'All I hear is anger and frustration': how Brexit is affecting our mental health

[Soph0571]

“At the abstract level,” Bueno says, “there’s a swell of real distress. Anxiety, disappointment and rage – but it’s an impotent rage that can’t go anywhere.

“Ultimately, it’s a test of bearing the unbearable, which is an existential threat to a lot of people who end up in therapy in the first place. We can’t fight death, but there’s a complete frustration that this seems unfightable, too, that democratic agency doesn’t exist. Politicians are our ultimate caregivers. We’ve entrusted them to look after us.”

Younger people might be more deeply affected – and for reasons more profound than the idea they were hoping to work in Paris. “My experience of millennials is that they’re far more politically engaged than we were,” says Bueno, who is 47. “So they’re more invested in their political identities, which makes this more painful.”

The disconnect between what some people feel – more than six million signed the revoke petition – and what it is assumed that everyone feels (they want to leave, now; they voted once and don’t want to say it again), leaves huge swathes of the population with their political views denied, rendered inauthentic. What if you’re in favour of free movement? What if you think sovereignty is a stupid thing to get worked up about? What if you never thought international collaboration on lawmaking was a bad thing? What if you didn’t see it as losing control? You’re not just outside political parties and discourse, you are a non-person, stateless in Brexitland. And if your civic identity is quite central to your sense of self, that’s hard to take.

[link:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/04/anger-and-frustration-how-brexit-is-affecting-our-mental-health|

I can certainly say I am bloody cross ALL the time....

[T_i_B]

1. There isn't a single aspect to this that isn't dispiriting

Last edited Thu Apr 4, 2019, 06:38 AM - Edit history (1)

The bad motivations, the fanaticism, the lies, the wilful ignorance, the bigotry, spitefulness, hate, incompetence and uncertainty. Even the Brexshitters themselves are becoming weary and dispirited by the whole mess. So we are going to need to support them too.

We all have to find a way to cope with this nonsense and I have to say that avoiding 95% of the British Media at the moment certainly helps. Life is too short to put up with the likes of John Humphreys, Julia Hartley Brewer and Mark Francois.