Mental Health and the Matter of Priority.

I was talking to a woman yesterday who’s had a lot to do with mental health services in the area. She told me that mental health provision is the ‘poor relation’ in the NHS. It’s the one that’s most underfunded and afforded lowest priority.

I find this a little disconcerting because, as I’ve regularly asserted on this blog, perception is the whole of the life experience. Everything we regard as important in life ultimately distils to it – pain, pleasure, aspiration, everything. It’s all ultimately in the mind. Exterior factors in the outside world and the machine that is our body often provide the stimulus, but the mind is the bedrock of the experience.

That being the case – and notwithstanding the need to repair the machine when necessary – shouldn’t the mind be the highest priority, not the lowest? I think so.

And there is, of course, the question of whether the mind is a function of the brain and entirely dependent on the physical organ, or whether the mind – and in this context I presume synonymy with consciousness – is an independent faculty which uses the brain in order to organise and facilitate its many functions. I favour the latter and so maintain my support for better understanding of mental health issues. I do realise this is a difficult expectation of a health establishment seemingly entirely reliant on material science, but it would good to think that they might take the issue more seriously.

Unrelated note 1:

I’m reading a new book at the moment – Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust. It’s a prequel to his much-vaunted trilogy His Dark Materials and I have to say that I’m finding the writing style less than satisfactory. I have the impression that it was written in a hurry and not edited well. But the plot is sufficiently engaging and I’m getting through it quickly, so quickly in fact that I’ve been searching for something to take the literary reins when it’s finished. Today I found a novel in a charity shop which appears to be right up my rickety street. It’s by a man called Haruki Murakami (who I assume is Japanese because I haven’t looked him up yet) and is called Kafka on the Shore. The synopsis makes it sound pretty surreal – talking cats and showers of fish falling from the sky, for example. Me to a tee, I hope. Looking forward to starting it.

Slightly related note 2:

Every night I find a new insect bite somewhere on my arm, my neck, or my hand. They itch from early evening all the way up to bed time, so my question is: why do insect bites only itch when the light falls? Could it be that my mind only recognises the external stimulus when the diurnal energies are low? Should I be taking some important inference from this? Off to read about Dust now.

(This post is unedited, by the way, because I’m in a hurry. And today I picked up an information booklet on pre-paid funeral plans. That was enterprising of me, wasn't it?)