I Wish I Knew What to Do Now, Besides Cry My Arse Off.

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Trigger warning

Contains language with potential to upset or distress.

You may not want to read this if you feel - or you are - emotionally vulnerable.

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Towards the end of 2020, I attempted an exercise in honest, raw expression of my feelings. These are the words I wrote then and, only now that I am a long way out of the woods of this episode, do I feel comfortable passing them on.

The other reason I have to put these words out there, is that - frightened as I am at the depth of my state of mind back then - it is also true that I survived the ordeal.

Mental health is very much in the news. Budgets were bandied about in the run-up to the 2019 election, but the reality on the ground is that the provision of services is much worse than it was when everyone felt safe taking the piss. And back then, we didn’t have a Government hell-bent on gaslighting us into the ward with a daily diet of bare-faced deceit.

It’s not easy being unhinged.

I am at my wits’ end. I am paralysed by fear. I want to end everything. My life is crumbling around me. I have massive debt because I was unable to work, to think clearly, to even pick up the phone to find work. The debt now crushes me as bills remain unpaid, bailiffs are threatened, and I quake when I hear someone at the door. I own my misfortune, it came from within me, which is why I am a liability to everyone I know. Any opportunity I ever get crumbles in my hands. I am very afraid. In the panic I have created within myself, the urgent need to ‘do something’ manifests in my mind as the only thing I feel I can do now.

I type this narrative now, all too aware that it looks like a suicide note, but I wouldn’t want you to feel that it is an ultimatum to fix my problems ‘or else’.

I was diagnosed a few years back with Social and General Anxiety Disorders with some quite scary scores. I was prescribed some SSRIs and sent off on a kind of online self-counselling module with telephone support. After a year of that I was discharged from this cut-price Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and allowed to continue to pop brain pills.

My anxiety is cyclical, a biorhythm like a hormonal cycle. The best the pills can do is to level the troughs and peaks which, more often than not, keeps me out of wildly impulsive behaviour.

I wish I knew what to do now, other than cry my arse off. I fear that once I open that gate, I will not be able to stop and will transition from next-to-useless to utterly redundant. I’ve been holding this back of late. I fear it would be an act of complete self-dissolution.

And so, we come to the ‘hook’ of this comment piece. I have been following the political circus around, looking for some hope.

It’s not a controversial opinion to say that the Westminster Bubble is out of touch with the real world, and recent pronouncements on mental health only serve to underline this. But I would go further, I would say that following politics is detrimental to my mental wellbeing. That Westminster in general – and the Government in particular – are agents of anxiety, vectors of depression, knowing collaborators of despair.

Despair is what makes people act on their worst impulses. An absence of hope is what propagates hate. Your unfettered awful impulses are entirely selfish and they are supported by the concurrent outpouring of hate that allows your selfishness, your base instincts to rise above whichever underclass is in the frame for your woes.

Speaking as someone who has become moderately self-aware of his own un-hinging, you are as much a victim of the vectors of depression as I am. You are not the agent of change that will restore the country to some imaginary past-glory; as part of the establishment’s ruse, you are yourself their underclass, their willing, sick accomplices in the dissemination of irrational fear and loathing.

I suspect, like many, my decline began after the banking crash. As an economic event, it wiped out a lot of the work I was doing as a writer. It only took a few years to transition from a moderately stretched income to financial worries, followed by an accelerating descent into something bordering on destitution.

Today, my bank card was refused with a basket of shopping at the convenience store till. It turns out that my overdraft had been revoked. Apparently, my mutual building society sent me a letter – shortly after they awarded their CEO with a salary of £2.4 million – outlining how bad I was.

I never got the letter, which is an all-too familiar woe these days, but there was also no email, text, phone call. They have all these details and, as an online customer, there is even a secure messaging service they might have used as well. But they didn’t.

I don’t dispute their decision, just the fact that they didn’t seem fit to mention it to me in a way that I could have seen it for sure. You can’t just remove someone’s cashflow without making sure they got the message, surely?

Don’t be silly, of course you can.

All of this nonsense underlines a point. It doesn’t matter how many compliance-tested homilies you issue on poverty, mental health and the like, when everything the state does is to operate against a base level of principle. The ‘decent thing’ is never done anymore. And it's not because it's too expensive or too difficult, it’s because very few people in power have any decency left.