Breaking the Divide:

Why Mental and Physical Health Should Be Treated as One.

I’m going to have to get a bit political now, but before you run for the hills just hear me out. Mental health is just as important as physical health.  In fact, there shouldn’t even be a divide between the two; they are not two separate entities, they are linked. You can’t have one without the other, like light and shadow, north and south, Ant and Dec.  Take one away and the other wouldn’t exist.  So why do we – and by we I mean the people in charge of where funding is granted within the NHS – give physical health such a high priority over mental health? Why is mental health so severely underfunded in the NHS?

Of course, there is the argument of being able to see the problem, so it’s easier and simpler to treat.  If I break my arm then a doctor would be able to quite easily look at an x-ray and see the break in the bone. The doctor then sticks a cast on it and six weeks later I’m as good as new.  Now I know not all physical health problems are as easy to treat but with the technology we have today there’s always a way to physically see the problem. No doctor has ever been able to see my panic disorder.  They can recognise some of the symptoms if they asked me some questions, but no one (including me) has ever seen my panic disorder.

We have also got to remember that we live in a world where, for hundreds of years, mental health didn’t exist.  And even when the link between mind and body did start to become apparent the treatment of mentally unwell people was abhorrent, attaching a stigma to any condition that deemed you mentally ill. A stigma that is, although nowhere near as bad as say a fifty years ago, still very present today.

Another more obvious argument toward spending more money on physical health than mental health could be as simple as survival; if you stab me in my anxiety I’m not going to die. I think a lot of it does come down to keeping people alive and keeping them alive longer.

BUT…

How many more people could we keep alive if we invested in giving them the help they need with their mental health?  How many people have we lost already because of lack of funding in this area? And I don’t just mean to suicide.  You’d be hard pushed to find a middle aged person who at some point in their life hasn’t used alcohol to escape from feelings they don’t like or can’t deal with.  What happens when that becomes habitual? And again I’m not talking about the most obvious answer here; you don’t have to be labelled an alcoholic to have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol.  We all know the health risks linked to drinking too much alcohol, and if you don’t then I seriously implore you to Google it (after you’ve finished this blog of course). Drinking alcohol is about feeling better.  Feeling better how? Feeling better mentally!

It's not just alcohol or drugs that we use to escape from how we feel.  We turn to food for comfort, and it’s generally not the kale and lentils we immediately reach for after a really stressful day. Politicians are always banging on about obesity in the UK becoming an epidemic and how it costs the NHS millions of pounds every year.  Have they ever stopped to address WHY people are struggling with their relationship with food? Is it not blindingly obvious that if we helped more people with the relationship they have with themselves then the relationship they have with food would heal also.

Investing in the mental health of this country could actually save millions if not billions of pounds in the long run. And not just in the NHS either. Imagine all the crimes that could be prevented.  I’m not saying crimes are just committed by mentally ill people.  What I am saying is every human has a brain which controls emotions.  That brain is linked to their body, and when people can physically feel their emotions in their body and don’t have the right tools to deal with those feelings they can make all kinds of bad choices.

It needs to be about treating the illness and not the symptom.  About going directly to the source and working from there.  And where is the source? – MENTAL HEALTH.

So I ask again – why do we spend so much more money on physical health than mental health? No, I don’t understand why either.