This month, Martin Ling became the new manager at Swindon Town football club in England. The photograph on the BBC website, heralding his return to the game, depicts Mr Ling smiling broadly in front of his new club’s emblem. A closer look at this image reveals the club’s motto: Salubritas et Industria meaning "health and industry". This seems particularly fitting for Mr Ling, who left his previous post at Torquay United due to a mental health problem.
Mr Ling is not the first nor will he be the last to have his ability to work temporarily compromised by a mental health problem.
According to the World Health Organisation, one in four of us will, at some point during our lifetime, experience such a problem. In the US, the Centese for Disease Control and Prevention cite depression as the nation’s leading cause of lost workdays. The UK’s Health and Safety Executive reports the same thing: depression has now even overtaken skeletomuscular complaints when it comes to total number of lost workdays in the UK.
However, beyond the debilitating aspects of some mental health problems, there is also the issue of social stigma. Mr Ling struggled for nearly three years to regain employment after his highly publicised breakdown. Was this due to negative attitudes towards mental health problems, or was there always just a better person for the job? Would re-employment have been easier if Mr Ling had beaten cancer or heart disease rather than depression? Almost certainly.
Stigma towards mental health still exists. Consider that less than a century ago mental health patients in Germany were deemed as having “lives not worth living”. Robert Proctor, a Stanford University history professor, argues that, under the Nazis, gas chambers were first introduced in psychiatric hospitals, before their installation in concentration camps. It’s estimated that German psychiatrists were complicit in the murder of some 70,000 mental health patients during that dark period. In the US too, many thousands of people with mental health problems were once subject to compulsory sterilisation in line with the so-called “prevention of idiocy act”.
While most countries no longer attempt to exterminate or sterilise people with such problems, we do continue to shun, stigmatise, demonise and discriminate. The Time to Change campaign, led by UK charities, Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, documented various ways in which people with mental health problems continue to be discriminated against around the world. Examples range from laws in Lithuania excluding people with mental health problems from home ownership, to swimming pools in South Korea that restrict access based on mental health status. Until 2013, having a mental health problem in the UK would have prevented you from jury service or being a company director.
These are all examples of discrimination at the institutional level. These things are relatively easy to fix: change laws and take down the signs prohibiting access. At the personal and private level, however, things can be far more painful and resistant to change. People will often exclude, patronise or ridicule individuals known to have experienced mental health problems – heeya maynoona (she is crazy/possessed). They may fear disgrace by association, even when the sufferer happens to be a member of their own family.
I will resist the temptation to parrot the clichéd line that mental health problems are just like conventional health issues, because they are not.
If you have a broken leg, we will generally know exactly why your leg is broken. If, however, you wake up one morning feeling totally worthless, hopeless and devoid of motivation, we can often only speculate about the causes. However, in spite of these key differences, shouldn’t we still offer sympathy and support? Blaming and shunning people with mental health problems helps no one.
Dr Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States
On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas
