The State, disgracefully, is more concerned with distressed loans than its distressed people, writes JOE HUMPHREYS
GREAT EMPHASIS has been placed to date on measuring the financial cost of the recession – the black hole in the banks and the reduction in national income. But no attempt has been made to quantify the psychological impact of the economic downturn on the population, or indeed to put some strategy in place to address it.
This is astonishing, given evidence to suggest people are under increased mental stress – and not just those at the sharpest end of the recession. A general fug of despondency hangs over Irish society and, critically, the tools to deal with it are not immediately obvious.
Growing up, we learn life skills about accepting our lot. We are taught from a young age not to covet our neighbour’s wife or goods. We are admonished for “keeping up with the Joneses”. But the unspoken assumption behind such advice is that we are all doing okay, living in our semi-ds in something like domestic normality.
But what if your neighbour is still driving around in a BMW 5 Series while your home is being repossessed? What if you’ve lost your job and it’s causing your marriage to crumble, while Mr Jones has transferred all his property into Mrs Jones’s name and skipped the country? Should you still be stoical, or fly into a destructive rage?
One challenge people are facing today is handling a changed social status. Another is overcoming the regret of ill-judged expenditure. Living in a house falling deeper into negative equity may feel like prison torture. A nagging memory of some rash acquisition – like a €200 T-shirt or a pair of never-worn Manolo Blahnik shoes – can provoke profound self-loathing.
Probably the biggest group at risk of depression and anxiety are the newly unemployed, particularly former breadwinners, and especially men. The number of females classified as unemployed by the CSO (which includes in its figures people in their late teens) rose from 38,400 to 79,300 between 2007 and 2009, while for males the figure jumped from 83,000 to 226,500. What has the State – the public or private sectors – done to help these people? What words of encouragement have they received other than Bill Cullen’s crass advice that people now out of a job should try working for free?
My father was made redundant in the early 1990s from a job in the cutthroat motor trade. He did his best to shelter his family from his disappointment, but a tangible sense of insecurity stayed with him, along with an empathy for those without meaningful work, until the day he died.
Studies show how unemployment produces deep mental scars, especially for men. A growing body of research suggests we grossly underestimate the trauma caused by losing your job, as Nick Powdthavee notes in his recently published book, The Happiness Equation. “It takes roughly one year to adapt (almost) completely to the significant distress that the death of a husband, a wife or a child brings us,” he writes, citing various studies. “Unemployment, by contrast, takes a much longer time, if not for ever to adapt to. And when we do, it’s only partial. Incomplete.”
Health services have a role to play in mediating what is a national psychological upheaval, but they should not, and cannot, do it on their own. Among others, media organisations must take responsibility, and Taoiseach Brian Cowen was right in one sense (albeit perhaps not the sense he intended) when he criticised the incessant negativity of the Fourth Estate.
The media’s tendency towards fulminating and fuming has the inadvertent effect of making people feel vaguely hopeless, or powerless to effect change, when surely the attitude we should take is: Don’t get angry, get even. Becoming a cynic is really akin to admitting defeat.
The media (admittedly a multifaceted beast) has also played a role in narrowing public discourse, to the extent that fundamental questions, like “What should you do with your short time on Earth?” or “How can you really be happy?”, are virtually never discussed. This is all the more serious because the Catholic Church, which might once have generated debate on these issues, has made itself irrelevant (through self-inflicted wounds) and there is no other institution which can readily substitute.
Worse still, the place once occupied by priests and philosophers in the public sphere is now almost entirely populated by technocratic or managerial know-it-alls. It is more than a year since novelist Colm Tóibín first called for economists to be banned from the airwaves and, without wanting to be flippant, heeding his request might be one step towards rediscovering our sense of humanity.
It is easy to blame the Government for everything that is perverse. But the fact that the State has proven itself more capable of responding to distressed loans rather than distressed human beings is a disgrace to us all. If we truly are a society, and not just an economy, we need to acknowledge we’re in real pain; we feel – with some justification – that we’ve let ourselves down, some of us are hurting bad, and we need to talk about it.
Breda O’Brien is on leave