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We Need to Stop Treating Mental Health Like a Selling Point

As with feminism, we’re seeing a serious issue commodified by the music industry while major government action remains pretty much non-existent.
Emma Garland
London, GB

Awareness: this is the term most often used in reference to the UK's snowballing mental health crisis. Often it's used positively, through campaigns like Time To Change that aim to tackle the discrimination—particularly among men—that can prevent people seeking treatment. Sometimes it's used like a band aid for a severed limb, such as when Theresa May claimed the problem was "more about the stigma" than funding, even though budget cuts are leading to a rise in unexpected deaths, and lack of emergency beds mean the NHS often has to pay private hospitals to take their patients or send them hundreds of miles away. Then there is the music industry, which, despite so many artists and organizations being vocal on the issue over the last few years in particular, has routinely failed to provide enough tangible support. What it has done, however, is spin it into something marketable.

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In a similar way to how "feminism"—in its vaguest terms—has been hijacked as a way of selling anything from period pants to singer-songwriters, mental health is rapidly becoming a commodified issue. Most recently, NME put Stormzy on the cover of an issue titled "Depression: it's time to talk" without his permission. The cover features Stormzy holding his fist in his other hand like an Eastenders character about to avenge a family crisis—as if to say "yes, it is time to talk"—and it's designed to give the impression that he gave NME an exclusive interview in which he spoke about his mental health, when in fact he turned their request down. They quoted things he'd said elsewhere and ran the cover anyway. Just weeks earlier, Stormzy spoke about his misconceptions about depression, his own experience and what convinced him to talk about it on his debut album, Gang Signs & Prayer, in an interview with Channel 4 News. Being the first time Stormzy had spoken so openly about depression, the video ended up going viral. NME then basically printed the transcript of that interview, with an intro tacked on.

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