Mental health

Wednesday

James Innes-Smith

The truth about the anxiety epidemic

Knots in the stomach? An overwhelming sense of despair? Nervous, restless and tense? That'll be the anxiety talking and for good reason. What with the financial crash, austerity, Brexit partisanship, climate change catastrophising, social media derangement, pandemic pandemonium and now the possibility of a third world war, I'd be concerned if we weren’t all feeling a tad anxious. Indeed NHS leaders are now urging ministers to tackle what they are calling a 'second pandemic' of depression, anxiety, psychosis and eating disorders, brought about by recent events. Indeed, one study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that diagnoses of anxiety had tripled in young adults since 2008. It's right that we take mental illness seriously.

Tuesday

Daniel DePetris

Is Putin nuts?

From our US edition

As Russian forces level Ukrainian cities with artillery, missiles and airstrikes, there's a concerted effort to get inside the mind of Vladimir Putin: from pundits, former US national security officials and current heads of government. What could possibly get the man to stop the bombardment and support a ceasefire? Is Putin intent on conquering all of Ukraine? Or is there some combination of concessions the Ukrainian government and the West could offer that would end the war and bring about a full Russian troop withdrawal? The fact is none of us know what Putin’s endgame is. Putin’s own advisors, especially those kept out of the inner circle, may not even understand what the Russian leader is planning.

crazy nuts

Sunday

Spectator Editorial

Biden fails to fill his office

From our US edition

"The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Fitzgerald wrote that in 1936 in an essay called “The Crack-Up.” At the time, the US economy was coming out of the Depression. A Democratic administration was expanding the reach and influence of the federal government, notably into areas of the economy where it did no good, and war was on the horizon. On the bright side, inflation in 1936 was 1.46 percent and GDP was growing at 12.9 percent per year, which is even higher than the capitalists of the CCP have recently claimed for China.

president

Thursday

Max Pemberton

Why legalising cannabis is safer than decriminalising it

I hate weed. Week after week, I see the tragic effects of this substance and how it destroys the minds of the young. I work on a mental health ward which, like many around the country, is home to some of the victims of our current lackadaisical attitude towards cannabis. This drug is particularly dangerous to the developing brains of young people and yet we know that this age group are the most likely to be experimenting with it. Despite protestations from the powerful pro--cannabis lobby, it has been proved beyond doubt that cannabis use is associated with depression, anxiety, psychosis and avolition (poor motivation).

Thursday

Colin Grant

The debt I owe to cannabis

Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and Jeremy Hunt have all admitted that they tried cannabis as young adults. Neither the admission nor the THC psychoactive component of the drug, which makes you high, seem to have done them much harm in their pathways to successful careers in parliament. But a new governmental war on drugs is afoot which some fear may lead to unexpected consequences, and not just for those who ply their trade on street corners or draw up on Deliveroo-type scooters to supply cannabis as if it were a takeaway curry. I wouldn’t bet on everyone getting caught up in judicial dragnets, though; I imagine that middle-class consumers will still largely avoid censure and that the police and the Crown Prosecution Services will continue to target working-class suppliers.

Sunday

Stephen L. Miller

We will learn nothing from Oxford and Waukesha

From our US edition

In the past three weeks, two small communities in two Dairy Belt states have seen tragedy — and, of course, two very different media reactions. In Oxford, Michigan, Ethan Crumbley, a fifteen-year-old student, opened fire with a handgun at his high school on Tuesday. He killed four students and wounded eight and was taken into custody. After a brief search, both of Crumbley’s parents were arrested on manslaughter charges, for purchasing the firearm and gifting it to him. Ethan Crumbley has been charged with twenty-four different felonies including terrorism. Shortly before the shooting, a teacher identified disturbing signals in classroom, including his drawings depicting suicide, mass death, blood and firearms.

oxford

Thursday

Roger Scruton

Our gadgets are misleading us

From our US edition

Human beings are wanderers who roam the world in search of adventure. And this love of adventure creates a need for home: homecoming makes wandering worthwhile. Hence human beings have devised instruments that help them to navigate, so as to guide them to their destination and — most importantly — to guide them back again, to the place where they are at home. The sextant was one of the most beautiful examples of this: an instrument for steering by the stars, which you held to your eye, and which reminded you of the vastness of the space across which you peered and the littleness of your own ambitions. Our ancestors who steered by the sextant never doubted the fixed background to human life, the unchanging heavens by which they navigated.

gadgets

Monday

Amber Duke

#FreeBritney is redemption for toxic celebrity fan culture

From our US edition

After thirteen years, the queen of pop is free. Britney Spears is liberated from a court-ordered conservatorship that gave her father immense control over her personal life and finances. This is a victory for Spears, for the fans who have campaigned for her — and for other, less famous Americans who are trapped in conservatorships. Spears recently requested a court remove her father, Jamie, as conservator, testifying in March that the conservatorship was “abusive” and that she was “depressed” by the lack of power she had over her own life. The court ruled to remove Jamie in September and dissolved the conservatorship in full on Friday. For Britney’s fans, the ruling couldn’t have come soon enough.

freebritney

Monday

Harry Shukman

What’s on Biden’s mind?

From our US edition

Delaware used to be Cale Boggs country, almost as much as Massachusetts belonged to the Kennedys. Boggs served as governor, congressman and twice as Delaware senator, so in late 1972, when he was seeking a third term, the race looked sewed up. But as summer turned to fall, his 28-point lead evaporated. Voters started paying attention to Boggs’s rival, a Democrat youngster with fire in his belly and a spring in his step. Anti-Boggs ads said his best days were behind him. According to his fresh-faced opponent, Boggs was a ‘helluva nice guy’ but, after decades in power, he had ‘lost that twinkle in his eyes’. On election day, Boggs lost by a margin of 3,000 votes. The people of Delaware sent to Washington a 30-year-old thruster named Joe Biden.

biden mind artificial

Thursday

Ursula Buchan

Try forest bathing – by day and night – to ward off depression

Ever since a consensus emerged that trees and, by extension, their ecosystems, were both vastly interesting and badly threatened, great tottering logpiles of books about woods or individual tree species have seen the light of day. Of these books, one of the most influential has been The Hidden Life of Trees (2018), written by Peter Wohlleben, who for many years has looked after a forest in the Eifel mountains in Germany. I read that book with interest, and needed no persuading that woodland trees form, in effect, a community, both as a result of the scents they give off and the interactions between their roots underground.

Friday

Amber Duke

Is Joe Biden OK?

From our US edition

Just before the Christmas holiday in 2018, then-President Donald Trump canceled his planned vacation to his Mar-a-Lago resort, citing the partial government shutdown: 'I will not be going to Florida because of the Shutdown — Staying in the White House! #MAGA.'  The administration determined it would be poor optics for the president to spend 16 days in sunny Florida during a major political standoff. President Joe Biden has refused to take the same approach, even as his poorly planned withdrawal of troops in Afghanistan led to the Taliban's rapid ascent to power and the stranding of thousands of American citizens in Kabul. As I wrote previously, we did not see the President for nearly three days as the Taliban seized the capital city.

biden ok agenda

Thursday

Sebastian Coe

Should Simone Biles listen to Novak Djokovic?

I’ve always been a Spectator reader, so I’m delighted to be writing a diary about the Olympics from Tokyo. My first experience of an Olympic Games was probably the most political of them all — Moscow 1980. I wasn’t sure that I would be competing until a few weeks before the opening ceremony. The build-up was fraught with geopolitical tensions — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the US-led boycott of the Games. Thatcher’s government fell in line with Uncle Sam — a little too eagerly — only to then lose its fight with the British Olympic Association. So we ended up going. I lost the first of my finals that year over 800m, which inspired some fairly critical reportage.

Peter Jones

Simone Biles, Plutarch and an Olympic trial

The outstanding gymnast Simone Biles has pulled out of several Olympic events, saying: ‘I just don’t trust myself as much any more.’ Many took the view that this was a fashionable ‘mental health’ issue. Ancient Greeks might have come up with a rather different analysis. Plutarch (c. ad 100) is said to have been the author of a letter of condolence to one Apollonius whose son had just died. In it he considered how best one should react to loss in the context of the whole field of human suffering, which Greeks regarded as the common lot of all mankind. For example, Achilles in the Iliad claimed that Zeus possessed two storage-jars, one filled with evil, the other with blessings. A man could be served from the jar of evil alone, or from a mixture of both.

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

The strange veneration of Simone Biles’s Olympic exit

An opinion columnist should have some self-awareness in life. When your job is to sit behind a laptop droning on about politics, for example, one should be very careful before casting aspersions on the mental and physical performance of one of the most decorated Olympians of all time. Simone Biles, who transcended poverty and abuse to become in all likelihood the greatest gymnast ever, with 19 gold medals in World Championships, clearly has nothing to prove when it comes to mental toughness and physical excellence. You can’t hurl yourself head over heels, through the stratosphere, in front of millions of viewers, without both — never mind doing it better than anybody else.

Tuesday

Max Pemberton

Prince Harry could learn from Kate Middleton’s mental health work

I wonder if the royal family realise how lucky they are to have Kate? She may have been born a commoner, but she is proving herself to be the best asset the Firm have. As naff as this sounds, she comes across as actually caring and wanting to use her position of power and influence to do some good which is quite refreshing in today’s self-obsessed, navel-gazing world where those in the public eye only seem to care if there’s a long-lens camera trained on them while they do their good deeds. Along with William she has championed causes such as mental health which were profoundly uncool when they first adopted them and are now considered in vogue in no small part thanks to their involvement. Kate is showing herself to be a thoroughly modern royal.

Thursday

Helen R Brown

A matter of life or death: Should We Stay or Should We Go, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

Leave or remain? That’s the question hanging like a cartoon sledgehammer over Lionel Shriver’s 17th novel. Although she makes merry with the parallels, her subject isn’t Brexit. It’s how long a person should choose to live. Should we allow ourselves to shamble, with gentle optimism, into decades when mental and physical decay are statistical probabilities? Or should we Take Back Control, and off ourselves before revolted strangers are required to wash our private parts at great cost to our struggling NHS? The characters Shriver charges with assessing the options are Cyril and Kay Wilkinson. We meet them in their early fifties as they return home after Kay’s father’s funeral.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Why I’ve gone off country sports

‘Oh, I do so love to see all the lovely pheasants running around the place,’ said the lady walking the Alsatian up the farm track. The huge dog was straining at the leash, pulling her along, but she was trying to stop for a chat with the builder boyfriend as he mended a fence. I came alongside them in my car as I arrived at the farm to ride Darcy. I got out and joined the tail end of the conversation, in which the builder b took it upon himself to explain to this sweet lady that the pheasants got shot. Look, he had to. She was under the impression the footpath ran through a wildlife park, and that the millionaire at the top of the track was putting the pheasants there for the walkers to look at. I reckon this explains why the whole village support the local shoot.

Thursday

Grace Curley

Do you truly believe Joe Biden is in his right mind?

From our US edition

Liberal journalists and politicos are obsessed with the truth. The truth, besides Donald J. Trump and Fox News, is their favorite topic. In October, former Clinton administration secretary of labor Robert Reich called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help name every person ‘whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe’. In February, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose suggested President Biden appoint a ‘reality czar’. Speaking of Biden, during a campaign stop in 2020, Joe told a crowd in Iowa that ‘we choose truth over facts’. After the speech, MSNBC informed their readers that Trump supporters were pouncing on Biden’s ‘harmless mistake’.

right mind biden

Thursday

Jasper Rees

Remembering David Storey, giant of postwar English culture

There is a famous story about David Storey. It is set in 1976 at the Royal Court where, for ten years, his plays had first been seen before heading away to the West End and Broadway. That same week he had won the Booker Prize with his novel Saville. With unrivalled success across fiction, theatre and cinema, Storey was a giant of postwar English culture. He was also, compared with most writers, an actual giant. This Sporting Life, his novel made into a groundbreaking film, grew out of his experience of playing rugby league for Leeds. Unlike Saville, his new play Mother’s Day was greeted by a raspberry fanfare after Alun Armstrong dried during a speech containing 27 uses of the f-word.

Tuesday

Ben Sixsmith

Bo Burnham flirts with post-comedy

From our US edition

Inside, the new Netflix special from comedian Bo Burnham, was apparently written, directed, performed and edited solely by its star throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. An impressive feat. In the same timeframe, I posted literally thousands of tweets. What can I say? Some of us are just born productive. Inside was also filmed entirely in one room. It is a bare, depressing sort of room, uncomfortably reminiscent of the bare, depressing room of the angel-faced serial killer at the center of Takashi Miike's classic horror film Audition. Happily, Burnham is not keeping a captive in a trash bag. Still, the man has a lot of morbid cerebral fun with the question of whether he can leave the room or whether he is stuck there. Burnham’s creativity is to be welcomed.

bo burnham