‘Knowing that you are loved yourself, loving others, seeing love in practice, serves as a foundation for resilience.’ Photo: courtesy of Alison Mitchell
The Retreat Lecture, 2021: Equality, truth and privilege in mental health, by Alison Mitchell
‘Knowing that you are loved yourself, loving others, seeing love in practice, serves as a foundation for resilience.’
Alison Mitchell is the development officer for the Quaker Mental Health Fund (known until last year as The Retreat York Benevolent Fund). She has worked for more than three decades as a mental health social worker. During that time, she told some 250 Friends, she had had a good view of what she called the ‘stress-vulnerability matrix’, that combination of factors that can increase one’s risk of developing mental health problems. In an inspiring and compelling lecture, she used her own life story to talk about how inequality or privilege could have an enormous effect on mental wellbeing.
Alison grew up in a secure and happy home, she said, with a loving mother and Methodist minister father. But this contented family scene was shattered when her father died in the act of saving her life. Childhood trauma like this can have an enormous impact on mental health, she said, but Alison’s described how circumstances ensured that the event ‘was a tragedy, not a disaster.’ It was ‘good fortune’, she said – the fortune of having ‘a supportive and safe enough community around me … support from family, from the church community and from the state.’
Others are not so fortunate. Adults in the lowest income bracket are three times more likely to experience problems with their mental health than people in the highest income bracket, said Alison; children are five times more likely. Fifty-two per cent of people who identify as LGBT+ report experiences of depression in one year; forty-six percent of trans people contemplate suicide in the same period. Black people are four times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act than white people. Poor mental health can arrive for many reasons, she said, and to anyone, but ‘if you have few opportunities to shape your life, if people reject you for who you are, if there are barriers to you engaging with the world… then this can wear down your resilience’.
Alison said that there were three key reasons why she believed she had avoided poor mental health herself: ‘Faith, hope and love.’ Firstly, ‘believing in some purpose… gives shape and meaning to life, and being part of a faith community has been shown to be a protective factor’. ‘Part of good mental health is having faith in your fellow humans; being able to make good enough judgements about other people and having faith that they can do the same for us.’ This was not true for everyone. Seeing people put faith into action through hope, like her mother peace campaigning (left), helped Alison ‘develop the habits of hope – loving the world, persevering, putting things into perspective.’ Then love – which can be as practical as the institutional love that provided a council home for her family – is essential. ‘Knowing that you are loved yourself, loving others, seeing love in practice, serves as a foundation for resilience.’ This was the most important lesson: ‘We must live love.’
Yearly Meeting Gathering videos are now embedded at www.quaker.org.uk/ym/programme.
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