The silent killer

                                                The Silent Killer

One of the truisms of the modern age is that everybody is responsible for their own destiny. However one field where things have to move on is the field of metal health. Mental health is one of the great problems of the age. It is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide

For a society that generally stigmatizes people with mental health problems they are surprisingly common. According to MIND the national mental health charity one in four people will experience a mental health problem each year. This is a fairly staggering statistic!

Yet in charity collections MIND and mental health charities lag further behind others.  Our culture sees mental illness often as a threat.

While the numbers of People with mental health problems who engage in unprovoked attacks on people is small the stigma remains. Mental health is associated with individuals being dangerous and unpredictable.

This makes it very difficult to successfully reintegrate mental health users into the society. Most programs of education do not cater for this and there is vey little maneuver room in most employment contracts to allow or people being ill for part of the ear. In this respect many mental health users have great problems with the system and successfully integrating themselves within society.

For a large part of the British population mental illness is a fact of life. One in four of the population will experience a mental health problem in the course of a year. Mental illness has a major effect on the quality of life of the individual concerned. Although only a killer if it leads to suicide or self harm and despite the Brits looking down on Scandinavian countries Britain has a much higher suicide rate than they do and its rates of self harming are among the highest in the world.

What can be done to sort out this problem? In most respects the question comes down to better support for sufferers in what is increasingly an overlooked epidemic. The consequences for society are quite great as a lot of talent is overlooked. For some people the experience of mental health problems can be positive spurring them to do things with their lives. In this respect excluding about a quarter of our population from meaningful activity is not an option.

How does a society deal with this epidemic? In Britain mental health services do exist but one of the problems thrown up was the fact that in the eighties all the institutions closed to be replaced by care in the community. This however  meant that a lot of people who had become institutionalized ended up on the streets. Mostly community based care does work with some significant exceptions. The perception of users is quite mixed with  many having significant complaints about the way they have been dealt with by the system.

The problem of mental health is an epidemic that will not go away and in this the United Kingdom is not significantly different from most Western countries. How we deal with it will be one of the significant challenges of this century!