Stop labelling people as having ‘mental health problems’ unnecessarily and toughen up
Unnecessary labels are rotting the moral fibre of the nation, says Ann Widdecombe
The Tories have woken up to woke and now promise a raft of commonsense measures, all taken from Reform which was awake all the time. Rishi-Washi promises an attack on the number of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion posts and the supremacy of parents in sex education while Keir Starmer is still trying to define a woman.
While it is reassuring that at long last the EDI empire could be shrunk and children protected from the nonsense of being told there are scores of different genders, the fulfilment of that agenda depends on Labour losing which is an unlikely scenario. So it is a case of as you were.
We may have to wait for a Reform government before any real change of direction actually happens but meanwhile there is another tendency which is rotting the moral fibre of the nation, one which I call Labellitis.
It is enough to be a bit anti-social or outspoken to be instantly classed as “on the spectrum”. A child is no longer just naughty or ill-disciplined but is suffering from ADHD. How odd that not one of my classmates in the six schools I attended had it! A person undergoing a stressful period is said to be suffering “mental health problems”.
Recently, someone told me that a mutual acquaintance is “seriously dyslexic”. I have been receiving communications from that person all my life and find no evidence of any dyslexia, let alone the “serious” variety.
She took exams late in life and passed them. She is poorly-educated, elderly and often too lazy to check back her texts but her letters and emails are as literate as her education allows.
Once labelled, a ready excuse is then available to avoid taking the problem in hand. Perhaps even more important than that, genuine sufferers feel trivialised. Serious actors who have had to overcome real dyslexia in learning a script do not need to be equated with people too lazy to learn proper spelling and sentence construction and as for “mental health problems” being applied to every stress and strain, those who really do have mental illness feel exasperated. I know because they have told me.
It is time to stop the amateur bandying about of terms which should be used only after proper medical diagnosis. It is time to toughen up and, as the late Prince Philip might say, just get on with it.
