Iain Ferguson

Mental health in the UK and elsewhere is in crisis. It is a crisis with many different faces. At the time of writing one of the most prominent of these is the extremely high level of emotional distress affecting children and young people. In 2018 a large-scale survey by the Children’s Society found that a quarter of girls and nearly one in ten boys in the UK self-harmed ( deliberately hurt themselves) during the previous year. The charity estimated that 110,000 children aged 14 may be self-harming, including 76,000 girls and 33,000 boys. It is a shocking finding but one which is perhaps less surprising when set against that of a study the previous year that found that British 15 year olds are among the unhappiest in the world. Britain came 38th out of a league table of 48 countries.

This level of emotional misery among children and young people is both tragic and appalling. However, as I argue in my book Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress, the current crisis of mental health is not confined to a single section of society. The unemployed, people with disabilities, students, workers, older people—all are experiencing increased levels of mental distress. Nor is the crisis purely a UK problem. A Guardian article in 2018 extolling Copenhagen as one of the “happiest cities in the world” also noted that 23 percent of its population felt stressed “a lot of the time”! And a 2017 report by the World Health Organisation identified depression as the single largest contributor to global disability, with anxiety as the sixth largest contributor.

My book was written in an attempt to show how a Marxist analysis and socialist politics can make sense of what I argue is one of the key “public issues” of the 21st century and to point a political way out. As I acknowledged in the book’s introduction, however, mental health is (in a term much-loved by academics) a “contested” topic so it was to be expected that others, including friends and comrades on the left, would disagree with at least some of the book’s arguments. In fact there has been a much higher level of agreement than I anticipated. Some readers, however, including Shirley Franklin in a review article in a previous issue of this journal, have been more critical and have challenged some of the book’s core arguments.6 In this response I will attempt to address some of the points Franklin raises.

From: International Socialism 2019 issue 161

Editor: Wang Yi