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There’s a lot of well intentioned stuff about mental health and COVID and Christmas just now. But for some people all this attention on being alone, being unable to follow through with plans, or how difficult it is for mental health is making things feel worse. Want to know why?
All this consideration of what it is to be alone at Christmas is hard for some people. Partly because all the emphasis comes as quite a surprise to people who every year at Christmas experience deep loneliness, loss, grief, sadness, memories of trauma, and more. It’s confusing.
It’s understandable that some of those people want to ask why it’s only now that some mental health experts, the media, some charities and others have so much interest and emphasis on the difficulty of loneliness and sadness. It is actually making some people feel even more alone
It’s difficult for others to see the emphasis on the suffering of children who won’t get to see family or have disrupted holiday plans. Not because they can’t empathise with those children and they don’t feel sad for them, but because they wonder where all these loud voices were.
Children who grew up in institutional care, or detained in hospital, or secure units, who spent months at this time of year in seclusion. How can they interpret the sudden concern for children’s mental health at Christmas? What was it that made them so much harder to care about?
It’s not that the new influences on mental ill health and loneliness don’t matter. The suffering is real. People are hurting and we need to consider how to help. But the focus needs to include those who already suffer and hurt, not just those for whom it is unusual or new.
Because if what we are talking about and offering in our help and our hope to people finding this hard isn’t effective and inclusive enough, and if it isn’t working for people who already know what it is to struggle at this time of year, is it a sign that we need to rethink it?
It’s so important if the current support and enthusiasm for mental health and combatting loneliness is:
a. Real
b. Going to work
That it doesn’t actually exclude or make things harder for people who already live with mental health problems.
a. Real
b. Going to work
That it doesn’t actually exclude or make things harder for people who already live with mental health problems.
The current ideas underpinning the discussion on COVID, mental health and Christmas - based on a startling exclusionary set of assumptions and idea of what’s normal, who matters, and whose suffering matters, is not the best place to start from. There is a choice here.
