I Couldn't Care Less: A Sign of the Times
Created | Updated Apr 14, 2013
A Sign of the Times
From time to time my wife asks me if depression is a modern illness. This is usually during one of the phases in which she seems to think I know everything. The rest of the time I am a gormless idiot who can't operate a pair of scissors without supervision, but at least she doesn't bother me with complicated questions.
Well today I have, exclusively for you nice people, a possible answer and it's all to do with Bognor. Put simply, there is a recognised time in the 19th century or thereabouts when working people began, finally, to have leisure time. I'm not saying nobody amongst the workers ever kicked back and had a couple of pints or a birthday party, but certainly things like holidays were born, laws about working conditions stipulated working hours and, in due course, requires two weeks' paid leave a year. Whole towns would up sticks and toddle off to places like Blackpool and Morecambe for a couple of weeks dampness and sand. Actually, Bognor was a bit more upmarket than that in those days, hence the ‘regis' bit.
What all this has to do with depression may seem a mystery but the answer is relatively simple. It may seem glib, or simplistic to suggest that people never had time for depression but I think there is something in it. I am sure many people living and working in appalling conditions of constant hardship for little money every free hour they had were deeply unhappy, but they never really had the time to dwell on it. The curse of modern society is that people are able to be unemployed. There's a sort of perverse logic to this, so I'm going to go with a fresh paragraph.
In physical terms it is painfully visible what we have done. We have cut ourselves out of evolution to the extent that people with physical maladies, blindness for example, that would mark out their genes for extinction in a Darwinian race, can survive in the human sphere where they can be cared for and supported. I'm not for a second saying this is a bad thing, but it is a thing that presents us with the challenge of caring for people who simply wouldn't have been alive without all manner of medical advancement. And a similar problem is true with the emotional fallout of social deprivation. In a pre-welfare era people who could not find work would have either gone into workhouses and slogged hard for their meagre rations, or they would simply have died. Now that we offer a greater measure of support to the unemployed we have to recognise that this changes the rules again. We have changed the rules again.
Just as we can't carry on in a world where we are keeping more people alive, and keeping them alive for longer, without adjusting to the new realities this presents, so we can't support people when they are unable to work without recognising that being unemployed doesn't just mean that you need a bit of money to buy food and stuff. On the conversation thread for last's week's column, which is only a day old as I write, Peanut has already made the good point that even if you can stretch your allowance over the weeks for food and other regular bills, when something breaks down or goes wrong (a boiler, your car, a third drastic thing I can't think of) you have no excess money to sort it. You haven't got a couple of hundred quid to replace your cooker if it blows, and it will, because you could only afford a cheap second hand one in the first place.
But it's also the psychological impact that needs consideration, which is where we come back to depression. One of the best pick-me ups for depression, in my experience, is to be doing something. To achieve something, anything, can, potentially, break the spell of torpor, the sense of your own uselessness. In previous centuries the unemployed were either forced to work or left to rot. In this day and age they are kept going and more or less left in the back of the cupboard, unworried about and left to go off, unless they are able to sort themselves out. The longer it takes, and it can take a long time, especially in a recession, the harder it gets and the greater the sense of failure and of worthlessness.
I don't know what the solution to this is. I'm not proposing a return to the workhouses, certainly. Perhaps more could be done to link people out of work with the huge raft of voluntary jobs available, and in need of filing. If job centres kept a database of all the groups and organisations that require voluntary support and encourage people on their books to take these opportunities, especially where the need in question met a particular skill set, then everyone would win. People would have gainful employment to keep them busy and occupied, the charities and others would gain, albeit temporarily, a willing and available workforce and nobody could complain that these people were happy to just sit around doing nothing all day. There we go, let's all do that.
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