It’s not that I’m green in any political way, but I do hate seeing plastic carrier bags blowing down the street like tumbleweed, or hanging from trees like Tibetan prayer offerings.

In our house, we refuse to use them, entering supermarkets with rucksacks and other suitable containers, and feeling very virtuous in a dreary sort of way.

The trouble is, the world won’t allow us to dispense with them. Various charities that should know better put large, white plastic bags through the letterbox inviting us to donate items we don’t want.

Yesterday, it was the PDSA, an animal charity. Note to PDSA: wildlife is harmed by plastic bags!

Today it was a “mental health” organization, bleating “You’ll improve your mental health by donating your unwanted items.” Self-serving, or what?

This got me thinking about the whole business of mental health. For a start, what exactly is it?

When I was in my teens (duck out now or take the consequences), I developed an unhealthy taste for the novels of Dostoyevsky. The first one I laid my hands on was A Raw Youth, in the exquisite translation of Constance Garnett.

The work is an extended essay on frenzy. The youth in question stumbles around 19th-century Russia in an advanced stage of frenzied excitement. He clearly mirrors the psychological state of its author.

Callow youth that I was, I lapped it up, reading through the night in a frenzy of anticipation. This was the life for me: a frenzied one. What a pain I must have been in those days.

It’s easy to look back and gasp at the foolishness of young life, but we can’t relive it now. Too late, old chum.

My conundrum is, did Dostoyevsky have “mental health”? Would he even have recognized the pastel, slightly perfumed phrase? He simply got on with writing some of the world’s best political and psychological literature, and inspired countless teenagers with nothing better to do into the joys of a frenzied existence. It explains a lot, doesn’t it?

But would we actually want everyone to have mental health? Wouldn’t it be rather tedious?

In fairness, I’ve always been a laid back sort of fellow, frenzy never came easily, and I soon lost interest.

I’m beginning to think that my concern about plastic bags is the first sign of late-onset mental health.

Now where did I put my copy of Crime and Punishment?

John Evans