Tuesday 25 June 2019

Medicalising everyday life doesn’t help anyone’s mental health

Medicalising everyday life doesn’t help anyone’s mental health | Adrian Massey Not all suffering is mental illness. Pretending it is raises false hopes and puts pressure on an already strained NHS

I have a growing sense of unease about the Americanisation of British society’s attitude towards mental health. In the 1980s, British audiences smiled bemusedly at neurosis-laden Woody Allen films and the normality with which American television and cinema treated notions of therapy, meds and interventions. To a British ear, the protagonists of these human melodramas could seem self-absorbed, foolish and narcissistic; figures of fun to be pitied for their inability to maintain a stiff upper lip and their ignorance of the power of a strong cup of tea. Yet now these are all concepts that have been normalised in Britain too. The Guardian

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