Mind if your mind's in the media?

I don't have a degree in media studies or mental health, so I'm not a professional expert. However, I've lived with a mental illness depression - and I have to work with and through the media, pretty much constantly. So in a sense I have the expertise of having to live with mental illness and the media.

Politics isn't necessarily the best environment to mix media scrutiny and mental illness.

Media often isn't good for mental health. The world is a depressing place and the media tends to remind us of a lot of the depressing things about it. And, I am involved in politics and, let's face it having John Howard as your Prime Minister for more than 8 years would make many people depressed.

The media also doesn't spend as much time as I would like talking about the things that I want them to, and too much time talking about the soap opera and puffery that constitutes many aspects of Parliamentary and political debate in Australia, but it's very easy to complain about the media, in the same way that it's easy to complain about politicians or about umpires at the football. Now I enjoy a good whinge as much as the next person, but it's not likely to make things better.

What we need to do, whether we are in politics or in the mental health field, or are one of the 99% of the community who are interested or concerned about improving something, even if it's just the quality of their life or their childrens' lives, is to recognise that the media is just a bunch of people, in the same way that politicians are a bunch of people, or people with mental illness are a bunch of people.

The media is not this arcane mysterious thing that you need to spend ten years of secluded study on in order to get the first glimmerings of understanding. It's like trying to understand any other human being. The media's really not that complicated, but at the same time we'll never fully understand why sometimes they do the things they do.

When we are talking about understanding each other better, one of the first things we have to accept is that people aren't logical and life often isn't logical and that, indeed, is part of its attraction.

One of the things that attracts me about politics is that often you are forced to confront the fact that life is full of paradoxes.

One of those paradoxes is that the fact that I suffer from depression is also a reason why it is dangerous for me to talk about it. Not surprisingly, I have a feeling that it might be a good thing if people had a better understanding about depression one could say that it's very much in my personal interest that that occurs. Telling people what I know about it seems to me to be one way of helping people understand it better. However, for me to tell people what I know about depression would involve admitting that I suffer from it, and have, in varying degrees of seriousness, for many years.

Unfortunately, depression is considered to be sufficiently serious an ailment that it's considered a bad idea to let people know that you have it, especially if you're in public life and especially in a profession, such as politics, where there are always people on the look-out for opportunities to attack you personally and publicly. There's no better way in politics to discredit a person's (and their party's) views and policies, than to discredit the person. I should emphasise that, contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of people in politics are actually interested in building support for ideas and solutions and policies rather than personally attacking their opponents, but there are always a small number who either don't have the interest or the ability to do this and they tend to focus on muckraking and denigration instead.

What all of this means is that I have been cautioned in the past that I should not talk at all about my own experiences with depression, not because it isn't important, but because of concern it would hinder my credibility, and therefore my effectiveness, on the hundreds of issues I want to make a difference on.

As one of my advisors often and quite wisely reminds me talking to the media is not therapy - some things should only be said to a trained health professional. So one piece of advice I have is - always encourage people to talk about mental health issues if they wish, but strongly encourage them to think twice about WHY they might want to talk about it to the media.

If there is any hint that they wish to talk with the media for some form of personal relief or therapy, advise them to talk about it to someone else. This is NOT because the media are evil or shouldn't be trusted, it's because their role is not as therapists and they will not deal with the information they are given in the way a therapist would that's what therapists and other health professionals are for.

As some of you may know, at the end of last year there was widespread, sometimes inaccurate, media coverage and controversy about me. There were a few media reports, quoting unnamed sources, stating that I suffer from depression. For reasons I will elaborate on shortly, I don't think this is a big deal, but I was annoyed that it came out in this context and may have been perceived as some sort of excuse for behaviour I was accused of.

Another paradox because the media did something I didn't want to happen, which was to talk about my depression, it gave me the chance to do something I did want to happen, which was talk about my depression. If someone was going to talk about my depression, it might as well be me.

It also gave me an insight into why people don't talk publicly about their depression. Whilst it is fair to say that most of the journos that spoke with me about the issue were sympathetic, it is also fair to say that some of the questions that were asked were offensive and irritating.

There were repeated questions about what my childhood was like, how I got on with my parents, whether anyone else in my family suffers from mental illness, whether I had bad experiences at school, etc. It highlighted the almost automatic stigma which families get labelled with along with the person who suffers the mental illness. It's no wonder people often don't want to talk about it.

This leads to another of those paradoxes. Being affected by depression is not a big deal, but because people don't treat it seriously or realistically, it's a serious problem. What I'm saying is we shouldn't be too serious about this issue, because it's too serious a matter. If we are too serious, stern and just plain boring about it, we will not be able to deal with it effectively. Mental health is a very serious matter literally life-threatening - but part of why we handle it so badly as a society is because we make such a big deal about it.

A common attitude towards people who have depression and many other mental illnesses is that they should just 'get over it'. My view is that everyone else should get over it, it's a big deal to have to live with it sometimes, but that's no reason to make a big deal about it and even less of a justification for being ignorant about it.

Illness, including mental illness, is a part of life and sometimes life sucks. You can blame the internet, blame drugs, blame society, blame the government, blame music, blame TV, blame parents, blame teachers and some times these things are contributing factors. Everything's to blame and nothing's to blame. I tend to think that we should accept that sometimes shit happens. It's a good idea to try to stop shit happening, but it does seem to be rather good at continuing to happen and we probably should acknowledge and accept that and get over it.

Illness is not much fun and it's a good idea to be without it. But our health and our illnesses are part of who we are and we shouldn't feel ashamed of that. Living with depression has had some positives it tends to mean I often don't feel like talking, and especially don't feel like talking about myself, which might seem unhelpful for a politician, but you wouldn't believe the number of people that praise me for being a good listener.

By definition we have to live with life and it's a good idea to encourage people to continue to do that, whilst acknowledging that sometimes people will choose to put an end to that. Most of what we should do, including in politics, is basically to try to make life better - make life better for us and more importantly better for those who are worse off than us.

This is a very serious, very complex issue and I think we should deal with it by keeping it simple wherever possible and by taking it a little bit less seriously. We should do all what we can to try to understand the issue better, which means trying to understand people better, trying to understand the human condition better, and trying to understand how we can communicate with each other better.

This is the text of Democrats Leader Senator Andrew Bartlett's opening address to the Internet, Media and Mental Health Conference: Brisbane April 22nd 2004

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Thursday, August 26, 2004

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