Gary Speed’s death shows we urgently need to tackle the ignorance surrounding mental illness

When I started reading mysterious tweets on Sunday saying “Gary Speed RIP”, I did not know who they were referring to. But the volume of these tweets made me curious to know who Gary Speed was and why his death had caused such a stir. I discovered he was a 42-year-old husband, father and football manager and that he had committed suicide on Sunday.

That somebody felt so desperate and in such mental pain that they could not bear to live is obviously extremely sad, and I have every sympathy for Gary’s family and friends. I also have every sympathy for Gary – to take your own life is a terrifying thing for an individual to do.

But what struck me even more than the public outpouring of respect for this man, was the joyous tittle-tattle I overheard in my day-to-day life from ignorant people gossiping on buses, in shops, in offices…

On Monday, I overheard different people say – with evident delirious excitement at having something to dissect, despite their own clear ignorance of mental illness – such terrifyingly ignorant statements as:

-       “Ooh, did you hear about Gary Speed? Ooh, what was that all about?” (Said as if they’d just heard that someone famous had been caught having an affair, or something equally salacious.)

-       “How selfish of him. He had kids, and to do that just before Christmas? So selfish.” (Said as if to imply that if only Gary had waited until January 2, it would have been OK.)

-       “But I saw him on TV the other day and he didn’t look depressed.” (Said as if to imply that people with depression and mental illness wear their pyjamas all day, their pants on their heads and shuffle about dribbling.)

In all of these situations, the people these statements were said to agreed with the first person, and joined in the gleeful bashing of Gary Speed for being so ‘mental’, ‘selfish’ or ‘deceptive’.

I’m annoyed with myself for not butting in and calmly explaining to these people how frightening their ignorance was, and suggesting that perhaps it would be a good idea for them to find out a little bit more about the many types of depression and mental illness, so that they could have more empathy next time something like this happens. Because there will, unfortunately, be a next time. And next time, it may not be a public figure: it may be their partner, their friend or even themselves. Regardless of being a public figure, Gary Speed was also someone’s partner, father and friend.

But I didn’t say anything because I felt too angry and too upset with them, and I knew I would not be able to talk calmly – in all likelihood I would have fumed, ranted and maybe even cried. And these are not actions that would have effectively put my point across – more than likely I would have merely reinforced their view that people with mental health problems are ‘deranged’.

Because I do have mental health problems – I was diagnosed with depression four-and-a-half years ago, and was too ill to work for almost two years. While most of the time I am now much, much better than I was, like everyone with mental illness, I still have times when I struggle. And sometimes I don’t feel brave enough, or well enough, to talk to people about it – especially when I realise how ignorant they are about mental illness, or how amused they are by the topic.

Mental illness can affect anyone. It is not a joke. It is not a subject to be laughed about over the water cooler in the office. Someone feeling so desperate that they take their own life is not a topic for gossiping about like an excited fishwife.

Gary Speed’s suicide has brought several issues into the open air, but the one that is most apparent to me is the glaring and desperate need for us to keep talking about mental illness, to fight to remove the unfortunate stigma attached to mental illness, and to work to educate those who don’t understand mental illness.

Figures from the Mental Health Foundation suggest that one in four people in the UK will be affected by some kind of mental health problem. So it is imperative that the gross ignorance surrounding mental illness is addressed.

There are already some good campaigns being run that are trying to do this. Time to Change has a lot of information on their website about ways to talk about mental illness openly, and offers advice for people wanting to find out more. Put simply, talking tackles discrimination. It really is that simple. It can take courage to talk about mental health (and I know I’ve failed at times to speak up when I hear ignorance about mental illness), but it’s the only way.

Mind is another excellent organisation fighting to help people with mental illness and to raise awareness, and it was only on November 28 that they published an article showing that recent Mind research proved mental health was still a taboo topic in the media. It’s frightening.

We must take something from Gary Speed’s death, and if that something is the ability to talk about mental illness, suicide and depression, then so be it. The ignorance surrounding these topics needs to be addressed, and now is as good a time as any to start.

And let’s start by stopping decrying something as ‘mental’ if we find it unusual. Let’s start by stopping calling something ‘mad’ if it is silly. Let’s start by stopping using all those terms as ‘nutty’, ‘manic’, ‘crazy’, 'batty', 'loopy' etc in derogative, light-hearted or dismissive ways. Even if you don’t feel able to start talking about mental health, you CAN stop using those terms in the wrong way.

Billy Bragg interview: “We need more opinionated women”

Photo: Michael Barbour

After 30+ years as one of our most-respected protest singers, Billy Bragg has never been more relevant than now. In these turbulent days of mass occupations in major cities, industrial strike action and deep-rooted recession, Billy’s no-nonsense approach to trying to change the way we operate makes a lot of sense.

This Sunday and Monday, Billy was in Bristol – primarily for a sold-out gig at the Fleece & Firkin on Monday, but also to perform at the Occupy Bristol camp on College Green, and a spontaneous gig at the recently opened Occupy UWE camp. Throw in getting some rhyming slang for shit on BBC Radio Bristol, and Billy was kept busy on his flying visit.

He also kindly made time to talk with me, and I had the pleasure of catching the end of his soundcheck before his gig – which included a chorus of Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want: an extra treat for me as it never made it’s way onto the final playlist.

“SHIT COMES AROUND AND GOES AROUND”

With a career as enduring as Billy’s, it could seem depressing that his songs warning of Thatcherite hell are so relevant again. But he takes it in his stride, saying: “That’s the trouble if you write topical songs.” Bringing it into a more recent perspective, and linking to one of his newer songs (Never Buy The Sun), he adds: “When the Milly Dowler phone-hacking scandal broke, people were saying ‘You’ve got to rewrite the lyrics to It Says Here’, and I thought I probably should. So I looked at them and thought, ‘Actually, you know what, I don’t have to rewrite them at all’. That’s the sad thing about being a topical songwriter – shit comes around and goes around.”

And while that’s true, this has been a particularly busy week for the population concerned with standing up to the shit that’s doing the circuit. Today (Wednesday), Billy was in London supporting the mass public sector industrial action. “Our political discourse has become so shameful that the leader of the Labour party – the LEADER of the LABOUR party – can’t even come out and support public sector workers when there’s industrial action.”

All being well, Billy’s plan was to record vox pops for Radio Five Live… “I’ll be talking to Tories,” he laughs, “Trying to be impartial.” There’s a pause before he wryly adds: “We’ll see what happens.”

“DOING WOODY’S WORK”

What’s been happening since October are the Occupy camps, which are growing in number weekly. The main Bristol occupation on College Green is the second biggest in the UK after St Paul’s, and is gaining in strength all the time – despite concerns from some people that the demands of the camps are unclear, and that women’s issues have not been fully engaged with.

Yet Billy insists he’s seen no evidence of women being sidelined at the Bristol camp or any other. “All I can say is a woman introduced me on stage, a woman sorted me out when I got down there, a woman showed me where to go and what to do. That’s not uncommon. But I think there always is a male thing going on, and as night falls it becomes more macho.”

Expanding on this, Billy adds: “I was down there last night [Sunday] after dark and it was quite Neolithic. People come out of the woodwork after dark, people who may be sleeping on the streets and are tempted by a fire and maybe some beer… There’s bound to be people who are not completely signed up to the programme who want to come for a bit of warmth and company.”

For all that, the Occupy movement has fired Billy with enthusiasm, not least because the spirit of the movement is so closely aligned to his own reason for becoming a protest singer. “The reason I’m here is that I work for a man called Woody Guthrie,” Billy explains, referring to the American protest singer who died in the 1960s. “Woody Guthrie never did a gig like this where he had a dressing room and a rider and someone selling t-shirts. He played schools and picket lines and occupations. So I have to do that, too.”

In reference to his performance at Occupy UWE that afternoon, he added: “I was saying to the students: ‘I’m thanking you, I have to be here because of who I am and what I believe in. But you’re students, you don’t have to be here. So salute you, never mind me. I’m supposed to be up here, I’m Billy Bragg, I’m doing Woody’s work.”

There are many people who have called the Occupy movement wishy washy and complained it is unclear what the demands are, but Billy simply says it depends what expectations you have. “The globalisation movement smashed shop windows and burned cars. You can smash up branches of McDonalds all day long, nothing’s going to happen,” he states. “What’s happening now, though, is different. While all those demonstrations were going in the 1990s, and with the miners’ strikes in the 1980s, capitalism was rampant. Now capitalism is flat on its arse and something has got to change because we’re all up against the wall.”

When pushed on what that change might be, he says: “In a very broad sense, it’s all about accountability. Those who have economic power over us – the bankers, the multinationals, the lobbyists – those people must be held to account. If it was down to me, I would have publically funded political parties and have all lobbying be transparent. Nothing should be done behind closed doors. Why do our politicians want to say things that are off record? We employ them! They are our employees. They should be accountable to us.”

Yet his faith in the current Occupy movement is clear: “I have confidence in them to articulate a compassionate ideal in a way that’s not tarnished by totalitarianism, in a way that’s not held back by what happened in 1917, that looks forward to 2017 and what kind of world we want to live in. Not how Lenin did it, or Trotsky did it. That doesn’t work anymore. Marx isn’t the problem: Marxists are the problem. Those sour old bastards! They need to stop lecturing and start listening.”

“IT WAS WOMEN’S VOTES THAT
SET UP THE WELFARE STATE”

It would be impossible for me, as a feminist activist, not to ask Billy where he stands on equal rights for women and feminism. “How would you define feminism?,” he muses. “I’m a socialist but there’s a lot of different definitions of a socialist.” There are a lot of different definitions of a feminist, too, I say. “I believe that women should have equal pay with men. Does that make me a feminist? I believe that childcare should be provided free. Does that make me a feminist? I do the washing up at home. Does that make me a feminist?” I laugh and say that I don’t think it’ a question of ticking boxes! “In that case, in the sense that I believe we should live in a fair and equal society, then I’d like to think I’m a feminist. But I’m also a disablist, a gayest…” Well, I think they all go hand in hand… “Yes, that’s true.”

But when talking about the history of union membership, Billy stresses it was thanks to women’s suffrage in 1928 that the election of 1945 saw the roots of the NHS being planted.

“In 1945, we had the first election where women’s votes really counted,” he says. “A lot of people say that the 1945 election was about soldiers. It wasn’t. Women under the age of 30 first got the vote in 1928, and then there wasn’t an election between 1931 and 1945. So an entire tranche of young women with children had come in, and it was their votes that set up the welfare state. Not the soldiers’.” He’s quick to add: “The soldiers did vote for a better world, but the significant thing was the untapped bulge of young women of childbearing age who did not want to go through what their mothers went through. That was the vote that made the welfare state.”

“ANARCHY IN A POLITICAL SENSE”

When the UK riots kicked off in August, Billy was in America and he says it was extraordinary hearing over the wires what was happening at home. “I couldn’t get a handle on it. What was it about? It was weird,” he says, still sounding baffled and saddened by what happened. “I saw rioters had burned down the Westbury Arms in Barking where I come from, and I couldn’t understand that. What would they do that? It was totally illogical in the sense that previous riots had been focussed on some sense of social anger. And although it began with the death of Mark Duggan, it quickly descended into a free for all. It didn’t have a focus.”

What was highlighted at the time, and is the only thing we can salvage from the riots, were the volunteers who selflessly cleaned up the mess. “The anarchy to me was the people who came the next day and swept it all up without being organised. That’s real proper anarchy. That’s what anarchy is in a political sense.”

“THE TIME IS COMING WHEN YOU
CAN MAKE POLITICAL MUSIC AGAIN”

With the clock ticking towards Billy’s time on stage, I was anxious not to keep him too long. But I wanted to know if he thought it would be possible for a new protest singer-songwriter to enjoy the same longevity that he has? “Five years ago I’d have said it’d be really difficult, because any kid starting out would have been going against the tide,” he says. “But now, with the Occupy movement…”

I ask if he worries that the Simon Cowell-ification of the music industry – an industry that synthesises an unidentifiable, characterless, soulless puppet for a TV series, who is then forgotten three months later – is deadening our ability to recognise real talent. “Abba were number one all the way through punk,” Billy states. “The only punks who got anywhere near the top of the charts were Blondie. The Sex Pistols, The Clash… forget it. They never got anywhere near the mainstream.”

Returning to opportunities for new talent, he adds: “I think the time is coming when you can make political music again, because it’s hard to make it without political context. I’ve managed to keep going because I’ve found an audience that connects with it. I’ve spent my time looking at issues and connecting with things like Woody Guthrie.

“The thing that worries me now is that what supported what I did is no longer there, which is the NME, Sounds and Melody Maker. When I was making political music 30 years ago, the editors of those three papers were children of 1968, they believed that music was the alternative lingua franca. That was how we talked to one another, it was how I talked to my parents’ generation as a working-class person. The only medium available to me was to buy a guitar and learn to play and write songs. But that’s all gone. Even the NME pours piss on anyone who’s political now.”

And it’s not just the printed music press, as we also have a whole world of online commentary to deal with now. And Billy is not a fan of Facebook: “People think they’re engaged but they’re not in the way that the audience will engage with me tonight, I promise you that. Facebook likes are not the same as coming together.”

I ask if he gets much abuse online. He says he doesn’t, adding: “You know why I don’t get as much abuse as you? Because my genitals are outside my body. Women with opinions get a lot more shit. Some people cannot stand the idea of a smart woman voicing an opinion. But we should stand up to people who are abusive to women online. Your freedom of speech isn’t freedom to be abusive.”

It’s time to wrap up and for Billy to grab some food before he goes on stage, but as a parting shot he says: “The younger generation are in the throes of discovery and energised by everything. And we need more opinionated women.”

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The Bristol gig was the last night of Billy’s tour, and his set closed with him calling on stage both of his support acts – Sound of Rum and Akala – and the three vocalists performing an extended version of the 1931 union anthem Which Side Are You On? With lyrics rewritten to take in our contemporary situations, the affirmations from the audience were overpowering but not nearly so much as Akala’s repeated opening chant of “We are the 99%” – truly spine-tingling. 

If the future is in the hands of women and men now, as much as the creation of the welfare state was in 1945, then women and men need to jointly keep fighting in solidarity to ensure we keep the NHS and don't let the bankers grind us down. 

One25 Bristol Community Cake Book

Need a Christmas present for the cake lover in your life? You can’t do better than the Bristol Community Cake Book, produced by essential Bristol charity One25, and selling on their website here for the bargain price of £4.99. I’ve just bought three for presents, that’s how good they are.

The book is beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated with colour photos, and well supported by lots of Bristol restaurants and foodies. Recipes have been donated by everyone from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to Pieminster and, of course, One25 volunteers. And those recipes include the tempting Apple, Pear & Honey Cake, Boisterous Brownies and, err, Courgette Cake (well, let’s give it a go!).

All profits from the book go to One25, which is a Bristol charity that is run by women for women who are street-based sex workers, those who are in the process of exiting such work, and those who have now exited. Launched in 1995, the charity helps vulnerable women build new lives away from violence, poverty and addiction. Support One25 by buying this tasty book!

Feminism In The News

“It is lazy journalists who frequently rely upon stereotypical representations of men and women, and who consequently do injustice to social movements.” (Mendes, p67)

Anyone with even a cautious interest in feminism is aware that we don’t get a good deal from the media. We never have. However, it’s not as cut and dried as all that and there are corners of the media, pockets of publishing, where women’s rights and feminism issues are allowed an airing… although there are always compromises and sacrifices involved.

In this extremely thorough analysis, Kaitlynn Mendes (a journalism lecturer at De Montfort University) goes back to 1968 and examines how feminism has been represented by eight national newspapers (four each in the UK and US).

Feminism In The News: Representations of The Women’s Movement Since The 1960s (Palgrave Macmillan, £49.99) is such a detailed and carefully woven study, presented in an academic yet readable style, that there’s little to find fault with. Apart from with Mendes’ findings that women’s issues have been so consistently and persistently relegated for so long, despite advances in reality!

Depressingly, Mendes’ studies confirm there has been little to no improvement in the perception of feminists as “crazy, ill-tempered, ugly, man-hating, family-wrecking, hairy-legged, bra-burning radical lesbians” (p35) from the ‘60s, and that – as we know – the lie that bras were burned at the 1968 Miss Universe pageant just will not go away. It proves that if the media peddles a story loudly enough, it simply doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, because people will want to believe it if it makes a marginalised group look foolish. However, Mendes also reports an attempt, in 1978, to counter the bra burning myth with an equally preposterous myth of men burning their y-fronts: “Downtrodden men are after something you have already got – equality. Moves are afoot to make 1979 the Year of Men’s Liberation. Bonfires of y-fronts could soon be burning in the streets” (p80). What a shame this equally ridiculous tale never worked its way into folklore in the same way.

What also won’t go away is the attempt by much of the media to ‘humanise’ feminists by needing to state the woman’s marital status and whether or not she is a mother in any introductory text. Mendes cites a 1970 report about Betty Friedan at the Women’s Strike for Equality rally which, she says, spends more time focussing on Friedan’s visit to the hairdresser than it does on the reason for the rally.

There is a lot of weight in Feminism In The News given to the public perception of feminism, because unfortunately this is something that is going to dog us until patriarchy no longer has the upper hand. Feminists on both sides of the pond have always been presented as unfeminine and threatening, an alien and ‘other’ type. While anyone who experiences or lives feminism knows this to be nonsense, sadly it is the willing disbelievers who we have a harder job to convince. Mendes calls this “the normalisation process” that the media needs to go through in order to try and reconcile these unruly deviants as “normal” (p60, p77).

Unable to escape the need to focus on the appearance of women, Mendes also notes a trend in her sample papers – especially in the 1970s – to link feminism women to all manner of apparently unsightly physical conditions from alcoholism to baldness, as well as the antisocial characteristics of bullying and violence (p118). Who knew that feminism could make your hair fall out?

Mendes observes trends in the writing of feminism, with newspapers honing in on one woman’s experience of a topic – thereby skewing or biasing their coverage, and neglecting to represent “the diverse nature of feminist political theory, goals and tactics” (p51).

In more recent years, she observes a trend for newspaper articles about feminism to try and hook the feminist thread up to pop culture, in a bid to make it fashionable. So there were scores of articles pondering whether Sex And The City was a feminist show, whether Bond girls are feminists, and declaring just how much of a feminist icon Cheryl Cole and the like is (p136), which is a trend that’s just not going away.

In almost all areas of her book, I agree with Mendes wholeheartedly and her findings are hard to doubt anyway. But one point ruffled my feathers – Liz Jones from The Daily Mail, whatever Mendes may say, is not a feminist. While rightly stating that The Daily Mail is particularly opposed to feminism, Mendes goes on to add that “certain writers such as Liz Jones are responsible for what little supportive coverage existed” (p148), and later: “Authors such as … Liz Jones stand out for their commitment to feminist values” (p165). Make your own mind up on that one, but I can’t think of one feminist who would stand next to Jones in a line-up.

Clearly, by only focussing on eight newspapers, Mendes’ findings are relatively limited, however to have focussed on more would surely be impossible, and the fact her results from eight titles have been condensed so precisely into this trim volume is a credit to her.

Feminism In The News is an important and useful text, not least because in one book we now have clear academic proof that – regardless of what male editors may like to tell us – feminists have been consistently and repeatedly pushed to the margins and treated like a joke. It would be interesting to see follow up articles and volumes focussing on specific countries, or types of publication, to gain a bigger picture of this problem, as well as to try and suggest solutions for allowing women’s feminist voices to be heard on pages outside of The Guardian.