Trendy

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.

Funny, I always found that drink, drugs and sex made me feel less stressed. The whole notion of stress being a new thing is about the closest this column ever gets to the actual truth, and it's only a brief flirtation. Street-Porter seems to be spectacularly missing the point, which is that while recognising and managing stress on any kind of organised or systematic level is new, stress itself isn't. Or are we supposed to believe no-one ever felt overworked before someone came up with a name for it?

...you can't claim time off work because you're fat. You can, however, suddenly find you can't 'cope' - and stress has become, in our work-orientated society, almost a badge of honour.

This is a form of magic, I'm sure. Every time I think it's gotten as bad as it can, it keeps getting worse. A badge of honour? Fuck me. If that's the case, I'd quite like to have my ticker-tape parade now, I think I've earned it. Except it isn't, of course. It's stigmatised and derided and dismissed, not least because of articles like this.

Stress has become so acceptable, the last government decided that the NHS would make counselling available for a whole variety of mental illnesses, from stress to depression to panic attacks and low self-esteem, totally gratis.

Thought we'd hit rock bottom with that last quote, didn't you? Well, Janet has now started to dig. But if you missed the last eighty years of Britain and don't want to know the score, look away now. 'Totally gratis' is what the NHS is for. It is kind of a thing. And just because the NHS treats something, doesn't mean it's 'acceptable', whatever that means, to the broader society, because the NHS is a medical organisation and not in the business of making value judgements.

Stress is a technical term used to describe the different loadings on a beam. Now it can mean virtually anything. My mum's generation didn't suffer from stress or depression. Instead, they just got on with the washing up, the ironing, their long hours in low-paid jobs, and - every Saturday without fail - they baked a bloody good Victoria sponge.

A pretty fair number of them stuck their heads in the gas oven afterwards, though.

Now, men are jumping on the depression bandwagon...

[...]

According to Tim, if - as research now indicates - 45 per cent of women earn the same or more than their husbands, then the male ego is under attack, and it's no wonder that more and more chaps are experiencing feelings of worthlessness and insecurity.

At this point, I'm afraid to say, I laugh out loud. The idea of feeling sorry for a bloke with low self-esteem is, frankly, risible. Let's just call it karmic revenge for all those years men have been in charge of everything.

I hate to interrupt Janet Street-Dworkin here, but if you're going to tie depression to the progress of feminism, doesn't it make sense to ask how it affects men, as well, instead of just finding it risible? First there's this huge assumption that if men are 'jumping on the depression bandwagon', whatever that means, it must be because they're feeling emasculated, a second logic jump from them feeling emasculated to this being because of women earning more, and then a steadfast refusal to consider what, if true, this might actually mean. Personally, I think it'd be an interesting thing to note about patriarchy that it pressures men into a repressive gender role (and a heteronormative one, but that's beside the point). Obviously to nowhere near the same extent as it does women, but if men are feeling emasculated in this way, then it strikes me that that's a conversation that needs to be had, and not just dismissed out of hand, because otherwise the whole anti-feminist backlash is only going to get worse.
Anyway, there's some more in this vein, but to be honest I don't think I have the patience for it. Just awful journalism from an awful person.