There is no escape in tears

Are we memeing ourselves into bad mental health?

After the White Ship disaster of 1120, when King Henry I lost his son and heir in a crushing national tragedy, the monarch sunk into such despair that the government effectively ceased to function. 

Everyone was scared of the king, a man known for meting out brutal punishments and who even had two of his own grandchildren blinded. Yet things had become so intolerable that eventually one of his leading lords, William de Tancarville, worked up the courage to tell him to snap out of his stupor. ‘My lord, get up!’ he told his king: ‘Go and eat, do not delay any longer! You would make your enemies happy if you continue to grieve. They would be delighted by your distress. Women should lament and weep, women should express sorrow, but you should take comfort and advise us all… There is no escape in tears. Get up at once and go and eat!’

It had the desired effect. The king worked his way out of his grief and began to function again, although he was never the same.

Grief is among the biggest triggers for depression, alongside illness, divorce and sudden unemployment, and the effects often last for months before subsidising. Throughout most of history such periods of low moods would have been seen as part of life’s vale of tears, but only in recent years has it been quite dramatically reframed, and today we’d probably say that King Henry was suffering from mental health problems. This is how sadness and anxiety have come to be seen, and the phrase ‘mental health’ is now everywhere. 

Just this week a school changed its uniform policy to allow girls to wear fake eyelashes ‘to protect their mental health.’ Businesses must now offer ‘mental health first aid training’, with one MP saying that ‘People do not always wear bandages to show where they have anxiety and depression.’

Whole industries are said to suffer from a mental health crisis, including publishing, where more than half of authors ‘said the process adversely affected their mental health.’ Writers tend to be depressed and neurotic and most books are a disappointment? You’re telling me now for the first time.

The BBC’s youth-orientated website is full of stories about mental health awareness; the walls of secondary schools across the land remind adolescents to think about their mental health. We’re often told by sportsmen and women about the ‘stigma’ around mental health needing to go. Even the Home Office refusing to allow foreign workers to bring over relatives is framed as having a negative impact on ‘mental health’, rather than just a disappointment.

The campaign for greater mental health awareness in Britain is spearheaded by the Royal Family, who are desperately keen that we all talk about the subject. For Prince William, mental health seems to have a similar place in his heart to Christianity for his father, and along with his wife he has even set up a charity, Heads Together, to encourage us to talk.

The Californian-based Harry and Meghan are naturally even more deeply into mental health awareness, and at a New York gala in 2022, where the Duke of Duchess of Sussex accepted a human rights award (yeah, me neither), Meghan Markle said it was important to speak ‘honestly’ about our experiences of mental health problems: ‘Ultimately, if you feel like there’s someone else that has a lived experience. they've gotten to the other side, and gave an example of resilience, an example of “there is a happy ending”, I think that's what most people are probably seeking out in those moments.’

At the same event, her husband said that sharing stories of trauma or pain had ‘an enormous impact’ because ‘Ninety nine percent of people on planet earth are dealing with some form of trauma, loss or pain even more so since 2020… We collectively can heal together if we share our stories.’

And yet, one might ask, if 99% of people are suffering some form of trauma, surely that term has rather lost its meaning?

Fred Skulthorp recently wrote about the paradox that ‘The more inclusive and recognised “mental health” becomes, the more we encourage the idea that “everyone has it”, the more reductive and meaningless the concept becomes.’