Increasingly, the story of mental illness and neurodivergence is told by people in the unusual position of being able to leverage it to some advantage. To get away with dodgy business practices, to avoid difficult consequences – hard questions and job losses. All of this is incredibly galling for those for whom compassion, or the benefit of the doubt, or basic rights have been revoked in the wake of disclosure.

Before its release, Cyberpunk 2077 was hyped as ‘the video game of 2020’, a prediction that rings eerily true in the sense that 2020 was a disappointing dumpster fire, and so too was the game. Cyberpunk 2077 is a case study of what happens when you exploit workers, deceive consumers, and put a projected, ideal future ahead of messy reality.

The costs of what once would have been on-the-job training has been socialised and offloaded to tertiary education institutions, while the benefits of having a ‘job ready’ workforce are privatised. Employers benefit from the training that the taxpayer and the student fund. And they’re still unhappy.

‘Don’t worry,’ the message was, ‘only the sick and the elderly are at risk.’ As though sick and older folks aren’t hearing these messages, too. As though age and illness don’t thread through all human lives.

My first response to anti-vaxxers and others telling Sia that the real source of her disease were toxic ticks and ‘chemicals’ was rage. But reflecting on this state of mainstream medical knowledge has allowed me to have empathy for how people get into these alternative explanations.

We need to reframe the way we think of mental health – not just in terms of mutated genes, dysfunctional cells, misfiring neurons, and individual memories of an unhappy childhood, but also as an extension of public life. The mind is both a personal and politicised space.

Kondo claims it could help overspending, weight loss efforts, starting a business, unhappy relationships, career dissatisfaction, feelings of insecurity, stress, procrastination, not knowing your direction in life, and so on. Under this rubric, any problem could be absurdly blamed on not being tidy enough.

When US musician Mariah Carey was diagnosed with bipolar back in 2001, she feared it would end her career. Over the following seventeen years she worried that someone would ‘expose’ her secret. Stigma concerning mental illness is real; although Carey’s one of the most successful performers of all time, she was still unable to talk about her diagnosis.

I’ve been at a few storytelling events in which adults bring in the diaries they kept as a teenager and laugh at the things they wrote. I laughed along, but with some sense of disquiet. There are limits to looking back on your direct experience – as you lived it then – with a jovial posture. Reading through my own old experiences would not be funny. My old diaries talk of a deep sense of misery and loneliness. Reading them aloud would be enacting a cruelty to a self that no longer exists but who I feel protective of, and sad for. I also don’t think it would be an ethical representation of a woman, nor of a person who lives with mental illness, nor of myself.

Natalie Wood had lived in the same house on Kippax Street in Surry Hills for most of her life. She was an elderly woman, a retired machinist at David Jones and a divorced war bride. It is likely that she died in early 2004, though police didn’t find her body until they searched her house in 2011. By then, part of her ceiling had caved in and a tree had spread into an upstairs room. Canisters of expired coffee and condensed milk were found amongst her other possessions, such as jewellery and her medications. There was dust and cobwebs.

Progressives in Belgium have begun to argue for the right of individuals with mental illness to decide their own fate. Last year, three per cent of euthanasia cases in Belgium were for people with psychiatric conditions. In the last month, a highly publicised decision will allow Laura, a 24-year-old woman, to receive a lethal injection to end her psychological pain. Laura, who is otherwise physically healthy, has depression. She reportedly told Belgian newspaper, De Morgan, ‘Life, that’s not for me.’

With Tony Abbott’s new cabinet ministry announced, Australia no longer has a Minister for Mental Health. This is far more than an aberration. A lack of accountability when it comes to mental health in this country constitutes a crisis, a crisis that has spanned decades. Despite significant government investment in mental health since 2006 (some $8 billion in funding), there is a large degree of resource waste.