How mental health was dragged into the culture war

Mental Health Awareness Week starts on Monday, a time we should be surely reflecting on real progress, like reduced stigma, greater openness and a deeper understanding of mental wellbeing. Instead, it arrives amid a growing political effort to recast that progress as a societal menace.

Let’s be clear, the claim that Britain is “overdiagnosing” mental illness is not a serious diagnosis of a social issue. It’s a political strategy. It reframes vulnerability as weakness, support as excess, and turns one of the country’s most pressing public health challenges into a convenient scapegoat for a much older and familiar objective – shrinking the welfare state.

What’s being constructed is not a policy debate, but a culture war front. Pitting the “deserving” against the “undeserving,” with mental health as the battleground.

The real target: welfare spending

And the usual suspects are piling it on.

Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice has likened mental health to the “modern-day equivalent of back pain,” suggesting people are “swinging the lead.” Nigel Farage has warned of “massive overdiagnosis” creating a “class of victims.” Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt has argued young people are being overdiagnosed with mental health conditions, while Kemi Badenoch has said we are living in an “age of diagnosis” that is economically unsustainable.

This language does more than question policies and trends, it invites suspicion, not just of those seeking help, but of doctors and the system itself. It implies diagnoses are handed out too easily, that hardship is exaggerated, and that support is being gamed.

Sadly, once that premise takes hold, the policy direction inevitably follows.

The Labour government is tightening eligibility for health-related benefits, aiming to reduce Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and Universal Credit, as part of efforts to curb a rising disability benefit bill, with a particular focus on narrowing access for those with mental health conditions like anxiety or depression.

Yet research into similar Conservative-era reforms warns such cuts are likely to have “devastating” consequences for disabled people’s mental health, while pushing many into poverty.

A study by public health experts at the University of Liverpool examined the impact of cuts to out-of-work disability benefits introduced by the Conservative government in April 2017. It found that the cuts, pushed through parliament by Tory work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith as part of his Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, had a “serious” impact on disabled people who left work in that period. The changes were associated with an additional 92,000 people with long-term conditions each year reporting “common mental disorders” such as depression and anxiety. The £30-a-week reduction for those in the work-related activity group (WRAG) of the Employment and Support Allowance, was linked to a “serious” deterioration in mental health among affected claimants.

The research also warned that such cuts can impose significant downstream costs on public services, including the NHS, social care and local authorities.

Framing mental health as overdiagnosis provides political cover for these measures, and it’s a framing that’s depressingly familiar on the pages of the right-wing press. Just this week, the Telegraph’s front page proclaimed ‘welfare pays more than work for 600,000 households,’ linking benefit spending to pressures on Britain’s defence budget.

Such headlines construct a narrative of excess, even when the underlying data is far more complex.

The reality: a system under strain

This narrative also bears little resemblance to the state of mental health services.

Data from Rethink Mental Illness shows that patients routinely face far longer waits for mental health treatment than for physical conditions, with many waiting over 18 months. That is not evidence of overdiagnosis, it’s evidence of under-capacity.

Research from Mind, YoungMinds and the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition paints a similar picture: that young people feel underserved, not overindulged; that parents are concerned about access, not excess; and that there is widespread belief that policymakers are failing to respond adequately.
The idea of a system awash with unnecessary diagnoses collapses when confronted with the reality of long delays and unmet need.

What’s actually driving the crisis

Rising levels of mental ill health, especially among younger people, are well documented, but they are not the product of a cultural fad, driven by TikTok content that frames traits like talkativeness or difficulty finishing projects as evidence of ADHD, as the right-wing culture warriors would have us believe.

Evidence points instead to a convergence of structural pressures. The charity Mind notes how a significant proportion of mental health problems are linked to early-life adversity, including poverty, trauma, and social isolation.

Economic instability has also become a defining feature of today’s youth, with the cost-of-living crisis cited by many as a direct contributor to declining mental wellbeing.

The Health Foundation highlights how economic policy can shape feelings of insecurity and hopelessness, while research from King’s College London points to the additional influence of social media and technological change.

These are complex, overlapping drivers. Reducing them to “overdiagnosis” is not simplification, it’s distortion.

Another factor often misrepresented is the rise in mental health awareness itself.

Campaigns such as Mental Health Awareness Week, led by the Mental Health Foundation, which was founded in 1949, exist because stigma and silence once dominated public attitudes. Greater visibility today reflects progress in recognising and addressing mental health, not a sudden surge in fabricated illness.

To characterise this shift as a problem is to imply that previous underreporting was preferable, that fewer diagnoses meant a healthier society. But the evidence does not support that conclusion.

Pushback from the front line

Mental health and disability organisations have hit out at claims of widespread overdiagnosis, pointing to how individuals often face prolonged, difficult processes to secure diagnosis and support.

They warn that dismissive language risks deepening stigma and discouraging people from seeking help, consequences that are particularly dangerous in a system already under strain.

Mel Merritt, head of policy and campaigns at the National Autistic Society, condemned Farage’s comments as “wildly inaccurate” and that they show how “completely out of touch with what autistic children and adults have to go through to get a diagnosis or any support at all.”

“Children with Send and disabled adults, including autistic people, are not victims who are being ‘overdiagnosed’” he said.

“They are people who face huge delays and long fights to get the most basic support across every aspect of their lives, including diagnosis, education, health and social care.

“Spreading misinformation only perpetuates stigma and makes life harder. We’re calling on all politicians to drop the political point-scoring and stand up for their autistic and other disabled constituents.”

A familiar playbook

And this strategy has precedents. In Hungary, former far-right leader Viktor Orbán pursued welfare retrenchment under the banner of promoting work.

In 2012, he announced Hungary would move away from a “Western-type” welfare state, arguing it was not competitive. The goal was to force the unemployed into public work programmes. The government cut maximum unemployment benefits to three months and slashed average benefit payments to roughly 25% below the minimum wage.

While employment figures improved on paper, the model coincided with rising inequality and broader economic strain. It ultimately faltered amid stagnation, inflation and growing public dissatisfaction, culminating in the election victory of Péter Magyar’s Tisza party.

Farage has peddled similar themes, recently arguing Britain’s main divide is between “those that work and those that don’t,” even suggesting he would pursue benefit cuts despite the risk of riots.

It’s a familiar line within the populist radical right, and one that history suggests carries significant social costs.

As Annamária Artner, senior research fellow at the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of World Economics, wrote in Social Europe in 2016: “Hungary represents an extreme outlier in its zealous adoption of workfare, questioning the fundamental values of solidarity which should underpin a social Europe.”

By casting society as “those who work” versus “those who don’t,” figures like Farage reduce complex realities to moral categories. Mental health becomes a marker within that divide, recast as evidence of dependency rather than a legitimate condition.

As Mental Health Awareness Week approaches, the contrast is depressing. On one hand, there’s been decades of effort to reduce stigma and expand support; on the other, there’s a growing weaponisation of mental health within a broader ideological battle.

The evidence points to a system under strain, shaped by economic pressure and unmet need. The culture war narrative, by contrast, points elsewhere, towards individual blame and systemic retrenchment.

The danger is not only that this narrative is wrong. It is that, if acted upon, it risks deepening the very crisis it claims to explain.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch