Murnaghan 8.12.13 Interview with Eric Joyce MP & Lucy Beresford, psychotherapist about the pressure on MPs.

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, a Labour MP made news this week by opening up about his battle with depression. John Woodcock admitted he was seeking help for the illness but said he would continue his work as an MP. So what effect do the pressures of parliamentary life have on politicians and should they be more open about it? Well I am joined now by the MP for Falkirk, Eric Joyce and the psychotherapist, Lucy Beresford. A very good morning to you both and I’ll start with you, Lucy. Were you heartened to have this glimpse into some of the pressures that go on in Parliament opened up there because statistics tell us that there must be many other MPs who have some kind of mental health problem?

LUCY BERESFORD: Well at least one in four of us is going to experience mental health problems so that means over a hundred MPs possibly. We had a superb debate last year with Charles Walker, Kevin James and others actually opening up about their mental health issues so anybody in the public eye that does that and proves you can be a functioning adult and still have mental health issues that you are trying to address, it’s fantastic for attempting to reduce the stigma. That’s the problem, we’ve still got too much stigma about mental illness.

DM: Eric Joyce, talk to us more broadly about the pressure in there. I was just talking to Ed Balls about the pressures of performing in that Chamber but different people have different ways of coping with them, you had different ways of dealing with them and it led to the position you are in now.

ERIC JOYCE: The fact is that MPs have to live a particular kind of life where they are in the public eyes, whether they are in the House of Commons or in their constituencies and they will have different ways of coping with that almost permanent on-message kind of life. Some people will keep things tightly bundled up, other people maybe like myself may behave in a different way, badly in my case, but the fact is John in this case, he was very courageous because it doesn’t surprise me that there are other things going on in somebody’s brain unnaturally if they have been forced to constrain their natural selves pretty much all the time. It’s a bit like a teacher, when you say I am very, very angry with the class, MPs have to do that much of their lives and I think concomitant strains come along with that.

LUCY BERESFORD: Also you have to think about the constituency effect of the career. I have training for dealing with the fact that people come and sit with me and then they pour out their distress or their trauma but MPs don’t have necessarily training to deal with somebody sitting in front of them and feeling very overwhelmed, very upset but they have to deal with that on a weekly basis without necessarily either the training or the environmental support. It is a very competitive environment as you were discovering with your conversation with Ed Balls, it’s a bear pit, it’s a very intense chamber and when people are shouting at you, they are shouting at you. It’s a very personalised attack. It is a bit like the discussion we were having a couple of weeks ago about cricketers and the high level of cricketers who also have mental health problems because again the sledging that goes on on the pitch is really intimidating and you have to be an incredibly strong character actually to go into it.

DM: But this is the point though, isn’t it? Again from the Ed Balls interview, not a lot of people feel a lot of sympathy for MPs. They think you lot, you know, you dish it out and stick knives in each other’s backs but they don’t actually feel, goodness me, poor old you, look at the hours you work, look at the strains you are under.

ERIC JOYCE: Of course that’s right and that’s just the way it is. The public sort of want two things from politicians it seems to me, they want people who will do their best to fix things from a personal point of view with constituents or from a national point of view, Ed and George Osborne, people like that, doing their best for the nation and all that but they kind of also seem to want moral exemplars who have higher standards which is a kind of risible notion really when you think about it but you can’t really have both. I think a lot of politicians manage to get through their political careers without being caught out badly and some don’t but it is kind of an unnatural requirement for people.

DM: But how do you get that across, Lucy, to the population, that the people you elect in actual fact aren’t very different from you and they are like the bloke you meet down the pub and they will have all these stresses and strains and problems and issues that exist in the general population?

LUCY BERESFORD: I think Eric’s right, I think we have a very conflicted view of our politicians. We vote for them and then we say we now want you to be perfect, we want to divest ourselves of any responsibility for fixing things, we want you to fix it and then we wonder when actually that burden is too great. I think it is very much about people like Eric, people like Charles, people like Kevin, coming out and saying, do you know what, it’s very tough. What I’m doing is actually a good job for all of you but I’m coping with my own issues as well, demystify the therapy side.

DM: Thank you for that, I’m sorry we are out of time. Eric Joyce, Lucy Beresford, very good to see you, thank you very much indeed.