“This is a horrible thing to say, but I think the mental health thing is being overplayed at the moment. Because anybody who is even remotely sad says they’ve mental problems, so you go: ‘This is what’s called being human.’”

How many of you thanked Dame Joanna Lumley this weekend for saying what you’ve long been thinking? At last, a public figure brave enough to ignore the high fence and ‘Enter At Own Risk’ warning signs around this amorphous term. Someone who, like the little boy at the end of The Emperor’s New Clothes, was willing to state the obvious. No – being “even remotely sad” doesn’t mean you’ve got mental health problems; these are two different things.

If the emails and messages I’ve had from readers are anything to go by, I’m guessing over 90 per cent of you will have agreed with the shocking, outrageous, cancellation-worthy comments Lumley made in her interview with GB News’s Isabel Oakeshott on Friday.

Your thoughts on this issue probably aren’t new, either. I bet you’ve been having discussions around it over the dinner table for months, maybe even years, arguing the pros and cons of ‘stiff upper lips’ with children and grandchildren. Those discussions will have been tentative in the early days – as, like me, you acknowledged the need for greater awareness around mental health problems, and welcomed this new openness in a long-stigmatised area – and then more robust, as the opportunists jumping on what the Ab Fab star called the “mental illness bandwagon” became too flagrant to ignore.

“Why,” you may have wondered as you scanned articles in which children claim homework is harmful to their mental health, teachers claim teaching is detrimental to theirs, university students are “triggered” by hard work, civil servants are “triggered” by their own workplace, and actors openly monetise their own mental health battles, “does nobody actually come out and call this what it is? The shameful and often cynical exploitation of an important cause for personal gain.”

As a columnist who has dealt with various degrees of ‘fallout’ after “this is a horrible thing to say, but…” columns over the years, I can tell you why. And it’s not the social media vitriol, although that can be pretty unpleasant, and after three days of Lumley being called everything from “dangerous” and “stupid” to a “snooty cow” on Twitter, the 75-year-old may already be regretting her remarks. (The irony of the mental health warriors lobbing abuse without a thought for Lumley’s own mental health won’t be lost on her.)

But the real reason most public figures, journalists included, shy away from certain “protected issues” is that they know anything they say, however carefully worded, will be misconstrued.

This is quite deliberate. It’s easier to shame and silence someone once you’ve stripped away all nuance and turned a balanced statement into the attack you secretly want it to be (victimhood, again). How dare this woman suggest mental health problems are all made up? That the suicidal and the clinically depressed just need to “get over it”?

Only, of course, at no point did Lumley say any such thing. But it doesn’t matter how many couches and caveats she included in her remarks, or how vehemently she pointed out: “Of course some of you are going to feel bloody awful or suicidal or mentally depressed – that’s a different thing.”

It doesn’t even matter that the actress has previously spoken out about her own problems – the nervous breakdown she suffered in 1971 that left her unable to leave her home and struggling to breathe, or the decades of support she has given to the mental health charity, Sane. Despite all this, and in a perfect illustration of the selective hearing that occurs in these instances, one tweeted: “I’m intrigued what qualifications she has to make such a dangerous statement/assessment?”

That some people have exploited the conversation around mental health is undeniable. And I realise that despite everything I have just written, this will be read as: “Everyone claiming mental health issues is making it up! They’re all liars who need to pick themselves up, dust themselves down and get on with it!”

But if Lumley’s dissenters bothered to unplug their ears, they would understand that the actress was defending the mentally ill against the chancers so intent on “some sort of special treatment” and the perks of victimhood that they don’t care if they demean the term.

Mental illness may manifest itself in a million different ways, but we all know who those chancers are – just as we all, two years into a pandemic, are likely to have seen the real devastation it can cause at close quarters. So, no, Dame Joanna, I don’t think it was “a horrible thing to say”. If it helps protect the words “mental health” from being delivered with a sneer and an eye-roll, I’d even say it was necessary.