Dorothy Rowe

November 2004

What Is A Beautiful Mind?

Dorothy Rowe

The film The Beautiful Mind tells a simplified version of the life of the brilliant mathematician John Nash who at 31 found his life taken over by the delusional belief that he was involved in a Cold War spy operation where he was dominated by the spy chief and alternatively encouraged and harassed by an old friend and his young niece. Many people have such a psychotic experience, but John Nash was remarkable in that he recovered from the psychosis without taking psychiatric drugs because he learned how to deal with the kind of intrusive thoughts which can wake us from our sleep and torment us during the day.

At first John Nash's reactions to this ongoing imaginary drama led to his incarceration in a psychiatric hospital where the frequent administrations of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and mind-clogging drugs matched in terror the drama in his mind. When he returned home he found that his treatment prevented him from working, loving his wife, and caring for his child. He decided to deal with the persecutors in his head by facing them and telling them that from now on he would ignore them. This was a battle, but eventually he was able to return to Princeton University where in 1994 he received the Nobel Prize.

To placate the powerful drug companies the film makes out that John Nash was cured by taking the newer psychiatric drugs, which is untrue, and it fails to explain the origin of the figures which he saw as clearly as he saw the people around him. Psychiatrists have always regarded visual and auditory hallucinations (seeing people and hearing voices) as merely symptoms of a disease, schizophrenia, in the way that red spots are a symptom of measles. However, in recent years the Hearing Voices Movement, which is made up of people who have had such experiences, has shown that these hallucinations are memories differing only in intensity from the memories we all have.

In one scene in the film a friend questions whether John Nash is ready to return to teaching. He asks whether the persecutory figures were still there. John Nash replies that they are and perhaps they always will be but that he's got used to ignoring them and they've got used to being ignored. John Nash then wonders whether all our dreams and nightmares are like this and says, 'They're my past. Everybody is haunted by their past.'

So we are. We are our past. Forget your past and you lose your identity. Unfortunately some memories can wake us in the small hours and fill us with horror, or nag at us during the day and prevent us from attending to what we should be attending to. When our past troubles us like this we can turn to the Hearing Voices Movement for advice on how to deal with unpleasant memories. They have developed a number of techniques for dealing with their voices which are equally applicable to other kinds of intrusive memories.

First, we must face our memories and see whether the meaning we have given them is actually sensible. We often forget that we made decisions in the past according to what we knew at the time. Of course we know more now, but blaming ourselves for not knowing then what we know now is as silly as it would be for a doctor who practised in the 1930s blaming himself fifty years later for not prescribing antibiotics to children with diphtheria.

Second, we have to develop techniques for ignoring the memories when they come to mind. We must practise the skill of turning our mind to something else by saying firmly to ourselves, 'I'm not going to think about that now.' Have something else to think about, be it only some mental arithmetic or a cross word puzzle, or you can tell yourself an interesting story. I've got a fund of somewhat boring stories which I tell myself when sleep is slow to come. When you go to bed you can play a story tape or leave the radio quietly broadcasting the BBC World Service all night. People who hear voices have found that if they sing or talk the voices have to be silent. Singing or talking and paying attention to what you're doing will block a memory from coming to mind.

Some people have found that their voices are very insistent on being heard and they've dealt with this by making a deal with the voices, such as, 'You have to be quiet all the time except between five and six in the evening when I'll sit and listen to you.' If a memory insists on coming into your mind then set aside a time during the day to remember it, and refuse to pay it any attention to it in the hours when you want to sleep.

Often memories intrude because we cannot bear to let them go. We may believe that we deserve to suffer while we remember and that suffering shows that we are good; we may believe that not remembering someone means that we didn't love them; or we can try to deny that we have suffered loss by going over our memories. But suffering is just suffering. It's not virtue. If we love someone then that love is always part of us whether we think of it or not. Life is loss. If we want to live wisely we have to learn to let go of our losses.

For me a beautiful mind is not a mathematical mind but a wise mind. No doubt there are many wise mathematicians, but in this they are like ordinary mortals. A wise person is someone who is not haunted by the past but has learnt from it and has let the losses go; who plans for the future but is not wedded to those plans; who lives mostly in the present, mindful of what is happening. The past and the future are simply ideas. Only the present moment is real.

October 2004

My Last Guru

Dorothy Rowe

An ancient Zen story tells how there was a monk who, on his travels from place to place, had abandoned each of his possessions until he was left with nothing but a pottery bowl. One day when he was crossing a stream the bowl slipped from his fingers and lay broken on the pebbles. The monk looked at the bowl and said, 'That was my last guru.'

A guru is somebody or something from which we learn. The monk's last lesson was that we do not need possessions in order to survive.

I read this story a long time ago when I was discovering the wisdom of Zen, Taoism and Buddhism. I read it again told in another way in an email sent to me by a Saga reader whom I'll call Jacqui. She told me how her mother had been moved to a residential home as she now needed 24 hour care. Jacqui wrote, 'Surrounded now by strangers, and strange furniture in an area she has never visited before, she is happier than I have seen her for a long time. During her moves she has lost pictures, photographs, records, ornaments and clothes. I have been surprised at how upset I have become while my mother seems oblivious to her loss.' Jacqui went on to tell me how as a child she lost the chance to have a happy childhood. As an adult, despite her great efforts to keep them, she lost her marriage and her family. Now she faces losing her mother and 'my place as her daughter'.

Just as we can lose physical possessions we can lose the things that we feel define who we are, things such as son/daughter, mother/father, brother/sister, husband/wife, teacher, plumber, homeowner, artist, singer, cook, cricketer, dancer and so on. Thus we define ourselves in terms of our relationship to someone else or in terms of what we do. These are all things which we can lose. The people we relate to can die or disappear from our life. The opportunity to do what we do may no longer be available to us, or we may become incapable of carrying out such an activity any longer. As these definitions of our identity disappear we can feel that we have disappeared, that we have become a no-thing, a non-entity. This terrifies us and destroys our self-confidence.

Often when we've lost something we've been able to replace it with something else. Lose a spouse and find another, lose a job and retrain for another, give up mountaineering and take up rambling. But there comes a time when replacements are no longer available or when what has been lost is irreplaceable. Such losses can seem to be unendurable because we cannot let go of what we have lost.

Buddhism defines suffering as the desire to make reality repeatable. Life is change, but we can find it hard to accept this when we have lost or fear that we may lose something that we see as being essential to us, defining us and giving our life its meaning. We fight against the endless changes that life brings and as we do so we suffer. How can we stop the suffering that loss brings?

Suffering and sadness are not the same. In sadness we acknowledge that something we loved has been lost. There's no sense of conflict in our feeling of sadness. We acknowledge that something we loved has been lost or that something we wanted can never be ours. In suffering we fight against accepting that what we loved has been lost and that something we desire can never be. We tell ourselves that it isn't fair that this has happened to us. Haven't we always worked hard to be good? We don't deserve what has happened. Then we tell ourselves that this loss is our fault. If we'd been really good it wouldn't have happened, that our loss is our punishment for not being good enough. When we complain about the injustice and blame ourselves we are trying to hold on to our precious possession, believing that if we complain enough, berate ourselves enough that which we have lost will be restored to us. Trying to make reality repeatable we suffer.

We cannot let go of what we have lost because we believe that without this possession we are nothing. It is this belief which lies at the heart of our suffering. The story of the last guru teaches us that we do not have to have possessions in order to exist. Thinking of yourself as being a good person is just as much a possession as thinking that you are a daughter, a singer, a cook. Babies come into the world experiencing themselves just as they are. Then they get taught that that won't do. They have to be good children and take on various roles by which to define themselves. We all go through this process, and in the course of it we lose the ability just to be ourselves. We acquire possessions and then we fear to lose them. We suffer. We need to learn that we do not need to define ourselves to ourselves. Other people may demand definitions of who we are but to ourselves we are simply ourselves. We exist. We don't need possessions to assure us that we do.

When Jacqui looked over her life she could see that she had lost many things in her life yet she had survived. She had done this because she had let go of the things she had lost. She acquired other things but instead of regarding these things as possessions which defined who she was she saw them as things which simply gave her satisfaction and pleasure. At the end of her email she said, 'I survived losing my childhood; I survived losing my choice; I will not be annihilated; I will survive as a person.' Her mother had been her last guru.

September 2004

Is Debt a Vice or a Virtue?

Dorothy Rowe

Personal debt in the UK is nearly a trillion pounds. It's made up of what we owe on credit cards and other loans and, most of all, on what we owe on our mortgages. I find such an amount of debt very troubling but then I grew up in the years when to be in debt was shameful. I saw my mother put a shilling or so aside each week until she had enough to buy some new linoleum for the kitchen, or, if she saw some small item she needed but could not immediately afford, she would put it on lay-by. At the shop the item would be wrapped in brown paper and put in a cupboard beside other such parcels, all waiting for their would-be owners to pay the full amount. It was a great day when the last few shillings were paid and the parcel given to the new owner.

After World War Two governments tried to stimulate the economy by allowing expensive items to be bought with hire purchase. However women were not considered capable of managing their own finances. A woman wanting to use hire purchase had to get two male guarantors to sign the hire purchase agreement. When I bought my first car the hire purchase agreement was signed by my husband and my father. Two men less capable of managing their own finances would be hard to find. Now almost daily my post is contains offers of favourable loans and extra credit cards. Owning your own home and refurbishing it to the highest standard has become a national goal and competitive sport. There is now an enormous range of objects which our parents, had they ever encountered them, would have regarded as luxuries but which we regard as necessities.

Such a plethora of money and things is immensely seductive because it appears to promise to fulfil our greatest need and to assuage our greatest fear.

Our greatest need is to feel that our life has some significance. We all need to feel that other people have noticed our existence and regard it with some respect. We all need to feel that we have not simply filled in time between birth and death; that we have left what Samuel Beckett called 'a stain upon the silence'. When the time comes for us to leave the world stage we want to feel that our life has been satisfactory to us and that something we have done will have a long lasting effect upon the world. Those people who present themselves for the humiliations of Big Brother are seeking significance for their lives just as others seek significance through the arts or business or politics or the church. Having a nice home, a new car, the latest bit of technology can promise to give us the significance we crave. Manufacturers and advertisers sell what they hope is an image of personal significance.

When it comes to our greatest fears we fall into two groups. There are the extraverts, the People Persons, whose greatest fear is that of being rejected and abandoned. Through credit they can try to appear to be so attractive, so generous, and so admirable that people want to be in their company. If that fails then with credit extraverts can try bribery. The promise of a super present can ensure that grandchildren come willingly to visit, and paying off their parents' mortgage can create a lifelong sense of guilt in the parents which ensures that your children will always be there to look after you.

For introverts or What Have I Achieved Today Persons credit means that you can ward off the chaos that follows failure by expanding the range of goals you could achieve. Your home can be endlessly improved, or you can move ever upwards from one expensive house to an even more expensive house. A good education can ensure that your children are always a credit to you, while your smart wardrobe and even smarter car can smooth the path of your successful career.

It is easy to forget the danger of living on credit. The poorhouses and the debtors' prisons have long since closed. Governments since the 1980s may have condemned drunkenness and gluttony but they never condemn greed. Indeed, it has now become highly moral to be in debt. We are all consumers now. Whether Conservative or Labour, governments have pursued policies which ensure continual economic growth. Politicians of the ruling party praise themselves for achieving such economic growth but they fail to point out that without such a huge amount of personal debt the growth rate of the British economy would be much lower. The committee which decides what the interest rate will be carries an enormous responsibility. If the interest rate goes beyond a certain point and repayments become larger than what the debtors can afford, the effects on individuals and on the economy will be disastrous.

Britain is not alone in this degree of indebtedness. Indeed, the whole world runs on debt. My image of the international capitalist system is of a large number of people engaged in a game called 'Keeping the Debt Balloons in the Air'. These people are standing close together on a huge field. Above their heads float millions of balloons of various sizes and colours. The purpose of the game is to keep all these balloons in the air. None must touch the ground and burst. Anyone can join the game provided he brings a balloon to join those already there, but once a person and his balloon have entered the game he cannot take his balloon and leave. The game must go on forever.

Events affect the game. Small, nasty wars and conflicts that threaten the game have to be contained, and so far this has been managed. However, another world war would disrupt the game completely. Hence no large power can afford to start a world war. For those of us who remember that the last world war debt for once can be seen as a blessing.

Dorothy Rowe The Real Meaning of Money HarperCollins.

July 2004

We're Not Robots

Dorothy Rowe

Ever since Dr Frankenstein created his monster we've been fascinated by robots, machines that can do everything that humans can do and more. Human-like robots feature in cartoons, in science fiction novels and television series, and in sober accounts of what life will be like in the future. However, while Frankenstein's monster felt loneliness, pain and hatred, the robots of more modern fantasies are deemed to have no feelings. Operating with absolute logic and reason, and with an intelligence far superior to ours, these imaginary machines achieve feats of which we can only dream.

Of course robot replicas of human beings are only a dream. There are now millions of robot machines which build and operate other machines but these robots don't replicate people. Building a robot human being is an extremely difficult task, something which no one as yet achieved. The study of robotics has produced some limbs and hands which work quite well, and scientists working in Artificial Intelligence have created computer software which can mimic a good chess player or a particularly stupid therapist but no one has produced a computer which thinks as we do. In scientific and philosophical circles the battle over whether this can be done rages fiercely.

A philosopher who's very much engaged in this battle is Daniel Dennett who writes about how our brains are 'semantic machines', that is, machines which creates meaning. That seems obvious, doesn't it, given that what we're engaged in all the time is making some kind of sense of what is happening. The big problem is how to find what the intervening steps are between your brain working away and you thinking and feeling.

Which brings us to a problem which scientists have created for themselves. Instead of understanding that feelings are one of the ways we make sense of what's happening, scientists banish them from their work or say that emotions are separate from everything else and not important. So scientists build a computer that can play chess but, when the computer wins a game, it doesn't get excited. Psychiatrists deal with emotions by ignoring them or saying that they are symptoms of a mental disorder, while psychologists put all feelings in a box labelled 'emotion' which is quite separate from 'cognition' which is thinking without emotion. Please don't trouble psychologists by asking them whether statements like, 'I hate my father' or 'I love you' are emotions or cognitions. It only upsets them.

Emotions are messy and confusing. When we see the robot-like characters acting so simply and straightforwardly we can envy them for being able to think so clearly, untroubled by doubt or suffering the pangs of love or loss. Yet we can share Captain Kirk's concern about Mr Spock, a Vulcan with the robot-like features of a high intelligence and no feelings. Captain Kirk knew that if we don't have feelings something is seriously wrong.

Daniel Dennett calls our brains 'semantic machines' and I call human beings 'meaning-creating creatures' but actually we're both talking about the same thing. What you and I and everyone else calls 'myself' and 'my brain' is somehow a single whole, and this 'myself/mybrain' is busy all the time trying to make sense of what's going on. We can give meaning to what's going on in different ways - in words, or bodily sensations, or images, or feelings.

Feelings are a special kind of meaning. They're immediate and, in that moment of creating a meaning, entirely true. You walk into the kitchen and see that someone's left the place in a mess, and the meaning you give to that scene is anger. You take a visitor to your front door, say goodbye, and, as the person leaves, the meaning you give to the scene is intense loneliness. In that moment the anger, the loneliness are absolutely true.

Feelings are the only truth about which we can be absolutely certain. You can only guess what the events were that left the kitchen in a mess or what your visitor was thinking as you parted, but at the moment you felt that anger, that loneliness, you were absolutely certain about what that scene meant to you. Afterwards you can interpret your feelings and perhaps try to change them. You can tell yourself that the messy kitchen isn't important or that if you keep busy you won't notice that you're lonely. You can choose to make yourself miserable by feeling guilty about being angry, or you can confuse yourself by lying to yourself and denying that you felt lonely. We'll lie to ourselves about the truth of our feelings when that truth seems too much to bear. To admit to ourselves that we get angry with the people we depend on or that we are in fact alone can be far too painful. So we'll call anger fear, or the ache of loneliness a symptom of a yet undiagnosed heart disease. Instead of accepting that at that one moment we interpreted a certain event with a certain emotion we'll use our intelligence to hide our own truth from ourselves. Creating and interpreting feelings is a messy business.

Our feelings, the rationalisations we'll make, and the lies we'll tell about our feelings all have one purpose, that is, to hold ourselves together as a person. If we don't do this we can come to feel that we're falling apart, that we're just going to shatter and disappear.

Where does this sense of being a person come from? No one knows. It's something to do with how we create meaning and how we develop as a baby. Whatever this sense of being a person is, it has the ability to create feelings to express itself and to defend itself. Our feelings help define who we are, they help defend us from other people who threaten our sense of being a person, and they enable us to be close to other people. We're not robots. Feelings make us human.

May 2004

The Pleasures of Martyrdom

Dorothy Rowe

Martyrs have been very much in the news. We respond with horror when we learn that yet another suicide bomber has brought death and injury, and we feel great sorrow for the victims. We puzzle over why a young man or woman would willingly relinquish their life and all possibility of future happiness. How could a young woman give up the joy of being close to her children? Yet this was what Reem Riyashi, mother of two small children did.

A clue to the reasons for such actions lay in her statement made in a video just before her death. She said that, as much as she loved her children, she loved Allah more. Such a statement reproves us all. People of superior virtue place greater value on higher things - love of God, love of country, love of their national or religious group - while we poor, misguided creatures place value on family and friends and the simple pleasures of the flesh. The lives of the Christian saints and martyrs record many instances when onlookers to a martyrdom were reproved for their lack of virtue. The fashion for Christian martyrs to be burnt or thrown to lions faded but the motive of martyrdom to demonstrate superior virtue is alive and strong, and present in its purest form in the Domestic Martyr. Not everyone manages to achieve full Domestic Martyrdom but many try.

My sister took to martyrdom when I was born on her sixth birthday, thus robbing her of the status of an only child. Her cries of complaint were well justified because our parents did little to ease her distress, but gradually such complaints became an habitual response to any advantage she saw me as possessing. As time went by her angry tones of, 'It's not fair' melted into the dying fall martyrdom, 'You have everything and I have nothing but I don't mind.' As a child I was intensely annoyed by her claims to martyrdom because I didn't feel I enjoyed any advantages but as I got older I became intrigued and amused by how she could extract martyrdom from so many ordinary situations. Visiting me in Sheffield she was martyred by learning that my postman arrived at 7.30am while back home in Australia she had to wait until early afternoon for her post.

It would have been cruel to deprive my sister of the pleasure of feeling deprived but virtuous as she endured her martyrdom. Besides, my experiences of her martyrdom and that of my mother who was no slouch in being martyred stood me in good stead with the Domestic Martyrs I met in the course of my work as a psychologist. These were the mothers of many of my depressed clients.

Alas, my sister could never become a fully fledged Domestic Martyr. Her quick and noisy temper put paid to that. Masters of Domestic Martyrdom never fly into a temper. They are always patient and long suffering, but somehow always manage to let their family know just how patient and long suffering they are. They present a model of a virtuous life to which the rest of us can only aspire, or perhaps not, since Domestic Martyrs equate suffering with virtue. Domestic Martyrs are without fail kind and loving, and they always mean well. Meaning well doesn't necessarily mean that they know what other people need and want, since paying close attention to your suffering and your virtue leaves little time to observe others closely. Nevertheless, Domestic Martyrs always believe that they know their children better than they know themselves. As the child of a Domestic Martyr it's no use protesting at what a Domestic Martyr does seemingly in your interests because that will only produce the martyred cry, 'I only want what is best for you.'

I am an expert on Domestic Martyrs because many depressed people have a Domestic Martyr as a parent, usually a mother. Fathers can be Domestic Martyrs but the role is usually taken by women who see Domestic Martyrdom as a way to wield power without appearing to do so. Fathers, defeated in the battle for power, usually opt for the quiet life and deal with all discipline issues with the advice to the children, 'Don't upset your mother.'

To be a successful Domestic Martyr you have to bring up your children to be experts in feeling guilty. You must always let them know that their misbehaviour causes you pain. With small children use phrases like, 'Poor Mummy' when they fail to eat the food you have so lovingly prepared. Let older children minister to you while the headache brought on by their misbehaviour forces you to rest. If you fail to turn your children into experts in feeling guilty they will not stay around to bear witness to your suffering but instead leave you alone to go about their own sinful pleasures. Once your children are experts in feeling guilty they are able to blame themselves for any disaster that occurs. Chance happenings and the behaviour of other people they always see as being their fault. Thus with this skill they are able turn the natural sadness which follows loss into the prison of depression.

In the attempt not to feel guilty the children of Domestic Martyrs will work endlessly to prevent their Domestic Martyr parent from suffering. However, they can never wrest suffering out of the hands of a determined Domestic Martyr. You may think that you have met all the needs and wishes of your Domestic Martyr but she will still suffer because she is busy worrying herself sick about you. Alas, as much as you try to be what the Domestic Martyr wants you to be, you can never meet her high standards.

Your impossible task leaves you feeling frustrated, angry and despairing. Visits and phone calls to the Domestic Martyr become very hard to make. Meanwhile the Domestic Martyr continues to suffer and feel virtuous, and she also feels very, very lonely.

Dorothy Rowe Depression:The Way Out of Your Prison, third edition, Brunner-Routledge.

Saga May 2007 (not published)

What Children Learn 

Small children have to learn a great many very complicated things. They have to learn that some marks on a piece of paper are nothing more than that, while other marks stand for certain sounds, and that these sounds together can make a word. They have to learn the mysteries of counting and dividing things into groups. Then there are the rules being good - doing as you are told, being clean, not being aggressive, sharing, and taking your turn. It is often hard to understand why some things are good and others bad. Even harder can be learning about how to keep yourself safe. It is easy to see why running on to a busy road is dangerous but why is it important to wear a hat? 

Past generations of parents did not spend much time thinking about how best to explain these matters to small children. Children were told what to do, and when they failed to do as they were told, they were punished, often with a slap. Nowadays parents are taught, quite correctly, that punishing a child for not doing what he should is the least efficient way of teaching a child how he should behave. Where rules need to be followed, parents should be calm and firm. However, it is not enough simply to tell children what they should do. Children need an explanation of why this is so. Pitching an explanation at a level which is accurate as far as it goes but which the child can understand can be difficult. On an Australian beach I was very impressed with the way a mother spoke calmly and firmly to her three-year-old son. She said, 'If you don't wear your hat we'll have to go home.' At three it is impossible to understand about the dangers of getting skin cancer but a three-year-old does understand about having to leave a nice place and go home. There was only one thing wrong. The mother was dressed in a bikini. No hat. She had forgotten that children learn most not from what adults say but from what they do.

June 2007 (not published) 

What Syndrome Have You Got? 

 Nobuo Kurokawa has discovered a medical syndrome which afflicts 60 percent of older Japanese women - Retired Husband Syndrome (RHS). The symptoms include depression, rashes, ulcers, asthma, and high blood pressure. Meanwhile in Australia some 27 percent of children were found to be doing paid work even during school term. A psychologist, who shall be nameless, thought that this was good because paid work was an excellent cure for children suffering from Slothful Child Syndrome. Every day, it seems, a psychiatrist or psychologist discovers some previously unknown syndrome which affects a surprising number of people. 

These psychiatrists and psychologists take their diagnoses very seriously. They seem to be unaware of the number of jokes and witty remarks based on the notion of a syndrome which are in circulation. When the Australian cricketer Shane Warne retired from first class cricket there were many speculations about how well he would deal with retirement. One commentator said that he feared that Shane would soon be suffering from SDS - Spotlight Deprivation Syndrome. Devotees of magazines like Hello and fans who crowd the pavements in order to see their favourite film stars are said to suffer from CWS - Celebrity Worship Syndrome. 

Those of us who haven't been trained to spot syndromes of a psychiatric nature think that people aren't forced to behave in certain ways by some syndrome but that they have reasons have reasons for doing what they do. A married woman who over the years has developed a way of running her home which suits her can be greatly distressed when her recently retired husband that she change all her routine in order to fit in with what he wants. A friend of mine, telling me about the imminent retirement of her husband, said, 'I married him for life but not for lunch.' I can't think of any child I've known who didn't suffer from Slothful Child Syndrome. Children rarely regard tidying their bedroom or helping around the house as being as important and interesting as their parents do.  Perhaps psychiatrists and psychologists who discover syndromes are themselves suffering from SIPE - Self Important Professional Expert syndrome.

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 Lara 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 who 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 ourselves.

Dorothy Rowe 31/5/10
Given at the British Library on 2nd June 2010

A Brief History of the Ideas and Practices in Psychiatry in the UK

I am an Australian clinical psychologist who came to England in 1968. I took my first degree in psychology at Sydney University and my PhD from Sheffield University. I have written a number of books, the latest of which is called Why We Lie. It will be published by HarperCollins in May 2010. We lie in many different ways. One very popular form of lying in public life and in the professions of psychiatry and psychology is to call something by a name that doesn't actually reflect the truth.

When in 1957 there was a very bad accident at the nuclear reactor called Windscale, the methods of working at Windscale didn't change a great deal but the government changed the name of the place to Sellafield and hoped that people would forget what actually happened at Windscale. I was working at St John's Psychiatric Hospital in Lincoln when in 1984 the managers decided to change the name of this unpleasant, unhappy place to 'The Mental Health Trust'. The hospital didn't change, just the name. When in the 1980s passengers and patients were being renamed - they were now 'customers' - the words 'mental health' began to be used in all the places where 'psychiatric' or 'mental illness' used to be used. Thus we now have a mental health system, while people who would in previous years been told they had a mental disorder or mental illness are now told they have 'a mental health problem'.

In the 1970s a number of people who had managed to survive many years as a psychiatric patient began calling themselves Survivors of the Psychiatric System. This name was not a lie but an accurate representation of what they were. They had been very lucky to survive. Some of these Survivors had been given the diagnosis of schizophrenia, an illness that psychiatrists regard as an incurable. However, these people demonstrated in their own lives that it is actually possible to recover from schizophrenia. They began what became known as the recovery movement. Unfortunately, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have colonised the recovery movement, much in the way the British in the 19^th century colonised countries in order to create the British Empire. Psychiatrists had always talked about 'managing' a patient's schizophrenia or depression in the way that a medical doctor talks about managing a chronic illness such as diabetes or epilepsy but, in colonising the recovery movement, psychiatrists substituted the word 'recovery' for their word 'managing', despite the fact that recovery from an illness means that you no longer carry the burden of that illness. Managing a chronic illness means that you have a burden from which you can never be free.

The history of the psychiatric/mental health system is a tragic history because it demonstrates how little we understand ourselves. Human beings are very intelligent in understanding the objects around us but, when it comes to understanding how we operate as individuals, we are very stupid. If we did understand ourselves, I would not have to begin my lecture by explaining all this to you. You could have been taught all this at school, but children who understand how they operate as human beings are children who think for themselves, question what their teachers tell them, and are never unthinkingly obedient.

A summary of what you need to understand about yourself follows this paper. The early chapters in my last two books, What Should I Believe and My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend which is about siblings, contain an account of what neuroscientists now know about how our brains do not show us the world but create guesses about the world. Everything you perceive is a guess. These guesses form predictions about what will happen. Sometimes your predictions prove to be quite accurate. Sometimes they are wrong.

When our ideas about the world are not quite accurate we make adjustments to our ideas. This is the process we call learning. However, sometimes we discover that we have made a major error of judgement. There is a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is. You will have had this experience at least once in your adult life and many times when you were a child. It is an ordinary, common experience. Yet both psychiatrists and psychologists ignore it or turn it into some kind of pathology. Psychiatrists talk of 'panic' and psychologists talk of 'trauma', but they will not talk about an experience that they themselves will have had many times. For them it was so frightening that they are too frightened to talk about it. Yet this experience and the ways we try to avoid this experience are the central feature of every film and play you have ever seen and every novel you have read. Because you know, though you may not be aware that you know, what this experience is, the story you are being told grips you.

This is what you know, though may not know that you know.

Remember when you were living your life, thinking, 'This is me, this is my life, and that's what my future will be,' and one day you discover that you have got it wrong. The person you were going to spend your life with is no longer available to do that, or the career you planned is not going to happen. Or perhaps you had grown up believing that, if you were good, nothing bad would happen to you or your loved ones, and then something bad happened. Remember how you felt, how you were shattering, crumbling, perhaps disappearing. Remember the terror you felt?

If you understood that it was some of your ideas falling apart, you would have had to confidence to say to yourself, 'This will pass. I just have to bear this uncertainty until I can create ideas that better reflect my true situation.' But if you did not understand this, your self-confidence will vanish and you feel helpless and alone. You might try to hold yourself together by resorting to a desperate defence of, say, blaming yourself for the disaster, but then you find yourself in the terrible prison of depression.[1] Or you might become very obsessional, or you might try believing that you can run away from what is frightening, and so you become very, very busy.[2] 

In this state you are likely to encounter people who do not understand what the experience is that you are going through. Instead they see you as being mad. Most religions have the tradition of explaining madness being attacked by demons. Intensely cruel methods were used, and, in some places, are still being used, to drive the demons out of the person. When in the 18^th and 19^th centuries doctors wanted to take over the lucrative asylum business, they invented all kinds of physical causes.[3] Some psychiatrists continue to claim that depression is caused by a gene and/or by a biochemical change. Yet geneticists point out that all genes do is express different proteins, while psychiatrists like David Healy show that there has never ever been any scientific evidence to support the belief that a biochemical change causes depression.[4] 

However, there is a massive amount of scientific evidence that severe mental distress leads us to behave in ways that are called mad, and that this severe mental distress arises from the way we live our lives and the society we live in. For instance, when in 1965 I was doing my Diploma in Clinical Psychology, I was told, correctly, that only young women became anorexic. If a young man presented with anorexia, the anorexia was a symptom of schizophrenia. In those days you were lucky if the man in your life had a bath and a shave, and put on a clean shirt when he was taking you out. Twenty years later men's magazines were telling their readers how they should look and smell, and, lo and behold, there are now many young men who are anorexic.

Psychiatrists have always been inventing mental illnesses, but now this has become an extremely lucrative business with the authors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) working closely with the pharmaceutical industry. Everyone can find a diagnosis that applies to themselves in the DSM. If nothing else, you qualify for Personality Disorder Not Yet Identified. If ever you've been depressed, you're in the DSM under Major Depressive Disorder in Complete Remission.

Despite all this activity, the greatest advances in our understanding of mental disorders have come, not from mental health professionals, but from those who used to call themselves survivors but now call themselves users of the psychiatric system. They were the people who showed that a psychiatric diagnosis need not be a life sentence. Some of them showed that hearing voices is not a symptom of a mental disorder but a form of auditory memory that at least one third of the population experience. Of those who hear voices, only those people who voices speak to them in very unpleasant ways become psychiatric patients. This year the First World Congress on Hearing Voices was in Holland. You should in the course of your training read some of the literature on Hearing Voices and attend at least one hearing voices group. www.hearing-voices.org 

The history of the psychiatric/mental health system is a history of cruelty comparable with the history of slavery. Please, when you work in the mental health system, do not continue this history of cruelty. Always remember that every person who has been told that they have 'a mental health problem' is a fellow human being, and, even if you cannot do anything useful for that person, you can at least be kind.

When George Bush and Tony Blair departed the political stage, we hoped that the eight years of political lies and hypocrisy had come to an end. No more Weapons of Mass Destruction, no more God speaking directly to the president and telling him to go to war, no more Blair excusing himself by saying, 'I believed that what I was doing was right.' Believing that you are right does not make what you do right. Hitler believed that what he did was right. Blair's successor Gordon Brown might not have Tony Blair's charm, but he did seem to tell the truth, while Obama, we hope, will save the world. People welcomed the new pope, Benedict XVI, while overlooking the fact that he had been in the Hitler Youth. They assumed that, like many young Germans, while he outwardly conformed, he knew that what the Nazis taught was wrong. However, when he reinstated Bishop Richard Williamson who had claimed that only about 200,000 t0 300,000 Jews had died in the Holocaust, many people had to reconsider their assumption.[i]

As ever, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - the more things change the more they remain the same. In politics and religion, hypocrisy reign supreme.

Hypocrisy is a form of lying. Being hypocritical, we pretend to be someone that we are not. Our lies serve many purposes, but under all those purposes is just one purpose. We lie in order to hold ourselves together as a person.[ii] We want others to think well of us, and we want to think well of ourselves. If other people reject us, or we reject ourselves, our sense of being a person threatens to shatter, crumble, even disappear. When the situation we are in suggests we are not the person we want to we think ourselves to be, we often choose to lie.

Contained within our concept of the person we are is the concept of the person we could become. Sometimes this concept concerns the talents we possess and could develop. Sometimes the concept is about power and the advantages that come with power. The beliefs that we hold about politics and religion are contained within our concept of who we are. For some of us, these beliefs are not very important. They are no more than a few decorations added to the structure of our sense of being a person. But for some people, the beliefs they hold about politics or religion are the beams that hold up the whole structure. They find any threat to these beliefs very frightening. Such fear readily turns to anger. Over the past few months I have been the object of this anger felt by the religious people who were offended by my book What Should I Believe? If there had been a stake handy, I would have been burnt on it.[iii] When in 1972 I was at the Karl Marx Clinic in Leipzig in the DDR. I failed to make a sufficiently fulsome response when the Director of the clinic asked me about what I thought of mental health care in the DDR. I felt I came close to being shot. I had put myself in these dangerous situations because I had told the truth as I saw it.

We all know that politicians lie. It is built into the democratic political system. Each political party represents the interests of particular group in the community. It would be possible to have a cooperative political system where the different parties agreed on certain issues, and agreed to differ on others, but instead we have an adversarial system where parties face one another across the political chamber and argue. If the party in power holds a certain opinion, the opposition party must hold the opposite view. Individual party members are required to present themselves as sharing the opinions of their party. To do otherwise would put their careers at risk. Thus hypocrisy is built into the political system.

It has always been easy for an opposition party to take an opposing stance to the government's economic policy. An economist, who once was an advisor to the Conservative Party, told me, 'For every economist who holds an opinion on the economy, there is an economist who holds the opposing view. Both are wrong.' Economists advise our political leaders, so can we assume that, when it comes to economic policy, all political leaders are wrong?

Whenever we are faced with a new situation, the only means we have to deal with it is our past experience. But what do we do when the situation we are facing is very different from all the situations we have faced in the past?

The current financial crisis bears some similarity to the Great Depression of 1929, but, in those days, the global institutions that we now take for granted did not exist. The present head of the Federal Reserve Bank of America is Ben Benanke who is a world authority on the Great Depression. The Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman said of Benanke 'Nobody was more prepared, intellectually, for the mess we're in.' He went on, 'The Benanke Fed has suffered from the problem of being, again and again, behind the curve. The financial crisis keeps developing new dimensions, which few people - including the very smart people at the Fed - see coming.'

Complete ignorance has never stopped a politician holding forth about his views and claiming to be right. When Australia was facing the credit crisis, the Leader of the Federal Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, would have people believe that he and he alone knew what should be done. The fact that he spent so much time criticising what the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was doing suggested that he did not know what should be done. However, Malcolm Turnbull is an ambitious man, and, in fulfilling that ambition, some hypocrisy might stand him in good stead with those people who believe that no Labor Prime Minister could ever be right about anything.

When Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of Britain, she dominated her cabinet, forcing many of them to endorse publicly policies in which they did not always believe. Kenneth Clarke, as Minister for Health and then Chancellor, gave Margaret Thatcher strong support, and he prospered accordingly. With the defeat of the Conservative government in 1997, he returned to the back benches. He has considerable business interests and is often heard in the media talking about his passionate interest in jazz. His ambition now seems to be to lead a pleasant life. David Cameron, the leader of the opposition, does not seem to have realised that he cannot control someone who has no further political ambitions. He brought Clarke into the shadow cabinet as business minister. Cameron and his shadow chancellor, George Osborne, are very ambitious men, so no matter what steps Gordon Brown took to deal with the credit crisis, they criticised him. Cameron's once economic adviser admitted very readily to me that Cameron had no ideas about what should be done, but when has having no ideas ever stopped an ambitious politician?

A paucity of ideas often leads to greater and greater exaggerations. George Osborne had claimed that Gordon Brown had already 'bankrupted Britain'. Cameron joined him, claiming that very soon 'the money will run out' and Britain will be bankrupt.'

In the business of buying and selling we have to trust one another. Doubt one another and trade collapses. No politician should express in public any doubts about his country's ability to meet its debts. In the past banks have collapsed, not because they did not have any money but because people believed that the banks did not have any money. Kenneth Clarke was able to put his country's interests ahead of his own. When asked in a television interview whether there was a possibility that Britain would go bankrupt, he said, 'I don't think that's a realistic possibility.'[iv]

Note the Clarke talked about possibilities, not about absolutes. Many people acknowledge that, whatever ideas we hold, there is nothing about which we can be absolutely certain. We can talk in terms of possibilities. This includes talking about politics and religion. We can feel favourably towards certain religious or political ideas, but be aware that what ideas we have have grown out of our experiences, and that other people, having had different experiences from ours, see things differently. When we speak about the basic subject matter of religion, the nature of death and the purpose of life, we allow for doubt. There are many Christians who make plenty of room for doubt. I had an email from one of my readers called Nicky who told me about her life and said,

I find your words about religion very wise, although I'm a Christian now, but I think this kind of wisdom is universal. So many people won't tolerate or take seriously someone else's point of view, and I think that, despite the fact you are not a believer, you have real respect for other's beliefs and understanding. I've found some very wise and friendly people at Church - they say we just have to believe God loves us and will forgive us. We do not need to do good works to get into Heaven, just to believe that Jesus died for us, and that we are not to judge, or anticipate how God will judge others (whether Christians or not). We will do good because of our love for God and each other.

The godly whom I offend cannot tolerate doubt. They regard their beliefs as being absolutely true, and they reject those who do not share their beliefs. I was shocked by the hypocrisy of those who present themselves as highly moral people. A radio producer working in the BBC Religious and Ethic Department edited my recorded words so that what was broadcast was the opposite of what I had said. Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet, interviewed me, and then wrote an article about me that she must have known was intemperate. She tried to prevent me seeing the article. Although it had been published in the journal, it was not put on The Tablet's website, and it took three months of emails and phone calls from my publisher's PR and me to extract a copy from Catherine's secretary.

It takes courage and self-confidence to live our life in the face of uncertainty. Many people feel that they cannot summon up such courage and self-confidence, and so they tell themselves that what they believe is absolutely true. The philosopher Simon Blackburn spoke of 'the problem of the false sincerity of those who deliberately insulate themselves from reasonable doubts in order to maintain the convictions they need to prosper.'[v] Such people try to hold themselves together by lying to themselves. They try to hide from themselves the knowledge that there is nothing in life about which they can be absolutely certain. They tell themselves that they believe something which they, in fact, do not. In word and deed they are hypocrites.

When we tell ourselves something which we know is not the case, we repress what we know to be the truth and create in ourselves a conflict that inevitably has dire consequences. People lie to themselves about all kinds of inconvenient truths. In my writings about depression, I have talked about those people who want to believe that their parents were kind, loving, wise people, and so they repress the truth that their parents had hurt and betrayed them. Instead of recognising that a painful childhood leads to unhappiness, they blame themselves for everything that has gone wrong in their life, and so turn ordinary unhappiness into depression.

When we first lie to ourselves and repress something that we know to be true, we learn a tactic that is always at hand whenever we are in a situation where acknowledging the truth could be bothersome. We abandon trying to establish what the truth is, and instead create immediately comforting lies.

Establishing the probability that something might be true is actually very difficult. I am in the process of writing a book called Why We Lie[vi] and have just finished a long chapter about the difficulties human beings have in establishing the probability of any truth. Lying is easy. All we have to do is to create a fantasy.

Lies are usually expressed in language, and when lying becomes our preferred mode of communication, we abandon any attempt to find a precise and accurate language in which to express our thoughts. We use language to misinform.

Take, for instance, these two statements, 'I have faith in God', and 'I trust God'. Here the words 'faith' and trust' are assumed to have the same meaning, but they do not. Trust requires evidence. Faith does not. The various religions require their followers to have faith. Some churches, like the one Nicky attends, require their congregation to have faith in something quite modest, in contrast to some religions who demand a faith that involves the giving up of all independent thought. In contrast, we trust people and institutions when the evidence shows that the people or the institutions are trustworthy. All it needs for us to lose trust is one piece of evidence to the contrary. Despite the fact that God is, at best, forgetful and somewhat unreliable, and, at worst, indifferent to what befalls believers, many people continue to have faith in God.

We are always engaged in interpreting what is going on around us and inside us. We have two kinds of interpretations. We can look for evidence to support the interpretations we create, or we can create interpretations and not bother to look for any evidence. The first way is rational thinking, and the second fantasy. Fantasy is tremendously important in many ways, but we should always remember that the definition of madness is the inability to distinguish in your own thinking between rational thinking and fantasy. I have met a great many people who have lost this ability. Only a small proportion of these were psychiatric patients. The rest masqueraded as normal people, often in positions of power and influence. These are people who insist that their fantasies about the way the world is are absolutely true. They repress the knowledge that to doubt is part of being human. They lie to themselves, and, inevitably, they lie to others. They cling to their lies because they fear that, if they acknowledged the truth, they would fall apart. At the end of his book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 Paul Krugman wrote, 'the only important obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.'[vii] Krugman was writing about economic doctrines, but his words apply equally to the doctrines of religion.