Is it any wonder that our public is so sick when merely surviving is a struggle?
Is it any wonder that our public is so sick when merely surviving is a struggle?
- “In 2022/23, 75,730 people (16.1%) were diagnosed with depression by their GP which equates to one in every six adults. Mental health conditions, particularly depression, are more prevalent in people with increasing numbers of physical conditions. Residents in the most deprived parts of the city are twice as likely to have a mental health condition than those in the most affluent. Men were less likely to have a mental health condition than women, with women 1.6 times more likely than men to have a mental or behavioural condition.” State of Health in the City: Liverpool 2040, published January 2024
It was during the 2010s that the phrase “s*** life syndrome” was coined; a phrase which describes the inevitable, toxic effect poverty, discrimination, abuse, and all other manner of social ills can have. Sarah O’Connor’s 2017 Financial Times article on “s*** life syndrome” in Blackpool won the 2018 Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils. In it, she explained: “As people overlooked by the modern economy wash up in a place that has also been left behind, the result is a quietly unfolding health crisis. More than a tenth of the town’s working-age inhabitants live on state benefits paid to those deemed too sick to work. Antidepressant prescription rates are among the highest in the country. Life expectancy… has recently started to fall.”
Simply, if the circumstances of your life are inescapably bad, so it follows that your health will be too. Like all animals, our mental wellbeing is fundamentally linked to the conditions in which we live. A human being cannot thrive – mentally, physically, emotionally – in a society in which the fulfilment of our most basic needs absorbs every ounce of our energy and time.
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This form of mental anguish cannot be blamed simply on an imbalance of brain chemicals, and so cannot be properly addressed by medication alone. As much as it is a disease of the mind, depression is also a disease of poverty, and all that comes with it. It is the black mould building up in the corners of your squalid rented home. It is the new school uniform you struggle to afford. It is the bitterly cold winter nights you spend huddled, shivering, under a heap of blankets after your energy company informs you, helpfully, that “energy prices are rising again”.
Around the time “s*** life syndrome” became a more recognised social phenomenon, I too was among its many sufferers. I was on a six year waiting list for NHS treatment. The taps in the bathroom of my small rented flat were broken, and had been for some weeks as my landlord continued to promise the arrival of a “mate” who would “have a look at it”. I was poorly paid, with no hope of building a mortgage or retirement plan – by my rent, I was building somebody else’s. I had no social life. I was disabled and totally alone.
This was my lot in life, and I considered it with the same dull greyness which tinged every part of my world at the time. The only life I would ever have in the vast infinity of the universe, and this was how I was to spend it. In a state of perpetual exhaustion with long working hours, long commutes, slum flats which I could not afford to heat and the knowledge that society had been crafted with the specific intention – the need – that I remained this way forever.
There was nothing particularly unusual about my situation. The inescapable mundane misery of my life was an experience shared with thousands of people. No doubt this has a knock-on effect, disproportionately affecting groups already marginalised on grounds of race, gender, sexuality, disability, who face additional barriers and are generally poorer as a result.
But as conversations swirled around the moral outrage of poverty in Britain, one thing many seemingly failed to accept was the fact that such travesties are required for our society to function, such as it is. The ultra-rich cannot exist without a solid foundation of working class bodies to build on. For exotic holidays and private yachts, your children must skip breakfast and go to school hungry. For high-end parties, top brand clothes and jewellery, you are no longer allowed to see a dentist on the NHS.
Poverty, and all the troubles that come with it, will continue to plague our communities for as long as a miniscule percentage of people are permitted to hoard wealth. No, you cannot have good housing. No, you cannot have better health and social care. No, you cannot work better hours for better pay; in fact you must work for less as wages continue to lag far behind inflation levels.
Is it any wonder that our public is so sick when merely surviving is a struggle?
These glaring class inequalities have not gone unnoticed, resulting in the worrying, rapid spread of far-right ideologues. This past summer, Merseyside was rocked by a series of violent uprisings in Southport, Liverpool city centre and Walton following the fatal stabbings of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice Dasilva Aguiar. Spurred on by social media lies, rioters shouted racist abuse, vandalised properties, looted businesses, attacked police officers, and set fire to a local library. Similar racially-motivated riots were witnessed in other deprived Northern areas – Blackpool, Middlesbrough and Hartlepool.
Economic hardship has historically given rise to fascism, which appeals to the masses with promises of normalcy, family values and a return to a time of all-encompassing happiness. It is the rest of us – the disabled, the religious and ethnic minorities, the leftists, feminists, gay people, transgender people, sex workers – who are to blame for the erosion of the British public’s quality of life. They are the ones who are taking all the good houses, the good jobs, good healthcare, and if their numbers are reduced, there will be more available to the “right” demographics.
The truth of the matter is far more bleak, more insidious, and burrowed so deep into the workings of our society that to imagine any alternative is considered impossible, ridiculous and stupid. The truth is these things have not gone anywhere, or been “used up” by whatever undesirable-of-the-week featured on some far-right podcast. There is no real shortage – the shortage is by the design of those who hoard wealth and resources at others’ expense. Everything necessary to produce a better quality of life still exists in Britain today. Just not for the working classes, not for me, and not for you.
