I'm all right, Jack
by Charlie Edwards
We have tried not to be too alarmist - there's no reason why we need to highlight life threatening / fear inducing stories - the UK fieldwork we undertook this year and before Christmas 08 capture the ongoing work in government and communities on making the UK more resilient and it's pretty positive stuff - some of the work needs improvement and a tweak here and there but most of it is fantastic.
Creating fear is most of the time counter-productive - people feel powerless to do anything if they are scared - its why Governments and organisations always need to tread carefully when communicating risk otherwise there is a tendency for the message to get lost in the noise (of screaming people)... fortunately we know this - the problem lies in the fact that government is still pretty terrible at communicating risk - something we tackle in Chapter 3 Lost in translation.
This week the Mental Health Forum published a report arguing that a more fearful UK society is linked to a rise in anxiety disorders. Andrew McCulloch lays out the aim of the report in his introduction,
We must learn to live with fear as individuals, communities and a society. It is not surprising that we cannot always do this – it is hard wired into our brains. But we have to factor it in, only then can we address the key challenges of the 21st century. This report aims to help individuals, communities, leaders and commentators to find ways to start doing this
What is interesting is that this message got rather lost in the ensuing media scrum. Here are some of the top headlines:
Anxiety, fear on the rise in Britain: mental health report
Britons 'living in fear' as record numbers suffer from anxiety
Britons are increasingly living in fear
Nation's growing unease 'hindering recovery'
UK society 'increasingly fearful'
Terrifying and also to a some extent not true. As the Economist points out:
Look a little closer, though, and people seem reassuringly resilient to doom-mongering. Official survey data suggest that the number of people suffering from anxiety disorders is up, but only slightly, from 13.3% in 1993 to 15% in 2007 (in America the figure is 18%). Mental health is tricky to measure, but Britain does not seem noticeably worse than other rich nations. Its suicide rate is low, and the OECD, a rich-nation think-tank, reckons that British prescriptions of anti-depressants hover around the average.
Apparently we tend to over estimate how fearful other people are:
Although 77% of respondents agreed that “people are more frightened or anxious than they used to be”, only 37% felt that way themselves, whereas 29% said they were more sanguine than before. That discrepancy extends to specific terrors: 63% of people think the economic situation is a major cause of fearfulness in others, but only 12% of respondents confessed to feeling “quite” or “very” scared about it personally (see chart). Shame or self-delusion may explain some of the difference (28% of respondents claimed, rather improbably, never to feel frightened about anything).
This chimes with our research in Resilient Nation. As we argue there is a paradox at the heart of our society:
As individuals we have never been safer, wealthier (in spite of the current recession) or healthier. We have never had so many tools to help us live our lives, but as a society our complicated lives, individual fears and increasingly high expectations have led us to believe that we are more at risk than ever.