Life purpose can help change perspective

SPIKE Milligan’s gravestone in the churchyard of St Thomas's, Winchel-sea, bears, at the comedian’s request, the witty one-liner: “I told you I was ill.”

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It is actually written in Gaelic because the church elders didn’t approve of jokey messages on gravestones, but everyone gets the message and it provides a chuckle, as befits a man who spent his life making us laugh.

Spike really was ill. He died from kidney failure, aged 83, in 2002. He had also suffered many episodes of serious mental illness throughout his life and had discussed and written about them candidly many times.

There is a big difference, however, between properly diagnosed conditions, such as the bipolar disorder that afflicted Spike Milligan, and the self-diagnosed mental health issues that, a recent survey suggests, are today allegedly suffered by two thirds of young people aged 16 to 25.

It would be completely wrong to belittle anyone suffering from genuine mental illness. The treatments, from ever more sophisticated drugs to a wide range of therapies available today, must be provided for those who can benefit from them.

But it is almost impossible to believe that the proportion of the population now suffering from mental health conditions has expanded so rapidly to become what would be considered, if the illnesses were physical, a major health crisis far above what we saw in the pandemic.

That’s not to downplay the accuracy of the reported feelings by those young people who responded to this and other mental health surveys and declared themselves unwell.