I now understand that I was clinically depressed at the age of 15. I suffered bouts of it, soul-destroying bouts that sometimes landed me in the hospital, for as long as I can remember. Not to mention the violent up-gusts that pushed me above the clouds, where the air is very very thin and may even damage your brain.

Bipolar, in other words. That's the word for it, or at least the nearest thing to describe it clinically. Am I proud of it? Not exactly, but I'm working on the shame bit. I know, in my intellect at least, that there is truly nothing to be ashamed of. But I DID create holy hell for the people I love the most, and was never able to explain it to them, because I'd "snap out of it" (at HUGE effort and strain) and try to right myself, so I looked and sounded "normal" again. For their sake.

This racked up a huge mental and emotional debt, and after years of struggle, there was a humiliating landslide. I cracked in 2005 in the most flamboyantly awful way possible. All I got out of it was a correct diagnosis, after the this-way-and-that-way that went on for some 30 years.

The average person with TRUE mental illness is misdiagnosed an average of five times before being correctly diagnosed. I will ask you to read that sentence one more time.

Five times? I think it was ten. Maybe more. Meantime, though I did moan a lot about the term "mental illness" being a trap (for how can you be "ill" and "well" at the same time?), there seemed to be no alternative. 

UNTIL NOW!

Until someone-or-other, probably an influencer on social media, decided to take "mental health", a perfectly respectable term, and squeeze and pump and inflate it until it was the size and bulk of the Hindenberg - and every bit as gaseous and overblown. 

Oh, the humanity! With this much gross and even ludicrous misuse and overuse, the whole thing becomes meaningless and - eventually - very easy to dismiss. The upshot of it is, those of us who really DO suffer, and HAVE suffered, and likely WILL suffer from "mental health issues" until we take our last breath, are still being marginalized, because we are lumped in with the chippers who are just jumping on the latest meaningless media bandwagon.

All right, I've chuffed and moaned enough for now. But I'm glad someone else is noticing this, and saying, wait a minute. It's very telling that it's a Brit. People in North America are still tiptoeing around the subject the way Tiny Tim tiptoed through the tulips. Except that when HE did it, it was at least entertaining.

Iconic cupcakes and other irrelevancies

This is the greatest mystery of the human mind—the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning.

John Steinbeck

This WILL make sense: itwillitwillitwillitwillitwill. . . and if it doesn't, it's cuzzadafact that I just got up and am not yet fully awake and have many other things to do.

I've been compiling a list of things that belong together, mainly because they annoy the shit out of me. If they seem dissonant, irrelevant, etc. (I almost said "whatever"!), then bear with me. Soon all this nonsense will wear a crown of meaning.

 

The cupcake theme leads the way, more or less, because cupcakes have become ubiquitous since that moment some time in the '90s when Carrie and Miranda sat there on a park bench cramming their faces with cake and talking about (what else?) "crushes".

Cupcakes might've become Big (to coin a phrase, an awful one) anyway, but somehow-or-other, perhaps because of Carrie spitting out little pieces of cake while she waxed all giggly like someone in high school,  they blew into the stratosphere - imagine  little multi-colored sparkly-icinged projectiles raining down on us all - and still dominate kids' birthday parties, baby showers and even WEDDINGS.

No more does the bride-to-be fuss and twitter (I mean "twitter", not "tweet") about that dire necessity of marriage, the wedding cake. She won't have one anyway. It'll be a cement-frosted edifice made oout f styrofoam and it will cost $1550.99.

No, she will fuss and twitter about importing "special" cupcakes like the ones Carrie and Miranda ate 18 years ago on Sex and the City. From the Magnolia Bakery in New York.

This is how cupcakes become. . .(and here is my point - yes, there is one - ) iconic. And if cupcakes can become iconic, so can everything else.

The word is thrown around so casually these days that no one notices any more. James Bond has his iconic martini. The Kardashians have their iconic stupidity. Justin Bieber has his iconic stupid haircut. Simon Cowell has his iconic nastiness.  And I'd think of more, but I don't have to: just listen for it for one day and you'll see.

So what is an icon? It's a symbol so culturally significant that it comes to stand for a whole world of meaning. I think it even has religious importance, a focus for prayer or worship. It hardly relates to cupcakes. But in this air-puffed, sugar-spun world, maybe it does.

 

Let's get the next one out of the way now because it nauseates me so much:  "awesome". In the course of a day, I hear this 29,000 times, to the point that it means nothing at all. In fact, its empty-headed non-meaning is worming its way into the dictionary, as so many non-words eventually do.

"Here's your change."

"Awesome."

"I had my shoe fixed."

"Awesome."

"My AIDS test came out negative."

"Awesome."

And so on, and on, and on.

If something really is "awesome", such as whatever-that-American-thingie-is-called, Mount Rushmore, or Old Faithful, or the Sistene Chapel or something, I don't know what the response would be because you've already used up "awesome" on all those stupid, empty-headed, meaningless things.

I saw a book not long ago: 500 Things that are  Awesome, or some-such. I flipped through it and, as my Jewish brethren say, plotzed. One of the things they listed as "awesome" was your colon. It described in detail its role in processing human shit as it made its way out your - I won't go any further, but hey, it's "awesome", isn't it?

Another one I'm hearing every day: "surreal". Maybe it's because our whole world is surreal now. But it's being applied to everything, i. e. the plumbing failing or having to take your cat to the vet. "He was throwing up furballs. It was surreal." Why do these words catch on? Is it a disease, and how soon before we all start scratching?

I will add to this "no problem" in place of "you're welcome".

"Thanks for loaning me $5,000,000.00 till payday."

"No problem."

What does this mean exactly? "This is not a problem." " There is no problem here." Why say that instead of the courteous non-phrase "you're welcome" (which doesn't mean very much either)?

People say it BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE IS SAYING IT. Mooooooooo!

But the lowing herds of humanity don't stop there. "You betcha" sometimes stands in for "No problem," and means even less.

I don't know if this is a catch-phrase or just a stupidity, but whenever something disastrous happens, a fire or a shooting or 9-11 or anything on a traumatic, unexpected scale, everyone says, "I thought I was in a movie."

No one seems fully present in reality any more. It's all watched on some sort of vast screen in 3D, and we're just spectators with no active role. "It looked like a movie." "I heard some sort of popping noise."

That popping noise is GUNFIRE, you fucking idiots, and that is what it really sounds like, not the "BLAMMMMM!"  that has stood in for decades on TV and in movies. It's a sound that comes out of some sort of central sound effects bank, and it's the only way movie directors can convince people that a gun has actually been fired. It's kind of like cars exploding into fireballs when someone lights a match. It doesn't happen that way, but it has nevertheless become our collective reality.

So when someone fires a real gun, it sounds kind of like a muted firecracker, a puh-puh sound, and no one dives for cover but just stands there stupidly waiting to be shot because THIS MUST BE A MOVIE. Which might be followed by another statement (if such a thing were possible):

"This must be dead."

Shut. UUUUUUUUHHPPPP!!!

Not long ago I was sitting at the bumpy back of a shuttle bus, when I overheard two girls talking.

They must have been somewhere around the age of fourteen (oh God, maybe twelve), headed to Megalopolis Mall for some serious retail therapy. They were deep in conversation in rapid, breathless phrases that almost ran together into one word:

“So I’m like, you can never wear those jeans, Ashley. And she’s like: Kaylee, they make me look 15 pounds thinner! And I’m like, you can’t see them from the back. It’s like majorly muffin-top. And she’s like: maybe I don’t want to look anorexic and have no butt at all. And I’m like: bitch, what are you saying? And she’s like: nothing personal, Kaylee, but you’re like soo thin I can see right through you.”

Her conversation mate Madison replied, “I’d like be so offended, Kaylee, you’re just soo not anorexic, you can like wear a size zero and she’s like jealous.”

I tried to count the “I’m likes”, but lost track after about 20. This phrase, originated by kids who were born in the mid-‘90s, has hung on with surprising tenacity, even longer than, “Then I go. . . then she goes. . . then I go. . .” (“Go” meaning either “say” or some other active verb).

I don’t know how it happens, but obnoxious phrases and quirks of speech seem to worm their way into common discourse, to the point that I’ve heard middle-aged people say “I’m like” (and inflect their voices with that curious upward, ask-permission sound at the end of sentences that communicates chronic but somehow fashionable uncertainty.)

I can’t remember when I first started to hear the phrase “change it up”. You can arrange your living room furniture around the 80" flat screen TV, or you can change it up and stack the sofa on top of the coffee table. Bored with a certain routine? Change it up.

(This is related, but only indirectly, to “man up”. I don’t need to translate that one.)

I am convinced that this particularly irritating phrase originated with Dr. Phil, that transplanted Texas cowboy, his speech peppered with “y’alls” and “you guys” (and don’t get me started on that one, often used by 20-year-old waiters on dignified elderly couples).

Another Phil-ism that I detest is the dreaded “You know what?” I know a woman who says it before every sentence she utters. I am tempted to respond with “NO! WHAT?”, except that this phrase doesn’t really mean anything, and she probably has no idea she’s even saying it. Her mouth is just flapping and something is coming out.

As the song goes, everybody’s talkin’ ‘bout a new way a-walkin’. Or, a-talkin’. Here are some particularly poisonous examples.

No one can say a short “e” sound any more. It’s more like “ahh”. As in, “ahhvry.” “Ahhvry time I go out with my boyfrahhnd, he’s like, I wanna go to bahhd with you, and I’m like, soo not rahhdy.” This isn’t just in people under 30, unfortunately. It has spread like a communicable disease. The jaw drops lazily open and doesn’t bother to come up again (“sahhx”).

It isn't an accent. It's an affectation, and it radiates "dumb" more than people realize.

Another annoying quirk is one popularized by Stacy London of the psychologically sadistic show What Not to Wear (in which women are completely broken down, cult-like, in order to be built back up again by the immutable laws of fashion): “Shut! Up!”. This is not a literal shut up, but almost a seal of approval, replacing the outworn “you go, girl!”. It’s a variation on Elaine’s “Get! Out!” on Seinfeld, accompanied by a push so hard it literally knocks the other person over.

Oh, but I’ve saved the worst ‘til last, and it’s so ubiquitous that people don’t even hear it any more. “Icon”. Or “iconic”, the two are almost interchangeable. Tomorrow, as an exercise, count the number of times you hear or read “icon/iconic” in the media. I once counted five, and that wasn’t unusual at all.

Anything can be iconic now, which means that nothing is. Some asshole journalist was blathering on and on about Sex and the City (after that lame movie came out) and said that the cupcakes Carrie and Miranda ate were “iconic”, leading to a rash of cupcake stores that now litter the landscape all over North America.

OK then, can cones be iconic? As in ice cream?

You nahhver can tahhl.

I'm like, iconic

Sometimes I think I'm being left behind so swiftly, the people around me are a blur. I'm turning into one of those grannies that picks at grammar and parses sentences.

Or something.

I was never taught to write, not exactly, but reading a gazillion books when I was a grubby little kid taught me something about respect for language. I kind of soaked it in. It hurt me when someone mangled the language, especially in print.

I'm aware of the phenomenon of catch-phrases, words or clumps of words that catch on and become so common that no one notices them any more. The big one right now is "I'm like".

I challenge you to count the number of times each day that you hear "I'm like" (or "he's like", or "they're like," etc.) Everyone says this now, often several times in a sentence. Even Oprah and Katie Couric say it. Does anyone stop to think what it means?

"Like" means, well, either you like something, or you resemble it. "I'm like" seems to be saying, "I don't feel this way, but I feel something like it." It's all happening at a remove.

And don't get me started on "icon/iconic". It proliferates like a cancer. Maybe icon started with computers, who knows, but iconic (which for some reason reminds me of some sort of verbal ice cream cone) has long departed from its original meaning: a person or thing that is representative of an entire culture, a focal point for humanity. (It can also mean, in its original form, a religious object like a statue that becomes an object of veneration.)

Everything's iconic now. Pop singers are iconic. Pants are iconic (if they're Levis). I wince when I see it. Is it one of those words that people think makes them look intelligent if they use it? The worst, but only so far, was an item related to Sex and the City: cupcakes. Yes. Cupcakes are iconic. Or at least, a certain variety sold in New York are iconic.

Maybe some people or things are iconic, like Bogart and Bacall. But they only come along every so often, and usually aren't recognized until after they're dead.

So what's the point of all this? Shit, I got another lousy rejection the other day, and it has me smarting. And aching. I've already published two novels that I am very proud of, but neither one was a hot seller. Since 2005 I've written two more novels and a book of poetry. And I get brushed off everywhere. Agents won't look at me. Why? Maybe because I write in complete sentences! Cupcakes aren't iconic, and I'm not like anything, I am.

The casual mangling of language has become the norm, and if you're like me and care about how to put a sentence together, you're obsolete. Or so it seems right now, after the latest kick in the head has been delivered. I won't quote her exact words, or the Agent Police will get after me.

So I should maybe retitle my latest novel? What should I name the baby?

How's this: "I'm Like, Iconic, Cupcake."