Hello, my name is David Rumsman and this is Talking Politics.

Today we're going to talk about the politics of mental health and we're also going to talk about the mental health of politics.

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I've got Helen Thompson with me and Chris Brooke. I should probably start by saying none of us

is claiming to be an expert on mental health. What we are interested in is the politics of it, because mental

health has become a much, much more visible political issue in the last few years. And one of the

things it would be good to talk about is why we think that's happened and what we think is

driving it. But there's another trigger for this discussion too, which is the imminent publication

of a book called The Inner Level.

It's the follow-up to a really important book by the same authors called The Spirit Level, which

was published in 2009, which, along with Thomas Piccatee's capital in the 21st century,

made inequality an absolutely central issue of politics. And the argument of the spirit level,

to summarise it very briefly, was that inequality is bad for everyone, that a massive data

could be produced to show that well-being, health, quality of life suffers in increasingly

unequal societies across the board. So it's not just the people

at the bottom to be almost anywhere on a hierarchy which is geared around status and is increasingly

strung out, strings people out. The inner level builds on that, but it's a little bit different.

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