‘Grief is work,’ said one of the parents of the teenagers killed by Anders Breivik on the island of Utoya in Norway. ‘To deal with grief — that’s work from the moment you wake up till the moment you fall asleep. And even then many people struggle with their grief when they sleep.’ His frank, no-nonsense approach was striking given that he had experienced probably the worst thing that could happen: to lose a child and in such a terrible way. He was talking to Claudia Hammond for her new World Service series, The Truth about Mental Health (Fridays).
The six programmes take us on a global tour of the ways in which communities and government agencies deal with illnesses such as depression, dementia, bipolar, epilepsy, autism and schizophrenia, and the traumas of natural disaster and random violence. Treatments are often radically different — that difference being especially marked between the westernised countries (where many of life’s emotional and spiritual problems are being reclassified as ‘illness’ and treated accordingly with drugs) and the developing world (where almost half of those suffering from psychosis live in chains or locked in solitary confinement). With one in four people estimated to suffer from some kind of mental illness at some point in their lives, finding more effective and less costly treatments is crucial. What can we learn from each other?
In Norway, for instance, the government and voluntary organisations all met together the very next day after the traumatising events in Oslo and Utoya to decide what their co-operative response should be. How could they help the bereaved to move through their grief and come to terms with what had happened to them in such a random, nightmarish way? What could they do to prevent survivors staying trapped in their memories of what they had witnessed?
It sounds so obvious, to work together, and to decide quickly how to develop a coherent plan, using the combined expertise of all the agencies involved, with up to 60 professionals working together, and ‘all pulling in the same direction’.
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