the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

My mental health is my business and yours is yours. If you want to share your problems the I have no issue with that, but I really don’t want to share mine.

Some of that comes from my age. I am of a different generation, once removed from the one that went through the Second World War and we lived through the threat of a nuclear war along the way. My father served in the Royal Navy during WW2. I know from his service records that one of his ships was not inly sunk, but that the one that rescued him was sunk too. He did not talk about his wartime experiences other than occasionally mentioning some of the places that he saw.

I was brought up around people who did not share their problems too widely. You might confide in a close friend, but that was it. The idea of confiding in a stranger was unthinkable, but did we emerge from this as generations of twisted people? No. Of course there were some who had issues, but, in general, we got on with life.

It’s about experience. The old expression “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, like most old adages, is based in truth. I think that I was lucky to have lived in the period that I grew up in simply because I grew up. Life was hard and certainly was not fair, but we got on with it. We took the knocks and toughened up. We had to because we knew that life would hit us again sometime.

Somewhere along the way, as we tried to do the best for our children, and their children, we softened them up and then they took it further. All this cobblers about “No losers”. Of course there are losers and someone is going to come last. So what? We should be striving to make ourselves as strong as we can be, not a bunch of no-hopers. There will always be people who excel, and we should celebrate that, encourage it. 

I feel very sorry for modern generations who can’t seem to cope with anything. There is so much help on offer and I hope that people can make use of it, but the real answer has to come from within. It’s your mind and, in the end, only you can manage it.