Doctor, doctor, I’m upset about Brexit

Rich Remoaners are reportedly flocking to Harley Street, seeking treatment for the latest illness to afflict Britain’s beleaguered elite: Brexit anxiety. Dr Vanessa Ruspoli, Harley Street counselling psychologist, coined the term to describe her patients’ regular use of Brexit as a means to express their general feelings of anxiety and inadequacy.

This isn’t the first time Brexit has sent people into therapy. Following the referendum, there were reports that Nottingham and Leeds universities were offering ‘Brexit therapy’ and ‘wellbeing workshops’ to dons in distress.

Ironically, it is usually Brexit voters who are diagnosed as mentally unstable. Brexit-bashers have a habit of reducing the largest democratic vote in Britain’s history to an expression of inchoate rage and mental rot. The vote is pinned, not on any positive aspiration for popular sovereignty, or rational rejection of the EU’s unaccountable politics. Rather, it is pathologised as a ‘collective howl of rage’ or a ‘frenzy of hatred’.

In an article for the Guardian last month, author Ian McEwan likened the referendum result to ‘a depressed teenage self-harmer, [who] takes out a razor to scour a forearm and now contemplates its own throat’. Leaving the EU is an ’emotionally charged decision’, he wrote.

It’s fitting that Brexit, so often pathologised by the Remainer commentariat, has itself become a psychological affliction among the anxious and affluent. As we leave the EU, a continent-wide Safe Space for elites, it is no wonder that the most comfortable are the most distressed by the masses’ demand for change.

Fraser Myers is a producer at WORLDbytes.