Dorothy Rowe is the renowned psychologist of whom the writer Sue Townsend said, ‘Dorothy Rowe’s is the calm voice of reason in an increasingly mad world.’
I might have finished my new book Why We Lie (HarperCollins May 26, 2010) but the lies in all their various forms continue. I could have written a book of infinite size but my publishers set a deadline. This blog is a kind of continuation of the book.
I began thinking about Why We Lie when George Bush and Tony Blair were telling us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. By the time I started writing it in 2008 the global economic crisis was revealing some of the lies that the bankers and politicians had told. Climate change was no longer merely a theory being developed by some scientists and had become a reality that was affecting the lives of millions of people. At the same time, millions of people were engaged in the form of lying called denial – the refusal to admit the truth that was there before their eyes. Meanwhile, individuals were continuing to do the one thing that never fails to make a mess of their life. They were lying to themselves
Mark Rice-Oxley’s article in the Guardian (ref) was entitled ‘Depression – the Illness That’s Still Taboo’.http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/02/depression-mental-health-breakdown This was an account of Mark’s first experience of depression. On the night of his 40th birthday ‘I really knew something was wrong. . . . A tide of panic was rising.’ During the following nights he felt ‘small and frightened’. Two weeks later at his parents’ home, ‘the house I was born in, the place I still love – I disintegrated.’
He wrote, ‘They used to call it a nervous breakdown. Now it’s depression. . . Depressive illness isn’t like that Monday morning feeling, or getting back from holiday to find that the cold water tank has burst. It’s medical fact, like breaking an arm, only the broken bit is in the chemical circuitry of the brain.’
This is what the psychiatrists mark consulted told him. They didn’t tell him that depression being caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain is not a fact but a hypothesis for which no scientific evidence has ever been found. David Healy, Professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University and world renowned for his research into SSRI drugs and depression, calls it a myth. (See his book Let Them Eat Prozac).
Mark consulted Graham Thornicroft at the Institute of Psychiatrists (sic – probably the Institute of Psychiatry in London) who told him about the prevalence of mental illness in the UK, and Tim Cantopher, psychiatrist and author of Depressive Illness: Curse of the Strong. Cantopher said, ‘If you try to do the undoable, you’re going to get this. Stress doesn’t make you ill. You do – by trying to do the undoable.’
Mark wrote, ‘If I’m honest, I have been trying to do the undoable for years. . On paper [my life] looked marvellous. In reality it made for long years of chaotic breakfasts, a messy school run, some exercise, a dash to London, 10 hours on a pinball newsdesk, back to release my wife for a school governors’ meeting or a conference call or to move the house slightly to the left. Late for everything.’
Many of the emailed comments about Mark’s article commended him for describing just what the experience of depression felt like. However, on the following Saturday August 7 there was a group of letters in the Guardian that took him to task for calling depression an illness.
Paul Reading, lecturer in mental health as the Open University, called Mark’s article ‘moving’ but went on to say that it had only one flaw. ‘He refers to succumbing to an “illness”. This reliance on the medicalisation of mental distress is a continuing dilemma for both survivors of such experiences and those employed to help them.’ Andrew Cooper, Professor of social work, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation and Felicitas Rost, project Co-ordinator, Tavistock Adults Depression Study wrote, ‘There is increasing evidence that mental health problems are developmental in nature, and up to three quarters of adult difficulties start in childhood. Psychotherapy frequently reveals present and past losses, in keeping with known risk factors. Drugs and brief cognitive therapies can help greatly, but they do not engage our complex histories, the rejections, separations and bereavements revived by current adversities. Sometimes it is the loss of our cherished idea of ourselves that precipitates “breakdown”. If we have not mourned these experiences fully they persist, corroding our self-esteem.’ Jeremy Goring of St Leonards-on-Sea pointed out that what Mark had experienced was an acute feeling of ‘dis-ease’. He was pleased that Mark had ‘discovered the truth of the saying that there is always learning in the depression.’
Mark lived a life of extreme busy-ness. If he had asked himself, ‘Why is it important to me to do all these things?’ and answered it honestly he would have discovered something that he had known all along, that he was a good person and, like all good people, he believed that, no matter how hard he worked and how much he tried to please everyone and not let anyone down, he was never good enough, and that, if he let someone down, that person would reject and abandon him forever.
No one is born believing that, ‘As I am I am not good enough. I have to work hard to be good.’ However, we are born needing to make a bond with a mothering person. When such a person appears we soon learn that, in order to keep this person’s benign attention, we need to be good in the way this person defines ‘good’. Some mother might define their baby’s ‘good’ as not making a mess, not making a fuss and quickly learning to be toileted trained, while other mothers might define ‘good’ as being very loving to mummy and looking after her, and so on. For some small children the fear of not living up to their mother’s expectations and being rejected and abandoned by her is so intense that earning their parents’ love becomes central to their sense of who they are as a person. When in adult life they become depressed and cast around for an explanation why, they cannot see what is right in front of them, their need to be good and their fear of being annihilated as a person – what Mark called disintegrating.
Mark did spend some time with a therapist, for how long he did not say. He wrote, ‘Therapy taught me that I am not who I thought I am, that some of my reflexes and instincts are unhealthy.’
In contrast, in his wise and wonderful book Family Romance, John Lanchester described his periods of long and intense panic after his father died. Lanchester, an extravert like Mark, makes very clear his fear of rejection and being abandoned, all by himself in the world. Finally, he entered into a long period of therapy. He wrote, ‘I would say that the things that psychotherapy has helped me with have to do with feeling my feelings as and when I’m supposed to feel them, rather than mediated into mysterious mood swings or (worse) emerging as a form of panic. It helped me face painful feelings related to loss and abandonment; it helped me make sense of myself; it helped me deal with the illness and death of people I loved; and it helped me to write. It did that by helping me spend more time in my head without panicking. It helped me sit still, which is something you have to learn to do if you’re going to write books.’
Mark did learn ‘how to let time pass without trying to fill it’. But he did not learn everything that depression could teach him.
The best book about the experience of depression that I have ever read is Gwyneth Lewis’s Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression. In this she wrote, ‘[Depression’s] purpose is to teach you how to avoid becoming depressed again. In that sense, depression is a very kind disorder, and will return only if you refuse to learn the lessons it has to teach you.’
Mark described how he gradually became alive to the world again. However, six weeks after going back to work he relapsed ‘and need another month to build up from the bottom again. Even now, a year on I still feel the sharp edge of something, But, happily, it does little more than prod me, remind me that I need to tread carefully.’
Mark has not learned how to avoid becoming depressed again. Life is never without adversities. The chances are that he will become depressed again until, as Gwyneth said, he learns the lesson that his depression can teach him.
If there is a special place in heaven for magazines that encouraged freedom of speech Openmind is on its way there. The next issue of Openmind will be its last. It will be replaced in May 2010 by, according to the Chief Executive of MIND, Paul Farmer, by a ‘lively, engaging and thought-provoking magazine that will work alongside an interactive members’ area of our website.’ This will provide ‘the dialogue between service users, professionals and providers so valued in the current publication.’ Thus the one beacon of light in the murky world of the lies and misinformation in the psychiatric system will disappear. However, when historians come to research how thinking about severe mental distress has changed over the twentieth and early twenty-first century, the archives of Openmind will be a vital resource.
When terrible disasters befall us we often find it difficult to summon up the courage needed to behave in the ways that our society expects us to behave. The people around us might comfort and support us, but often they do not, perhaps because they are too wrapped up in themselves to care about us, or perhaps they know that they are implicated in the cause of our distress but wish to deny this. For instance, it is only quite recently that psychiatrists have had to accept the research that shows that a significant number of the men and women who become deeply depressed or psychotic were sexually assaulted when they were children by the very people they should have been able to trust. When we become severely mentally distressed, some of us try to deal with our distress by withdrawing into ourselves to such a degree that we lose contact with the reality we share with others; some of us try to run away from our distress and become extraordinarily active; some become highly obsessional and compulsive; some retire to a place such as their home where they feel safe and refuse to venture out; while some blame themselves for the disaster and become depressed. Instead of seeing that such behaviours are the extremes of what we can choose to do when we become very anxious, psychiatrists have given each of these a label that they call a diagnosis. These psychiatrists believe that the label tells them all they need to know about the people they regard as being mad.
Different societies at different times have created different kinds of mythical causes for these states of severe mental distress. The medieval Church claimed that severely mentally distressed people were possessed by demons. By the nineteenth century many doctors in Europe saw that they could make money by opening asylums for mad people. They justified this by claiming that mad people were suffering from mental illnesses. Psychiatrists invented causes for these mental illnesses, and told, and in some cases continue to tell, their patients that their illness is caused by a gene or bya biochemical change in the patient’s brain. No physical cause has ever been found for any mental illness. Physical causes of mental illnesses are myths. A myth is a fantasy, and a fantasy presented as a truth is a lie.
People are so frightened of madness that the words we use in connection with madness become frightening in themselves. New terms have to be created. Thus ‘asylum’ became ‘psychiatric hospital’, while ‘mental illness’ became ‘mental disorder’, and then ‘mental health’, as in, ‘He’s got a mental health problem.’
Whatever the name, life for the people locked up in these asylums was far from pleasant. On the rare occasions when a psychiatrist talked to a patient, all he wanted to establish were the symptoms the patient experienced. He was not interested in the patient as a person. When I was working at St Johns Psychiatric Hospital in Lincoln, I met people who had been there for fifteen or even twenty-five years, yet in all that time no psychiatrist had asked them to tell their life story in the way they wanted to tell it. Yet, when they told their story to me, I did not need a biochemical change or a gene to explain why they had been severely mentally distressed. The reasons were there in the person’s story; clearly visible to anyone who had a reasonable knowledge of the way we live our lives, and who wanted to understand.
The psychiatric patients I met in the 1970s the patients were what psychiatric patients had always been – obedient, grateful and uncomplaining. They knew what the punishments were if they were not – being labelled ‘troublemaker’, moved to an even worse ward, silenced by an injection of a major tranquiliser. The physical conditions of these hospitals had somewhat improved since the nineteenth century, but the ethos had not. According to the psychiatrists, a mental illness was lifelong and incurable. When they did speak to patients, they patronised them and often lied to them. When they spoke about them to their colleagues they often used the vilest terms. One consultant I worked with referred to long-stay patients as ‘the dregs’, thus ignoring the fact that the drugs that the psychiatrists had prescribed for these patents destroyed the tissue of their cortex and caused the illness tardive dyskinesia. The management-speak used in mental health settings nowadays conforms to what is considered to be politically correct, but it can be used in ways that are as destructively patronising and insincere as the language used by the psychiatrists of past years.
The great glory of MIND is that it did not become a worthy, self-regarding charity where superior people showed concern for people who were incapable of looking after themselves. When I first encountered MIND in the form of Dr Falla, the superintendent of St Johns Hospital, I found that this was how he interpreted the role of MIND, as did many like him. However, by the end of the 70s a group of the most extraordinary and supremely brave people emerged from the psychiatric hospitals. They called themselves Survivors of the Psychiatric System, and they demanded equal representation in MIND. They were tired of being patronised and silenced. They wanted change. Not everyone in MIND was in favour of this, but there were sufficient people of good sense and good heart who knew that this was the way MIND had to go.
Many of these Survivors were well educated. They subsequently wrote books that took these issues to a much wider audience. They encouraged others Survivors to write about their experiences, especially when in 1981 Anny Brackx founded Openmind. She remained either its editor or latterly publisher more or less throughout its life. Sara Dunn took over editing it in 1997, and Kathryn Perry came on board in 2002.
Openmind was sold on subscription and was not widely known. I recommended it to all the clinical psychology and social work students I met so that they could discover what actually went on within the psychiatric system. The magazine carried information about any changes in the regulations affecting the psychiatric system, and short news stories to do with mental health. Even more important were the reports from the local mental health associations that were part of MIND, the critical studies of some aspect of the psychiatric system often written by someone who knew the system from the inside, and, most important, first person accounts of severe mental distress and of the treatment the person received. Just as no one can know what war is actually like without reading the accounts written by soldiers in the front line, so no one can know what happens to us when we lose our grip on our life without reading the accounts by people in their solitary struggle to hold themselves and their life together.
I know nothing of how the team managing MIND come to their decisions, but two decisions made recently have left me wondering whether MIND might be in danger of losing its way. The first is the decision to close Openmind without having ready in its place a website that continued Openmind’s outstanding work. The second is the decision to include Alastair Campbell in the list of candidates for the 2009 Champion of the Year.
This award celebrates ‘the work of people who have made an outstanding contribution to increasing understanding of mental health.’ Candidates are nominated by local association of MIND and the Mind staff, and the short list published on the MIND website so the public can vote for the person they feel should be the Champion. Perhaps the MIND website should spell out more fully what is meant by ‘an outstanding contribution’. Mental illness used to be unmentionable in public but now many celebrities claim to be depressed or have a ‘drug problem’ in the hope that the ensuing publicity would revive a flagging career. Indeed, Alastair Campbell did not mention his breakdown publically until he lost political power along with Tony Blair. Such celebrities are very different people from the Survivors who began the revolution and those who followed them.
The Survivors did not get together to plan the revolution until after each of them had carried out the private revolution of changing themselves. The treatment patients received in psychiatric hospitals was so destructive of self-confidence that most came to believe that they deserved nothing better than what they got. What was so extraordinary about the Survivors was that they had managed to cling on to a vestige of their belief that they deserved something much better than what they got. They asked themselves, ‘How did I end up in this horrible situation?’ They allowed themselves to question what the psychiatrists had told them. Then each of them set out on a journey of discovery into their past. I have never forgotten Brian Davey telling me how he had questioned his mother about what was happening in the family during his early childhood, and she, brave woman, told him. Many parents of the severely mentally distressed refuse to do this, and get very angry when their adult child’s questions imply that they were not perfect parents.
What the Survivors were doing was what we all need to do, to examine our childhood with an adult eye. It takes courage to confront our demons from the past and see them for what they are. We all have such demons because childhood is never the perfect happiness that many people like to pretend theirs was. Many people refuse to recognise their demons’ existence, preferring to pretend that they have nothing inside them that cause unnameable fears and conflicts.
Some demons, once confronted, fade away, but some stay within us forever. However, a person can devise tactics for keeping demons in order so that they never run amok again. Thus a person learns how to manage his life, and, in the course of this, gains much wisdom about living. Such people demonstrate their wisdom in the way they live. For instance, Clare Allan writes most perceptive articles for Guardian Society. Stephen Fry became notorious for abandoning his role in a West End play and running away to France. However, he returned, confronted his demons, and since then he not only produced such magnificent work but he has become a National Treasure.
Alastair Campbell will never become a National Treasure. He had his breakdown true, but he gained no wisdom from it. If he had, he would not have so ferociously supported Tony Blair in following George Bush into the Iraq War.
The achievements of the Survivors and those that followed need to be celebrated. For instance, the Hearing Voices Network has effected that greatest beneficial change in the care of severely mentally distressed people since the Quaker William Tuke built the The Retreat in York in 1792. Champion of the Year has also celebrated those people who, not having experienced severe mental distress, chose to learn about it from the inside. In deciding to have a story line of a much-loved character developing dementia, all the people involved in the making of the radio serial The Archers had to learn not just the process of developing dementia but the mental distress that the process causes not just the person experiencing it but the mental distress each member of his family suffers.
We hear a great deal about the stigma of mental illness, often from people who have not considered its origins. People are stigmatised when they are looked down upon by people who regard themselves as their superiors. Stigma cannot be eradicated while there are people who regard themselves as being superior because of their wealth, class, nationality, race, religion, or their supposed mental health. Such people forget that human beings differ very little in terms of genetics or in terms of our basic needs and desire. We might be very intelligent in understanding things and the world around us, but in understanding ourselves most of us are very stupid. Openmind set itself the task of educating us about ourselves. We cannot afford to lose such a great little magazine.
August 2010
Mind replaced Openmind with a pamphlet called Connections.
Who is David Cameron? We know the facts of his life but not who he is as a person. ‘More spin than substance,’ say many voters. Close friends and colleagues say that they have no idea why he wants power. Is he merely a vacuous politician, or is he a front man for those Tories who are planning a return to the Friedman market-driven, small state economy once they are in power? Cameron’s ideas of ‘the broken society’, and ‘the Big Society’ and the parent-run private school could come from the Milton Friedman Handbook. A sudden, savage cut in public spending would create the shock that is central to the Friedman programme. A hung-parliament that was incompetent and divisive would give these Tories the chance they need.
In the introduction to his book about the global financial crisis Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone Money and No One Can Pay John Lancaster wrote, ‘The aftermath of the crisis is going to dominate the economics and politics of our societies for at least a decade to come. It’s important that we try to understand it, and begin to think about what’s next.’ To understand what comes next we need to know about the past.
Lancaster is a writer, so his book, as well as being very informative, is full of good stories and interesting ideas. One of the themes of the book concerns how Britain ceased to be a country where the manufacturing industry was balanced by the finance industry and became instead one where the financial service industry became ‘the biggest and most important sector of our economy and one of the few areas of British life which had a claim to dominate the world in its sector.’ He went on, ‘there are four sectors in which Britain is world-class: finance, arms manufacturing, the creative arts and higher education. Of these, the first receives strong government support, the second lavish investment, the third is largely left to mind its own business, and the fourth has been gradually run down, with three decades of consistent discouragement and underfunding. What would Britain look like today if instead of the arms industry or the City it had been our Russell Group universities which had been the subject of attempts to achieve world supremacy?’
The website of the Russell Group states that the Group ‘represents the 20 leading UK universities which are committed to maintaining the very best research, an outstanding teaching and learning experience and unrivalled links with business and the public sector.’ Had all British universities received the money that the government gave to the the arms and the financial services industries how different education, not just in universities but in schools and colleges would be today!
There was a time, back in the 1960s and 1970s when some politicians, both Labour and Conservative, dreamed of a Britain where education was valued because it produced people brimful of ideas in every worthwhile area of life. All this soon vanished when Jim Callaghan lost his grip on the economy and Margaret Thatcher came to power. Since then power has resided in the hands of politicians who fear new ideas because new ideas create change in ways that these politicians cannot predict, much less control. They feel much happier with moneymen and arms manufacturers. The one idea that sustains the financial sector is making money, while the arms industry is sustained by the ideas of making money and killing people. John Lancaster wrote, ‘I have people I count as friends who work in the City. We get on in the ways in which people get on, but there is sometimes a moment when you hit a kind of a wall. It’s usually to do with fundamental assumptions based on the primacy of money, and the non-reality of other schemes of value.’ The history of the arms trade shows very clearly that all that arms manufacturers want is a continuous series of wars. They do not care who is fighting whom, and they are very happy to supply both sides at once. Stupid political leaders oblige them by creating wars. This paucity of ideas held by immensely wealthy moneymen and arms manufacturers and the politicians who support them explains in part why so little is being done to deal with climate change. Understanding climate change requires a scheme of what is valuable that includes the Earth and the welfare of other people.
When those in power fear all ideas other than the few that they possess, they use their power to impoverish and constrain the creative imagination that generates ideas that go beyond ordinary, everyday experience. The creative imagination also allows us the freedom to doubt anything that we are told is true. When our leaders hold few ideas, education ceases to be a ‘leading out’ as the Latin root of the word educate implies, and becomes a controlling and moulding of the child in order to produce the kind of people that those in power require.
I wrote about this in my book Wanting Everything, published in 1991 when the effects of the Thatcher government were becoming very clear. Margaret Thatcher wanted to destroy all those brave experiments in education that had developed over the 1960s and 1970s, and to create an ideology based on the ideas of the economist Milton Friedman. Friedman had rejected the Judaic faith of his parents but could not give up the idea of having a faith. In his autobiography Two Lucky People, written with his wife Rose, Friedman called himself an agnostic, not an atheist. An atheist sees a faith as an unnecessary burden, whereas an agnostic is searching for a suitable faith. Friedman came to see the free market as an infallible god, and this is where he placed his faith. If Friedman was the Jesus in the free market faith, Thatcher was one of his many disciples. The result of this, as Lancaster wrote, ‘The free market stopped being one way of arranging the world, subject to argument and comparison with other systems: it became an item of faith, of near-mystical belief. In that belief system, the finance industry made up the class of priests and magicians, and began to be treated as such. In the UK, that meant ideological hegemony for the City of London.’
The essence of the free market is competition. Tony Blair, a man who tried on faiths like suits to see which one would best enhance his charm, readily adopted the faith of the free market. He saw that competing in the free market required a certain kind of education. Students needed to be well versed in the basic literacy and numeracy skills, and they needed to be focused on one aim, making money. Hence his stated aim of ‘education, education, education’. For him the arts were unnecessary, except as providing opportunities for his friends to parade their wealth and he his charm.
The Thatcher-Blair kind of education as moulding always produces in the recipients what Fintan O’Toole, in his marvellous book Ship of Fools about the economic crash in Ireland, called ‘an ideological induced stupidity’. Here O’Toole was talking about the ideology of the Catholic Church, but this term also applies to the application of any ideology to young minds. The ideological stupidity produced by the Thatcher-Blair form of education was ideally suited to the kind of output the media empire of Rupert Murdoch was producing, and this output reinforced the kind of ideas that emerged in the Thatcher-Blair form of education.
Gordon Brown as Chancellor went along with the faith of the free market. This belief did not clash with his Presbyterian beliefs. Protestantism and trade have always been closely entwined. However, at a deeper level, Brown is held fast by the ideology of Presbyterian guilt. When the falsity of the free market faith was revealed, Brown could abandon his attachment to that faith, even admitting publicly that he had made mistakes, but he cannot break free of the ideology that says that we have to earn the right to exist, and whether we have achieved that right we cannot know until we face our Maker. However, it seems that it is not the question of God’s forgiveness and acceptance that troubles Brown. It is the improbability in this world or the next of ever getting from his father, the Reverend John Brown, the unqualified words, ‘Well done, son.’ Presbyterian parents know for certain that praising a child spoils him. (I speak from experience.) Had Brown been able to free himself from his Presbyterian guilt, he would have left politics when he was on the high of being the Prime Minister who knew how important it was, when the credit bubble burst, to abandon Friedman economics and pay heed to the words of John Maynard Keynes. Greatly praised by his friends and by those who wished to see him go, Brown could have left the insoluble problem of our successful financial future to politicians young and foolish enough to think they can solve this problem. Then he could have spent time with his young children, and returned to the work he loves best in the Third World. However, that would mean that he was enjoying himself, and, as Malcolm Fraser when Prime Minister of Australia told pleasure-loving Australians, ‘We weren’t put on Earth to enjoy ourselves.’
Although David Cameron has been Conservative leader for five years and much in the media, I cannot write a sketch of him as I can of Gordon Brown. I have no idea who Cameron actually is. When he first became leader and thus under media scrutiny, the consensus was that he was modelling himself on the young Tony Blair. However, Blair himself was then playing the role of a young, enthusiastic politician destined to do great things. (He is now playing the role of international statesman.) Thus the Cameron we see is an imitation of an imitation. There might be a real person inside this imitation of a person, but who he is I do not know. He might be a man of hidden shallows, or a power-hungry opportunist. Julian Glover of the Guardian found that Cameron’s close friends had no idea why Cameron wants power. Pollsters, so Glover reported, find that voters see Cameron as being more spin than substance. Blair had some skill as an actor but Cameron cannot act. He has a small collection of facial expressions, chiefly being anxious, being statesmanlike, being angry, listening, but none is convincing. Even when he speaks publicly about the death of his young son, his expression of grief seems to have been taught to him by a drama teacher who has never encountered the splintering, insupportable pain of grief. Cameron the real person must feel such pain but Cameron the actor seems to believe that he must distance himself from what he actually feels.
Many political leaders have played the role of being a political leader and have been reasonably effective as a leader because their acting was a cover for what they saw as their own personal deficiencies. Initially Cameron played the role of a nice, concerned leader, a younger version of the pre-Thatcher Conservatives who had inherited from their landed forebears a sense of duty towards those who were less fortunate than they. However, in the Thatcher years that kind of Tory disappeared, and in their place were the heirs of Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics.
To understand the assumptions on which Friedman economics is based we need to read Two Lucky People, especially the sections written by Friedman himself. His is one of those autobiographies where the writer reveals not only more than he intended to reveal but what he did not know was there to be revealed. The parents of Milton and of Rose migrated from Eastern Europe to America in the early years of the 20th century. They worked hard and were able to establish a home and to educate their children. Both Rose and Milton drew from their childhood experiences the conclusion that without exception people can stand on their own two feet and not need help from the State. They were both economists, yet they seemed not to notice that their parents had arrived in America at a very special time in that country’s history. Its economy was growing and immigrants were needed. This is no longer the case, and has not been so for some considerable time. Would-be migrants crossing the border into the south-western states of the USA find themselves, at best, being exploited by people wanting cheap labour or, at worst, being attacked and perhaps killed.
Two Lucky People reveals a man who has never really understood what it is to be a human being. He was not interested in the internal worlds of other people. This lack of interest in what people thought and felt prevented Friedman from understanding that he could never achieve his aim of tidying up and organising the world. The way our brains work means that we cannot perceive anything unless we can also perceive its opposite. Hence we know black because there is white; life because there is death; good because there is bad, and so on. Thus, at the same time we can have opposing ideas, needs and wishes. No matter how much we try to organise and plans our life and keep it under control, we find that living is always a kind of white water rafting on a wild river whose end is unknown, and not an organised march to a defined goal. Any leader and his followers who believe that they have an infallible plan for how people should live their lives is doomed to failure, as Communism, Fascism and free market economics have shown.
Friedman was sure that his ideas were the right ones, and that anyone who disagreed with him was either mad or bad. Socialists and Communists were both mad and bad. He refused to see that everything we do has unintended consequences for which we are to some degree responsible. He rejected most vehemently and at length the charge that, in advising General Pinochet about the Argentinean economy, he bore some responsibility for the terrible events that followed.
In his letter to General Pinochet in April, 1975, Friedman referred to the advice he had given Pinochet as ‘a shock program’. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom Friedman pointed out that ‘only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.’ In The Tyranny of the Status Quo in 1984 Friedman and his wife wrote, ‘A new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not seize the opportunity to act decisively in that period, it will not have another such opportunity.’ Every action that needs to be carried out should be carried out ‘all at once’. ‘A shock program’ became known as ‘the shock doctrine’, where the word ‘shock’ referred not just to the shock felt by those who were the recipients of unexpected economic actions but metaphorically to the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) so popular with psychiatrists when Friedman was writing. The rationale for ECT was that the electric current passing through the patient’s head wiped out all the troubling thoughts in the patient’s mind. In practice patients found that they had lost chunks of their memory, such as of a family holiday, or even the whole of their child’s childhood. The application of the shock doctrine to a country’s economy has an equally devastating effect on people’s lives.
Thatcher’s application of her version of the shock doctrine to the British economy was not as brutal as that applied by Pinochet to the economy of Argentina, but those of us here who were affected by it suffered in many different ways. Thatcher and her most of her cabinet showed the same lack of interest in and concern for her fellow human beings that Friedman had shown. In all the countries where the shock doctrine was applied the rich were protected, and they flourished.
Under Cameron the Conservative Party has followed a ‘don’t mention Friedman’ policy while patronising Thatcher who, luckily for them, can now be safely patronised. This does not mean that all Conservatives have abandoned the Friedman faith. Quite the reverse. Just as when in this country Catholicism was forbidden, priests lived in hiding and conducted secret masses, so Friedman priests have been conducting the equivalent of Friedman masses and drawing up their plans. The Friedman faith combines the pleasures of knowing that you are virtuous and strong because you are not afraid to inflict pain on those you despise, and of getting richer and richer.
Could it be that Cameron is not merely a bad actor but a front for a very cunning plan? It goes like this: first, Cameron and his colleagues lull the electorate, many of whom have left school full of the ideologically acquired stupidity of the Thatcher-Blair form of education, into believing that the Conservatives have a plan for the economy that is even more caring and concerned than Labour’s, and that they know what to do about the huge deficit, unlike the incompetent Brown. Second, the Conservatives win the election with a large majority. Third, once in power, they will launch their shock program under the guise of needing to deal with the huge government deficit. Without delay they make huge cuts in public spending and sell off what remains of the businesses owned by the state. Fourth, the country goes into recession and unemployment rises to astronomical levels. Fifth, shocked, confused, and perhaps ideologically stupid, people are unable to organise protests. They accept that, if they want schools, a health service and the like, they have to organise it themselves. Sixth, the economy stabilises, with the rich being secure and the rest doing the best they can without any government help.
This sounds like a really idiotic plan, but it is the basic programme of Friedman economics. There are more than whispers of this plan in the Conservative policy, particularly in education. Cameron has promised parents ‘the power to get a good new school in your community.’ These schools would be modelled on Swedish independent schools and Charter schools in the USA. Friedman and his wife felt so strongly about the ‘importance of privatising the school system’ that they ‘established the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation with the sole mission of promoting the public understanding and support of the measures to achieve that objective.’
Who is David Cameron? Is he able to give an account of himself that rings true to his listeners? Or is he no more than the part he had learned to play? If he is no more than an actor who exists only in the roles he plays, why does the Conservative party have him as their leader? Is he a front man who will be kept in place until others with their own plans seize power and discard him? Or is the plan that, on winning the election or the election after the hung parliament fails, the nice Mr Cameron whips off his disguise and reveals himself as the latter day Thatcher, friend to Pinochet and Milton Friedman, ready to eat Nick Clegg for breakfast?
. . . . . . and What Psychologists and Psychiatrists Don’t Know. This is a lecture that I gave at the British Library on June 1, 2010.
I started thinking about writing a book about lying in those months when we were being told about the certain existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction. But, of course, in the years I was working as a clinical psychologist in the NHS I was dealing with lies all the time. There were the lies we tell when we want to defend a much-loved theory, such as, ‘Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance.’ And there were the lies my clients had been telling themselves since they were small children. The most common lie was, ‘I am, in essence, bad and have to work hard to be good.’ If you want to get depressed, this is the lie you need to tell yourself.
Why we lie to others and why we lie to ourselves, and the consequences of these lies form the subject matter of this book. I defined truth and lies in terms of what is known about how our brain operates. I was not writing in terms of truth being a virtue and lying a vice, but in terms of how to live wisely by always telling ourselves the truth, and lying to others very sparingly, and then with great care.
Neuroscientists have shown that we are incapable of seeing reality directly. All we can ever know are the guesses our brain creates about what is going on. For a guess to be true there has to be evidence to support it. However, no matter how much evidence a truth has to support it, there is never enough to make it absolutely true. Absolute truths may exist, but our brain is incapable of identifying them.
Ideas that have little evidence to support them are fantasies. Fantasies are tremendously important. They can comfort us, relieve our bad feelings, and allow us to explore and experiment without having physically to do so.
A lie is words or actions that are intended to deceive. When what we know is limited or wrong we might misinform someone, but without the intent to deceive this is not a lie.
When the words ‘lie’ and ‘lying seem too harsh we seek other words and phrases, as if we want to hide from ourselves the the shoddy and sordid act lying often is. Or we put the word ‘white’ in front of ‘lie’ and claim that, in using a white lie, we are being virtuous. Often we are being kind and thoughtful, but in white lies, as in all lies, our ultimate purpose is to protect ourselves from what we fear the most, that moment when we find ourselves falling apart, shattering, crumbling, disappearing, in all being annihilated as a person.
Such an event is part of everyone’s experience. When we were small children we would predict what was going to happen next, and, because we knew so little of the world and people, our prediction would be wrong. We would find ourselves and our world falling apart. Adults, if they were wise, would hold us tight until we got ourselves together again. When we become adults we find that there are few wise adults who will hold us when our predictions fail and we start to fall apart. We have to find ways of protecting ourselves from this terrible experience. Lying is the most popular means of protection. We all become skilled in seeing off in the far distance a faint possibility of a threat to the integrity of our sense of being a person, and we lie.
Our sense of being a person, what we call ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’, is the structure that forms out of the ideas that your mind and your brain have created. All these ideas are guesses or theories, and they can be invalidated by events. David Laws thought he could keep something secret from the press. When he heard that the Telegraph had uncovered his secret, immediately he would have felt that he was shattering, crumbling, perhaps even that he was falling through an infinite universe. What we call ‘getting over the shock’ of such an event is the strategies we have developed to hold ourselves together when we start to fall apart. Some of us scream and shout and run about, while the rest of us go very, very quiet.
Common though this experience of falling apart is, psychiatrists and psychologists have ignored it. Psychiatrists allude to it when they talk about ‘panic’ and ‘panic disorder’, but they do not recognise its significance.
However, there are two groups of people who not only recognise the significance of this falling apart but make it the centre of their work. These are novelists and playwrights. In every novel and play, be it comedy or tragedy, there is a part where one or more of the characters discover that they have made a major error of judgement. They fall apart. This is the crisis. The denouement is the consequences of this falling apart. Often the end of a play or novel is where the central character leaves the stage, a sadder but wiser man.
Occasionally I am invited by a director of a play to talk to the cast in rehearsal about the characters in the play. One director I have worked with twice is Michael Wynne whose latest play The Priory won the Best New Comedy Award at the Oliver Awards last March. It is a funny, delightful and very thoughtful play that intertwines many more stories than the one I am going to talk about here.
Michael used a very old plot to illustrate how we live now, where ‘we’ are a group thirty somethings who work in the media. The old, much used plot is where a disparate group of people meet together in an isolated place. There is a crisis. The characters’ ideas are invalidated, and this experience changes them.
In The Priory a group of seemingly successful thirty somethings meet to celebrate New Years’ Eve in an old priory, now a luxury guest house standing alone in the woods. As each guest arrives we gradually discover that each of them has constructed a facade of fantasies and lies to persuade other people and themselves that they are more successful than they actually are. Into this come two younger people, Adam, Daniel’s young lover, and Laura, Ben’s fiancé. Daniel is telling himself that Adam is interested in him and not merely in having sex. Laura is telling herself that Ben loves her and will look after her.
Ben’s passion is his iPhone. He says, ‘It’s amazing. It makes me so happy. I’ve got my whole life on this. My diary, address book, maps, everything. I was the third person in London to have one, of the original ones. Camped out the night before. This is the latest version. I really don’t know what I did before this.’ (Before iPhones were invented there were men who identified with their cars.)
Later on in the evening when music is needed, Ben uses his iPhone’s store of music by attaching it to speakers. By this time everyone has been drinking and some have been taking drugs. They are all dancing when the lights go out. Someone, it seems, is moving about outside the priory. In the melee that follows, Ben’s iPhone is knocked to the floor and Laura inadvertently puts her high-heel through it. It’s now a dead iPhone. When Ben discovers this he falls apart. He blames Laura and rejects her. Laura cannot cope with rejection.
As the party proceeds everyone is so caught up in their own personal dramas that none of them notice that Laura is falling apart. Each of them, one way or another, is unwittingly embarked on a course that will strip away their lies and fantasies and face them with the truth of their life. Most of this takes place off stage. Only Laura enacts her falling apart on the stage in the full view of the audience.
Charlotte Riley who played Laura at the Royal Court did so brilliantly, revealing the bottomless depths of Laura’s loneliness and despair, and her immense self-hatred.
The means of relieving her intense feelings and of punishing herself is at hand, namely a large, sharp knife that had been used to slice the celebratory cake. She picks it up and careful and deliberately makes a deep incision on the inside of her arm.
When I saw Charlotte’s performance I wished it had been recorded as a video for compulsory viewing by every doctor and nurse who comes into contact with young women who cut themselves. Many of such professionals fail to understand the loneliness, despair and self-hatred these women experience. Instead, they describe these women as being ‘manipulative’ and ‘attention-seeking’. What kind of care and attention are these women getting when they have to make deep incisions on their body in order to get someone to help them?
At the end of the play Laura is in hospital and the others are leaving perhaps wiser than when they had arrived. However, the audience are left wondering whether Daniel has actually given up his fantasy that his young lovers care about him.
The Priory presents examples of invalidation and annihilation as they occur in ordinary life. In his novel 1984 George Orwell shows us how invalidation and annihilation are used in totalitarian states to destroy individuals and thus enforce obedience. This novel was first published in 1949, but it is as relevant now as it was then. Orwell also showed how we use and abuse other people in order to save ourselves from annihilation.
Orwell wrote this book at the end of the Second World War when the full horror of the totalitarian USSR was being revealed. In 1950 the Korean War began. It was this war that established the totalitarian state of North Korea. It also introduced the concept and practice of brain washing.
I read 1984 in 1950 when I was at university and the danger of being taken over by the USSR was very real. In recent years television has stolen Orwell’s names for total supervision by the state and for the ultimate torture, and drained then of all meaning. You can no longer be frightened by the words ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101’ as I was when I first read 1984.
1984 describes a society governed by the lies the State had created, and where every citizen is required to conform to whatever the State demands. The protagonist is Winston Smith, an ordinary man who believes that he has found a way to avoid being seen by Big Brother when he is with his lover Julia. In this he is mistaken. He and Julia are arrested.
Winston is subjected to a prison process whose aim is not to inflict painful punishment but to destroy his sense of being a person. With this gone he will no longer be a threat to the State. He will live and breathe, but he will be a nothing.
The last stage of this process is Room 101. When Winston enters this room most of his ideas about himself have been stripped away from him. Two important ideas remain. He believes that he is an essentially decent person, and that he loves Julia and will protect her.
However, his interrogator O’Brien knows what Winston fears the most. Winston is strapped into a chair, unable to move. He is presented with a wire cage. Orwell wrote,
‘It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats . . .’
O’Brien starts to move the cage towards him.
‘Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats . . .
. . . in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment – one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over, ‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!’
He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars – always away, away,’
Thus Winston, by betraying Julia, destroyed the two ideas that were left to support his sense of being a person. There was nothing to stop him falling into the gulf between the stars.
The empty person that Winston had become was not a fiction that Orwell had imagined. Accounts by Primo Levi and other writers about life in Hitler’s concentration camps talk of the Musselmen, people who are completely obedient to the guards. They move like automatons and never interact with the other prisoners.At the end of the war amongst the thousands of refugees were people, often children long separated from their family, whose horrendous experiences had left them without any tolerable points of reference around which they could create a sense of being a person. When the psychiatrist Robert Lifton studied the soldiers who had been brain-washed by the North Koreans, he found that the ones who were the most vulnerable to this technique were young Americans didn’t have a philosophy that they had developed for themselves out of their experiences. All they had were the simple ideas that they had been taught in school and church, and these they easily lost.
Amongst psychiatric patients are many who can hang on to a fragile sense of being a person only by defending themselves with those techniques that psychiatrists call the symptoms of mental illness. Many psychiatric patients have been the body that someone else, often a family member, has used to save themselves from some unpleasantness or deprivation.
We don’t have to be threatened with complete annihilation to resort to interposing another person’s body to protect ourselves. It is as common a practice as eating, and is the basis of the cruelty we inflict on one another.
Take, for instance, the practice of denying climate change. At present this is a very popular form of lying. Climate change threatens us both physically and as a person. Suppose you live on a part of the British coastline that is threatened by rising sea levels. Your home, that part of the country are part of your identity. When your home disappears under the waves, part of you goes with it.
Rather than face up to this terrible threat, many people are saying that the scientists have got it wrong, nothing bad is happening or will happen. What they are actually doing is interposing the bodies of other people between themselves and the threat. These are the bodies of the Inuits as the melting ice destroys their livelihoods, the Bangladeshis and the Pacific island people whose land is disappearing under the rising seas, the Indians whose water supply is drying up as the glaciers melt, the African farmers whose fertile land is turning into desert, the young African men and women who risk and often lose their lives in crossing the Mediterranean into Europe, and many, many more.
I began this lecture by talking about the politicians who lied to us about Weapons of Mass Destruction, and already a new parliament is presenting us with yet another example of a politician lying. It is hard to tell what exactly the lies were that David Laws told and which led to his resignation. It seems to be a matter of not just what he may have said to others, but the lies he had been telling himself. In the end the lies we tell ourselves are the most dangerous lies of all because they undermine our ability to determine what is true and what is false.
To work out what is true we need to understand how everything we know is a guess, and how our guesses can be invalidated. We need to understand why sometimes we feel that we are falling apart, and why we fear this experience so. We need to recognise why it is so important to tell ourselves nothing but the truth. On those occasions when we feel it is necessary to lie to others, we should do so carefully, because we know there will be there will be consequences we did not intend. And we should always remember that no one has the right to interpose another person between themselves and danger. Life has always been difficult, but the economic and environmental issues we are facing means that, to have a reasonable life, we need to look after one another, and be truthful with one another and with ourselve
For the last two months I have been out on the road publicising my new book Why We Lie. It was not so much on the road as on trains or waiting at stations to see if the train I need to get is actually going to run. If you are thinking of writing what will be your first book here is something you need to know. Writing the book is the easy part. Then come finding a publisher and, having done so, preparing and checking the text. Then comes the really hard part. Unless you are an A class celebrity, your publisher will have no money to advertise your book. You have to do that by accepting every invitation, however insignificant, to do something that will let people know that your book exists. According to Wikipedia, in the UK in 2005 some 206,000 books were published. It doesn’t matter how good your book is, if people don’t know about it, they won’t buy it. So when your publisher’s publicist says to you, ‘You’ve got an invitation to Much-Binding-in-the–Marsh’s Literary Festival,’ you go. If your publicist says to you that the radio station 7ZH (audience figures 12) want to interview you about your book, you turn up on time and give your wittiest and most entrancing performance.
The BBC is renowned for trying to get its facts right. When a mistake is made, there is a correction and an apology. When, in a religious programme, my words were edited so as to make it appear that I had said the opposite of what I had said, the BBC apologised and invited me to set out my views on their Religion and Ethics website. Ref Generous though the BBC were, I expected that their Religion and Ethics Department would never again invite me to take part in any of their programmes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/atheism/people/rowe.shtml However, I was invited to take part in a BBC1 God-slot programme, The Big Questions. This did surprise me, but then I discovered that the programme was actually made by Mentorn. Apparently, Mentorn’s researchers did little research, or at least when they worked on The Big Questions. They not only failed to uncover my past, but they also failed to find that a lie-detector or polygraph does not identify liars. Anyone claiming that it does is gravely mistaken. In failing to do their research Mentorn allowed the BBC to give advertising time to a man who made his living by pretending that with his polygraph he could identify when a person was lying.
According to their website, ‘Mentorn is one of the UK’s longest established independent television producers. Since 1985, we have made thousands of hours of television for broadcasters in the UK and worldwide. Our offices in London, Oxford, Cardiff and Glasgow produce programmes across a range of genres: drama, current affairs, factual and entertainment. . . . Our current affairs output includes the BBC flagship politics programme Question Time, now into its 30th year; and high profile editions of BBC One’s Panorama and Channel 4’s Dispatches such as the BAFTA winning edition on Beslan. In 2007 we won the tender to make BBC One’s new religious and ethical debate show, The Big Questions which is currently mid way through a 43-week run.’ http://www.mentorn.tv/
It was not until I was in the green room that I discovered that Mentorn had invited a man who was described as ‘a lie-detector expert’. Had I known this and the nature of the programme before I set out for Bristol where this programme was being made I would have withdrawn. A programme where there was a serious discussion of how difficult it is to tell if someone is lying would have been worthwhile, but such a programme had not entered the minds of those entrusted with making this programme.
The recording took place in a school where one large room was used for the set. This was basically a U-shaped arrangement of chairs placed facing a dais. The front row of the chairs was for the people who had something special to say about each question, while the three chairs on the dais were for a retired bishop, a rabbi and a woman journalist, all people with opinions.
Then there was the presenter, whose warm-up patter seemed to be aimed at getting us to like her because she constantly denigrated herself. We soon discovered that she also denigrated any person there (other than the bishop, the rabbi and the woman journalist) who did not respond as she wished them to.
The programme was supposed to be a discussion but in fact nothing was discussed. Instead the presenter would point to an individual and ask a question. That person was required to state his or her view as briefly and simply as possible, that is, to state a prejudice, not a reasoned view. Try to add a touch of complexity and the presenter would hold her briefing sheet across the person’s face to stop the person talking, in mid-sentence if necessary. The people who got any kind of hearing were those who talked the loudest, presenting their well-rehearsed view. Three people excelled at this, the bishop, a man who called himself a libertarian, and lie-detector expert. His name was Don Cargill, and he informed us that with his machine he could tell when a person was lying. http://www.nadacgroup.com/don_cargill.htm
Don was sitting next to me. While we were waiting to begin he told me about the wonderful work he did. His clients would say to him, ‘I just want know the truth.’ His clients were people who, he said, wanted to know whether their partner was unfaithful, or whether their partner was a paedophile. When recording started and he had an opportunity to advertise what his company did he made the most of it.
Ignoring the presenter, I spoke up loudly, clearly and succinctly. It is easy to be succinct about polygraphs. They do not identify liars. All they reveal is emotion. A truth-teller can be in a high state of emotion while a cold, practised liar is not. Yet, according to Don Cargill and his colleagues, the truth teller is lying and the cold, practised liar is not. The presenter could have asked me for my evidence, and I could have quoted the world expert on lying, Paul Ekman. In his book Telling Lies he states simply, ‘The polygraph exam does not detect lies, just signs of emotion.’ But the presenter did not. Instead she shut us up by ordering us to go into the playground and finish our argument there.
Next day I received an email from a researcher on the programme. Clearly this was an email that was sent to every person who took part.
Dear Dorothy,
I just wanted to say thank you so much for giving up your Sunday morning for The Big Questions. We very much appreciated your contributions. You were an invaluable member of our show and made some really interesting and important points.
I hope you enjoyed taking part in the show and we look forward to seeing you again.
Thank you for your routine ‘thank you’ email. I not only gave up my Sunday morning but I also gave up my Saturday afternoon and evening and much of my Sunday afternoon.
I have been puzzling over what was the purpose of having Don Cargill on the programme. Was it because, as you had a nice young man as an example of an alcoholic (albeit an ex-alcoholic), you had an example of a liar in a not-so-nice man who was selling a skill he did not possess to gullible people at a point of great crisis in their lives? Or was it that no one in your team could be bothered to do a little research on polygraphs.
If polygraphs worked, the police and the law courts would be using them. All neuroscientists are agreed that the evidence is that the only thing that polygraphs do measure is emotion. They do not and cannot show that a person is lying. Some American states do use polygraphs, even though American neuropsychologists like Paul Ekman have been telling them for years that polygraphs do not identify when a person is lying. Similarly, some American states continue to use capital punishment, despite the fact that the research has always shown that capital punishment does not reduce the incidence of murder.
In recent research neuroscientists have found that certain changes in a person’s brain might reflect the effort needed by a person to lie, but this research has not been sufficiently replicated for neuroscientists to say with any degree of certainty that these changes shown on the scan do reflect the effort involved in lying. They will never be able to say yes, definitely, this person is lying because an MRI scan cannot read a person’s thoughts. Neuroscientists are a long way from being able to do that.
I find it scandalous that the BBC has allowed a person like Don Carhill to advertise what he does, or purports to do.
Please pass this email on to other members of your team.
Yours sincerely,
Dorothy Rowe
To date I have not received a reply from any member of the team or from Mentorn.
However, some weeks later I did an interview on BBC Radio Wales about Why We Lie. It was a straightforward interview until the end when I was asked, ‘Do polygraphs show that a person is lying?’ I was given amply, uninterrupted time to explain that polygraphs reveal nothing but emotion.
From my experience it seems that the BBC is a huge closed system in which news and gossip whizz around at the speed of light. Most BBC staff care enormously about maintaining the BBC’s fine reputation, but a few do not.
Do remember this, and that, when you’re out publicising your new book, you’re unlikely to get any writing done, not even answering your emails.
My two cataract operations are over and the soreness in my eyes have just about disappeared. In that time I’ve learnt a lot, little of which I had expected to learn.
I had planned to spend the week before the first operation resting and practising my relaxation technique for the operation. On the Sunday evening at the beginning of that week I went into the kitchen, switched on the light, and found a rat on the worktop. I have lived in this ground floor flat for 14 years and have never seen as much as a mouse in it. The next twelve days I spent leaping out of bed early so I could be ready for for when Tony from Rentokil arrived, and on other days for when Manuel the builder arrived to repair what Tony had needed to demolish and to block of every place where a rat might squeeze through. The first four days of these twelve days I spent sharing my home with the rat and trying to outwit this cunning, devious and ingenious creature. When there were no more signs of the rat, Tony waited a week before deciding that the rat had finally died from the massive amount of bait it had eaten. By the time I got to hospital I was so glad to have a chance to lie down.
The operations were extraordinary. They were no more painful than any minor operation. There was some pain when the anaesthetic wore off, and each eye felt quite sore for some days, but there was no pain that an aspirin could not ameliorate. There was nothing to see during the operations except random sensations, but for me this was when the operation became really interesting.
For many years now I have been explaining that the way our brain operates means that we cannot see reality directly but only the interpretations and meanings that our brain creates out of our past experience. The consequence of this is that we each live in our own world of meaning. The first operation was on my left eye, so I knew that all I could experience was random, unstructured sensations as the lens in the eye was removed and replaced with a plastic one. Meanwhile, all the my right eye could see was a shifting pattern of diffuse blue light and white light created by the blue sheet covering my face and the lights over the operating table. Yet that was not what I perceived. My brain was busy turning these random sensations into meaningful images that I could describe in words. The sensation on my left became a set of horizontal concentric circles like the circles made by Saturn’s moons that Professor Brian Cox had talked about in his recent television series. On my right the blue and the white splodges were transformed into a bright blue sky with small fluffy clouds, such as can often be seen in summer in Australia, except that my picture of sky and clouds was set in a rectangular rococo frame.
The second operation taught me something I thought I already knew very well.
If there is one thing that psychologists have proved many times over in many different settings is that we learn far more quickly when we are rewarded for right or nearly right responses than when we are punished for wrong responses. (What we learn from punishment is fear, often followed by rage and the desire for revenge). Psychologists call such rewards ‘positive reinforcement’. Young mothers used to be taught that rewarding children spoilt them, and that naughtiness should be dealt with by a hard slap or two. Today young mothers are taught to reward their small children with an almost continuous stream of ‘good girl’, ‘good boy’, ‘you did that very nicely’ and so on. Often now they praise their child for doing what the child had already begun to do, having apparently decided to do just this. Perhaps the child is sitting quietly and the mother notices and praises him for sitting quietly. Most mothers master the technique of positive reinforcement very quickly because they soon see how well it works. In other settings the success of positive reinforcement are not so readily apparent, so many people, especially in certain professions, not to use it. All my experiences of having an operation were where the surgeon treated the patient as an insensate log over which he and his team conducted their conversations. There is nothing lonelier than being the log in such an operation. Now I discovered that this was not what my consultant did. He and his team explained to me what they were doing just before they did it. Moreover, as the operation proceeded, my consultant praised his team for each well-practised movement that was carried out. He included me in this praise.
At about the middle of the second operation, when I judged that my old lens had been removed and the new one was about to be put in, my consultant praised me for lying still. To move at that point in the operation would be the height of stupidity, yet at that moment I did not interpret this praise in this way. Rather I felt a warmth arise from the centre of my being and I was immensely comforted. Thus, I guess, there are times when a small child pays no heed to his mother’s rewarding words, and other times when when her praise pierces the shell of the world of meaning in which he lives and assures him that, while he enjoys the privacy of his own world, it is possible to contact others and be contacted by them, and be comforted and strengthened by the touch of a hand or a few simple words.
These past four weeks have not been easy but, apart from the rat, well worthwhile. In a follow-up meeting with my consultant my eyes were tested and I was told that I had 20/20 vision but need reading glasses for small print. I can certainly see the world more clearly now.
When I started this blog my aim was to write a post each week. So far I’ve met this aim, but the next ten days might prevent me from finishing the posts I’m working on now, one on the continuing drama of Lehman Brothers and one on the work of the psychologist Stanley Milgram. Tomorrow, Monday March 22, I’ll be having the first of two cataract operations. The operation itself, so everyone tells me, is nothing to be concerned about, but after the first operation I’ll have one eye that sees the world clearly but requires reading glasses and the other eye that continues to see the world as sort of smudged and out of focus. The second operation on March 30 should give me two eyes that see clearly, but then I’ll need to find the reading glasses that will suit my two new plastic lenses.
I suppose there’s some sort of irony in all this when you consider that I’m always pointing out that our physical make-up does not allow us to see reality directly.
In my post entitled The Death of a Great Little Magazine I said that Stephen Fry, ‘became notorious for abandoning his role in a West End play and running away to France. However, he returned, confronted his demons, and since then he not only produced such magnificent work but he has become a National Treasure.’ I was basing what I said on what the media had said about what Stephen was doing. Also, I had been watching his television programmes, and heard him speak at the Mind Award lunch where he had been given the Champion title. In my clinical work I have know a large number of people who had been plunged into the hideous whirlpool of anxiety, mania and depression but had managed to find something that had enabled them, not only to emerge from this experience, but to learn from it and become a much wiser person. It seemed to me that this is what Stephen had done.
Amongst Stephen’s many achievements since the terrible time when he fled the theatre is his award of an honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, something that British psychiatrists do not hand out lightly. Their professional journal The Psychiatrist always features and interview with one of their number. In the March 2010 issue Stephen was the interviewee. He was asked,
What has been the highlight of your career?
Playing Oscar Wilde. Making a documentary series on bipolar disorder.
. . . And the lowlight?
The lowlight . . well, running away from a West End play at the time was a lowlight, but the two above would have never happened without it, so perhaps it was a good thing.
Thus Stephen confirmed what I had surmised.
The poet Gwyneth Lewis wrote the best book book on the experience of depression that I have ever read. She called it Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book about Depression. From her own experience of depression she was able to say, ‘In a sense, depression is a very kind disorder, and will return only if you refuse to learn the lessons it has to teach you. . . Depression teaches you that the only permanent way out is by finding and accepting the truths you have been avoiding, even if you thought you’d already faced them. A relapse shows that you haven’t and there’s more work to be done.’
When you’ve been depressed but have learnt the lessons your depression had to teach you, you might believe that, now you’ve got life really sussed out, bad times will never come again. But life isn’t like that. Very unpleasant things can still happen. Many of my clients told me that, faced with a crisis, they saw that they had a choice. They had learnt a new and much better way of living, but they hadn’t forgotten how to take themselves down the path back into a depression. They could see the seductive power of depression, how it enabled them to shut out all the difficulties there that they should be facing. They could ignore it all, and let somebody else be responsible. Facing up to the crisis was so much harder. However, by then they had acquired what Stephen Fry calls ‘mental wellness’.
In his interview for The Psychiatrist he was asked,
We are used to looking at mental illness, what does ‘mental wellness’ look like?
It is something to do with being able to cope. Things will get bad, but somehow one copes (even after a lot of wailing and moaning and pain) – I think Archbishop Ramsey, decades ago, defined wisdom as the ability to cope, I would say that that is what mental wellness is too.
That is the best definition I’ve ever heard of mental health. And Stephen ought to know.
We’re used to science fiction telling us stories about people travelling in space in a space ship, just as we’re used to walking into a silver cylinder where we’re fed, supplied with drinks, and where we watch television and go to sleep. Time passes, and then we’re told to leave the cylinder whereupon, lo and behold, we find they’ve shifted the scenery and we’re in another country. Why not do something similar when with climate change Earth becomes too uncomfortable a place to live? Instead of arriving at another country we could arrive at another planet or a whole series of planets until we find one as nice as the planet whose climate we have ruined?
The search for a suitable planet could take our lifetime, and our children’s life time, or even longer, space being so unimaginably immense. How would we and our descendants cope with living in a cylinder, admittedly a cylinder much bigger than the ones we travel in today? Science fiction tells us that human beings are capable of travelling for huge lengths of time within a spaceship but is this really so?
This is the problem. We are children of the Earth, and we’re more attached to Earth than we know.
Time, as we experience it, is not just a matter of setting our clocks so that they will tell us how much time has passed since we first set them. On Earth we always have marked the passing of time with the rising and setting of the sun and the passing of the seasons. However, we are more intimately connected with the passing of time than simply through what our eyes tell us about the passage of the Earth around the sun. In her delightful book Time, Eva Hoffman wrote, ‘The adjustment of the diurnal cycle does not occur through anything as simple as sight, which would let an animal know whether it is day or night, or through any sensory signals from the environment. Rather, the periodicity of living creatures is governed endogenously, from within, by versions of that marvellous mechanism called the “biological clock”.’ The biological clock or circadian rhythms govern the complex biochemical and physiological processes in our body. As the scientists who work with astronauts know, interruptions to circadian rhythms have serious consequences. Circadian rhythms operate over a more or less 24 hour cycle. Just as the Earth does not take a precise 24 hours to circle the sun, neither do our circadian rhythms closely follow our man-made clocks.
Such is the way that we perceive what is around us that we measure ourselves and all that we see in relation to the Earth. We see everything in human sized terms. We see the world in relationship to our human size. When Captain Kirk and the Star Ship Enterprise travelled through the final frontier of space, all the worlds they encountered and all the sentient creatures they found they could see in the same way as they saw themselves and their planet Earth. Yet as far as we know, out there in the farthest reaches of space, there could be sentient beings that are the size of particles or the size of planets. In a world of particle-sized beings everything would appear to us to be travelling at the velocity of particles, while in a world of planet-sized beings everything would appear to us as travelling very slowly. Eva Hoffman wrote, ‘We come into the world equipped with a certain mode of consciousness, so that we are predisposed to to understand reality in a certain way. At the same time we are inextricable part of the world we come into, so that we imagine or experience time and space as we do – as time and space – by virtue of being constituted as we are, and of coming into the world as it is.’
Inside the spaceship everything would relate back to us. The spaceship would have been been built and now run by us. We would have set the clocks, just as we would have built and programmed the computers. Yet this was not how we lived on Earth. There we had something outside ourselves that we could relate to in terms of ourselves but which operated independently of us. That was the kind of world in which we became ourselves. We learnt about the part of the world where we lived by interacting closely with it. On the DVD of the Disney-Pixar film Up there is a short film about the team who created Up. Central to the plot of the Up are the Tepuis. These are immense, table-topped upthrusts of ancient rock rising thousands of feet out of the jungle in Canaima National Park, Venezuela. Drawing the Tepius from photographs was not good enough for the team. They need to climb the Tepuis, stand on their surface, and be surprised and moved by what they discovered. Ricky Nierva, the art director, commented, ‘You’ve got to smell it, you’ve got to taste it, you’ve got to be there to get the realness of it.’
This is how we as children learned about the realness of our part of the Earth. In learning this, we became part of the Earth, and the Earth became part of us. The sight, the smell, and the taste of our Earth are part of our body’s memory and a vital part of our identity. Would the children born on the spaceship feel about the metallic surfaces of their world in the same way as we feel about the plants and insects, flowers and trees, the birds and animals, rivers, lakes and ponds, the sea, the wind and the sky that we saw from Earth? How terrible it would be to climb aboard a spaceship knowing that you could never go home again.
For the last forty-odd years Barbara Ehrenreich has been inspecting aspects of American life with a mercilessly critical eye. Her latest book is published under different titles in different countries, but my copy, published in New York by Henry Holt and Company in 2009 is called Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Positive thinking and Positive Psychology are big business in the USA, and like all big businesses in America, Positive Psychology seeks to conquer the world.
Big Business ignored the harm it has brought to the countries where it established itself. As Peter Maas described in his book Crude world: The Violent Twilight of Oil, large oil companies like Shell and Exxon-Mobile despoiled the land and displaced the people living there, thus causing enormous suffering. In a similar way Positive Psychology ignores the real pain and suffering that many people endure. Martin Seligman, who established the business of Positive Psychology, advises us to pause at the end of the day and count our blessings. That is all very well if you are living in circumstances where there is much to be grateful for, but, if you are an Iraqi or an Afghani who has lost everything in the war Big Business (the Pentagon, Haliburton, Blackwater) brought to their country, what blessing can you feel grateful for, except, perhaps, that at the end of the day you are still alive?
Positive Psychology ignores how many people, particularly people who get depressed, feel an intense hatred for the world and everything in it. This was how my mother felt. At times of crisis she would exclaim with intense disgust, ‘It’s rotten! Everything is rotten!’ She closed her ears to my father’s pleas that she be more optimistic. With my mother and people like her, their hatred of the world has spilled out from their intense hatred for and disgust with themselves. If, under the influence of the gospel of Positive Psychology, they try to persuade themselves that they are happy, and tell other people so, they have to be constantly on guard to prevent their intense unhappiness from revealing itself. Such lies prevent them from undertaking the work of discovering the events in their childhood that led them to conclude that they were bad and unacceptable. Such a search is never easy, but it is the only way to arrive at the self-acceptance of which happiness is a by-product.
Happiness is always a by-product of what we do. When we become engrossed in doing something that we feel is important we might not notice that we happen to be happy. Make finding happiness your goal, and you have embarked on discovering the equivalent of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
I have often observed somewhat impatiently that there are people who get depressed and people who make them depressed. This is a gross over-simplification, but there are certainly many people who preserve their own equanimity by steadfastly ignoring or belittling the unhappiness of those around them. What Positive Psychology allows them to do is to pass off selfishness as wisdom in living.
Positive Psychology teaches that we can increase our own sum of happiness by undertaking some charitable tasks. However, is not doing good to increase one’s happiness similar to doing good in order to increase one’s chances of getting into heaven? And are not both activities examples of nothing but selfishness? Have not Positive Psychologists not realised that, if we are selfish, other people do not like us? Do they not know that being disliked does not lead to happiness?
Why have a blog when you have a website? 