Cover Story

How we chose this week’s image

Insert a clear and simple description of the image

Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief

One of our two covers this week explores a plan to bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians. The other looks into what Britain gets wrong about mental health—too many mild cases are being medicalised and too many severe ones ignored.

The tricky thing about the Middle East cover was to strike the balance between our exhortation to make peace and our recognition of the horrors of an ongoing war. Israelis are still reeling from the rape and murder of October 7th; Palestinians are watching the mangled bodies of women and children pile up in Gaza. Amid the carnage, blithely proposing peace could seem at best to be naive and at worst to belittle suffering.

The dove with the Holy Land for wings is set against a black background, which is suitably sombre. But this is a story where maps and the lands they portray are highly contested. To have one land, from the river to the sea, could be taken by Israelis that we want to abolish a homeland for the Jews, and by Palestinians that we embrace the maximal claims of the most expansionist Jewish settlers. Neither is true: this cover obscures our view that Israelis and Palestinians need to find a way to live side by side.

The mash up of Israeli and Palestinian flags, as if they were layered on a wall covered with posters, nods to the history of claim and counterclaim stretching back decades. It is an elegant metaphor and it illustrates that we understand making peace would not be simple. The drawback is that readers would struggle to make visual sense of it.

Here we have a journey through a bombed-out maze to some sunny uplands. Over the years Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have thrashed out almost every imaginable permutation of land swaps and security arrangements. All failed. The Oslo accords, marked in 1993 with a wary handshake on the White House lawn, left the hardest details until last. Every inch of progress had to be wrung out of the two sides. This sapped belief that success was possible. If peace is possible at all, it will be fiendishly hard to get to.

This is a powerful idea, too. However, when you have seen news shots of the complete ruination of Gaza city, our maze comes across as surprisingly intact. It is as if we were trying to minimise our account of the destruction caused by Israel’s bombardment. We realised that it would be hard to represent Gazan-scale damage while still depicting a maze that our Israelis and Palestinians could traverse.

We settled for a butterfly alighting on a wall. It is a metaphor for fragility, but it is also a symbol of hope. And, after we had added some bullet holes, it struck the balance we were seeking. Peace requires new leaders on both sides, the backing of America and Arab countries plus the will and—much harder—the belief of Israelis and Palestinians themselves. And yet for two peoples locked in a violent embrace, peace is the only salvation.

Much of the rich world has struggled with rising rates of self-reported mental-health problems, particularly since the covid-19 pandemic. But the numbers in Britain are startling. Around 4.5m Britons were in contact with mental-health services in 2021-22, a rise of almost 1m in five years. In the past decade no other European country has seen a greater increase in the use of antidepressants. A National Health Service survey in 2023 found that one in five 8- to 16-year-olds in England had a probable mental disorder, up from one in eight in 2017. In 17- to 19-year-olds the figure had increased from one in ten to one in four.

This tsunami about to engulf a lonely figure is washing around someone’s head. It illustrates the misery of mental illness but not Britain’s particular problem. For all their good intentions, campaigns intended to raise awareness are leading some people to conflate normal responses to life’s difficulties with mental-health disorders. Special treatment creates incentives for people to seek diagnoses and to medicalise problems unnecessarily. The need to treat people with mild conditions competes with care for those who have the most severe ones.

Britannia on the couch gets closer to the message. But this is an inside illustration, not a cover.

This cover illustrates this demand by alluding to a famous Conservative campaign poster that dates back to unemployment under a Labour government in 1978. And it captures the reality. Some 57% of university students claim to suffer from a mental-health issue; over three-quarters of parents with school-age children sought help or advice over their child’s mental health in 2021-22. In surveys they increasingly describe grief and stress as mental illnesses, redefining how sickness is understood. As a result, at least 1.8m people are waiting for mental-health treatment. The number of young people in contact with mental-health services has expanded at more than three and a half times the rate of the workforce in child and adolescent psychiatry.

Partly because 1978 is a long time ago, we ended up choosing this instead, based on the Rorschach inkblot test, created in 1921 by the Swiss psychologist of that name. When you look at this cover what do you see? The answer—we hope—is Britain and the fact that its mental-health is in a mess. If looking at this cover is faintly disturbing, you have an inkling of what life is like for the patients.