UK Mental Health Crisis now costing £100bn and rising

Nina Lakhani from the Independent on Sunday wrote a very interesting piece about the deepening crisis with mental health in this country.

Here at FISU, we know that being stressed over a long period of time leads to mental health problems for some people.  It all depends on our personal tolerance levels, which are different for each person.  One person's pleasure is another´s poison, which clearly reflects our subjectivity-individuality.

Meditation and relaxation techniques are medically and scientifically proven to deal with stress, and especially the negative stresses of everyday life.  We all experience positive stress (pressures that are necessary for us to survive) - like having to get up for work each morning and doing a day's work, but when this too becomes a problem it turns into  something negative in our life and so the burdens mount and we feel that we cannot cope. Stress also accentuates our worries and we find ourselves constantly at battle with our thoughts and unable to rise above our own personal circumstances for long enough to do something about it.

When you can relax you are so much more objective to everything - and less emotionally involved.  It doesn't mean that we no longer care (which we would term detachment), but we are less emotionally involved, which in reality means we can care more but in a far more balanced way emotionally.  You do rise above the personal problems in this objectivity and this is often accompanied by intuitiveness and problem solving.

What our governments and leaders have to learn is that stress is the first port of call to psychosis.  If a person can remain relaxed and in control of their emotions, then they are going to not only have better mental health but physical health too as all disease is actually dis-ease or agitation of the mind (having a mental origin). 

Our world is not going to get any easier, but we can find ease in dealing with it which thousands  of our meditators around the world confirm.(and proven by credible University studies).

The report compiled by DH, MHF and HSE illustrate the following:

• One in four people will experience some mental distress each year
• 80% of people with mental health problems are unemployed
• British men are three times more likely to commit suicide as women
• 9 out of 10 prisoners have a mental health problem
• 11.4m working days were lost to stress, depression and anxiety in Britain between 2008 and 2009
• 23% increase in GP prescriptions for psychiatric drugs in 2009 -an increase from 53m (2004) to 65M (2009)

The UK has one of the highest rates of self-harm in Europe, at 400 per 100,000 of the population.  Also, about 45,000 people a year are sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

Doctors and medical experts combined with the government need to tackle this problem by educating the general public about the benefits that relaxation bring.  Society is not going to change and the pressures will always be there, we just need to learn how to cope with them more effectively.

I am not shocked by these figures as I see this on a daily basis, but I am shocked that such reports as these are not taken seriously, or something definitive is done about tackling this problem.

Let's hope this new coalition government, who are keen to save money, make some positive efforts towards this very serious problem.

Rajesh Ananda

Spiritual Leader