There is a phrase, ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’. But the reality is more like, ‘What doesn’t kill me I will need to forget.’

Consider the early 1900s and the Spanish Flu pandemic. It killed more people than World War One, yet that war gave us a new forms of evocative poetry, films, books and songs, while that pandemic was ignored in popular culture. Analysis of novels from that time show people did not want to buy a pandemic story.

Similarly consider in the 1800s and Paris. Around 1870 the city is besieged in war by Russian forces and thousands die. Two years later is the Uprising with the Communards and another 10,000 people die. Yet what do people do with all this? In 1874 the Impressionist painters create a new movement of loved pictures of sunny fields of flowers, of small boats bobbing in a calm harbour on a sea of light, of young people in bars and on picnics.

So it is now in the 2020s with the latest pandemic.

Never mind that the British authorities handled it the worst of all the developed nations, that children and young people still bear the scars, that people of colour died in overwhelming numbers, that inequality and poverty decided much of who would die.

Instead we have a post-pandemic backlash against young people (snowflakes), against talking about race and inequality (DEI), and against public health (vax). The new conversations on over-diagnosis and young people’s mental health have to be seen in this context.

Yes, the one-size-fits-all response of medicalising the rising number people with distress and difference would be better dealt with by a range of social and community responses (eg open dialogue), but that isn’t the motivation for the backlash.

And now we have politicians making deep cuts to the benefits payments for disabled people which are designed to fall hardest on people with mental health conditions.

We must not forget where these rising numbers came from, and who was responsible.