Nhs Positive Quotes

Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?

She and fellow doctors were angered by the government’s positive messages about how well the NHS was coping. ‘I understand there’s a balance between not wanting to panic people, and I also understand about reputation management. But every evening at the [government’s televised media] briefing you just couldn’t recognise anything that they were saying. It was so discordant with what we were seeing. They’d made it all up.

Dr Power stood up. “Because your staff are not components that can be fitted in, or replaced when they are unpredictable, or when they are simply being human. Because our patients are not playing a game called ‘business’ with profit and loss and winners and losers. Because patients have no choice, but to be patients and it’s our privilege to be in a temporary position where we can help them. And, inevitably, when we ourselves fall ill; when we grow old, then we can only hope that we will receive the help we ourselves need in turn. Because that’s the reality of life. And not some self-aggrandising game". - Dr Power, speaking in The Good Shepherd

The cooperative mentality can orient us to be egalitarian in our ways of thinking. Recent evidence suggests that egalitarian attitudes produce more healthy responses when people are confronted with stressful social encounters than biased, competitive and non-egalitarian attitudes.13 There’s also growing evidence that fostering cooperative attitudes and behaviours in children and adolescents (in contrast to competitive and individualistic ones) promotes positive relationships, improved mental and physical health and higher achievements.14 In addition, it’s increasingly thought that cooperative groups will out-compete competitive/individualistic ones in the long term. In fact, business is finding out that the internet is a good source for problem-solving because people simply like to share their thoughts and ideas for free! It’s sad that, in the face of this, governments continue to buy into the business model that competition creates efficiency. Within the NHS, for example, we’re increasingly split into small competing groups called ‘business units’. Fostering high levels of cooperation would be far better.