World Mental Health Day 2019 is here and this year’s theme is suicide prevention. Meanwhile the mental health Foundation’s Mental Health Awareness week in May had the theme of “body image”. Let’s put this together and examine the connections.
Last year’s Children’s Society Report found in particular that pressure to conform to rigid sex role stereotypes make children unhappy. Children and young people must be allowed and encouraged to feel good about their bodies, and their expression and this can help to improve mental health. So far so good.
.
It’s no secret that ANM considers the ‘youth mental health crisis’ to be a political crisis. Children and young peoples’ mental health cannot be reasonably separated from national and worldwide events, especially in an age of hyper-connectivity.
Children and young people must find an internal response to this political crisis while they’re being told to aspire towards excellence. Society (politics) says nothing about the impossibility of doing this. The inevitable dissonance has simply been projected straight back onto young people as being about their mental health.
This involves things like knowing that our Government is selling arms to Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemeni children, but that you must try and get ahead and contribute to UK standing in the world. Ridiculous no?
.
On World Mental Health Day ANM would like you to consider the relevance of body image to mental health in the suicide of 15 year old Jenny Fry, who killed herself in 2015 because of electro magnetic frequencies at school.
Her family had tried to help by removing wireless routers at home, but her school would not take action. Her mother told The Independent
“I took lots of information into school to show the head teacher, Simon Duffy, but he said there was equally the same information available claiming WiFi was safe,”
Could this head teacher have made this false equivalence about claims of safety as against evidence of harm if radiation was visible? Where is his liability, or at least responsibility for exacerbating the symptoms that drove Jenny to suicide as a way of escaping, while denying their existence?
.
When we’re considering mental health through the self image of our body politic, we must insist that false equivalency is not used to degrade and destroy individual human bodies and lives.
If there are claims of danger, and other claims of safety, that fulfils the EU (and Welsh) requirements for the precautionary principle.
Otherwise it’s a ‘he said she said’ argument over human health, and arguing about an invisible pollutant known to have biological effects.
.
And you can see below Swansea’s Councillor Thomas making the same mistake: at 14.03 he makes the statement that research and studies are being done on “all sides of the argument“.
This is pure dysmorphia of the body politic. Scientific research isn’t done from ‘a side of an argument’: that’s propaganda.
We can’t see radiation, but we can see the betrayal in authorities pretending that safety or non safety is simply a question of opinion while people get sick and die.
.
On World Mental Health Day 2019 let’s take a massive step to improve the self image of our body politic and make the invisible visible. In this way we can show children and young people how much we value their living presence.
In taking suicide as a global theme, let’s admit how much of the whole youth “mental health crisis” could actually be due to this same invisible radiation, known perfectly well to cause depression, and even suicidal ideation.
For the sake of all kinds of bodies, on World Mental Health day 2019, let’s make a stand for sanity.
.
Featured Image from Erica Mallery Blythe’s presentation at the Environmental Health Conference, London 28th September
Amazon News Media, ANM, City and County of Swansea, Councillor Thomas, European Union, featured, Good Childhood Report, Jenny Fry, Precautionary Principle, Simon Duffy, The Children's Society, The Independent, Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, World Mental Health Day, World Mental Health Day 2019
Comments RSS Feed