We need to talk about…….no PLEASE not THAT again, it’s all been said.

A post about mental health

There it was, in the news again today.

Another person lost to suicide.

And as I read the article, there IT was again.

That same, well-meaning yet vacuous soundbite. You know the one. I paraphrase.

“We need to talk about mental health, there’s still so much stigma attached. It’s a conversation that needs to be opened up”

Needs to be opened up???

“Like a whore’s legs it does!”

I wanted to scream, vehemently disagreeing.

No! Thats NOT it!

Or at least not all of it.

Why do I say this?

Because never before have we had so many places ready to take your calls, listen to your worries, write you a prescription.

It’s everywhere. From prime time news to adverts on buses and trains. From royals, to charities to social media self help gurus.

We are living in the age of ‘the ailment’. The age of condition, of disability. An age in which these things have not just been normalised but actively encouraged and sometimes glorified.

A few weeks ago, I was on a train when a stranger proceeded to remove two tablets from his pocket.

“I take this one for my depression, this one to help me sleep”

He said matter of factly. He was off to stay at his sister’s and was questioning whether he should have a few bevvies.

With me a complete random he’d met on the train.

He’d obviously not got this memo that there was stigma around this. That it was taboo. Ditto the numerous friends I have who openly admit the various meds they now take for their sanity.

No.

The conversation we need to be having is WHY so many people are now depressed and anxious.

That conversation.

It can’t be coincidence can it? That so many of us have dodgy wiring, downer chemistry, shit genes?

Did our creator (or evolutionary science equivalent) seriously make THAT many fuck ups?

Really?

Some of us, people like myself, are committed to the art of FEELING. Truly experiencing our life. Our moods. Whatever they may be.

To wrap ourselves in meds or therapies presents like sticking a fan in a sauna.

“Hang on….can we not just exit the sauna?”

We want to yell.

I once knew someone who put wallpaper up with blue tack. Short term to a squinting eye,  it masked. Was a good cover up. To those who passed by windows, those who didn’t hover too long. But, oh how frequently It fell down and revealed those foul walls never smoothed nor sanded.

Those cracks.

The stubborn woodchip that has to be forcefully hacked away at. Lump by painstaking lump.

Our government, Big Pharma and MSM have worked together to not only create a market by gaslighting us all into believing we are probably depressed and/or anxious but they are simultaneously feeding that beast. Quite a nice little circuit they have going on there, isn’t it?

They don’t so much ‘open conversations’ but literally beckon you over, ushering you in from the street to take part in their sick coffee morning. The one where they tell you how they can help you whilst taking away the very things that serve to stabilise people. Secure jobs, strong community, decent standards of living, peace.

So I’ll say it again, the conversations that need opening up are not those about admitting you’re depressed.

It’s passé.

If you’re depressed or anxious, join the club.

It’s a big one and it’s only getting bigger.

Instead, how about we open a new conversation about those who actively leech off that depression, those who lock us into these cycles of dependency. Recycle our pain for their profit. Those who have no desire to change their systems that subjugate, frighten and fence us in.

Our false friends who want us hooked on their wares, not to make us feel good but rather, to keep us from feeling at all. To have us working blindly for ‘the man’, a rattling rotting army of doped up zombies, Those sadists who enjoy the smug feelings of control their highly lucrative solutions offer whilst simultaneously stoking that very fire of fear.

The feeder to our fat girl.

To suppose that ‘talking about feelings’ is the answer to everyone’s problems, that depression is an awkward elephant in the room that just needs coaxing out on to the couch with a few peanuts, is to deny the colossal mammoth that stands behind it.

The mammoth of wars, of draconian rules, of ridiculous policies, of goaded societal division.

The mammoth of new ills like social media that drain us of our humanity. Of surgeries led by vanity and delusion.

The mammoth whose tusks gore at us all daily, edging us out into the circus ring to perform one last perverse spectacle, that of our own demise.

But hey, go ahead, enjoy your white elephants, your pink sugar elephants, your docile flying Dumbos.

Until we address the mammoth, in all its tangled, stinking wool, we will lose more and more good people. People who came here to truly live. The sensitive ones. Not in the ‘I’m offended’ sense, but rather, those of us who prize raw feelings as their diamonds, ‘real’ as their gold.

Those of us who have no desire to dance within the confines of the sauna, no matter how powerful the fan.

Those of us who came to dance barefoot in the sun,

That is the conversation I open.

Feel free to continue it.