DISBELIEF

I think that it’s a widely held belief that the mental health policies of our country are, well, let’s be generous and say “not what it could be”, which is a bit of a shame given how many of us are likely to have at least one “episode” of (at the very least) depression during our long, and now likely to be very austere, lives.

The problem is, of course, that from a political point of view, dealing with mental health problems just isn’t all that “sexy” and there is still a sneaking suspicion that, amongst certain members of the political classes at least, there is still a belief that such things are brought upon the sufferers themselves and that they ought to just pull themselves together and snap out of it.

Successive governments have brought in policies designed to “save money” and which the headline comment is the rather positive-sounding notion of “community care” which sounds good and rather neatly side-steps the old Victorian sense of locking people away forever in bedlam, but sadly means that it then appears to be in favour of locking them out of the kinds of places where they can be helped so that the “caring, understanding” greater society (which includes all of those “reckoning” stuff on the forums, by the way) can help them in its “caring, understanding” way…

This basically leads to tragedies happening which everyone, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, can see were bound to happen, but for which nobody seems prepared to take responsibility before the fact.

So that, when a patient with a history of violence feels pretty sure that they are likely to commit a violent act, pleads for some help that they don’t actually get, and then goes out and does commit a violent act, the best we can do is blame them completely for it, pretty much lock away the key on them, and watch as the authorities pass the buck around and try and weasel out of taking any of their share of the blame, whilst seeking to reassure us to trust them to make certain that it will never happen again.

But then, of course, it does… and it’s still nobody’s fault… or it’s society’s fault… or solely the knife wielding maniac’s fault… or, of course, the government’s fault… and someone, somewhere will claim that the only person you can ever blame is the person who commits the violent act, even if they’ve begged for help to stop them from doing so and have voices in their heads and chemicals in their brains that prevent them from being able to stop themselves without getting some kind of professional help.

Lock ’em up, throw away the key, and leave the families to mourn and grieve.

You see, generally, as a rule, as ordinary human beings, we make some kind of a decision and try to convince ourselves that no real harm will come of it. However, some kind of harm does usually come from a decision one way or another (We buy a cake, which means somebody else doesn’t get a cake), it’s just that most of our decisions are so trivial and mundane that there is “no real harm done…”

Spend any time in a hospital, and you get the impression nobody knows what’s going on with anyone at all, and they’re all just fire-fighting to get through the average day, and that’s precisely the sort of environment where decisions are being made that are significant and do potentially have quite dreadful consequences.

Which is precisely why there has been such a large number of tragic “incidents” reported recently where situations have escalated out of control and left any number of people in desperately sad situations which, according to the enquiries held afterwards, could have been prevented.

Now, I don’t doubt that the people who made the wrong decisions always feel devastated if something like this happens on their watch, and, because we do live in such a “blame culture” it’s not hard to see why everyone is trying their level best to cover themselves, which leads to the usual bland statements of regret, etc. which convince none of us that anyone is going to do very much to change anything in the long run.

As to that “blame culture”, well, it’s kind of inevitable really. After all, we all want to lash out if something like that happens to someone we care about, and sometimes the only way is to point the finger at where the harm was really done and hit them in the pocket or the career path, and punish them where it hurts the most.

I do think, however, that most of us would want there to be a smidgen of hope to be pulled out of a tragedy, some small  crumb of comfort which enables those of us left behind to find any reason to carry on, so perhaps, if there is any to be had at all, this is possibly it:

As people we genuinely still would rather think the best of each other, that we’re really not capable of doing that much harm and that nothing really bad is going to happen. Somehow we are capable of convincing ourselves that it will probably all turn out to be okay, even if we’re biting our lip and wondering as we sign the release forms.

In the end, most people in most jobs are trying their very best to be as helpful and reasonable as they can be, and if a client goes away feeling happy, then we feel that we’ve done an okay job, even if there are still one or two nagging doubts lurking about in the back of our minds…

Of course, as human beings we ought to know that people are capable of doing the most monstrous things, but the fact that we choose to believe that they won’t should, I suppose, be taken as a positive thought…

It’s not much… but it’s something…

And it’s the kind of thinking that probably helps those axe-wielding bean-counters sleep better at night, too…