 The Tokyo Olympics will be remembered as the first one to happen without a live audience. That's of course, because they took place amid a global pandemic. Perhaps not unrelated to that pandemic, they'll also be remembered as the first games where athletes frequently spoke about their mental health. That pertains most famously to Simone Biles, Biles, who's thought to be the greatest gymnast of all time, pulled out of four events, citing difficulties with her mental health. She has since announced she will be competing in Tuesday's Bean Final, as we talked about on the show last week. The decision to withdraw drew criticisms from the likes of Piers Morgan. We won't go into that as we did that last week. You can check that out on our YouTube channel. In terms of opening up about mental health, Biles has now been joined by Adam Petey. Adam Petey is probably Britain's most high-profile competitor at these games. He's won two golds and a silver in Tokyo. That includes gold in the 100-meter breaststroke, which he also won at the Rio Olympics after the wins. Petey announced he would be missing September's International Swimming League, I haven't heard of it either, to look after his mental health. Like Biles, Petey also received some flack after announcing the decision, sharing an article about that move. He tweeted, reading some of the comments in response to this is why we have such a stigma around mental well-being in sport. It isn't a normal job. There is a huge amount of pressure. Money does not buy happiness. And then he goes on, I'm taking a break because I've been going extremely hard for as long as I can remember. I've averaged two weeks off a year for the last seven years. Unfortunately, there are people out there who think they know you more than you know yourself. I should probably add, I mean, other jobs do have lots of pressure. So while I completely back Adam Petey's decision to take a month off to focus on his mental health, he probably shouldn't justify that by saying that being a sports person is not a normal job because I would like every work to be able to take a month off because all jobs tend to be fairly stressful. But we'll put that to one side for one second. Finally, and perhaps most dramatically, we can go to Raven Saunders. Saunders is an American shop putter who made Tokyo's first podium demonstration after winning silver in her competition. Saunders said the X sign, which you can see her making there, represented the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet. Saunders, who is 25 and gay, has frequently spoken about mental health struggles, including considering suicide in 2018 on doing the X gesture, which is expected to fall foul of the International Olympic Committee's ban on political demonstrations on the podium. Saunders said, I really think that my generation really don't care. At the end of the day, we really don't care. Shout out to all my black people. Shout out to all my LGBTQ community. Shout out to all my people dealing with mental health. At the end of the day, we understand it's bigger than us and it's bigger than the powers that be. We understand that there's so many people that are looking up to us that are looking to see if we say something or if we speak up for them. I should note, in case it wasn't clear, when she's saying we really don't care, she's saying we really don't care if the IOC tell us we can't protest on the podium. Not I really don't care about all of these social issues because clearly she does. Ash, we often talk about how responses to mental health problems in society can't be purely symbolic. We need material solutions, good housing, good jobs, good pay, et cetera, et cetera. These kind of messages from elite athletes do also matter, don't they? It is quite refreshing to see these elite athletes who are heroes for so many people coming out and saying, look, I'm struggling too and I'm gonna be open about that. Well, I think what's really important is for us to be able to look at both of those things at once, that of course you need to address the material underlying causes which either make people much more vulnerable in terms of experiencing mental health issues, factors which make the experience of mental health issues much more severe and then also the availability and the accessibility of proper mental health care, right? I think we need to look at that as well as the fact that there is, I think, this quite profound cultural shift when it comes to destigmatizing certain aspects of mental health issues and mental illnesses by young people in the public eye, either in the field of the arts, music, entertainment or indeed sports, these two things happening at once. Because I do think that what we're seeing is that you've got a generation of young people who in Britain and in America are in quite a profound way disempowered in the electoral process. And both of those elected power structures tend to represent not only in their composition but also in the representation of interests, older voters who tend to have more socially conservative views but also are more likely to be financially secure. So looking at rates of home ownership, savings, all of that kind of thing. I'm not saying that every single baby boomer is rich, I'm saying that these things break down along generational lines. Not only is that where young people are dominant because that's where young people have always been dominant. I think the growth of social media has also shifted power within that realm because no longer does an athlete like Raven Saunders have to go, well, how do I impress these really nasty, really reactionary editors and producers and the people who shape broadcast and print media? You've got a direct line to your following and your fan base because of social media. And you've also got I think a kind of shift of power away from broadcast and print media outlets who now know that they've also got to follow the story as it unfolds on social media. And that I think is really powerful when it comes to achieving cultural shifts, changes in norms, values and viewpoints. So while I think we've got in many ways, a deepening of all of these factors which have created a mental health crisis for young people, the rise in precarious forms of employment, the decline in stable housing, the fact that we are in a very volatile political situation, the climate emergency on the horizon, all of these things can really fuck with your mental health. You I think also have this area in which people feel empowered to speak out and not have to count out to the kind of norms which dominated broadcast and print media. And I've said this before, that's why you have people like Piers Morgan ultimately trying to make a name for themselves by being a reactionary backlash against that shift in norms. But it's the scream of the imminently defeated. Piers Morgan knows that this isn't gonna be something that he can win, it's something he can in the short term capitalize on for notoriety, but he can't win it. Because you've got your Raven Saunders, you've got your Azenpites, you've got your Simone Barsas, and you've also got Tyrone Mings, who today was speaking out about his experiences with mental health issues, anxiety and having real trouble around the start of the euros. This is I think a generational shift in norms. It might just take a while for it, if it ever does, to manifest in a change in politics proper. No, I think that's really important, especially that generational divides, people sometimes find them controversial because they say, oh, well, look, I'm of an older generation, I'm open about mental health and I'm actively anti-racist if what we're talking about is football players taking the knee. And obviously that's absolutely true in many of these cases. But I do think one thing that's interesting about sport and culture is in a way it does pick people out quite randomly. You know, it is genuinely meritocratic. The Olympics is genuinely meritocratic, at least the popular sports, not those sports that actually probably only 10 people do in each country anyway. But the popular sports are, sorry to anyone who does the poll while... Sorry for the dressage enthusiast out there, but it's not a meritocracy because only five people do. How many people do it? It's quite, I assume it's quite easy to qualify for these things. Maybe I'm wrong, in any case. You get a horse, Michael. You get a horse and tell me how easy it is. Popular sports are genuinely meritocratic. So it is interesting that you've taken this sort of random cross-section of society when it comes to the Olympic team or when it comes to the English football team. And they are all people who are, you know, quite in tune with communicating anti-racist values, quite in tune with sort of communicating their solidarity with people suffering from mental health struggles in a way that I'm not convinced would have been the case, you know, 40 years ago or even 20 years ago. Potentially it would have been and they just didn't have the social media to make that communication. But I do also think that probably perhaps social media has changed those norms within that generation. I suppose, I mean, in a way, I'm sort of rephrasing what you've already said, Ash, but just to emphasize why I think generational analysis is important when it comes to issues like this. Yeah, I mean, I think like... Because one, it allows you to express yourself more authentically, all right? I also think that in terms of how celebrities now use social media, it had this big shift towards, you know, being handled by management and publicity. And then the pendulum has swung back because actually what celebrities like is having a direct link to their audience and not having it being so managed and curated. And then on top of that, I think you've also got, you know, a huge extent to which power is now just no longer dominated in a public relations sense by, you know, the old gatekeepers of respectable discourse. And I think that a generational analysis, it doesn't explain everything, but I think it explains an awful lot about why we are at this kind of tipping point when it comes to mental health advocacy. One thing that I would like to add, though, is that I think it's important to acknowledge that this project of destigmatization is very, very partial because the kinds of discussions around mental health that it's seen as acceptable to have, it tends to be around depression and anxiety rather than the kinds of, you know, very layered, very complex presentations of mental illness, which also involve things like substance abuse or schizophrenia, the way in which one of these things can then overlap when there is an adequate care and support with homelessness and rough sleeping and all sorts of behaviors which can fall under the bracket of, you know, the deviant, the criminal or the dangerous. So one of the things that I always say be wary of with celebrity mental health advocacy, the insistence of it's okay not to be okay is that all of that is happening within certain constraints and certain limits. So if what you want to do is have a conversation about how do you support people in their experiences of mental health crises, thinking about what it is that's being asked for by celebrities, which is a more hospitable and the stigmatized environment. That's only one part of what needs to be there. There's this whole other realm of I think quite complicated institutions and support structures which need to be in place to catch those people who have those kinds of experiences with mental health which don't see reflected in celebrities.