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As parliamentary manager for mental health charity Mind, Louise Rubin’s job usually involves lobbying parliamentarians and arranging campaigns to promote good mental health legislation. Until this week, when Rubin saw various newspaper articles about the collective mental breakdown in parliament.

Rubin read stories about MPs crying in the toilets, of rapid weight loss and weight gain, and of a general feeling of utter exhaustion. Most MPs, of course, attributed the stresses and strains to the never-ending turmoil of the Brexit process. “That’s when we decided it was time to step in and offer our support and advice,” Rubin says.


Mind sent a letter to all 650 MPs providing them advice on how to best manage their wellbeing. Rubin called this “a low-level intervention”. “We can’t solve the Brexit crisis,” she says. “We’re only suggesting people are aware of their mental health, and seek help if they do need to.”

Being an MP is an unenviable task, says Timothy Kirkhope, a Conservative MEP, former MP and current member of the House of Lords. “The commitment itself is enormous – and then we get onto the political themes and pressures that are on MPs from their constituents and the local associations, which is much greater than it used to be.” Around a decade ago, Mind conducted an anonymous survey of MPs: like the general population, one in four MPs said they were struggling with mental health problems. As the stress of Brexit has ramped up in the last few months, Rubin worries that statistic is now much higher.

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She’s not alone. Kirkhope, who was a government whip for five years in the House of Commons and one of Britain’s first mental health commissioners back in the 1980s, is worried for the wellbeing of the 650 MPs sitting in the lower chamber. “There’s a whole lot of factors right now operating on people and their ability to resist things which haven’t been seen before,” he says. “They’re under the sort of pressure that affects their mental health but also creates side issues like depressive illnesses, issues such as domestic strife, and issues such as physical illnesses as well.”

Mind’s email to MPs wasn’t the only guidance they’ve received about how to handle the mental stresses of Brexit. On March 4, Lindsay Hoyle, deputy speaker of the House of Commons, emailed all MPs to remind them of the support available to them, including a confidential, 24-hour phone line providing counselling.


What’s causing extra headaches for parliamentarians trying to find a way through the Brexit mess is the perceived irreversibility of whatever is decided by MPs in the coming weeks. “The actual decision is massively important, because it has an impact not only right now, but for years to come,” says Kirkhope. “Normally, you’d say, ‘Well whatever I decide now between elections can be reversed by an incoming government of a different complexion at a general election, which is bound to happen within five years’. We don’t have that situation here.”

There also seem to be few good options – a belief tacitly shown by parliament’s unwillingness to back any proposal for Brexit with a majority. That is a major dampener on mental health. It’s a vicious circle: MPs are kept at work for longer and longer hours, making decisions in the maw of bare-teeth public anger and accountable to the always-angry social media hordes. The worry keeps them awake at night, causing them to make ever-more complicated decisions with ever-less sleep.

“Every person has a different way of coping, and a different level of tolerance around sleep demands and physical demands,” explains Stuart Duff, a business psychologist at Pearn Kandola. “Long hours are not helpful to decision making.”

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“If you have a way out, a plan B or something, where you know you can escape, that’s fine,” says Kirkhope. “But these people are trapped. The MPs are trapped. Unless they decide they don’t want to be MPs anymore, in which case they can get out of it I suppose, but if they’ve got a little bit of political ambition left, they’re trapped in something they can’t control and frankly the pressure cannot be alleviated in the short or even medium term.”


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Labour party grandee Alastair Campbell is acutely aware of the challenges of delivering on such high-stakes decisions, alongside the insociable hours. “For those who do the job well, being an MP is always pretty tricky, because it’s not a very normal lifestyle,” he explains. “A lot of the work is away from your family, and even though the working practices have changed, the hours still aren’t great, and you get a lot of abuse.”

Campbell was often the one dishing out the abuse to members of the press who crossed him in covering the New Labour government, but he believes the pressure on elected officials has increased thanks to the prevalence and always-on nature of social media. “That’s definitely got worse,” he says. There’s always been a generational thing where people say they hate politicians, but because of social media and the divisions of the Brexit debate which have been inflamed, there are MPs who are seriously worried about their safety and security.”

Campbell is also an outspoken advocate for increased mental health awareness, going public with his own problems at a time when few would. Coupled with the responsibility of making such difficult decisions, he believes Brexit has left MPs isolated and alone. “If you think of how many British people at the moment are waking up at the moment and thinking: ‘What the fuck is going on?’, these guys are doing that in spades.”

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However, while MPs can turn to the police for advice on how to stay safe in the face of threats from an increasingly vituperative public, and to colleagues for advice on how to progress politically, Campbell thinks there’s little support for MPs struggling with their mental health. It’s partly their own making, he reckons. “It’s an obvious thing that there should be in any high-pressure, high-stress working environment, but politics is uniquely difficult and politicians are uniquely resistant to that kind of thing.”

While a dozen or so MPs have admitted they’re struggling with mental health problems at present, Campbell knows, from private conversations with MPs, that many more are suffering. “I know why they would not necessarily come out and want to say what they’re going through,” he says. He also thinks the one in four statistic of MPs admitting to mental health difficulties is an underestimate.

“It’s very stressful at the moment,” Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine tells me on a phone-call as she dashes across the capital to catch a flight from London City Airport to her constituency in Edinburgh on Wednesday evening. “I wouldn’t say at the moment it’s something I can’t cope with, but we are beginning to feel just the strain of not getting home when you think you’re getting home. Constituency work that you can’t get done. It doesn’t feel like your life is your own anymore, because you’re at the whim of the government to change it.”

Jardine’s taking a risk in escaping from Westminster midweek – at the time she was betting that a meaningful vote on the Brexit deal wouldn’t be brought later that week, meaning she’d have to travel back to London. But it comes from one of the major frustrations throughout the Brexit process: parliament hasn’t been given a holiday in a while.

The parliamentary recess usually allows MPs the chance to rest and recuperate. Recess normally takes place at similar times to school holidays. But as we’re all aware, things are not normal.

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The last two recesses have been cancelled, ostensibly to ensure MPs were on the parliamentary estate to take part in crucial Brexit votes. “The decision not to have recess, both times, has felt afterwards pretty pointless because we didn’t actually achieve very much,” says Jardine, who became an MP after the 2017 general election that caused much of the parliamentary gridlock currently causing all the issues. “I’m not saying [the government] is doing it deliberately, but it’s a bit like water torture. It slowly wears you down.”

The late nights – Jardine was voting until 23:00 on Monday, then back in the Commons at 09:00 the following morning for further parliamentary business – are grating, and the tiredness adds to the stress.

“I’m actually surprised at the number of MPs that have spoken publicly about this,” says Rubin. “There’s about a dozen MPs of all parties – and all genders – that have been willing to talk about this. It’s a remarkable change from where we were five or six years ago.”

How the customs union became Brexit Britain's political hot potato Brexit How the customs union became Brexit Britain's political hot potato

That said, MPs are meant to be the decision makers. Unable to get a majority for anything, and beholden to the approval of European counterparts, some feel helpless. “In situations of learned helplessness, there is this general decline physiologically and emotionally in terms of what you believe you can do,” says Duff. That appears to be the stage we’re at with some MPs admitting they’re struggling mentally to deal with the Brexit process.

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The next stage, however, can have even more alarming consequences for the country. “You start to move away from the problem rather than deal with the problem,” says Duff. He adds that, so far, we’ve not seen that from MPs. “I don’t think any MP is publicly curling up and giving up. But I suspect along the journey they’ve felt they have no real influence over this decision.”

Still, the pressures felt by MPs are probably less than the stress that those closest to the centre of power are under. “I should imagine the closer you are to the prime minister or the cabinet, the more stressful it’s going to be,” she says. And, if that’s true, no one is feeling the stress more than the prime minister herself. “When we’re under pressure and stress, there is a difference between resilience and rigidity,” says Duff. He adds that Theresa May is quite a good example of this.

“Leaders tend to go into this stoic, rigid, robust mindset. ‘I have to be tough, I have to get through this, I have to stick with my red lines.’ And actually resilience is about bending with the problem,” he explains.

“It’s about learning from the problem every day, and not seeing things in fixed black and white terms. It’s about saying: ‘How do I improve what happened yesterday? What are the new options open to me?’ Leaders can struggle to do that, because they often feel the pressure to be right, and to have the right answer. And what we’re seeing right now is there is not a right answer.”

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