You can’t have openness about mental health without forgiveness

'Open up' doesn't go with 'You're cancelled'

Elizabeth Moss in ‘Queen of Earth’ (2015), one of the great recent screen performances of depression

For some time, I have wanted to write a piece and felt unable to. A piece about my own nervous breakdown at the age of 20, the psychic and physical violence I inflicted on myself and others, my self-harm and immature rage, about a period of time I feel deeply ashamed of as well as proud of having overcome. I have, for the record, apologized to all of the people involved, and they have accepted my apology; those affected have forgiven me and I have by and large forgiven myself.

I hesitate to write the piece. I regularly show great vulnerability on this newsletter, but I fear my openness about my worst times is a step too far, that my piece will be taken out of context just as a longed-for writing career is in bloom. That I will be punished for events that occurred over twenty years ago because I want to be honest about both them and what the reality of clinical depression can look like.

The fear comes from our current culture of harsh judgement for personal transgression. That culture whichwould trap me in that moment, that doesn’t account or even acknowledge that reaching my personal nadir at that time was the basis of so much good behaviour since, and that has somehow refused to accept that human beings can grow and change.

This fear of reproach is ironic given the increasing cultural demands, particularly of men, to be open and honest about their mental health. Yet the same culture is absolutely set up to punish people for their very worst moments; the lack of compassion extended to the person who slightly frames the wording in a Tweet wrong, the unearthing of messages from someone’s distant social media past, the sheer lack of compassion of many of those Very Online.

As Geoff Norcott recently put it, in the context of an appearance on Politics Live, discussing men’s mental health:

I do not see how the two imperatives of openness and punishment for transgression can happily combine. Their co-existence can only invite a sort of fake mental health conversation, where mental health issues are allowed to be expressed but only in a way which carefully cultivates likeability on behalf of the man sharing; share your mental health, but make sure in advance that it’s palatable. It’s a way of shearing out the unhappy reality that people in the throes of mental health crises can often behave appallingly to themselves and others. That mental health issues are not a safe topic.

Speaking honestly, there is also a wider social justice framework here which is utterly unconducive to men talking about their mental health; the idea namely that there is a hierarchy of privilege which straight white men are always at the top of, regardless of their particular circumstances.

This isn’t a realistic account of power and how it works – it’s a conspiracy theory. The fact that respectable middle-aged professionals espouse it doesn’t mean it’s any less of crank belief. You don’t need a doctorate to be able to say that generalizations this crude have no relevance to anyone’s experience of living in the real world.

And it’s a framework completely inconsistent with any straight white man speaking honestly about how things are in their mind – it hardly suggests a sympathetic ear if the response is going to be that their problems are always to be mitigated against a hierarchy of privilege.

No-one experiencing mental health issues experiences their life as a blessed one; I remember once crying out to girlfriend, when I had my breakdown, ‘I am in hell.’ The idea that straight white men are all living lives of undifferentiated advantage evidences a general lack of cultural sympathy completely inconsistent with allowing men to speak their minds; it’s a sick and twisted view of humanity so of course has no capacity to provide remedies for sickness.

Furthermore, there is the ridiculous concept of making people feel shame for their immutable characteristics. Men of any stripe cannot change who they were born as. Asking people to feel bad about things they can’t change can only excarcebate a mental health crisis, rather than provide a framework for them to deal with it.

A lot of male behaviour during spells of mental illness is indeed well-covered by the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’. When I was 20, I received a bad review of a play I wrote at Oxford. I wrote a email threatening physical harm to the critic who wrote it. Toxic masculinity much? I did this because I was off my nut, and though many would correct my language here, another feature I insist on as a mentally-ill person is to talk about my illness in whatever terms I like.

But what use is it now to define me now by that moment?

I’ve apologized – and I apologize again here to the person I wrote to; sorry, mate – but I am now 41 and have never done anything similar since. I have moved on, sought therapeutic treatment and medication. Because I was acutely aware of having done something wrong, I learnt from it. The mistake caused the reform. This is an entirely normal view of mistakes.

Yet the vicious culture of online destruction of reputations would take that moment in an instant and try to say ‘This is the same guy who wrote a threatening mail for a bad review’; they would force me back into a dark and shameful time; they would try and reactivate the crisis which, God willing, is no longer are part of how I deal with things. Though of course those who’ve suffered depressive episodes always fear their return.

When I say that I was mentally ill, I do not mean it as an excuse for writing a threatening mail; I was aware that it was the wrong thing to do even then. Still, there were contributing factors; being brought up in a household of frequent domestic dispute and violence didn’t help; my humiliation at Oxford before I had the tools to deal with it didn’t help; my excessive use of cannabis didn’t help.

None of these things are excuses but they are important context.

Yet if you tear people’s worst behaviour out of context and try to destroy their reputation on the basis of it you are saying you recognize no context; you are refusing to understand where people are coming from. There’s also the basic point that a person suffering awfully like that deserves compassion too.

I believe that our attitudes to each other should always be guided by compassion; that humans should face other, in the words of Kafka, as reverently and thoughtfully as before the entrance to hell.

Fighting my own tendencies to depression and aggression is and always will be one of the challenges of my life. I do my best and that fight doesn’t always put me, like any of us who fight it, in the best light. I demand no excuses for that, or even sympathy – but I do think we all have the right to understanding where we’ve come from.

Until we have that, we are demanding a sanitized presentation of mental illness which has very little to do with its reality, and we are no closer to including people with mental illness in our wider cultural dialogue. Mental illness is raw; it is ugly; it doesn’t take care of its sufferers or their victims.

At the age of 41, I am proud of the person I have become. I am not perfect; I still lose my temper with my spouse sometimes, for which I always immediately apologize. I still have moments when I feel deep sadness and shame at this part of my past. I would do anything to change it, but I can’t. None of us can. We can only go forward.

For my part, I insist that humans can improve and change, and have no interest in a culture around mental health or indeed public life that refuses to let them do so. For when I hear those Cancel Culture voices, trying so hard to forever seal people at their lowest points, refusing forgiveness and trying so hard to prevent the rehabilitation of others; well, I’ve experienced mental illness enough to recognize what its behavioural patterns look like. They look like that.

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