“Harden Up” and “Love the Coq” – A Shocking Day for Seymour

Every now and again when it comes to political commentary, I find myself inadvertently putting aside my personal biases and proclivities in order to actually engage with politicians as people.

Because ultimately, that’s what they are.

And it’s a perception no doubt hugely fostered by continually engaging with them as actual human beings, rather than, as Rudyard Kipling put it, “little tin gods on wheels” whom one only forms a dim and vague perception of through the distant medium of the media.

Unfortunately, one of the parts-and-parcel of being a mere human … is a propensity for human error. (Or, as arguably applies ACT’s economic policy – inhuman error writ large and Lovecraftian)

Seymour especially – as a first term MP and frighteningly young Minister – appears especially prone to it.

I’ve previously seen him bust out frankly bizarre comments in debate about things like importing immigrants into New Zealand for the sole purpose of giving Ron Mark a sponge bath, for instance.

And it’s presumably in the spirit of this sort of blurting out of vague, half-formed points topped off with a memetic miasma of memorability that David Seymour came out with Tuesday’s clanger about the French purported love of Coq.

No serious harm done there , but unfortunately, the same cannot be said of his recent comments to Victoria students about mental illness.

Now contrary to what you might believe about politicians and mental illness (i.e. the old mantra: “you don’t have to be mad to work here … but it helps – particularly if you’re about to so something as abjectly insane as attempt to part-privatize the welfare system for the mentally ill“), most Members of Parliament don’t have very much in the way of direct experience with mental illness. Although I’ve always privately wondered if the foibles, evils, perceptive-biases, and pathology of Neoliberalism are sufficiently such that its adherents could be similarly branded as suffering from some form of mentally afflicted malady.

In fact, the higher up you go in the realms of politics, the more likely it is you’ll find comments or commentary about mental illness – and most importantly, the personal experience thereof (as opposed to an abstract number-line on a health ministry’s budget sheet), to be shushed under the carpet rather than talked about openly or embraced.

Refreshingly, this is not always the case. Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, for instance, has appointed a Shadow-Minister for Mental Health to his Shadow-Cabinet. Former State Liberal Leader John Brogden’s highly personal account of the circumstances surrounding his suicide attempt while in office just goes to show how very strongly a political life and mental illness can be inextricably – and causatively – intertwined.

But these are the minority of cases.

In the main and for the most part, mental health issues *scare* politicians.

There’s any number of reasons as to why. In abstract, it’s presumably because they’re hard to control – the mental health issues, not the politicians.

But on a more personal level, I’ve always thought that the reason many actual career politicians seem so … well … afraid and reluctant to engage when it comes to living, breathing examples of mental illness standing right there in front of them, is for a different reason entirely.

They’re worried that it could happen to them.

And in an “industry” (if you could call it that) riven with disappointment, legitimate institutionalized paranoia, demandingly long work hours, and frenetic if not frenzied anxieties – it’s quite probably a semi-justified concern.

I could write a small book on my personal experiences and observations of the oft-daft ways in which politicians handle or respond to mental illness. (And in fact, sort-of am doing so)

But that’s not what this is about.

Instead, Seymour’s remarks represent yet another instance of a Government Minister attempting to apply a heavily ideological “solution” to a complex and intractable problem – specifically mental health.

We’ve already seen this from *exactly* the same Government (and in a move roundly supported by Mr Seymour) when it came to the rollout of Mental Health Bonds as part of that aforementioned part-privatization of the welfare and healthcare system.

Now while it’s fair to state that an off-hand answer in a campus debate about mental health issues is not going to be *quite* so damaging to sufferers as the pernicious effects of Government policy surrounding health and social development – the problem is that Seymour’s questionable views aren’t simply his own and aired in a light-hearted semi-serious context.

They’re a worrying perspective held by a relatively senior (somehow) public official – and one of the guiding voices in the corridors of power which help to determine the extent and ambit of government policy.

You can understand why people are thusly concerned.

To be fair to Seymour (gosh, I seem to be saying that a lot recently, don’t I) … there is an argument that the way we treat many mental illnesses and developmental disorders in this country is prone to legitimate concerns about “over-medication”. Consider, for instance, periodic panics about the over-prescriptions of incredibly powerful neuro-stimulants (up to and including a substance that’s quite literally the same as street-speed) to kids and young adults as a means for dealing with their purported (and potentially misdiagnosed) ADHD.

To be additionally fair to Seymour, there is also a core element of truth to his sentiment about how you “have to make a choice and choose to make the most of things.”

A decision to seek counselling, engage in cognitive behavioral therapy, or even simply to go to your GP and turn your diagnosis into a prescription (where necessary – and hopefully to buttress the other two approaches, in concert with support networks) … these are all “choices”, and affirmations of a sufferer’s aspiration to get better (if not well) – and restore as much functionality to one’s life as is expeditiously possible.

But a prescription anti-depressant is not a ‘concrete pill’, and there is a woeful gulf of difference if not diffidence between choosing to recognize that one is not well then taking steps accordingly to get better … versus attempting to “harden up” and ignore or minimize the nature and consequences of your illness.

That way – and all too often quite literally – madness lies.

Seymour, bless his heart, has presumably never had to grapple with mental illness personally – and therefore doesn’t *quite* appreciate the fundamental distinction between “harden up” [because an external force of conformist-pressurizing society told you to do so] and “I choose to undertake my best efforts to manage my illness and get better”. Or even that, for many sufferers of mental illness, plucking up the agency to attempt to “get better” is something beyond their reach at that point in time.

Also, and most importantly, there is a necessary causal linkage between “choosing” to seek wellness (whether it’s actually fully attainable or not) – and having access to the tools with which to make that happen.

Counselling and medications for treatment, psychiatry for proper diagnosis, and all the other necessary accouterments for sorting your mental illness – they aren’t cheap.

It almost goes without saying that in Seymour’s arch-neoliberal user-pays more-market view of the world, they’d hardly be any cheaper.

Our public health system – particularly the mental health end of the spectrum of care – creaks and groans under the weight of a continually expanding sea of users. Consultations with *decent* mental health professionals seem to be fewer between and harder to find. Under the TPPA, the costs of our medications will very likely go up substantially thanks to Seymour and his ilk placing PHARMAC under serious threat.

So in short and in sum: Seymour’s answer to a broad-ranging question about the pressures of student life (including a follow-up specifically focused on mental illness) apparently featured the words “harden up”.

That’s problematic – particularly given the ways such a declaration by a public figure can be used as a flow-on justification by others that mental illness is all, figuratively, in the sufferer’s head.

He also suggested that over-medication was part of the problem, and that one had to “choose” to seek to improve one’s condition.

These elements are *also* problematic – but for reasons explained above, arguably less so.

As a matter of fact, I happen to agree with him that making a conscious “choice” and effort to seek (relative) wellness is often an important part of starting to negotiate the long and fraught path towards some semblance of recovery (or functionality) for a person engaged in a punch-up with their own psyche.

But – and I really can’t stress this enough – such a choice can’t be made in isolation. It isn’t simply a matter of “willing” yourself to get better, otherwise mental illness just simply wouldn’t be a problem for many sufferers.

It’s a question of how you go about that process – and how you actualize that choice you’ve made into your own immanent reality.

And that’s *far* easier to do in a society with a compassionate, interventionist government … rather than the neoliberal hellscape into which Seymour and his party comrades would undoubtedly wish to see us condemned.

If any good whatsoever can come out of this situation, I hope it’s that Seymour can take a look at what he’s said … do some work getting to grips with the actual lived experience of mentally ill New Zealanders … and then use what he’s learned to help inform and change his perspective as to why an expansive, well-funded and protective state apparatus is *vitally necessary* in guaranteeing that choice and individual sovereignty upon which his libertarian creed is nominally based.

Anything less would be a Coq-up.