The climate of fear is crippling our mental health - Spiked, November 6, 2020

The climate of fear is crippling our mental health
Depression soared during the last lockdown. The second will cause yet more despair.

By Patrick West


The debate over lockdown is invariably framed in terms of that between two competing needs: the medical and the economic. On the one hand, there are those who say that the health of the nation and the imperative to protect the NHS must be paramount. On the other, there are the lockdown sceptics who say that people’s livelihoods and jobs must foremost be safeguarded from ruination.

A third factor is given paltry consideration, especially by government ministers: the issue of mental health. While it is acknowledged that lockdowns will affect the way we live, what is never admitted by the government – and often overlooked by mainstream anti-lockdown voices – is the devastating effect ‘staying indoors’ has had on our mental health.

One of the few outstanding voices has been Alice Thomson of The Times, who in a recent article related that the Office for National Statistics states that since the outbreak of the pandemic rates of depression have doubled from one in 10 to one in five. Among the most badly hit have been those aged 16 to 39, a group that has reported a 30 per cent rise in depressive symptoms. A paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggested that 18 per cent of UK adults reported having suicidal thoughts in the first months of lockdown. Meanwhile, in June the Institute for Alcohol Studies reported that almost a third of people had been drinking more.

Although some rates of depression and anxiety are directly related to the pandemic itself, a more common cause of these symptoms has been lockdown and government diktats over the summer. There have been countless reports and accounts of people driven to despair and depression by the loneliness, the spirit of paranoia and feeling of being watched and judged, with the ubiquitous masks giving a horrific sci-fi film aura to everyday life.

I myself, a healthy fortysomething, haven’t been afraid of the virus itself since April. But the state of British society in 2020 has sent me to despair and nightmarish gloom. So many millions feel the same. Is this the price we will have to pay for the next four weeks, for a not very lethal virus that is not currently the biggest killer in the UK? And what of the price we will have to pay in the future, with a vulnerable generation who grew up in a climate of fear, suspicion and paranoia? The actions of the government this year will have devastating effects in the future. We know the dire material fallout of Lockdown 2. Less well recognised will be its equally ruinous mental fallout.


John Sessions: autodidact extraordinaire

John Sessions, who died on Monday, wasn’t one to wear his learning lightly. The affable actor and comedian, best-known as a panellist on Channel 4’s Whose Line Is It Anyway? and protagonist on the BBC’s surreal comedy-drama, Stella Street, was an unashamed and conspicuous brainbox and polymath.

He could recite verbatim Finnegans Wake. He did one man stagings of Chekov. He could impersonate Keith Richards, Michael Caine and Al Pacino, flaunt his copious encyclopaedic knowledge on QI, adapt himself to the cinema with ease, or, on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, improvise the scenario of Ernest Hemingway going to the dentist or James Joyce at the seaside.

Sessions admitted that his public persona of ‘Mr Swotty’ could be irksome and that his immodest displays of erudition made him a ‘bit punchable’. The actor Timothy Spall described him as ‘a bit of a clever dick’. In one famous edition of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, in which contestants were asked to portray the person with whom they would least like to be trapped in a lift, Paul Merton stepped forward and said: ‘Hello, my name’s John Sessions.’

He blamed his ‘over-compensatory urge to intellectualise’ and tendency to show off on the fact that, unlike so many of his thespian and comedic contemporaries, he did not go to Oxbridge, having studied at Bangor University instead. However, Sessions had displayed attention-seeking tendencies even as a boy.

His life is a reminder of an eternal, profound truth: that feelings of insecurity and social inferiority needn’t be a bad thing, but quite the opposite. Sessions had what Alfred Adler called an Inferiority Complex, something the Austrian psychotherapist believed was a good thing, a beneficent state of mind that motivates an individual to seek power and recognition.

And so why shouldn’t this brilliant autodidact have flaunted his acquired knowledge and abundance of talent? If you put in the hard graft you earn the right to parade your significant cerebral wares.


Wokeness long predates Twitter

During this year we’ve all had to find more ways to entertain ourselves indoors. Mine has been reading more books than I would naturally, especially rereading escapist or humorous literature in order to lift the spirits. This has entailed taking recourse to some collected works of Peter Simple.

‘Peter Simple’ was a column that appeared in the Daily Telegraph from the mid-20th century until 2006. From the 1960s, it was written by Michael Wharton. It blended orthodox Tory invective with flights of fancy, with Wharton inventing a fantasy world full of right-on (or in today’s parlance, ‘woke’) grotesques, such as Mrs Dutt-Pauker the enormously rich and privileged north London socialist; Neville Dreadberg, the self-publicising and talentless avant-garde artist and writer of the ‘classic documentary television plays’ dealing with crime, corruption and cannibalism; Dr Heinz Kiosk, the psychoanalyst who concludes every invective with the bellicose refrain ‘We Are All Guilty!’; and Dr Spacely-Trellis, the Bishop of Bevindon, who is so achingly progressive that he barely believes in God at all.

As you can glean from this list, such characters wouldn’t be out of place in a satire today. This is because their real-life equivalents are very much with us. One entry from 1964 stuck out. It features Dr Spacely-Trellis defending a poster depiction of a nude Christ in the face of opposition from crusty conservatives, and it reminds us that the paradox of those preaching liberal tolerance using hateful language long predates Twitter. The passage concludes:

‘“The people who are objecting to this poster are the sort who voted Tory at the General Election. As Christians we must be charitable and understanding to this filthy subhuman scum”, he added, his face turning purple and his eyes starting out of his head. “But I would not care to be in their shoes on Judgement Day.’”

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, 'Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times', is published by Societas.

How closely linked are lockdown and Brexit? - Spectator Coffee House, October 10, 2020

How closely linked are lockdown and Brexit?

By Patrick West

Once upon a time, a long time ago, this country was consumed by the matter of Brexit. Everywhere you turned, in every medium, even among friends and colleagues, you couldn't get away from the subject: everyone was talking about Brexit. We were obsessed by it. From 2016 to 2019 there was no escape.

All of this changed this year. With the pandemic, the rancorous matter of Brexit vanished, or at least stopped becoming the emotive, divisive matter of primary concern. It has been relegated to a pedestrian news story about trading rights. In the year of the coronavirus and all its horrors, paranoia and despair, Brexit has become a sideshow. Right?

Wrong. While the clamorous conflict between Leavers and Remainers has ostensibly ceased, in our collective subconscious the same cleavage in our society remains – only the subject matter has changed. As you may have concluded from newspapers and your social media feed, Remainer and Leave camps have merely metamorphosed into pro-lockdown and anti-lockdown tribes.

For instance, back in 2016 it was Allison Pearson in the Daily Telegraph and Frederick Forsyth in the Daily Express who were the most vociferous in their invectives against the EU. This year, these two characters – among many other columnists and voices in general – have been just as ferocious in their denunciations of lockdowns, masks and curfews. When it comes to anti-lockdown/Leave and lockdown/Remain, the two camps, respectively, are often the same lot.

The parallel is at its most obvious when it comes to rhetoric about elites and 'experts'. During the Brexit referendum, Remainers often deferred to experts in academia or the City who warned about the dire economic consequences of Brexit. Leavers cited everyday wisdom and lived experience in their argument why we should leave the EU. Back then, the debate centred on academic knowledge and deference to experts, versus empirical evidence and common sense. It's the same today.

This argument from lived experience is repeatedly employed by the anti-lockdown-minded because the loudest voices to oppose further government restrictions come from small businesses. It's the anti-EU, lower-middle class types who own small shops and run small businesses who have been hit hardest by coronavirus measures. They are consequently the least inclined to support draconian anti-pandemic measures. There is no 'working from home' option for many small businesses or your manual, working class type from the north-east or midlands.

If Brexit was a class issue, then so is Covid. Working-class people who voted against the EU did so as much in revolt against the London metropolitan elite as they did against Brussels. There was a twin resentment then and there is twin resentment now. It's the Somewhere people versus the Anywhere people conflict all over again.

As with Brexit, we have a divide between the working class who can't work at home, and largely an upper-middle class in the Home Counties who are happy to do so – because they can. On average they have larger houses and more gardens, which make domestic life for them and their family palatable. For them, lockdown measures are merely a nuisance. For those in flats or terraced houses, and for those who cannot work remotely, lockdown is a nightmare.

Ultimately, it comes down to a choice between freedom and security, between libertarianism and utilitarianism. That was the fundamental question posed in 2016. Do we vote to leave the EU, and in doing so face an exciting and prosperous, or perhaps an uncertain and perilous future? Or do we vote to stay, knowing that things will be tolerable in an undemocratic and sclerotic union that at least affords us free trade?

We are faced with a different problem today, but it's still one that divides statist and libertarians. Either we are to be subjected to endless and repeated lockdowns, returning indoors every few months, with the hope that deliverance will come in months soon with a vaccine. Or our masters might miraculously take the libertarian leap in the dark, deciding to set free our youth and healthy working age populace, returning them back to the public sphere and back to normality.

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of 'Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times' (Societas, 2017)

Boris’s misguided war on obesity - Spectator Coffee House, July 3, 2020

Boris’s misguided war on obesity

Patrick West


Boris Johnson has declared the government's latest war on obesity. It's a continuation of the war on 'junk food'. It's a timely move, as in lockdown we've all been snacking and munching straight from the fridge, during the most ghastly yet boring year in known living memory.

Most of us have got fatter as a consequence. Predictably, we are once more now reprimanded for eating 'junk food'. Yet it's also an occasion to remind ourselves that there is no such thing as 'junk food'. There's only 'junk diet'.

The idea of 'junk food' has been around for a couple of decades now as the proliferation of fast food outlets has expanded exponentially, with those ghastly names such as 'McDonald's' and 'Burger King', offering cheap food for the terrible proletariat.

The waistlines of Europeans and Americans have expanded at an alarming rate as a consequence, so goes the narrative. During lockdown, matters have got even worse. Opening the fridge to see what snack is available has become the most domestically interesting pursuit of the day. Ordering takeaway food has been the norm.

Yet lockdown has made us a nation of new joggers aware of what we eat. We've been eating burgers and pizzas, that is true, but most of us – out of curiosity and sheer boredom – have also been eating lettuce, spring onions, pickled beetroot, and a whole array of unusual vegetables, just because going to the supermarket has become the sole source of recreation this summer.

A common complaint is that we have put on weight. At the same time, we have become more indulgent. And still, we are reprimanded that fast food is bad for us and makes us fat. To which the reply must be: only in lockdown, when for weeks we have been prisoners in our homes, gorging ourselves with pizzas, watching television and drinking ourselves into oblivion, as the only form of escape.

Sure, obesity is a problem for many people, and type 2 diabetes, which results from being overweight, can cause health problems. People with type 2 diabetes, like some in my family, are particularly vulnerable to Corvid-19 and I am especially keen not to develop it.

But the war on 'junk food' is profoundly misguided. It displays wrong, literal-mindedness thinking. Saturday night's burger or kebab after a few pints of lager isn't going to make you fat. Nor will a McDonald's or Burger King meal kill you.

What will kill you prematurely is having fried burgers and copious amounts of alcohol every day. Fast food and beer are not the bad boys here. A post-pub takeaway once a week is harmless and won't make you obese, just as one pint of beer at the end of the day doesn't make you an alcoholic. Concentrating on your diet on a weekly or monthly basis is more important than what you actually eat today or tomorrow. Moderation is the key word here. Eat meat in moderation. Consume alcohol in moderation. Have a moderate amount of vegetables every day.

Alas, we don't live in moderate times. Every fashionable diet has to be deemed to be some kind hardcore regime – hence the rise of puritan veganism, adherents of which look down with pure, self-righteous contempt at mere vegetarians who haven't, like me, eaten animals for a quarter of a century. I'm damned by vegans for eating anything that emanates from animals.

Obesity has been a problem in Britain for years. It's right that Boris Johnson should draw attention to it. But it's also important that a government that has made such a confusion in its response to the epidemic in Leicester also shouldn't send out ambiguous messages when it comes to obesity.

We need to get out of the everyday laziness that some have suffered since March. We need to walk every day. Staying at home watching television is bad for us, physically and mentally. These rules apply every day, all day, irrespective of any viral infection.

There has been much talk in the newspapers about how many of us have vowed to change our ways when this virus has passed. Personally, I don't believe it. As a native Londoner who grew up with IRA and then Islamist terror attacks, I've heard it all before: that terrible experiences change people's thinking about their lives. We'll all go back to as we were – mostly.

On the box: why communal TV is back - Spectator Life, May 5, 2020

On the box: why communal TV is back
Patrick West


While it has been widely observed that we are watching far more television during lockdown, it’s not just grown-ups who are turning to television sets to find escapism, relief from boredom and the latest coronavirus news. It seems that lockdown has spurred even teenagers to start watching proper television programmes on that strange, large, stationary rectangular object in the corner of the living room.

According to study from Barb, reported in the Sunday Times last week, younger adults aged 16 to 24 are not only watching 22 per cent more conventional programmes than before lockdown, they are doing so on old-fashioned networks on television sets, with the proportion viewing via portable devices falling from 1.7 per cent to 1.4 per cent. Three times as many young people aged 16 to 34 are watching BBC daytime television compared to a year ago. Lockdown has even generated a trend for teenagers and young adults to sit on the sofa to watch entertainment or the evening news with their parents. No wonder: in these worrisome times, it’s natural that families want to spend time together.

This is welcome news. As the original series of The Royle Family reminds us (it was created before the ascent of the smartphones), the television set in the late 20th century was for many the traditional hub around which families would come together as one. Communal television viewing for families – especially working-class families – was the customary occasion when a family did its most chatting and bonding, using programmes such as Grange Hill or Brookside as conduits to discuss relevant everyday issues that maybe pertinent to their lives, such as bullying, drugs or homosexuality. For the participants in Gogglebox, it does much the same today.

Of course, not everybody approved, especially the respectable middle classes. Television was widely deplored for having displaced the dinner table as the place the family assembled in the evening. 'Gogglebox' used to be a term of derision applied to a device blamed for destroying precious evening dinner time, in which mother and father used to ask son and daughter how their day was, how school was going, before they were shooed away to do their homework.

Yet even middle-class families were prone to employ the TV as a means of domestic binding. When I grew up in the 1980s, our family was capable enough of doing so, whether it be sitting down to watch the Rugby Five Nations, The World At War or films such as The Sound of Music or The Longest Day. TV had its positive role to play.

By the 1990s, however, television had become a problem. Or rather, an excess of it had. Households had forgotten how to turn television sets off; they now served as evening sedative apparatuses from hometime till bedtime. Breakfast television had begun in the 1980s; a decade later night-time television arrived. Second sets could now be found in kitchens and, most fatally, in teenagers’ bedrooms. They were indeed stupefying family time, shortening attention spans and taking us away from other stimulating and edifying pursuits, notably books. TV had already made reading too much effort.

With the dawn of the internet and advent of the smartphone in the new millennium, matters got even worse. It wasn’t merely that families were no longer sharing the same television experience, or that teenagers were secluded in their own rooms watching anything from a plethora of cable television channels. Teenagers weren’t even watching television programmes. YouTube clips had become the order of the day. Even an hour-long drama or a thirty-minutes soap had become too much bother.

The revival of the Royle Family this past Christmas and the continued popularity of Gogglebox hints at a spirit of nostalgia and longing. It suggests that we feel we have lost something in the evolving digital revolution, that there is something to be said for the communal TV viewing experience.

If, in days past, everyone would have watched the Morecombe and Wise Christmas Special, or would have asked ‘who shot JR?’, Gogglebox reveals how the Great British Bake Off or Strictly Come Dancing still provide for a communal, national watching experience. If the smartphone epitomises a fractured, atomised society, the television set still represents a society that sits together.

We may regret the reason why, in the past five weeks, families are once more coming together to watch with hope and fear the latest coronavirus headlines, or more happily, The Repair Shop or some other harmless but vital distraction. But it’s a good thing it’s happening nonetheless.

This development reminds us, and it should remind our baby-boomer parents, that the television set wasn’t and isn’t a bad thing after all. It may be an ersatz, soporific hearth, but like fireplaces of old, it’s a fine place around which families come together.