Boris Johnson is quite the renaissance man. He builds buses! He writes columns! He dabbles in politics! And now, it would appear, he fancies himself a mental health expert. On Sunday, Johnson used his Telegraph column to share his brilliant solution to Britain’s mental health crisis: drown out your inner demons with work. Yep, according to the sentient shock of hair that will probably be Britain’s next prime minister, you can rid yourself of depression by working harder.
Johnson’s views on mental health largely seem to be influenced by that famous wellness guru, Winston Churchill. “It was with work that [Churchill] pitchforked off his depression,” BJ informs us in his column. “[A]nd what was true for Churchill is basically true for all of us: that to a very large extent we ‘derive our self-esteem from what we do’. It is often from our jobs … that we get that all-important sense of satisfaction.”
This isn’t entirely false; many of us derive structure and purpose from work. Many of us are just like Churchill! However, positioning work as the cure for mental health problems is mind-bogglingly reductive. “Pull yourself together” is what Johnson’s basically saying. Buck up. Shake yourself out of it. But depression, of course, isn’t something you can simply shake off. It is not a bad mood. It is not a head cold. Losing yourself in work might help you feel better temporarily, but it is not exactly a solution to mental health issues.
It is also unhelpful, I think, to perpetuate the idea that we should “derive our self-esteem from what we do”. There is nothing wrong with being too ill to work. There is nothing wrong with doing nothing. And yet most of us have internalised the toxic notion that we should value ourselves according to our output. The pressure to constantly feel that we are being productive, to work non stop, is one reason so many of us feel perpetually burned out.
Conservatives think that work is the answer to everything because it allows them to put all responsibility, all blame, on individuals rather the system. Too poor to buy food? Just work harder! What do you mean you’re already working hard? Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work harder. Too depressed to get out of bed? Work harder. It’ll do you good!
Johnson’s column notes that 57% of working days lost to ill health in the UK are “due to stress, depression or anxiety”. This is alarming, he explains, because “as soon as someone leaves their job, and forsakes that self-defining sense of purpose, they are at risk of entering a downward spiral of depression”. Johnson, Britain’s knight in scruffy armour, wants to prevent that downward spiral by incentivising businesses to do more when it comes to their employees’ mental health. If he gets elected, he announces, one of his priorities will be to offer preferential tax treatment to companies that give their employees “the counselling and the help they need to do their jobs”.
While nobody can argue with the fact that companies ought to look after their employees, Johnson’s policy proposal should set off alarm bells. Access to mental health care shouldn’t depend on your employer or your employment status; it should be available to everybody. What Johnson is proposing sounds scarily like a step towards an American-style system, where employers are largely responsible for healthcare, not the government. It sounds scarily like a step towards privatising the NHS.
So let us forget corporate tax breaks, please. I have another suggestion for how we can improve Britain’s mental health: not working. Specifically, Boris Johnson not working in politics and never ever working as prime minister.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and brand strategist based in New York
