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Mental health crisis as a result of virus measures

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Who couldn’t have seen this coming with the reckless orgy of societal and economic destruction our government calls ‘response to virus’…? And these head teachers want the government to ‘do’ something about it? Like what? Send battalions of (masked) therapists to ‘fix’ these poor, suffering young people? Offer idiotic, insulting but cheap CBT online?

The government does not give a rat’s arse about mental health. It is still in the bad old days of 19th century psychology where psychological problems were seen as entirely the fault of the individual and nothing to do with what is going on around them or the conditions in which they live. Our government cannot provide semi-decent therapy or psychological services on a good day, let alone now when half of my colleagues are too scared of the virus themselves to see people… What hope or role modelling is adult society offering to young people when adults behave like frightened compliant sheep?

And there is nothing to fix. These young people are not ‘broken’ and neither are they ‘malfunctioning’. A response of depression and a sense of crisis and ‘not coping’ are normal when the conditions of life become impossible, when people are oppressed and when they are forced to live in fear; when all that adult society that should know better focuses on is (alleged) physical survival at the cost of *everything* that makes like worth living. Our emotional reactions are a response to our environment. They are simply information that tells us that something is not right around us, more specifically that we are being harmed or are stopped from developing our potential.

Most people’s brains are extraordinarily accurate in how they reflect the environment. That is what they have evolved to do. and we need to listen to them. If you want to help this mental health crisis, it is time to take life back. If government really had the good of the public at heart it would not have gutted the NHS long before the virus mania. If the health services were adequte to begin with, there would be no need to destroy everyone’s life. Those who really got ill from this new virus would have been handled well and the rest could get on with life without having to pay the price of our own government’s greed and inadquacy. Young people are suffering because the world around them is making theirs and everyone else’s life a misery. It’s not the virus itself that is doing it. It is the destructive and baffling response to it.

I read yesterday that Debenham is gone, all the stores and the jobs, gone. Whatever you think about the kind of economic system we have been living under, this is not the way to reform it by total destruction and leaving scorched earth everywhere. Last year has been the first time that the UN had to feed poor children in the UK. What is next? The Tory government were all about ‘financial resopnsibility’. Where is all the money coming from for furloughs? What are they going to do with hungry and homeless people, with all the suicides, the untold suffering physical and psychological and the deaths from repeated and endless lockdowns, which I have no doubt are already outnumbering the deaths *from* the virus. (Dying *with* the virus means very little).

I doubt that the government will lift a finger to help these young people, many of whom it has trapped at home with abusers with no school oversight. These young people do not need therapy or ‘mental health services’. At least not the majority of them. What they need is to live in a society that isn’t fear-driven, where people are free to live their lives and interact with people whose faces we can see, where we value fulfilment of potential and our natural environment over everything else. Why would young people feel good or look forward to adulthood, when they are emerging into a harsh, uncaring, cold, unjust and frankly insane world, and that even before this virus mania began? There is blood on our government’s hand and on the hands of all those who are colluding with the devastation it is inflicting on all of us.

One last word. This blog post (see link below) comes from ACEs Connections. ACEs refers to Adverse Childhood Experience. This term became a bit more familiar to public and authorities when a meticulous study on the impact of ACEs on physical health was published in 1998. It took it about two decades to be properly noticed even though it has been published and republished more times than I can count. The study came from a group of US epidemiologists who proved — something therapists and adult survivors of childhood abuse like myself have always known — that childhood trauma or ACE that can cause trauma, has a massive life-long impact on physical health. GPs here and elsewhere are still ignoring this and despite useful recommendations from the authors of the study and many who have adopted their results in the US. The NHS is in the dark ages when it comes to ACE.

This site belongs to one of the UK organisations that tries to make sure this issue remains in public consciousness and doesn’t disappear. But of course, like most public good organisations populated mostly by well-meaning but cowardly people, when this virus mania began, they said absolutely nothing about the adverse impact of lockdowns, masking and the comprehensive destruction of societal and economic structures would have on children and young people.

They offered no counter weight or advice to the government at all. They just toed the line. I wrote to them the other day about this. Got no response of course, but this suddenly turned up yesterday. It is weak and cites someone else, becuase they are too cowardly to bring themselves to write something on it properly themselves.

If this virus insanity does anything positive is that it has been smoking out the cowards, those who would turn over the next door Jew because the government said that you must do this because Jews are dangerous to society. People really believed this at the time. That is what all the politicians said and the media, that’s what the teachers at school taught and professors at university. Very few tried to stand up to it and we all know where this led.

I learned about cowardly people in my education in Israel. I have been dismayed all through last year to discover how many people can be frightened so easily that they stop thinking and stop caring, but pretend to care because they are doing what they are told and they want to believe that it is in the public good. I had to ditch a couple of people from my life because of this. (And if I sound angry it is because I am. It is OK to be angry in the face of harm and injustice.)

https://www.acesconnection.com/g/resilience-united-kingdom/blog/headteachers-warn-of-worst-ever-child-mental-health-crisis-standard-co-uk

https://www.acesconnection.com/g/resilience-united-kingdom/blog/headteachers-warn-of-worst-ever-child-mental-health-crisis-standard-co-uk

1 thought on “Mental health crisis as a result of virus measures”

  1. Alan Stanton says:

    My thanks for a thought provoking, angry and painful article.

    Am I one of those cowardly people? I’m certainly among those frightened by what’s happening.
    My wife and I are old enough to be among those given our first vaccine injections. It’s good news that our lying and incompetent government entrusted the vaccination process to the NHS instead of contracting it out to their corporate pals who seem to have messed-up everything else.

    The less good news: our London neighbourhood is one the areas in England where cases of the new variant virus have been detected.
    So tomorrow we will take advantage of tests being offered a short distance from our home.

    Anyway, I plan to reread and think hard about your hard-hitting article.

    Meanwhile, two preliminary thoughts.
    About your question: ‘where is all the money coming from?’ You may not have come across the ideas and research of people such as Richard Murphy and many others who argue that the money can come just as easily for furlough and health as it always does for weapons and bailing out banks. No, not simply taxes but from Governments creating money.

    I admit I’m not an economist, But please have a look at for example Professor Richard Murphy’s (free) website and videos.
    Also the works of others with similar economic analysis.
    My apologies if you are already familiar with all this.

    If you are not then you might see it as nonsense. Or you may just welcome it as a few shafts of sunlight in a grey world.

    Last point. You probably know the videos of Ken Robinson. In one of them he talks about the fallacy that education must be standardised and linear. Which makes me sad when I hear young people e,g, on TV or the radio talking abut their lives being e.g. “ruined” by exams cancellation. As if there was no way for them – helped by the Government if it chose to do so – to make fresh starts in different directions.
    Perhaps in the way you did?

    Thanks again for your article. And others I have been reading.

    Sincerely,

    Alan Stanton

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