My mental health tip for 2010? Go on a ‘News Fast’. Why? Because too much news is detrimental to your wellbeing.  We all know that news really means BAD NEWS. 

It winds us up; creating a sense of impotence at the random chaos that is our world. We worry and fret about events we have no control over. We hear and see things that are traumatising, leaving us overwhelmed and with repeated exposure, numbed out.  Boy, do we suffer when we watch the news.

Not wishing to be ‘badly informed’ (heaven forbid!! although if anything really interesting happens someone is bound to tell you) I allow myself a 10-minute snatch of Radio 4 in the mornings, but mostly because I enjoy the personalities of the presenters. What I find really interesting as the non-telly-watching, on a permanent-news-diet sort of gal I am, is that when I do come into full contact with it, it makes me feel anxious.

A recent hospitalisation brought me into contact with TV news. Now hospitals are places where news really should be banned. You are already terribly unwell to be there, do you really need to be suffering any more?

Coming round from an allergic reaction to some medication that made me feel as if I was tripping on acid in a Deer Hunter style video nasty, the TV set in my room was on. I woke up to someone breathlessly reporting on the apocalyptic events in Haiti. I have no issue with reportage that tells a story of human catastrophe with compassion, but that is not what I was seeing.  Our brave reporter showed us images of a little girl who he told us - almost triumphantly (at getting the scoop?)  - was dying.  In your face was her little dying face, in close up.

I will never forget the image of that child dying so many thousands of miles away. You may well say, ‘Well then he did his job and told you the news’. But we already know the news from Port au Prince.  What he did was exploit other people’s biblical suffering for entertainment ratings. The way he reported, the camera work, the relentless glare on her little dying body, the close ups of her agonised face and the traumatised and desperate father, unable to comprehend and who, if he had been fully aware, would have punched the reporter on the nose… be honest, would you let someone film YOUR child dying? News reporting is nothing short of horrific. The news has become a horror show. We should be ashamed.

On returning home, I turned on the radio. A woman read out in soothing tones and unrelenting detail the sadistic crimes of two pre-adolescent boys. We were spared nothing. That it was shocking enough that two little boys could be so disturbed as to torture their peers wasn’t enough for our newscaster. They wanted us to know everything - and I mean everything – that was done to the victims.

If you are a habitual news addict you may not notice what is being done to you. (This is called desensitisation and it cuts you off from your real feelings about what is happening to you.) But as someone who makes a conscious decision not to stress my life any more than it is already and who treats people who are psychologically unwell, I can assure you that what you are doing to yourself is making you anxious. Oh and if you are exposing your children to this stuff, then they will be distressed too.

And the irony is that we constantly ask ourselves what is going on? We all scratch our heads and say ‘Why?’ Why is everyone so anxious and depressed? Why are people so aggressive? Why are we all so hostile and intolerant? Well the answer, in part, is in the broadcast.
When will we get real about how noxious our media really are? How sensationalised, how morbidly obsessed, how grotesque. Popular culture will always reflect society’s values. Can they sink lower? Of course they can and they will. But I don’t want to be a part of it. Make a stand and join me. Ban so called news, ‘celeb gossip’ and demeaning TV from your lives. Then the people who create it will have to find something more enlightening to do and we will live in a less stressful, more compassionate, healthier world where our children won’t end up so brutalised and cut off from reality that they turn into murderous sadists by the age of ten.

My advice to my patients who are anxious and depressed is turn off the box, stop listening to the news and focus on what you can make good in your life, in your community, in your world. A relentless obsession with the dark side will bear none of us any fruit. Only fruitcakes and seriously toxic ones at that.