Samaritans Awareness Day is on 24 July and the following day sees National Schizophrenia Awareness Day. These are two important days in the mental health and awareness calendar and come at a time when the issues of mental health and wellbeing are more prominent than ever.

Samaritans Awareness Day continues their focus on a campaign which has been running for 8 years. The ‘Talk To Us’ campaign aims to highlight the charity’s work and the help it can offer. With events being held throughout July by the Samaritans the aim is to highlight the organisation’s availability at any time of day or night to listen to anyone who is struggling to cope. According to Mind, one in every four people in the UK suffers from a mental health condition each year. Those who are experiencing challenges or discomfort have somewhere to turn in the Samaritans.

National Schizophrenia Awareness Day aims to shine a light on the everyday challenges the millions of people living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia face and how we can tackle the stigma and discrimination around it. It is estimated that one in 100 people will experience schizophrenia. Despite being so common, the stigma surrounding schizophrenia remains stubbornly high due to a lack of understanding.

‘Schizophrenia is a very complex condition that can affect how a person thinks, feels, and experiences the world around them. While the word is made up of schizo (to split) and phrene (the mind), schizophrenia does not mean split personality.

People with a diagnosis of schizophrenia can often experience very different symptoms, including audio hallucinations (hearing voices), delusions, disorganised thinking and changes in body language or emotions.’

I have written on a number of occasions about the challenges faced by individuals as they age with life enduring mental health conditions and the lack of support which is targeted at their particular needs. Far from the situation improving over the years I am afraid that the context today as we recognise these two significant mental health days is getting worse not better.

We are faced with some particular and escalating challenges, including increasing demand and resource constraints. It is a given though frequently comes as a shock to some that the population of Scotland is ageing. This means on a demographic level alone that this has led to a higher prevalence of mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and dementia among older adults. Indeed, studies indicate that around 10-15% of older adults in Scotland experience depression, and a similar percentage suffer from anxiety. These conditions often go undiagnosed and untreated, as symptoms may be mistakenly attributed to aging or physical health problems. For regular readers you will see a resonance here with my last blog highlighting the rise of alcohol misuse amongst older Scots. Sadly we have also witnessed a concerning increase in the number of suicides among older men in particular. Although suicide rates are generally lower among older adults compared to younger age groups factors such as social isolation, chronic illness, and lack of support can contribute to this increased risk.

In addition, at the present time we are faced with not insignificant staffing shortages in mental health support organisations and amongst providers of social care and mental health support. This is all accentuated by the increasingly restricted resource many support services are working with because of underfunding or indeed because they have lost their funding.

And as if the demographic and practical support challenges were not hard enough, we still witness and have to live with enduring stigma. Regrettably mental health issues in older adults are frequently stigmatised, both within the community and among some healthcare providers. Older adults may feel ashamed or reluctant to seek help due to societal attitudes toward mental illness, particularly in older age groups.

As a result of the lack of specialist focus, lack of investment and stigma many of those working in the field who I speak to will argue that there is significant underdiagnosis. Symptoms of mental illness are still being mistaken for normal aging processes.

The mental health of older adults in Scotland is a complex and multifaceted issue that requires a coordinated and comprehensive holistic response involving all stakeholders including social care providers and families and those most impacted. These have to be approaches of care and support which meet the social, economic, housing and healthcare needs of older Scots.

Sadly, at the moment growing older with mental ill health in Scotland is an experience of isolation, despair and one where you feel you are simply not noticed, that your life does not matter. Just as I stated last week when I speak about alcohol harm, we urgently need all stakeholders to prioritise this harm and to do so in an inclusive prioritised manner.

There are many poets who have spoken about mental health struggles, but few have reflected on them as a lifelong experience into older and what ageing means for mental health. One who has is the late American poet Anne Sexton who wrote The Room of My Life:

Here,
in the room of my life
the objects keep changing.
Ashtrays to cry into,
the suffering brother of the wood walls,
the forty-eight keys of the typewriter
each an eyeball that is never shut,
the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest,
the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde,
the sockets on the wall
waiting like a cave of bees,
the gold rug
a conversation of heels and toes,
the fireplace
a knife waiting for someone to pick it up,
the sofa, exhausted with the exertion of a whore,
the phone
two flowers taking root in its crotch,
the doors
opening and closing like sea clams,
the lights
poking at me,
lighting up both the soil and the laugh.
The windows,
the starving windows
that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
Each day I feed the world out there
although birds explode
right and left.
I feed the world in here too,
offering the desk puppy biscuits.
However, nothing is just what it seems to be.
My objects dream and wear new costumes,
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands
and the sea that bangs in my throat.

Anne Sexton. “The Room Of My Life.” Family Friend Poems, https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/the-room-of-my-life-by-anne-sexton

Photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash

Donald Macaskill

Last Updated on 20th July 2024 by donald.macaskill