It’s a chance to engage with someone’s pain, distress and anguish. To hear someone’s story and experience. To ask them what tools and support they need and trust to their expertise in themselves, rather than immediately seeing them as disordered. To look at the wider issues surround mental health. Not to box it off, but to think of it relating to employment, housing, our political realities, world trauma, grief, death, bereavement and so much else. We have to look at mental health in the context of our lives, rather than as something which is damaging or dangerous. We must stop tying distress to illness or wrongness. We must not make mental distress apolitical. Yes as the adage says mental illness does not discriminate, but to say that it discriminates equally is nonsense. Age, race, disability, gender, sexuality, class – all of these things have an impact on us, and any mental health professionals that refuse to acknowledge this are doing a disservice to themselves and their clients. In short, we must learn to see this not so much as a medical issue, but as a social one.

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