Britain’s mental-health crisis is a tale of unintended consequences

IT HAS BOARD games, club nights until “silly o’clock” and bouncy castles. But Open Door, a social enterprise for youngsters on the Wirral peninsula, has still not achieved peak fun. Its founder, Lee Pennington, plans soon to move the charity to the “Joy Building”, an ex-council property that will be adapted so that visitors can whizz between floors on slides. Not that long ago, the charity would have called itself a youth club. Now it uses a different argot. “We’re rebranding mental health,” says Mr Pennington. “We’re trying to engage the disengaged, normalise the conversation and ultimately have a good time doing it.”Mr Pennington is not alone in trying to get more Britons to open up about their mental health. Visitors to Open Door have included the Prince and Princess of Wales, who have spearheaded mental-health awareness campaigns in recent years. Such efforts have been very successful in destigmatising mental-health problems. In a survey in 2019 more than three-quarters of Britons said that mental illness is an illness like any other, the highest of all 29 countries polled. Awareness has only increased since the covid-19 pandemic.