Letters on Liberty: Escaping the Straitjacket of Mental Health

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Sunday 20 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today. Faced with this challenge, the Academy of Ideas decided to launch Letters on Liberty – a radical public pamphleteering campaign aimed at reimagining arguments for freedom in the twenty-first century.

In his Letter – Escaping the Straitjacket of Mental Health – lecturer and mental-health professional Dr Ken McLaughlin argues that failing to distinguish between mental distress, which requires serious help, and the more mundane, albeit painful, times when we might feel low or anxious, is a problem. Many within the mental-health industry have inadvertently led more people to view themselves through the prism of mental illness, he argues. Ken writes that if we care about helping those in mental distress, and want to protect our freedoms, we need to ensure that we do not swap the literal straitjacket for its metaphorical equivalent.

Join Ken and respondents to ask whether our current approach to mental health risks failing the people who need it most. Is normalising mental health by talking about it as something everyone shares a good thing? Or does the relativisation of mental stresses as mental illness risk trivialising the more serious cases of mental ill health? Do recent examples, like that of Valdo Calocane, point to wider issues in mental healthcare of neglect or under resourcing? And should lovers of liberty come to terms with the fact that, as JS Mill argued, there are times in which it is necessary to remove someone’s freedom?

SPEAKERS
Dr Ashley Frawley
sociologist; author, Significant Emotions and Semiotics of Happiness

Matilda Gosling
social researcher; author, Evidence-Based Parenting and Teenagers – The Evidence Base (forthcoming)

Dr Ken McLaughlin
former social worker; academic; author, Surviving Identity: Vulnerability and the psychology of recognition and Stigma, and its discontents

Dr Carole Sherwood
clinical psychologist; co-director, Critical Therapy Antidote; founder, Save Mental Health; co-author Cynical Therapies and The Politicisation of Clinical Psychology Training Courses in the UK

CHAIR
Bríd Hehir
writer, researcher and blogger; retired nurse and fundraiser