ANXIETY is a terrible thing to have. I know this because I’ve had it. I had an awful time at work when the kids were young thanks to a toxic regime at work and a psycho of a boss.

In the end I was driven to go to my doctor, someone who knew me well who signed me off seeing the state of me because I really was in the grip of it.

It wasn’t an easy decision to go there because I felt ashamed of being weak, of not being able to handle the situation.

It didn’t really help being off if I’m honest because I was fretting about what people were thinking about me and I felt guilty about having time off.

My point being, I can talk from a stance of knowing what anxiety is and can differentiate between that and just mere worry.

I told my lads years ago, if you are losing a bit of sleep because you’ve got your driving test coming up or exams and you haven’t done enough revision or a bill to pay, they are normal life worries and will teach you a lesson and strengthen you for the future ie that you need to up your game/save up.

If you’re worrying that a combine harvester is going to plough into the back of you as you walk up Dodworth Road, then come back to me and we’ll talk anxiety.

The trouble is these days the pendulum has swung the other way, society has pandered to the ‘not all disabilities are visible’ trope too much and allowed those who want to exploit the system to do exactly that.

The fact that so many work hours have been lost through council staff having mental health issues, the fact that ten thousand people have gone up to the hospital with the same beggars belief. I’d like to bet that if many of those people who are chasing the sick note worked for themselves, the numbers would be greatly reduced.

I feel sorry for small businesses who suddenly find members of their workforce going off on the sick with an invisible symptom and owners having to fork out a wage for them.

What on earth can be done though because I haven’t a clue – but what I do know is that I worry for a society that confuses worry and anxiety, deliberately or not, because they are very different animals.

People going off with stress just because they haven’t done the work they should have and a boss has had a pop at them – rightly so and they play the sick card.

People who just fancy having a couple of weeks off when the weather is nice and don’t give a toss about those who will have to mop up their workload.

And you can’t call them out over it, because you can’t prove they don’t have it. It has become almost a badge of honour for some to say they have ‘issues’ because society has allowed that to happen.

As someone said on the letters page last week, when their father has spent four years in a PoW camp, it makes a total mockery of what stress is classified as these days.

Genuine anxiety is truly debilitating, crippling and exhausting and I can’t imagine why anyone would not want to get out of the pit of it as soon as they possibly could.

It is a 24/7 sleep-depriving, all-encompassing condition BUT it can very successfully be treated by non-addictive tablets these days which bring a patient back to a ‘normal’ functioning state.

Much more treatable than lazy-arse-skiver syndrome which, to date, has no known cure.