[A/N: Originally published 19/5/2010. Just one of a whole series of rants against the Daily Mail and other such horrible people, but this one is, I think, the most representative. - AK, 18/7/10]
Janet Street-Porter is just one of those people who, whenever I see them on TV or whatever, I always feel a corresponding need to shout and throw things. But the worst part is, I can’t even remember what she’s done to piss me off so badly. It can’t just have been a snap judgement on my part, can it? I mean, there must be some reason I don’t like her.
…oh yeah. Thanks for the help there, Janet.
‘Depression? It’s just the new trendy illness!’. Yes, I can see how this might be a nuanced look at Britain’s mental health. It’s the ‘trendy’ that gets me, though. Just the sneering, ugly superiority of it, dressed up in ‘Ooh, you know what I’m like – I tell it like it is, me’. No. No. Listen. Being ill-informed and loud is not the same as being forthright, or honest. It doesn’t make you independent or politically incorrect, and it doesn’t mean you’re in some way speaking truth to power. It just makes you sound like a mental fucking defective.
This shouldn’t make me as angry as it does. I shrugged off the Jan Moir thing, pretty much. But here we are, and although I’ve no doubt mentioned it before, I think it bears repeating:
Depression is not a fashion statement. It is not something you buy to go with your trendy new Balenciaga shoes. It is not attention-seeking. It is not an excuse for a bit of tea and sympathy. For many people, what it is is a crippling fucking illness. And if you seriously believe otherwise, you’re a fucking git.
But wait, it gets worse!
I am not denying that clinical depression is a real mental illness
Well, yes, you kind of are, aren’t you?
But let’s take a moment to consider whether depression is common among the poor or the working class?
Fuck you. No, seriously, fuck you Janet Street-Porter. Fuck you so much for trying to make this into a class issue. But since you asked, let’s take a moment to consider. In particular, I’d like to consider this study (can’t find a link to the thing itself, would be much obliged for one):
Children from poor families are more likely than their peers to be depressed as teenagers, with effects that can ultimately make it harder to climb out from poverty, a new study suggests.
[...]
The study, which followed nearly 500 Iowa families for a decade, found that children in poorer families were at greater risk of depression symptoms by adolescence.
Or some of this data:
Adults in the poorest fifth are much more likely to be at risk of developing a mental illness as those on average incomes: 20% compared with 8% for men and 24% compared with 15% for women. [...] People from manual backgrounds are at slightly higher risk of developing a mental illness than those from non-manual backgrounds.
So the answer to that (presumably rhetorical) original question was in fact ‘Yes, and it’s actually more common’. Not that this stops Janet:
I find something very slightly repellent about this recent epidemic of middle-class breast-beating.
Well, so far we’ve established that it’s not recent, it’s not an epidemic (in fact, the proportion of the working-age population estimated to be at elevated risk of mental illness has gone down over the past decade), and it’s not middle-class. I can also add that no breasts were harmed in the making of this post. So that sentence would be an example of what is technically known as ‘making shit up’.
That’s just the inaccuracy. Let’s move on to mocking and berating people for daring to talk about having low self-esteem. Maybe after that we can challenge some paraplegics to a dance-off.
This tidal wave of analysis about why ‘having it all’ isn’t what it was cracked up to be. Why daily life is a series of disappointments. Why sufferers feel empty and suicidal. Get a grip, girls!
[...]
But my life goes on, I haven’t retreated under the duvet with a bottle of pills.
More’s the pity.
Justine writes: ‘If I consider my female friends, most of them have been identified as suffering from, or treated for, depression at some point in their 40s.’ Well, I’ve conducted a straw poll of my friends and I beg to differ. Do we move in such very different circles? Isn’t this ‘new’ depression an affliction which seems to be the prerogative of the chattering classes?
I can only presume that the concept of a self-selecting sample is an alien one here. If peer-reviewed studies show depression (and treatment for it, so it’s not like you have to be middle-class to recognise it) as being pretty much universal economically, and the conclusion you come to after asking around your friends is that it’s a chattering classes thing… doesn’t that say more about your friends than it does about depression? This is why I love anecdata.
I’m not a complete cynic…
Yes you are. You’ll be trying to flog us copies of your books in a minute, look:
…but I am a 100 per cent ruthless realist. I’ve written two books about my no-nonsense attitude to life. The first, Life’s Too F****** Short, has been published all over the world, from Slovenia to Sweden, Spain and the U.S., and I’ve received a mountain of mail from people who say that my key message – that you need to strip away the c**p that clogs up your existence – made them laugh out loud.
I’ll cop to my ignorance here; I haven’t read Janet Street-Porter’s book, on account of, y’know, life being too fucking short and all that. But I’d venture to suggest that ‘it made me laugh out loud’ doesn’t quite mean the same thing as ‘this means you’re qualified to issue proclamations about mental health’. I suspect very few psychiatry textbooks have ever made anyone laugh out loud, but I have an inkling they might be a better source of information about depression than some hectoring self-help bollocks.
It’s called self-empowerment and costs absolutely nothing. The whole notion of stress simply did not exist a few years ago – it’s become a by-product of the ‘ megeneration’ that grew up in the Sixties and wanted to try everything, from drink to drugs to sex.
