Has Mental Illness Always Been Stigmatised in Modern Britain? Newspapers and the Munich Crisis

Recently, the mental health charity Heads Together celebrated its first year of campaigning.  Launched in May 2016 by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, alongside Prince Harry, its main initiative was to ‘tackle stigma and change the conversation on mental health.’ Standing before an audience of partners at Buckingham Palace, the Duke of Cambridge proudly emphasised the need for open conversation and declared that ‘the walls of judgement and stigma around mental illness are finally falling’.[1]

But reflecting on this point we might ask, were these walls as high as we have been led to believe? Did the British people of the 20th century really fail to empathise with those suffering from mental health issues? Or in an age of increased scientific understanding, have we overplayed the level of stigma attached to mental illness in Britain’s past?

Certainly, psychological fields, workplace policy, and general understanding of mental health has improved over the last century. However, psychological studies relating to mental health were developing as far back as the 19th century when Durkheim deemed that social factors increased the likeliness of suicide.[2] Even after the First World War, an understanding of ‘shellshock’ (or PTSD) and how it psychologically affected combatants was relatively understood. To address these questions further, we need only to look to newspapers of the late 1930s during a time where social anxieties were intensified by ‘war fear’.

This brings us to the Munich Crisis and the build up to Total War. At the risk of simplification, it is the surface-based study of earlier newspapers and ‘imperially’ fashioned texts which initially shaped our understanding of the public in the early 20th century.

At first it seems such texts depicted suicidal individuals as ‘weak’ or ‘cowardly’, which then enables historians to understand these individuals as shunned by society. However, reflecting on newspapers dating from around the time of the Munich Crisis in 1938 (where the language of imperialism was still relatively used), reveals a deeper understanding of depression than was previously assumed.

It was understood, as far back as the late 1930s, that one’s misfortune could lead to depression. For example, lost love, separation, debt, over-work and anxiety were known to increase the possibility of suicide. This was reflected in newspapers. In Bournemouth, the Daily Mail reported a suicide caused by ‘worr[y] over foreign bonds’.[3] While in Kent, the Manchester Guardian reported another caused by overwork, alongside his ‘nervous disposition’.[4] An inability to ‘endure […] parting’ was deemed the reason for a woman’s suicide in Shaldon.[5] The dangers to mental health of accumulated grief and stress were already widely acknowledged and attributed to circumstance.