One of the government’s “moonshot” programmes should be to eradicate all unnecessary psychological suffering in the UK. The target should be to make the UK the happiest country on earth. Not only would this, in time, significantly improve the nation’s physical health, but it would also create a more resilient society, which is economically dynamic, innovative, and productive. In the short term, it would create a large number of meaningful jobs in pursuit of an objective that, hopefully, the vast majority of people could get behind.
All the elements of solving the jig saw puzzle already exist. Psychologists, cognitive scientists and practitioners know how to help people (especially mothers, teenagers, and young adults) prevent and treat mental health problems. Marketing and communications professionals know how to get messages to go “viral” such that people take action. Looking after one’s mental health should be as common as brushing one’s teeth or going to the dentist. They can also figure out how to de-stigmatise and legitimise an all-in focus on mental health. And how to energise the existing health and teaching staff to be part of this mission.
Systems engineers can work out the end-to-end requirements from every angle for such a programme to work, all the way from getting the general public engaged, to identifying people who are looking for new careers, to providing the teaching and reskilling support, to any digital platforms and data infrastructure that would benefit the effort. Data analysts and software engineers can create the systems to capture data and analyse it over time to continually improve the system and measure its effectiveness. These efforts can help optimise provision of both reskilling and support measures to everyone over time.
Pedagogists can find the best ways to teach adults – who may not have previously done much beyond secondary school – the key skills required to support mental health interventions. The good news is that this primarily requires “people skills” that are inherent in every person, regardless of qualifications. Teaching professional will also be able to craft ways in which mental health (including emotional intelligence) becomes part of the school curriculum (as it already is in some other countries).
Economists can help identify the ways to “tempt” people into these new careers in health and teaching, and how to justify the “moonshot” based on its costs and benefits. Organisational psychologists can help ensure that job satisfaction among the newly created jobs remains high, hence contributing to effectiveness, productivity, and low turn-over. Political scientists can help identify likely sources of resistance, ways to overcome it, and ways to allow the “moonshot” to “fail small and fast” – as will inevitably be the case in such an effort.
Implementing the solution will, of course, be highly challenging, and will take a high-powered, independent, committed, patient, talented and inter-disciplinary team. There are many incumbent institutions and individuals, and thoughtful but inflexible experts, who will not see it as their first priority to make it work. Indeed, they will potentially sign up to such a vision “passive aggressively”, either with a sceptical, detached approach or by actively stopping progress at every turn.
I do not yet have a solution to how this aspect of the problem can be overcome. But it is surely worth spending some of the government’s £10+ bn R&D budget on. If we have the “best brains” in Britain, then they should be able to crack this, as long as they work across disciplines, are willing to experiment in “real life” (rather than just in labs), and are given the political and media “cover” to remain persistent, patient and systemic in their approach.
This is a fundamentally “human” challenge. Not coincidentally, most of the big societal challenges facing public policy institutions these days are similar in nature: systemic, complex, involving a large number of actors, and inherently “wicked” in that no silver-bullet solutions exist. The good news is that, as is the case with “moonshot” projects, there are likely to be a large number of solutions generated along the way that get deployed and utilised in all kinds of walks of life.
An added bonus beyond improving the nation’s wellbeing could therefore be a much deeper understanding of, and experience in, making such large-scale changes a success. Figuring out how to solve complex, systemic public policy problems, is at a huge premium, well beyond the sphere of job creation, reskilling, and mental health.
The prize of getting this right is enormous. As demonstrated, for example, in Richard Layard’s books, mental health is by far the most important driver of people’s wellbeing, life-satisfaction and happiness. And the mental health legacy of COVID-19 could be a crisis much worse than the pandemic itself. In 2020, life-satisfaction in the UK dropped by an amount equivalent to every single person having lost their jobs or every single person having separated from their partner! Indeed, it is likely that – if monetised – the drop in life satisfaction was far greater than the (unprecedented, roughly) -10% loss in GDP. Millions of people will need to be reskilled anyway as part of “building back better” and preparing the UK for a more automated, digitized future. The new jobs created might as well be deployed in the area that most people think is more important than anything else: their wellbeing.
295-11