Why our mental health is just as important as our physical health

I’ve not posted to this blog for a while but a few things caught my attention this wek which were worthy of comment I felt. This week there has been a few big stories of people who have struggled with their mental health both with tragic outcomes. The first was a young rock singer known as Little Chris who came onto the scene through a reality talent show on Channel 4. Actor, singer and TV personality Chris Hardman, whose stage name was Lil' Chris, has died aged 24. The cause of death is believed to be suicide. Hardman rose to fame on Channel 4 series Rock School in 2006 and went on to star in the stage premiere of James Bourne and Elliot Davis's musical Loserville. Speaking to WhatsOnStage, Davis said it was "awful, awful news", and confirmed that Hardman suffered from depression. "He was a super talented guy, so naturally gifted," Davis added. "He just had something that the nation saw and it catapulted him to early fame, which perhaps caused problems." As Lil' Chris - a nickname he picked up on Rock School - he released his debut album in 2006. Davis described him as a "fantastic" songwriter. He subsequently hosted his own talkshow Everybody Loves Lil' Chris on Channel 4. In Loserville, which premiered at West Yorkshire Playhouse in summer 2012 before transferring to the West End's Garrick Theatre, he played Francis Weir. "When you work with people on shows you become a close family very quickly," said Davis. "He suffered from depression and like many people had struggled to find a way through it." We also have seen the sad and devastating crash which looks now to be a deliberate act of suicide by co pilot of the ill fated German Wings airplane which crashed landed in the Alps this week. Investigations are ongoing but it looks as though the co pilot who locked himself in the Cockpit was suffering from depression and had been off work for a time previously. Also we have seen the 5th band member of One Direction Zane Malek leave the world famous band due to stress and not being able to cope with the limelight. So what should we make of these news stories and has the stigma around mental Health gone away or is it still very much an issue. Are these individuals weak for taking the difficult decisions they have done? Do we condemn them out of hand for being lesser human beings or should we look closer and look underneath as to why they felt they had been left with no more choice. These are just a few high profile cases of late but for sure there are many out there who suffering in silence everyday. Its time to hear their thoughts and feelings Do we really understand mental health? Speaking as someone who has felt very low at times and have seen professional help about my lack of self confidence and other issues I can say that society still does not get mental health illness’s and yes I do think they are illness’s and people do need help. Sometimes people don’t know how to get help but it is always out there if you need it there are people who can help you don’t forget that.

A citizen’s income

A interesting idea I’ve come across via the green party I’m not sure if it was their idea originally but a citizens income guaranteeing all a basic standard of living seems a really positive interesting idea and worth exploring more. I know there will be the claims of where wills the incentive to work be if we all get paid anyway let me explain. Work dominates our lives at present it forms the basis to much of what we strive for as wage labourers. Let’s not forget that a colossal amount of work is done in society that is not formally regarded as ‘work’. I am talking specifically about parenting, care of the disabled by family members, and voluntary work in the community. At the moment, much of this work goes unremunerated – and is even regarded as inferior to proper, ‘paid’ work in the formal sense. (”What are those mothers doing at home when they should be out looking for a job?” is a question often barked, usually at poor mothers). A CI finally provides the financial space for this socially invaluable work to happen. What sort of a society are we if we don’t recognise the importance of these tasks? There is also the class politics of this – how it affects the relationship between labour and capital. It seems to me that ‘welfare reform’ has a very specific agenda, which is to create a more pliable workforce. If people in work know that there is no longer much of a safety net, then they will hold on more tenaciously to jobs with bad conditions and bad pay. All of that means higher profits. A Citizen’s Income – a new, bolstered welfare state – begins to tip the bargaining power back in favour of labour. This is why a CI should be taken up by the trade union movement or at least explored to its benefits. But for me, personally, the best argument for a Citizen’s Income is to improve public health, through the stress relief that it would bring. I write this as someone who has been on and off benefits in the past few years, and I can personally testify that the stress of it all sometimes made me feel stressed. As the authors of the Spirit Level suggest, what could fill the explanatory gap between economic inequality and poor social outcomes is, simply, stress. Obesity, depression, addiction – all rooted in the intensely stressful society we live in. A Citizen’s Income – as well as being profoundly redistributive – would, in one fell swoop, lift a corrosive level of stress from our society. And what of the cost and the politics of it all? Well, it’s far more politically palatable than it may sound – as a benefit that would be universal, the divide and rule strategies used by the right to pit the working poor against the unemployed would be blunted. It’s possible that some people would simply not accept the principle that you can get something for nothing, but that is merely because people have internalised the twisted principles of capitalism: and that’s something we’ll have to fight against. It’s far more affordable than it sounds as well: as the Citizen’s Income Trust have demonstrated, the cost would work out at roughly the same as the current welfare bill, which – we must not forget, the vast bulk of which is pensions, housing benefit, and working tax credit. These are just initial thoughts. It’s possible there are serious drawbacks I have over-looked. Two spring to mind immediately. First, the definition of citizenship could be open to abuse – excluding those with a criminal record, recent immigrants etc. Second, contrary to my previous point about the class implications of a CI, it could entrench poor working conditions. It would be imperative those industrial battles continued. But for just now at least, I think this is an idea worth fighting for.

Marxist crisis theory, does it matter?

I’d argue it does very much. To have an understanding on crisis and the reasons why and how they occur under capitalism and why the system is riddled with contradictions and crisis is key to understanding the world we live in in 2013. In 2007/08 many so called economists were caught off guard when the economic crisis or what it has now been dubbed the great recession hit. Why was this? Well many economists are pro capitalist and do not understand the labour theory of value but also they were taken in by the system thinking that the boom times could keep on rolling and rolling indefinitely. As Marxists we know capitalism is a system which serves rich elite who control and own the means of production for profits sake. The recent economic crisis and persistent recession are bringing out new interest in Marx’s writings. We are in danger of Marx being reduced to a figurehead Who can be used by anyone to mean anything, as members of the “Marx industry” use his name to promote their own theories even when the result is to make Marx’s own theory disappear from view? Marx’s works can be difficult to understand today, when we have little context for the milieu in which he was writing, yet once understood, they illuminate capitalism and what must be changed in order to replace it with a new human society, as no other thinker’s writings can do. We want young people and new people looking for revolutionary ideas to be able to learn and evaluate Marx’s theories for ourselves, not to be misinformed by “Marxists” who are promoting their own theories as superior to his. Many economists including many Marxists point to one of the contradictions of capitalism at present of the huge hordes of money many capitalists are sitting on. This is indeed interesting and has puzzled me for a very long time. Until I myself read Marx and tried to get my head around how this could be. As comrade Bruce Wallace points out on his excellent blog http://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/ “By 2020 (seven years!) The capitalists will have $900 trillion of financial assets worldwide, compared to $90 trillion of GDP. Yes that’s right they are in massive debt but will have assets ten times the size of world economic output! How can this be possible? Some Marxists suggests that the capitalists have loads of capital (awash in profits, drowning in capital and other aquatic metaphors) and won’t invest because there is no demand. Yes this is the stock Keynesian bourgeois economist’s explanation of crisis. However we have a problem? How is it possible to be in massive debt but to be awash in assets at the same time? Well it isn’t. The projected $900 trillion in assets isn’t real! This represents the massive fictitious capital that has swollen and will continue to swell through the proliferation of financial instruments such as credit default swaps and other exotic financial trickery. In reality things aren’t so rosy. The US capitalists for example are in massive debt and any assets need to be balanced against that. Market Watch reported in August 2010 (which is a bit dated but trends have continued since then) ”According to the Federal Reserve, nonfinancial firms borrowed another $289 billion in the first quarter, taking their total domestic debts to $7.2 trillion, the highest level ever. That’s up by $1.1 trillion since the first quarter of 2007; it’s twice the level seen in the late 1990s”. So is it any wonder I’m starting to question and wonder just a little bit about our own economic analysis of the socialist party and the CWI. As Michael Roberts a Marxist economist who I’ve been following of late who I find has an interesting take on the global financial situation says in a recent blogpost “In my view, we are now in a Long Depression, centred in the advanced capitalist economies but also affecting the emerging capitalist economies. The latter do better because they still have ample supplies of cheap labour available to exploit (well, at least some larger emerging economies do). So absolute surplus value can be increased without Marx's law of profitability applying too strongly. What do I mean by that? Well, capitalists are permanently engaged in the search for value, or more specifically, surplus value. They can get that globally by drawing more of the population into capitalist production. The big issue is how much longer capitalism can continue to appropriate value from human labour power when the workforce globally can no longer expand sufficiently. Ironically, the UK's right-wing City paper City Am put it from the perspective of capital: "People, not commodities, land or even capital, are the ultimate resource of an economy, as the US academic Julian Simon famously put it. Without talented, motivated, skilled and educated individuals, nothing is possible; capital itself is a product of labour. Human ingenuity is able to overcome everything. Malthusians who dream of a shrinking population and who reflexively believe that every country is over-populated are wrong. This is always a lesson that nations suffering from shrinking populations relearn at great cost: all the productivity growth in the world is rarely enough to compensate for the psychological and actual effect of a declining population." More important, more people mean more potential value to be appropriated by capital. But getting more value and surplus value through extending the size of the workforce is increasingly difficult or even impossible in many advanced capitalist economies. Instead, in these economies, capitalists must try and raise surplus value though the intensity of work and through more mechanisation and technology that saves labour i.e. relative surplus value. But that, as Marx explained, brings into operation the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the ultimate barrier to further accumulation and growth in value (see my post on http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/crisis-or-breakdown/). “ Understanding crisis is crucial to have a chance in understanding the tight turns and longer term trends in capitalism and when the opportunities are best for the workers to go on the offensive. Right now workers are very much on the back foot defending their gains. As capitalism continues to struggle to improve the rate of profit more workers will be encourage into fighting back. Understanding crisis as a Marxist is crucial and taking a serious approach to the study of Marx’s work is the first step towards that. With thanks to my comrade Bruce Wallace and his excellent blog at http://69.195.124.91/~brucieba/

Not just a economic depression

As we inch further and further towards another recession a double dip some may call it or we could say a longer depression it has been found that people taking anti depressents is on the rise quite dramatically. But is this a surprise. With teh demand for more and more out of workers day by day to work longer and longer hours for less and less. If you have a family this is extra demand on you to bring back a good pay packet.

The number of anti-depressants being prescribed to people in Scotland is continuing to increase, according to the latest figures.

Statistics from the Scottish government suggest that more than one in 10 of the population are on the drugs.

In the last financial year a total of 4.6 million anti-depressants were prescribed in Scotland, up more than 350,000 on the previous year.

It is estimated 11.3% of Scots, aged over 15, take the drugs daily.

The rate of growth in the prescribing of anti-depressants increased from an annual growth of 7.6% in 2009/10 to 8.1% in 2010/11.

The continued rise in anti-depressant use comes despite a Scottish government pledge to reduce it.

The SNP had said they aimed to bring the yearly increase down to zero, and then by a further 10% each year.

The figures also showed a variation in the percentage of the population using anti-depressants across Scotland, with 8.3% of people living in Shetland taking the drugs compared with 12.9% in Greater Gl


Although this report states prescribed drug use in Scotland this is also the case right across the country during these tough times people will be driven to more desperate measures to gt by and make ends meet. It is a sign that workers are being worked too hard and are feeling the strain.

SO if we are facing a economic depression in the next few years lets not forget the human capacity to withstand this and the mental damage it can do to people and their families. This will have a big impact as people fear loosing their jobs and homes. This could be devastating for people. But lets not forget that behind this story is also a private drug company making a huge profit out of producing anti depressent drugs for people to take further exploiting people.

This is all very worrying and further signs of capitalism and its harsh realities.