Dorothy Rowe

Why theatre is essential in our life

Not long ago I was at the Ensemble Theatre to see a play Tuesdays with Morrie. Perhaps you have seen this play, or read the book by Mitch Albom that formed the basis of the play. The play itself is no more than two people talking, an old man, Morrie, who is dying of motor neurone disease, and Mitch, a man in his thirties who had been been Morrie's student. At its simplest and most obvious level, the story that emerges is that Mitch, having been hurt by the death of his uncle, the only person who really cared for him and whom Mitch loved, resolved never to love anyone again. Through their conversations Morrie shows Mitch that this is a very foolish decision because it will inevitably lead to a lonely, unhappy life. At this level, the play is sentimental, even trite. Yet all plays, in terms of their basic plot, are trite. Take, for instance, the play where two teenagers from feuding families, fall in love and, after a series of mistakes and misunderstandings, kill themselves. Their parents are distressed and end their feud.

Yet most plays aren't trite. Most plays have the richness and complexity that comes with the portrayal of the characters motives and feelings. The audience isn't presented with these directly. They have to search for them. A character might say, 'I am in love', but he may be lying, or he may be mistaken about his feelings. Juliet's love for Romeo is from the beginning real and intense, but Romeo first plays at being in love and then he discovers that he actually is in love. Yet Shakespeare doesn't tell us this directly. We have to work that out for ourselves.

Many plays have no depth, especially the multitude of dramas written for television. The people who commission such plays assume that their audiences don't want to have to think. In this they underestimate their audience. For most of us, working out what other people think and feel is what we do all the time. We find a play without depth utterly boring. However, there are people who cannot understand or do not want to understand that other people have feelings, and that we have reasons for what we do.

An acquaintance of mine told me that her husband was depressed and was consulting a psychiatrist. In tones of great amazement, she said, 'The psychiatrist wanted to see me. I didn't know why, but I went along, and do you know what he told me? He said that other people had feelings. I didn't know that.' I could understand why she always read the shallowest of novels and never went to see a play. I also understood why she had no sense of humour. A sense of humour requires the ability to see the incongruities and the sheer ridiculousness in what people feel, say and do.

Characters like this woman are often portrayed in comedies where the comedy is based on the fact that the character is quite unaware of his or her effect on other people. In Twelfth Night Malvolio was easily tricked into wearing yellow stocking cross garters. The television comedy series One Foot in the Grave had Richard Wilson portraying the ultimate in grumpy old men who, like all grumpy old men, was unaware of his effect on other people. We laugh at these characters when they are on stage, but, when we encounter them in real life, we discover how painful it is to be at the receiving end of the utter selfishness of the totally self-absorbed person.

I think that the woman I described was one of those people who truly do not know that other people have feelings. Such people had the most unfortunate infancy in that, in those first few months when a baby forms a bond with one mothering person, no such person was available for them. In the first months after birth, our brain sets itself up much in the way that a computer has to be set up, but the setting up software for the young brain is the environment around the baby. That environment must contain the right elements so that the baby's brain learns how to enable the baby to learn how to see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and form bonds with other human beings. All this has to be done within a certain window of opportunity. Miss that window, and the baby's brain never learn how to perform these tasks. If, say, a baby's eyes happen to be obscured, perhaps by a cataract, during the window of opportunity, the baby never learns to see because, during the window of opportunity, the visual cortex has been taken over by the other senses. In the same way, if a baby is born during a conflict such as in Gaza at present, or a natural disaster like a tsunami, or to a woman who does not know how to mother and no else is able to take her place, the baby is likely to fail how to learn how to form a relationship with other human beings. Such babies grow up thinking that the world is full of objects, some of which walk and talk. They also fail to develop a conscience. Psychiatrists label such people 'psychopaths', but not all psychopaths are criminals. Many of them are lawyers, politicians, CEOs, and hedge fund managers.

Those of us who did form a bond with some mothering person do grow up understanding that other people have feelings, but we can be very wrong in the feelings and motives we attribute to other people. For instance, vast numbers of people tell themselves and others that their enemies are dirty, wicked, and lacking all human feelings, unlike themselves whom they see as being clean, virtuous, and possessing all the finer feelings. It is this lie that creates and maintains all the terrible conflicts in the world.

Many people lie to themselves about their own feelings. If you have been brought up in the family where anger is seen by your parents as being totally unacceptable, or where the parents express their anger aggressively, you can become so frightened of your own anger that, when you do become angry, you call what you feel 'fear'. Unexpressed and unrecognised anger does not dissipate, and so, if you lie to yourself about your anger, you spend your life being a martyr to your constant anxiety. Many people, particularly men, tell themselves that they have no feelings, and that this is the mark of manliness. Mitch thinks that he had killed off his need to love and be loved. Close to death, Morrie scores a triumph when Mitch cries.

Ordinary plays show us the lies people tell one another, but good plays reveal the lies we tell ourselves. Good plays can also teach us, not only that we have reason for everything we do but that there are reasons behind our reasons. Many people do not understand that.

A popular novelist whose novels are racy but shallow discussed with me the plot of her new novel. Her story concerned a young woman who had gone back to her home town in order to unravel the mystery of her father's life. I asked, 'Why was it important to your heroine to find out about her father's life?' The novelist was nonplussed. She had given her heroine a motive to return to her home town where, as the plot unfolded, she would find romance, but she had no idea that we have reasons for our reasons, and reasons for those reasons, until we get to the one reason that underlies everything that each of us does. Our ultimate reason is that we have to survive as a person. So important is surviving as a person is to us, that, in an heroic act or an act of suicide, we let ourselves die in order to be the person we know ourselves to be. In less extreme circumstances but feeling that our sense of being a person is in danger, we will carry out the most stupid or outrageous acts, or believe the most nonsensical things. Shakespeare knew that the need to preserve our sense of being a person is the essence of tragedy. To be himself, Hamlet had to avenge his father. To defend herself against the living death of marriage to Paris, Juliet had to refuse the marriage, suffer her parents' rage, and ultimately kill herself. Macbeth thought that he needed power in order to be himself, but, in gaining power, he destroyed himself.

Shakespeare's plays have layer upon layer of meaning. Tuesdays with Morrie lack that depth, but it does have a truthful simplicity that can demonstrate to us how we operate as human beings. But to understand this, we have to understand what it is to be a human being. Everyone should know this, but many people don't.

A I stand here it seems to me that I'm here and you're over there and it's all real. But actually, what I'm seeing is a picture that my brain has created in my head. My brain has played a clever trick on me, and has persuaded me that the picture is not in my head with me all around it, but I'm in the middle and the picture is all around me. Your brain has played the same trick on you. What you're experiencing is the picture inside your head. If each of us could take a print of our picture out of our head, and hang it on the wall so we could walk around and look at all of them, we would see that no two pictures are identical. There might be enough similarity for us to recognise one another's pictures, but there would be differences in the depth and distances, in colour, and, most of all, differences in what each of us had noticed and what we have ignored. This is because our brain has constructed our pictures out of our past experience, and, since no two people ever have the same experience, no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way.

If we weren't like this, if we could look directly at the world and see what was there, we would have no media and no arts. There would be news reporting, but no analysts and commentators. No Gerard Henderson, no Phillip Adams. There would be no plays or novels because everyone would see everything in the same way and behave in the same way. If religion existed, there would be just one religion, and, presumably, no religious wars.

Because there is such variety in the way we interpret what we experience, there is such a large variety of religions, each proclaiming, 'We, and we alone, are in possession of the Absolute Truth!' Out of such foolish pride come the cruel, devastating religious wars, such as we see in the Middle East at present.

To know an Absolute Truth we would have to be able to see reality directly. If we were able to see reality directly, what we would see is hard to imagine. As it is, we live in a human-sized world. Elephants live in an elephant-sized world. Ants live in an ant-sized world. If we were capable of seeing reality directly, we would live in a particle-sized world, and we would no longer possess the ability to impose on this ever-moving, ever-changing chaos the familiar divisions of things and people. I wouldn't be able to perceive you, and you wouldn't be able to perceive me.

All the time our brain is constructing a stream of images and ideas. Some of these are conscious, most are not. This stream of images and ideas flows all the time, and, like a stream of water, it forms eddies and whirlpools. Early in our life one of these whirlpools becomes our sense of being a person - what you call 'I', 'me', 'myself'. When we look at a whirlpool in a stream, we can name it as a thing, but we know that, if we tried to lift it out of the stream, it would disappear because it doesn't exist on its own. It is part of the stream. It is the same with our sense of being a person. We talk about ourselves as if we are separate from our body, and all religions assume that there is a soul or spirit that is separate from the body, but, alas, neuroscientists have no evidence to support such a belief. Our sense of being a person and our brain are one.

Something we all know but rarely talk about is how easily our sense of being a person can be threatened with disintegration. We know that when other people treat as being objects of no importance, when they betray or humiliate us, we can feel that we are shrivelling, disappearing. Whenever we discover a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is, we feel ourselves shattering, crumbling, even disappearing. What is shattering and crumbling are some of our ideas, but, since our sense of being a person is made up of ideas, this feels as if we are shattering and crumbling, even disappearing. These experiences are so terrifying that we do whatever we can to protect our sense of being a person. Often what we do is stupid in the extreme.

As much as Capulet loved his daughter Juliet, he was prepared to use her or to destroy her in order to pursue 'an ancient grudge' between his family and that of Montague. He had built his identity on the need to defeat the family of Montague. As part of this, he wanted to give Juliet in marriage to Paris. When she refused, he told her she could

 'hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,

For by my soul I'll ne'er acknowledge thee.'

Lady Capulet, whose identity depended on that of her husband, saw her daughter as a threat, and rejected her, saying,

'Talk not to me, for I'll not speak a word,

Do as thou wilt, for I have done with thee.'

Mitch's parents wanted him to be a lawyer, not a jazz pianist. He defied them, went to live with his uncle in order to pursue a musical career, but, when his uncle died horrible death from cancer, Mitch faced the terrible chasm between what he thought his life was and what it actually is. He and his world fell apart, and he was terrified. He survived this experience, as we all do, because after all it's only ideas that are falling apart. However, if we don't understand that we have to abandon the ideas that no longer fit our situation and that we need to create new ideas, we proceed to creating defences against another such experience. As many people do, Mitch said to himself, 'If I hadn't loved my uncle I wouldn't have suffered so much. I will never love anyone again.'

All ideas have consequences. If we don't love, we never suffer loss. However, if we don't love, we are lonely. The pain of loneliness can be as great as the pain of loss.

All ideas have consequences. Plays are concerned with the consequences of the ideas their characters hold. No idea, and no action that follows an idea has entirely beneficial consequences. There is no set of religious or philosophical ideas which invariable lead people to a secure and happy life. Every belief system has painful consequences. Many plays end happily, but we would be foolish not to recognise that 'happily ever after' is simply a comforting fantasy. Comforting fantasies are essential to help us get through the many difficulties that life presents to us, but, if we tell ourselves that our fantasies are truths, we create enormous difficulties for ourselves. Fantasies need have little connection to the real world, but truths can always be tested against our experience, in the way that a scientist tests an hypothesis or a judge examines the evidence. If you say, 'My belief is true', we are entitled to ask, 'What is the evidence for your belief?'

We use fantasy to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. For instance, all we know for certain about death is that a living person grows strangely still. We don't know what happens after death. We fill in this gap in our knowledge with a fantasy, either the fantasy that death is the end of my identity or the fantasy that it is a doorway to another life. Whichever fantasy we choose, we use it to assure ourselves that that most important part of ourselves, our sense of being a person continues on. People who choose the fantasy of death being a doorway to another life see their sense of being a person continuing on as a soul or spirit. People choose the fantasy that their identity ends in death see something of their sense of being a person continuing on in their children, or their work, or in the memory of those who know them. There is considerable evidence that the last of these is true. When someone comes to matter to us, we create an image of that person and we take it inside us so that it becomes an integral part of the person that we are. In his last conversation with Mitch, Morrie instructed Mitch to visit his grave and talk to him. 'You talk, I'll listen,' he said, and as Mitch told the audience after Morrie had died, 'In the little phrase I finally figured out what Morrie knew that I didn't. If you lead your life as Morrie did, with people the priority, making memories, giving of yourself, then when you die, you're not really gone. You live inside the hearts of everyone you've ever touched. So when they visit a cemetery or when they're walking alone or when they're playing the piano you taught them to play, they can hear everything you've ever given them.'

Plays are fantasies, but, if they're good plays, they can teach us truths, but only if we're prepared to learn.

British Psychological Society - Psychotherapy Section

Dorothy Rowe

The Meaning We Give to Time

It's a great pleasure to be here today to help Phil celebrate her seventieth birthday. I first met Phil in 1968 not long after I had arrived in England when I went to a summer conference at York University organised by Don Bannister to introduce many of us to a new theory of behaviour, namely George Kelly's personal construct theory. There I met the Gang of Four, Don Bannister, Fay Fransella, Miller Mair, and Phil, four people who were going to have a great influence on my life.

Phil and I went on meeting at PCP conferences, but one time that I remember well was at the International Conference on PCP that was held in Holland. On our afternoon off Phil and I went to visit friends of mine who lived in a village some miles away. Phil and I were very proud of the way we managed to find our way there using public transport. It was such fun I entertained the idea that Phil and I might do some further travel together, but shortly after the conference Phil went to a summer school for painting where she met the most marvellous man who proceeded to charm and entrance her for many years to come.

Meanwhile I was exploring the possibilities that personal construct theory afforded me. Up till when I discovered personal construct theory all the theories I had studied - various learning theories, behaviourism, personality factor theory - had nothing to do with how people actually behaved. The most popular model for a human being has always been that of a puppet on strings manipulated by some force over which the person has no control - conditioning, or an inherited trait, or some mental disorder, or instincts, or genes, or biochemistry, or, in popular belief, the planets. Of course the person who uses such a model is not himself a puppet. It's just other people who are always manipulated by some intrinsic or external force. Such a model is popular because it gives the person who uses it the illusion of being powerful because he is an expert and other people aren't. The reason that personal construct theory has never become the leading theory in psychology is because it does not use the model of the puppet. Rather, the person is seen as an agent, interpreting the world in an idiosyncratic way, making choices and decisions. Personal construct theory is the ultimate democracy, and democracy is dangerous to those who would be powerful.

The basic premise of personal construct theory is that what determines our behaviour is not to what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us. As the ancient Greek philosopher Epictatus said. 'It is not things in themselves that trouble us but our opinion of things.' Neuroscientists have now shown that Epictatus was right. Constructed as we are, we are not capable of seeing reality directly. What we perceive is not what's there but the picture that our brain has created as a guess about what is there. The pictures that our brain creates can come from only one place - our past experience. Since no two people ever have the same experience, no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way.

Unfortunately most people, even the ones who regard themselves as being tremendously well educated, grow up not understanding this. Small children know that adults don't see things in the same way that they do. They know that their parents have different view from them of the pleasure and interest of, say, smearing jam over all available surfaces. However, most children lose this understanding because, in the process of learning how to be good, children discover that their way of seeing things is wrong and their parents' way of seeing things is right. This way of thinking is impressed on children by punishment and humiliation. Consequently most people grow up believing that there is one absolute, correct truth, and if they think differently then they are at fault. They must change their perceptions and see the world as all right-thinking people do.

Thus many people grow up believing that the world really is the way they see it, and that they really are the way they see themselves. If we believe this then we suffer because we soon discover that the world refuses to conform to our expectations. If we try to force the world to conform to our expectations we suffer and we cause other people to suffer. We can try to use physical force on other people, as is happening in Israel and Palestine, or we can tell ourselves that the world ought to be what we want it to be, and thus alternate between denying that the world is not conforming to our wishes and feeling aggrieved because the world has not conformed to our wishes. Some people live their lives like this and succeed in making themselves and the people around them very unhappy, and some people, wishing to deny the loss they have suffered, become depressed. As Alice Miller said, depression is the refusal to grieve.

Consequently the first part of therapy needs to consist of the therapist seeking to learn how the client sees himself and his world. The second part needs to consist of helping the client understand that he has created his view of himself and his world and that he is free to change these interpretations.

Clients are usually very reluctant to accept this. There is a certain security in feeling sure that the world is a dangerous place, that other people are untrustworthy and that you are in essence bad and unacceptable. By acknowledging your wickedness you show that you are striving to be good, and you know as an absolute truth that you live in the Just World where good people are rewarded and bad people punished. You might feel resentful that the rewards you deserve have been denied, and you might live in fear of the deserved punishment that is coming your way as night follows day, but at least you have the comfort of certainty. You have failed to notice that a totally secure world is a world devoid of hope and freedom, the two necessary conditions for a tolerable life.

Those people who believe that the world is exactly as they see it are also likely to believe that as they perceive themselves is absolutely fixed and that they are incapable of change. They've inherited their bad temper and tendency to depression just as they inherited the colour of their eyes. They are unaware that what we call 'I', 'me', 'myself' - that is, our sense of being a person - is actually a set of meanings, indeed the structure formed by all the meanings they have created throughout their life. Actually what I just said isn't correct. There's no little you sitting inside your head creating meaning. It's your meaning structure that creates meaning. You are your meaning structure. Your meaning structure is you.

I arrived at this understanding of what constitutes our sense of being a person from the way in my work with clients I came to see how all the constructs created by an individual connect to one another to form a meaning structure. In the 1990s I began to encounter work by neuroscientists on how neural connections were formed when an animal learns something. However, all the neuroscientists I was able to read were concentrating on consciousness. They didn't seem to realise that the big problem was to explain how the brain creates meaning. Consciousness is only a very small part of the great mass of the meaning an individual meaning structure creates. However, I was unaware that at Berkeley University in California there was a neuroscientist who had arrived by a totally different path at the same conclusions that I had.

This was Walter J. Freeman whose most recent book is How Brains Make Up Their Minds. There he wrote, 'Meaning is a kind of living structure that grows and changes yet endures.' ¹ He went on, 'In summary, each of us is a source of meaning, a wellspring for the flow of fresh constructions within our brains and bodies, sheltered by the privacy of isolation. Our constructions are by the exuberant growth of patterns of neural activity from the chaotic dynamics of populations containing myriads of neurons. Our intentional actions continually flow into the world, changing the world and the relations of our bodies to it. This dynamic system is the self in each of us. It is the agency in charge, not our awareness, which is constantly trying to catch up with what we do. We perceive the world from inside the boundaries as we engage it and then change ourselves by assimilation.²

Since our sense of self is our meaning structure, how we perceive ourselves, that is, how we feel about ourselves is central to our perception of the world. This is a far more complex concept than that rubbish jargon term 'self esteem' can ever indicate. How we feel about ourselves in made up of three major strands. The first is how much we care about, in the sense of love, and care for, in the sense of looking after, ourselves. The second strand concerns how much and in what way we value ourselves. The third strand concerns the dimensions we judge ourselves on and how harshly we apply our judgements.

This complex concept affects and is affected by all the meanings we create. We look at the world in relationship to ourselves.

The world as human beings see it is dominated by time. We see time as passing, never still, and ourselves as getting older. Ten years ago I was researching for my book Time on Our Side ³. I was busy asking clients, colleagues, friends, family, people I happened to meet on a train, 'How do you feel about time passing and growing older.' Without exception and irrespective of what age they were, they all told me they feared growing older. Time, one way or another, was their enemy.

Time, as we experience it, is very curious. We can go forwards and backwards in space but we can't in time. You came here today from home and you'll go back there, but you can't go back to this morning. Yet the great theories of science, Newton's mechanics, Einstein's relativity, and the quantum mechanics of Heisenburg and Schrodinger, all seem to work just as well with time running backwards as well as forwards. But this isn't what we see. All our experience agrees with the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that, when a process is irreversible, entropy, or the capacity of the system to change, always increases, so that the system in the future will have higher entropy than in the present or the past. Cold milk cools hot tea, ice melts, mountains crumble and we get older.

We perceive time as passing continuously, just as we perceive consciousness as being continuous. Yet scientists who study vision have shown that all we see of the world is an array of discontinuous snapshots which our brain then constructs into a continuous stream. We see no gaps in our surroundings and we see no gaps in time.

When our brain creates a picture of our surroundings it creates a picture of what we expect to see. When Captain Cook sailed his ship the Endeavour into Sydney Harbour the aboriginal people living on the foreshores ignored the ship and just went about their business as if nothing strange had occurred. The ship was an object totally outside their expectations. It was not until the sailors came ashore in small boats and the aboriginals saw objects the like of which they had seen before - men and small boats - that they could then actually see the Endeavour. This is how we all operate. We see what we expect to see, and when the world refuses to conform to our expectations we become frightened. One way of dealing with our fear is to deny what we have seen.

In western society time is expected to be linear and progressive. Some cultures have seen time as being circular with the ancestors being reincarnated in later generations. This was the belief of the Balinese in Bali and the Druse in Lebanon. But in western culture we see ourselves as progressing along a line which can lead to heaven and hell, or fame and fortune, or old age, doom and death. For us time consists of the past, the present and the future. There's a lovely Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where the little boy Calvin is walking along talking to his tiger friend Hobbes on New Year's Day. Calvin says, 'I'm getting disillusioned with these new years. They don't seem very new at all. Each new year is just like the old year. Here's another year gone by and everything is still the same. There's still pollution and war and stupidity and greed. Things haven't changed. I say what kind of a future is this?! I thought the future was supposed to be better.' Hobbes replies, 'The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.'

Until comparatively recently most people were unsure of exactly how old they were. For them the great milestone was Judgement Day when they would discover whether they would be spending eternity in heaven or hell. Nowadays every birthday comes as another milestone to be passed. It's not the particular birthday itself that's a problem but the particular value you and other people put on it. Does your approaching birthday mean that you are young, middle-aged or old?

Young, middle-aged and old are entirely relative terms, that is, relative to how the person sees himself. When Bob Zemeckis, the director of the film Back to the Future, was asked why the film had been so successful he replied, 'We had a lot of old people going to Back to the Future. When I say old, I mean over eighteen.'

Of course, when I was eighteen I regarded anybody in their twenties as old. Now at seventy-two my views are different. I feel that people younger than seventy are mere infants, while those of us in our seventies are young, those in their eighties are middle-aged, but ninety is old.

The scale young, middle-aged and old is not a straight line. It goes up to a high point and then drops away sharply. For instance, a Qantas pilot giving flight information to passengers aboard a 747 bound for Australia said, 'Before I sign off I want to wish Mrs Jean Willmington happy birthday. Welcome to the downside of your allotted three score and ten.'

When does your downhill slide start?

What we see as the high point and the downhill slide in our life can have a tremendous effect on us. Some years ago I noticed that of the twelve clients I was seeing regularly five were aged between twenty-six and thirty three. They were each suffering in different ways - depression, panic attacks, anxiety, despair, self-harm - but they were all agreed on one point. Thirty was the turning point in life. You had to have made it by the time you are thirty because after thirty you were too old.

The five differed on what they regarded as 'making it'. Mary and Susan saw thirty as the biological time bomb. Mary wanted a baby so that she could lavish on her child the love she had been denied in her childhood. Susan had the desperate but vain hope that in having a baby she would win her mother's approval. John, Simon and Peter, each for his own individual reasons, had set themselves the goal of reaching the pinnacle of achievement by the time they were thirty. They had failed to do this, and now they saw themselves as failures, their life in ruins.

Of course, now that they were in their thirties they would begin to lose what our society says are our most important attributes, sexual potency and sexual attractiveness. Many people, men and women, suffer enormous mental distress because they hold as an absolute truth the belief that to be acceptable they must be sexually attractive and be seen to be sexually active. Without that they are totally valueless, a nothing. In their thirties such people may work very hard at maintaining their appearance, but no amount of cosmetic surgery and hours in the gym can stop the march of time. For many thirty year olds forty is the last chance, and after that it's downhill to disintegration, degradation and death.

Forty is a big turning point for many people because by then most of us have made the choices which will determine the course of the rest of our lives. Some forty year olds, having made choices that are turning out to be reasonably successful, now start to enjoy the delights of power, be it the power of managing people and objects and achieving something, or the power of exploring and mastering a particular subject and obtaining great satisfaction. They discover that such power is more delightful than sex. Other forty year olds find that their choices have so narrowed their opportunities that all they see before them is a dreary trudge down a dusty road to death. Some people respond in drastic ways - some leave their marriage or their career, some try to assuage their pain with drink and drugs, while others prefer to deny that they have lost what they thought would be a wonderful future and thus they retreat into depression.

Now that life expectancy exceeds the Biblical three score and ten people in their forties see turning fifty as the big milestone - half a century. Few people are prepared for what happens once you enter your fifties. Unless you are a very rich man you become invisible. You might see yourself as a very young fifty but the young don't see you at all. In their way of thinking you are old, and to them the old are invisible. This is literally so. You wait at a reception desk, and the eyes of the receptionist go straight though you and see someone younger behind you in the queue. People bump into you because they haven't seen you. This condition does not change for the rest of your life. If you do what I do when I am ignored, speak up loudly, you will actually see people jump with fright. A ghost has suddenly materialised before them. I am finding now that once people have to notice me they often get angry with me because I am not behaving in the way they expect me to behave. Little old ladies are expected to wander around always wearing an apologetic smile and always explain themselves in terms of how incompetent and foolish they now are. I do get tired of those well-meaning but stupid middle-aged women who try to explain their own or their firm's inadequate practices in terms of my infirmity of mind.

Becoming invisible is a very curious experience but it has one great advantage if you're a people watcher. I find that I can be writing down what the people beside me are saying and they don't notice what I'm doing.

All of this and more I wrote about in my book Time on Our Side. Now I am ten years older I should perhaps add another chapter about what it's like to be in your seventies.

One of my regular tasks now is to work out the age of the person I'm talking to, otherwise I'm likely to assume that that person has first hand knowledge of an event I'm talking about. I was talking to a consultant psychiatrist the other day and was about to start a sentence with, 'You remember in the seventies in the NHS. . .' when I realised that this chap would have been all of eight in the seventies. I am often horrified by how little recent history people in their twenties know. I have discovered that many journalists, men and women, think that women have always enjoyed the economic and sexual freedoms that they do now. Such ignorance is dangerous, because newly won freedoms are easily lost.

We usually think of getting older as a process of progressive loss, but, while physical losses are inevitable, we are constantly adding to our knowledge and experience. This is useful, but it also serves to make us lonely. In his book How Brains Make Up Their Minds Walter Freeman often makes the point that we, our meaning structures, are essentially alone. Walter is seventy six, and towards the end of his book he wrote, 'The nature of our learning processes makes us more and more isolated as we grow older, as our cumulative episodic meaning structures become more and more complex with time and experience. We grow apart because of our unique personal histories. The more we learn, the more specialized we become, and the less competent we are to understand one another.⁴

I have to try to imagine the individual worlds of meaning of those people who were born after the Second World War, but I do have the advantage of having known those years as an adult. By contrast, people who are a decade or more younger than me, even if at school they have studied the history of those years, have a much harder task in comprehending how my contemporaries and I interpreted the events we lived through. If they cannot be bothered to make that effort of understanding they are likely to come up with very foolish notions, as did Oliver James when he wrote a book about how wonderful the nineteen fifties were and how it's been downhill all the way since then.⁵ The nineteen fifties was a terrible time. The great, enveloping, deadening pall of the Victorian era with its customs and morality still enveloped us, while we lived in fear of being caught up in a third world war infinitely more destructive than the war from which we had just emerged. There is something worse than being ignored, and it's having your own experience wilfully and ignorantly misconstrued.

This is why old friends are so important. We know one another's history. We can talk about past events without having to explain their significance. We can remember other decades which are as different from now as are other worlds. The greatest sadness of growing old is not our own death but the death of our friends. They take with them part of our history and they leave a hole in our world that no one else can fill. We must always make sure that throughout our life that we celebrate our friends.

1) Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1999, p.12.

2) ibid p.120.

3) HarperCollins, London, 1994.

4) Op cit 203.

5) Britain on the Couch, Arrow, London, 1998.

The Sydney Institute - Lecture

February 26, 2001

PEOPLE AND NATIONS -
THEIR NEED TO LOVE AND HATE

Dorothy Rowe

Everything that exists is an ever changing, seamless whole. Everything is connected to everything else. Yet this is not the way human beings see themselves and their world. We divide this seamless whole into chunks in order to create a picture of ourselves and the world. Sometimes these divisions bear some similarity to what actually exists, and sometimes the divisions are contrary to our actual experience. This is the case when we divide ourselves into mind and body, or our experience of being alive into cognition and emotion, These divisions are false. Each of us operates as one whole unit. Our mind and body are one, and it is impossible to separate our thoughts from our emotions.

Even that unit which we call 'myself', 'I', 'me' is not a clear, distinct being, separate from the rest of our world. We think of our skin as encasing our body and marking its boundary, but, were we able to see more clearly, our skin would appear as permeable and our body as a clump of nuclear particles which is in constant intercourse with everything else around it.

In much the same way we see ourselves as distinct, private individuals, each of us a person distinct from other people. Yet what we experience as 'myself' would not exist were it not for other people. Psychologists have always divided their professional discourse into social and individual psychology, even though this division is quite false. We cannot separate ourselves from other people.

Newborn babies who are fed and kept warm but never cuddled and talked to grow grey and die, a condition known as anaclitic depression. A baby who survives a lack of personal attention but who fails to form a bond with a mothering person grows up not understanding that around him there are both objects and people. People have thoughts, feelings, needs and wishes, while objects do not. Someone who does not know this treats people as objects. Consequently such a person inflicts pain with indifference, and does not develop a conscience, that is, that way of thinking which enables us to form a law-abiding society. Babies who never form a bond with a mothering person often grow up to be criminals, or to be diagnosed as suffering from a psychopathic personality disorder, but equally such babies can grow up to entrepreneurs, or lawyers, or politicians, or simply husbands and fathers, wives and mothers who cause their families endless pain and confusion.

We need other people so that we develop as a person with a conscience and the ability to empathise with others. We also need other people to sustain us in our daily lives. If we live completely alone we become eccentric and strange. We all need friends and we all need to learn the skills of friendship. These skills are both practical and personal. We need to learn the simple skills, such as how to greet someone in a friendly manner, but we also need to develop the many virtues of friendship - affection, trust, reliability, generosity, kindness, understanding, tolerance. To have a good friend you need to be a good friend.

However, whenever we approach another person in friendship we make ourselves vulnerable to the greatest danger that can befall us, that is, the threat of being annihilated as a person. We might fear death, but we can temper our fear with the belief that when we die some important part of us will continue on, be it our soul, or spirit, or simply that our friends will remember us. When we are threatened with annihilation as a person we feel that we are shattering, crumbling, disappearing. We feel that we will vanish like a puff of smoke in the wind, or like a raindrop into the ocean. Our very existence will be wiped from history.

This terrible experience can arise in the simplest of circumstances. My friend Joy gave me an example of this. Joy is a very friendly person and has always been interested in shopping, so when she was phoned by a marketing researcher, instead of making an excuse, she readily agreed to be interviewed. The researcher, a woman, needed some background information about Joy and inquired about her age group. Was she in the 20 to 35 group? No. The 35 to 50 group? No. The 50 to 65 group? No. Over 65? Yes. The researcher said, 'In that case we don't need you,' and put the phone down. Joy was not simply shocked at the woman's rudeness. She felt physically weak and diminished to the point of disappearing. Her whole life, all her work, everything she had achieved had been scorned and rejected and she herself was at the point of shattering and disappearing.

We feel ourselves threatened with annihilation whenever we discover that we have made a serious error of judgement. Joy had thought that, with her extensive experience of family life, she could make a contribution to a discussion about shopping, and the researcher showed her that she was wrong.

Everyone has made more serious errors of judgement than that. We might have thought that we were going to spend the rest of our lives with one person, and then that person abandoned us; or that our career path was firmly mapped, and then it disappeared; or that if we were good no disaster could befall us, and then we discovered that no amount of goodness prevents disaster.

If we can bear to remember those occasions when we made a serious error of judgement we can recall the terror we felt as we found ourselves falling apart, shattering, even disappearing. We can also recall how hard we had to work to hold ourselves together.

In our attempts to hold ourselves together we can resort to some desperate defences which lead other people to regard us as being bad or mad. We might turn against those people whom we see as the authors of our disaster and seek to destroy them in war or in an act of murder. Or we might turn against ourselves and blame ourselves for the disaster, and thus changing the sadness of our loss into the prison of depression, which is one of the most popular defences against annihilation. Indeed, all those behaviours which psychiatrists call mental illnesses can be understood as defences against annihilation.

Everything we do, whether in desperation or in the ordinary course of daily life is aimed in part at defending ourselves against annihilation.

How does this sense of being a person and the fear of annihilation arise? To understand this we need to understand how we operated as people.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epictatus said, 'It is not things in themselves that trouble us but our opinion of things.' In other words, what determines our behaviour is not what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us. Today neuroscientists have shown that Epicatus was right. Our physiological make-up does not allow us to see things in themselves. What we see are what Epicatus called our opinions, that is, our ideas, attitudes, perceptions, all of which are constructions which we have made.

Newborn babies do not simply open their eyes and see the world. They have to learn to see, and how they do this depends on their experience of the environment into which they were born. Babies born into rectangular rooms learn to see space differently from babies born into round rooms, and people who grow up in mountain valleys see depth and distance differently from people who grow up on plains. This learning to perceive applies to every aspect of our experience. We come into the world with certain potentialities, but whether and how these potentialities become actualities depends on our experience of our environment. It is impossible to separate the effects of nature and nurture, and to think that we can do so is to delude ourselves.

Neuroscientists can now tell us something of what happens to our brain when we learn. Every act of learning is accompanied by the setting up of connections between the neurones in our brain. What the brain does has been summarised by the scientists Terence Picton and Donald Suss. They wrote, 'The brain forms and maintains a model of the world and itself within that world. The model can be used to explain past events and predict the future.' Since no two people ever have the same experience no two brains ever have the same pattern of connections between neurones.

The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield calls this setting up of connections in the brain 'the personalization of the brain.' As a psychologist I talk about meaning structure. What we call 'I', 'me', 'myself' is a structure made up of all the interpretations or meanings which we have created. You are your meaning structure. Your meaning structure is you. Your meaning structure is not just a collection of ideas but a complex structure where every part is connected to every other part so as to form its own idiosyncratic logic. The pattern of neural connections in the brain seems to be the neural substrate of our meaning structure. Whether we think in terms of neurology or meaning, it is clear that no two people see themselves and their world in the same way.

This is the reason why people find it so hard to get along together. We are not born with an aggressive gene, nor do our hormones, nor our id, nor the planets millions of miles away propel us into war and conflict. We fail to get along together because we each see things in our own individual way, and we do not understand this and so make allowances for one another.

If we understood that everything we perceive and know is an approximation or a theory about what is actually going on we would understand what the experience of falling apart actually is and so not be afraid of it. To live safely in the world we need to construct theories about the world which are as close an approximation to the world as we can make them. Your theory about when it is safe to cross the road needs to be a good theory. We have developed techniques for creating good theories, that is, the techniques of scientific method, but these ways of thinking about our experience and checking our experiences by repetition and by discussion with other people are not used extensively by all people. Instead, most people prefer to construct fantasies, to regard these fantasies as absolute truths which exist outside time and place and which are known only to certain select people, to refuse to subject their fantasies to scientific method, and to react aggressively to anyone who questions their beliefs or who supports a belief which whose mere existence questions the truth of the dearly held fantasy. The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is based on the Israelis' belief that God gave the land of Palestine to them for their exclusive use.

If we understand that the experience of falling apart is simply a necessary process whenever we discover that we have made a serious error of judgement, we could abandon theories about mental illness and see disturbed behaviour as a desperate defence which could be rendered unnecessary by providing the person with the kind of support and safety which would enable him to go through the difficult period of dismantling an integral part of his meaning structure and constructing a better approximation of what was actually going on. We could also understand why in ordinary circumstances other people behave so peculiarly. In short, we could abandon that old saying, 'All the world's mad except me and thee, and even thee's a little strange.'

However, many people show great resistance to this kind of understanding. As a psychologist my work has always been concerned with finding effective methods for eliciting another person's meaning structure and seeing how the idiosyncratic logic within that meaning structure led inevitably to a certain behaviour. In my clinical work I was often required to provide a report on a person who had been found guilty of sexually abusing children and who failed to see that he had done anything wrong. In my report I would try to show the connections between the paedophile's experiences in his own childhood and his abusive behaviour as an adult. Whenever I lectured on this topic I could be sure that at least one person in the audience would accuse me of providing an excuse for the paedophile's behaviour and of failing to condemn sexual abuse. Yet, had I in another capacity been providing a description of the events which led to a person developing cancer no one in my audience would accuse me of being on the side of cancer. My reply to my accuser that an explanation is not an excuse never satisfied this person because his need to be judgemental over-rode any desire to think logically and see another person's behaviour in terms of how that person saw himself and his world.

It is much easier to judge others than to think about our own responsibilities. There is very little which happens to us over which we have control, but we always have control over how we interpret what happens to us. A paedophile might not have had any control over the adults who abused him when he was a child, but he is responsible for deciding to interpret his sexual abuse as an action which the child he was abusing actually enjoyed.

Virtually all of human suffering is a result of what we do to one another and to ourselves. If we understood how it is that we operate as meaning-creating creatures we would be able to devise ways of living which reduced our suffering to a minimal. Yet this way of understanding ourselves is never taught in schools. There are very powerful reasons for this.

As a baby and a toddler we all knew that everyone had their own way of seeing things. This was obvious from our experience. There we would be, left to our own devices for a while in the kitchen where we found a pot of something which was extremely interesting. As a scientist we explored its interesting sticky texture, and as an artist we admired its yellow transparency, and as both artist and scientist we explored its possibilities over the kitchen floor and over our own body. Then our mother entered the room and immediately we discovered that she saw the situation differently.

A few children have the fortunate experience of being born to parents who are prepared to accept that their children have quite rightly their own point of view, but most of us had parents who made very clear to us that if we thought differently from them we were stupid, immature, even wicked. We learned to mistrust our own thoughts and feelings and to feel that there was something wrong with us if we saw thing differently from those people who were in authority over us.

Any child who enters the education system confident in his or her own view of the world is immediately seen by most of his teachers as a threat. Any teacher who appreciates a child who is an original thinker will be caught in a painful conflict between the needs of such a child and the demands of the educational system that teachers must force children to conform to this system. In society generally people who think for themselves are regarded as trouble makers by the State and the Church. Much in society is directed at stopping people from thinking. Here in Australia it is considered better that people spend their time gambling, even though extensive gambling is very deleterious to the economy of a country.

Understanding that each of us has our own individual ways of seeing things means that no one can claim to be in possession of some absolute truth. There may be absolute truths somewhere, but, constructed as we are, we can never be certain that we have encountered one. Yet the power structures of society are built on claims to absolute truths. It is not just dictators, politicians and church leaders who want to make such a claim. Psychiatrists and psychologists make similar claims which take the form of mechanical models of a human being which only the expert can understand.

There was a fine example of this on BBC Radio 4 Women's Hour recently. The presenter Jenny Murray was discussing with a psychologist and a psychiatrist a newly discovered disorder called nocturnal eating disorder. If on occasion you wake up during the night, find that you cannot go straight back to sleep and so decide to get up, go into the kitchen and make a snack or a hot drink, you are suffering from nocturnal eating disorder. The psychiatrist explained the cause of this disorder in terms of some as yet undiscovered hormonal change, while the psychologist explained the disorder in terms of the failure of the superego to restrain the impulses of the id. Not one these three intelligent, educated people talked in terms of what actually happens to us, which is that we wake up in the night filled with the nameless dread that comes when our meaning structure is under threat, something which can happen when the controls we use during the day dissolve in sleep. To ward off the threat we do something ordinary and comforting as getting something to eat. However, if you know just what this nameless dread is you can deal with it quickly and get a good night's sleep.

Over the last thirty years there has been an increase in the number of people who understand how we each have our own way of seeing things and who have been brave enough to put this understanding into practice. Even though the easiest way to bring up children is to terrorise them into obedience, an increasing number of parents have taken on the hard work of raising children by taking seriously the child's individual point of view. At the same time an increasing number of people are recognising that conflict is never ending if one side simply defeats the other side, and that compromise and reconciliation are essential if conflict is to be brought to an end. However, such parents and conciliators face constant criticism and little support. Such parents are surrounded by observers who make comments along the lines of, 'If that was my child I'd give him a good hiding,' while conciliators are scorned by the very people they are trying to help.

In an effort to hasten the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland a group of women from both sides of the sectarian divide came together to form a political party, the Women's Alliance. It was very difficult for these women to come together because Catholics and Protestants shared no social life and, if forced by circumstances to converse, dealt with one another at best in icy politeness. Dialogue in Northern Ireland was conducted by each side shouting slogans. The Women's Alliance drew up a set of rules to prevent polemic and create proper conversation. No one was allowed just to make a statement of position. Each person had to present her reasons for that position. If one woman made a statement and presented her reasons a woman who held opposing views would then present her views along with her reasons for that view. For instance, if a Protestant woman spoke of the necessity, as she saw it, of the Union Jack to be flown over police stations and government buildings she would then have to describe what the Union Jack meant to her. She would speak of loyalty and continuity, and of the pride she took in being British. Then a Catholic woman would be asked to describe what the Union Jack meant to her. She would talk of being alienated from her own country, of being made to feel a second class citizen, and of her fear of the British forces of law and order. This mutual exploration of meaning structures allowed all the women present to glimpse the lived experience of people who shared a country but who knew little of each other. The work of the Women's Alliance not only expanded the experience of many people but also made a significant contribution to what is now known of effective methods of conciliation and reconciliation. But did this mean that the Women's Alliance became a significant party in the Northern Ireland Assembly? No. The voters stuck to their political prejudices and elected the same old bigoted men who had been the leaders in the Troubles.

These bigoted old men, like a great many men and women, refuse to contemplate any kind of reconciliation because they see forgiveness as a weakness and implacable hatred as a strength. At the same time other people, notably church leaders, demand that we forgive our enemies. Both groups of people fail to understand just what forgiveness is. This failure arises out of the false division we make of cognition and emotion. Doing this we fail to recognise that forgiveness is an emotion and that emotions are a particular kind of interpretation which we create. There are some interpretations which we arrive at after some thought and some interpretations which we arrive at immediately without any thought but with a sense of absolute truth. This second kind of interpretation is what we call an emotion or feeling. Of course we can mislabel our emotions and lie to ourselves about what we feel, but these are acts of stupidity which only damage ourselves. Our emotions are interpretations which we cannot will into being because we believe that we should ought to do so. You cannot force yourself to love someone or forgive someone when in fact you do not love or forgive that person. All we can choose to do is to act in a loving or forgiving way.

The reason that people will not change their beliefs even when it would be socially and economically advantageous for them to do so is that to do so would be a threat to their meaning structure. When we have built our whole sense of identity upon a certain set of ideas it can seem to us that to change our ideas would be to annihilate us as a person. The Australia I grew up in was a society of strong prejudices. That society was divided into Catholic and Protestant and the divide was as strong as it was in Northern Ireland. Foreigners were scorned and abhorred, while the Aboriginal people were not seen as human beings. It is not surprising that current studies of racial attitudes and anti-aboriginal feeling show that these prejudices are most prevalent in my generation.

Such prejudices are based on dividing the seamless whole of all that exists into rigid and absolute divisions. Such divisions prevent us from recognising that all human beings are very much the same, not just genetically, but in our needs, desires, hopes and fears. If we could see that the divisions we create are ideas that exists in our head and not in reality, and that as we created these ideas we are free to change them, then it would be possible for us to diminish our suffering simply by coming to tolerate one another.

Terence Picton and Donald Suss 'Neurobiology of Conscious Experience' Current Opinion in Neurobiology 4, pp. 256-65, 1994.

Dorothy Rowe Friends and Enemies HarperCollins, London, 2000

Dorothy Rowe Wanting Everything HarperCollins, London, 1992

Dorothy Rowe Beyond Fear HarperCollins, London, 1987

Dorothy Rowe Breaking the Bonds: Ending Depression and Finding Freedom HarperCollins, London, 1989

Dorothy Rowe The Real Meaning of Money HarperCollins, London, 1997.

The Sydney Institute Papers Vol 13, No2, pp.35-42

www.thesydneyinstitute.com.au

Dealing with Mental and Physical Illness

Any similarity between mental and physical illness resides solely in the language used to discuss them. It is the language of medicine, of physical causes, symptoms, syndromes, cures, and where the illness cannot be cured, management. We may talk about mental illness in terms of physical causes and cures and list the symptoms of mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, mania, obsessions and compulsions, and phobias, but such language actually prevents us from understanding what is happening to the person concerned.

If we want to understand a particular physical illness all we have to do is refer to the results of the scientific research into the functioning of the body. We no longer have to rely on fantasies such as bodily humours or demonic spells to explain why we become ill. The causes and effects of physical illness can be readily demonstrated by various tests carried out on the body. The medical profession is extremely reluctant to decide that a set of phenomena is a disease if a physical cause cannot be demonstrated. It took some time to establish that Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) was a physical illness while whether chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) is a physical illness is still hotly debated.

In contrast, if we want to understand mental illness or, as it is now called, mental disorder, reference to the body is a complete waste of time. No physical cause has been found for any mental disorder. Psychiatrists may claim that depression is a result of the chemical imbalance of the brain, that mental disorders have a genetic cause, and that psychiatric drugs restore the chemical balance in the brain, but such claims are without any scientific basis.

The brain is the most complex object we have yet encountered in the universe. It operates differently from all other known objects. There are a great many differences between individual brains because the pattern of connections between the neurones in the brain is determined by the experiences the person has, and no two people ever have the same experience. Neuroscientists like Walter Freeman  recommend that we should not talk of 'the brain' but of 'brains', thus acknowledging that no two brains are ever completely alike. Such wisdom is completely ignored by those people who are not neuroscientists but who wish to appear to be authorities on the brain. They talk seemingly knowledgeably about direct connections between brain activity and behaviour, as if, a magnetic resonance scan of a brain can reveal what the person is thinking. David Healy , the psychiatrist who has shown how dangerous drugs like Prozac can be, calls such talk 'biobabble', in contrast to 'psychobabble', the nonsense which is talked by another kind of would-be authorities. Unfortunately biobabble often replaces proper care.

For instance, if you get depressed and consult a GP or a psychiatrist you are likely to be told that your depression is a result of a 'chemical imbalance in the brain.' What isn't mentioned is that nobody knows what a chemically balanced brain is, so no one can possibly say what a chemically imbalanced brain might be. 

You might also be told by your doctor that one feature of a chemically imbalanced brain is that there a lower levels of serotonin in the brains of depressed people than in the brains of non-depressed people. The Australian national depression initiative called beyondblue has a website to inform people about depression. There it states that, 'Severe depression appears to be associated with a reduction in the chemicals in the brain.'  Such a statement appears to be based on sound research but it is not. Because there are no physical tests for any psychiatric disorder all diagnosis is simply a matter of the opinion of the psychiatrists doing the diagnosing. There is immense individual variation in these opinions. As a psychiatric patient you can discover that one psychiatrist says you are depressed, another that you are anxious, another that you have a borderline personality disorder. Thus it is extremely difficult for researchers to establish that their research group are all suffering from the same disorder. The beyondblue website may refer simply to 'severe depression' but in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual   used by most psychiatrists there are listed 39 different kinds of depression, including 'depression in complete remission'.

What can logically be deduced from the discovery that depressed people have lower levels of serotonin than non-depressed people? These lower levels and the depression occur at the same time. A correlation cannot be a cause. For instance, in the 1990s there was an increase in the number and size of the famines in Africa and an increase in the number of mobile phones. Can we conclude from that that mobile phones cause famine, or is it that famine causes mobile phones? To show that lower levels of serotonin cause depression it would be necessary to show that such lower levels occur before the person becomes depressed. To date no physical change has been shown invariably to precede depression.

The latest kind of anti-depressant drugs, the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), were created to replace the missing serotonin in the brains of depressed people. The beyondblue website states, 'Antidepressant medication is designed to correct the imbalance of chemical messages between the nerve cells.' When these drugs seemed to be successful in curing the depressed person the conclusion was drawn that this was further evidence that the cause of depression was a lack of serotonin. Drawing such a conclusion is the same as concluding that, because aspirin cures headaches, the cause of headaches is a lack of aspirin.

If you consult a psychiatrist about your being depressed you are likely to be asked about your family history to see if depression runs in your family. You may recall that in your parents' and grandparents' generation there were relatives who went through unhappy periods in their lives but in those days people were not diagnosed with mental disorders as they are nowadays. It is on such flimsy evidence like this that psychiatrists interested in genetics have concluded that depression has a genetic cause. Things do run in families. My father voted Labor, I vote Labor, my son votes Labor. Obviously we have the Labor voting gene. Trouble is, it is an Australian Labor-voting gene and it doesn't get on well with the New Labour-voting gene in the UK.

If you are interested in the whole question of genetics and mental disorder I would recommend that you read Jay Joseph's book The Gene Illusion , published last year, which shows how unscientific and self-serving most of the research into genes and mental disorder has been. Alternatively, you can read geneticists like Professor Steve Jones of London University who is always pointing out that complex behaviour cannot be explained by the functioning of genes. He often says quite sadly that no one even understands the genetics of height or of eye colour so to talk of the genetics of depression or schizophrenia is a nonsense.

Many people, perhaps most people, get depressed and get over it. Some of these people are prescribed anti-depressants, some are not. However, current psychiatric dogma is that depression is a genetic disorder which must be managed by psychiatrists. Many patients are advised by their doctors that, even though they are no longer depressed, they should take anti-depressants to prevent themselves getting depressed again. The beyondblue website states, 'Once you have had an episode of depression you are likely to have further episodes,' and advises people to continue taking antidepressants long after they have ceased to be depressed, even for the rest of their lives. Long term research on the prophylactic use of antidepressants shows that, despite taking these drugs, some 30% of the people taking them get depressed again. This figure is hardly good, but it cannot be concluded that the drugs actually prevent depression since of that 70% who did not get depressed an unknown percentage would not have got depressed again whether or not they had taken any drugs.

From written history we know that depression and psychosis have always existed, but they were not defined as mental illnesses until the late nineteenth century when the German psychiatrist Kraepelin declared that they were. In describing them he said that depression and schizophrenia were life long illnesses. Once you got depressed, once you became schizophrenic, you were in that state for life. This belief still operates in psychiatric practice today. 

In diagnosing schizophrenia psychiatrists were always taught to regard auditory hallucinations as the front-rank or primary symptom of the illness. In a psychiatric examination a psychiatrist would seek to establish whether the person heard voices. It was not part of the examination to ask who these voices belonged to and what they were saying. A person who tried to talk to a psychiatrist about the ownership and content of the voices would be ignored. Psychiatric nurses were taught that if patients started to discuss their voices the nurse should distract them by, say, suggesting a game of scrabble. Many ex-psychiatric patients are experts at scrabble.

Then about ten years ago a woman called Patsy Hage got angry with her psychiatrist. She took him to task for never letting her talk about what her voices were saying. Her psychiatrist, Marius Romme, is a very kindly man and he dutifully conceded that he was wrong. He listened to what Patsy told him, and then he listened to other patients talk about their voices, and it soon became clear to him that these voices were not just random noise in the person's head but part of the way in which the person made sense of his life. Marius and his research assistant Sandra Escher set about doing some systematic research. They soon discovered that quite a significant percentage of the general population hear voices. Most of these people hear voices that are benign, even helpful. Only those people who hear horrible, persecutory voices earn the diagnosis of schizophrenia. These patients themselves, once given the opportunity, were able to work out ways of keeping their voices in order.  The voices are actually auditory memories that occur in the same way as we can hear music in our heads. The voices and the music will disappear as soon as you start to speak because the brain cannot do both tasks at once. Have you ever wondered how many of those people busy talking into their mobile phones are actually engaged in keeping their voices in order?

The Hearing Voices Movement was set up and run by psychiatric patients. Their work has been the greatest advance in mental health since the asylums stopped shackling their patients. Many people, once diagnosed as incurable, are now leading ordinary lives. Psychiatrists responded to the Hearing Voices Movement by allowing nurses to run Hearing Voices groups and by redefining auditory hallucinations as a not very important symptom of the mental disorder schizophrenia. 

Such a re-definition is an example of what Professor Bill O'Neill, my professor at Sydney University, used to call 'saving your hypothesis'. This is a technique which protects you from having to say that you were wrong. Another example of saving your hypothesis occurred in the 1990s with regard to depression.

In the early 1960's when the first anti-depressants were being prescribed widely with good results psychiatrists' view of depression changed. Instead of seeing depression as a life-long illness they saw it as a short-term disease which psychiatrist could cure with drugs. This was the view of depression held by Professor Alec Jenner and his colleagues at the professorial in-patient unit in Sheffield, UK, where I went to work in 1968. They could see no point in having a psychologist there but they had no objection to my talking to the patients. At this clinic depressed patients were treated with drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). There was common pattern. People would come in to the clinic depressed and go out some months later not depressed. Then six or so weeks would pass and they would be back, depressed. I took to calling the front door of the clinic a revolving door, something which did not endear me to my colleagues. 

By the early 1990s the evidence from long-term studies supported my observations and could no longer be ignored. It showed that for those depressed people who were treated only with drugs and ECT a certain group of them would get depressed once and not get depressed again but for the majority depression recurred. The best predictor of further depression was the occurrence of an episode of depression. Here is a curious contrast with physical medicine. If, say, an antibiotic repeatedly fails to cure an infection most doctors would conclude that the antibiotic does not work. Not so with psychiatrists. It is not that the anti-depressants do not cure depression. It is that there is a kind of depression which is impervious to anti-depressants. This is now known as chronic depression. There's a lot of it about.

Also by the end of the 1990s evidence was accumulating that depression need not be chronic and lifelong . Depressed people who went into therapy rather than take drugs stood a very good chance of not only ceasing to be depressed but also not get depressed again. Very reluctantly psychiatrists began to take account of this. They particularly liked Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) because it does not ask difficult questions about family life, or old age and death, or what is the purpose of living. The originator of CBT was a psychiatrist Aaron Beck. There is no doubt that CBT, in the hands of a competent therapist, can be extremely effective. However, Aaron Beck was very careful not to offend his psychiatrist colleagues by showing that CBT was more effective than drugs. He and his followers always use the language of illness and never say that drugs are unnecessary. As a result cognitive therapists have never developed a coherent model of depression which shows why changing how we think can bring depression to an end.

Psychiatrists have not succeeded in developing a coherent model of depression or of any of the mental illnesses. They have been forced to acknowledge that, as they say, social and psychological factors play a part in mental disorders, and they acknowledge the success of CBT not just in depression but in all the mental disorders, but they shie away from examining the question of why changing how you think can bring a mental disorder to an end but changing how you think will not cure cancer or even the common cold. Having a positive attitude can be helpful in the course of a physical illness but thought alone will neither cause nor cure a physical illness.

Psychiatrists want to hang on to their belief in the physical causes of mental illness because it is this belief which justifies the existence of their profession. Thus on the beyondblue website the model of depression which is presented includes every possible aspect of a person's life but it explains nothing. 

Where therapy is concerned the beyondblue website gives the greatest space to drugs, followed by CBT and behaviour management. Therapies where the person and the therapist explore the relationship between childhood experience and adult life are given short shrift with the advice, 'Most people with depression do not need this kind of in-depth and prolonged re-evaluation of their life.'

What psychiatrists and many of the CBT therapists ignore is what actually determines our behaviour. Studies of the brain - our brains - by neuroscientists show clearly that physiologically we are not capable of seeing reality directly. All we can perceive are the structures which our brain learns over time to construct. These structures are theories, guesses, about what is actually happening. The structures which we create come from our past experience, and, since no two people ever have the same experience, no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way. What determines our behaviour is not what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us. 

All of the structures or meanings we create cohere together to form a structure which we experience as our sense of being a person. But the ideas which form our sense of being a person can easily be disconfirmed, and when this happens we feel ourselves falling apart. We cast around for some ideas which will defend us and hold us together. The most desperate of these defences are those behaviours which psychiatrists call mental illnesses. People turn to these when they have completely lost confidence in themselves .

However, if we understand that when we suffer a major disconfirmation of our ideas, such as happens when we suffer a disaster, our ideas have to fall apart so that we can construct ones that better fit our situation, we can ride out the chaos and uncertainty of such changes without having to resort to any of the desperate defences. If the disaster we have suffered has undermined our self-confidence we can rebuild it with the knowledge that, as we have created our ideas we are free to change them.

The cause of mental illness is ignorance and the cure lies in knowledge of ourselves.

Royal Society of Arts Lecture, November 11, 2004

How We Learn to Value and Accept Ourselves

A few months ago I went to stay with a friend who lives some distance from me. One afternoon we visited Louis who is the most wonderful child the world has ever seen. I know this because my friend, Louis' grandmother, told me. I had met Louis a year before when he was only a few weeks old. Wonderful though he is, it was unlikely that he would remember me. I was concerned that I shouldn't upset him in any way. The received wisdom amongst child rearing experts is that from about eight months onwards children recognise the difference between the people they know and strangers, and they become anxious when they meet a stranger. Moreover, Louis would be tired because he would have been at nursery that day. So I resolved to smile at him from afar and not invade his space.

Things didn't turn out like that. I sat myself at the table at the far end of the kitchen while Louis' mother and grandmother made tea and talked over the events of the day. Louis checked the kitchen to see if all was satisfactory and then he used my knee to heave himself upright and with a big grin invited me to join him in a kind of peek-a-boo game with him under the kitchen table. Two hours later when Louis had had his tea and his bath and was in his mother's arms on his way to bed his mother said, 'Kiss Dorothy goodnight.' Most 14 month old children in that situation would bury their face in their mother's shoulder while the adults coo, 'He's shy.' Not Louis. With a big smile he planted a big soppy kiss on my cheek.

Why did Louis not behave in the way the experts expect? I know the answer to that question because I know his family. One of the advantages of growing old is that you see how things turn out.

I've known Louis' father for about ten years. I met Louis' mother when she was one week old. I met his maternal grandparents when they were in their early twenties, and not long after I met their parents. I know this family's style. All families have a particular style, a way of thinking and behaving which gets handed down from one generation to another. Like all families, Louis' family has had its troubles but, no matter what, the family style has remained.

All the family members have always been highly idiosyncratic individuals. Even those who think of themselves as being conventional are conventional in an idiosyncratic way. One striking feature of this family is their extraordinary tolerance of one another's idiosyncrasies. Of course they laugh and gossip about one another, but there are no ruptures or rejections. This acceptance of one another shows itself in the way the adults treat the children in the family. They see children not as strange little creatures which have to be tamed and trained but as individuals like themselves. In short, they see children as people not objects.

We all know how we feel when another person treats us as an object without feelings and a point of view. When other people humiliate us, ignore us, laugh at us, pay no regard to our needs and wishes, when they betray, injure, and punish us, we know that they are denying our existence as a person. We find this extremely painful and frightening. We can try to fight back to force those who are treating us as objects to acknowledge us as we wish to be acknowledged, but when we are children we are small and helpless. We can be punished for protesting against the cruelty inflicted on us. If the cruelty continues we can come to feel that we have no right our own point of view. Indeed, we can come to feel that we have no right to exist.

Children born into families like Louis' family do not suffer the threats to their sense of being a person that destroy self-confidence. Babies are born full of unself-conscious self-confidence. They don't come into the world wondering whether people will like and accept them. They are unsurprised when people smile at them. However, most babies lose the self-confidence with which they were born, and become shy, uncertain toddlers well acquainted with shame and guilt. These babies have been born into families where the adults do not see the children as individual people with their own point of view. It is possible to be loving and kind to a child but still see that child as an object. After all, this is what many people do to their pets. They project their own ideas on to their pets and never attempt to try to understand how that animal sees his world.

In past generations any child who managed to retain a vestige of self-confidence was considered to have been spoilt. Not only was the biblical injunction, 'Spare the rod and spoilt the child' adhered to but the belief that children were objects not people was enshrined in our language. Men and women were distinguished by the pronouns which refer to them but a child was 'it'. Only comparatively recently have the pronouns 'he' and 'she' been applied to boys and girls.

The legacy left by Sigmund Freud means that nowadays some adults think about children differently from our forebears. The majority of adults still see children as expendable objects. If they did not, children would not continue to die in wars and conflicts, from poverty and curable diseases. In wealthy countries many parents are concerned solely with forcing their child to be a credit to them as parents. The child should be what the parent wants him to be, not what the child knows himself to be. Many politicians and pedagogues want to make all children conform to some educational theory and have no regard for how children see their situation. Freud's legacy has meant that nowadays some people think about children as persons and not merely objects. Fascinated though he was with sex, Freud couldn't help noticing that his clients did not think much of themselves. Freud wasn't greatly interested in this but therapists who followed him came to see that their clients' low opinion of themselves was central to their mental distress. Indeed, people demonstrate their mental distress in many different ways, ways which psychiatrists call the symptoms of mental illness, but whatever form the behaviour takes, the cause of it lies in the person's self-hatred.

Thus therapists began to see that their main task was to help restore their clients' self-confidence. This led them to question how children should be brought up.

It was clear that children need to be given some kind of discipline. Children have to learn how to fit into society. If Louis' parents don't say, 'No' to him occasionally and point out to him how he could improve his behaviour he'll grow up to be an outlaw. But how to do this without destroying the child's self-confidence?

This question has occupied the minds of psychologists, therapists and teachers for several decades. This question became a matter of public debate, a debate informed, and often misinformed, by the media. However, most people, and this includes most of the experts, hate thinking, especially thinking about dilemmas which allow no simple, once-and-for-all solutions. So the experts who hate thinking came up with a solution, and a complex set of ideas was transmuted into a simplistic dogma, the dogma of self-esteem. All that therapists had to do was to turn self-hatred into self-esteem, and parents should make sure that their children grow up with loads of self-esteem. There is now a self-esteem industry where counsellors and life coaches teach people how to increase their amount of self-esteem. And not before time. Oprah Winfrey has said that boosting people's self-esteem was 'the most important issue facing society today.' Not to be left out, the government's employment programmes for lone parents have been designed to 'excite the imagination, to build self-esteem and mutual self-help.'[i]

How do you turn self-hatred into self-esteem? Self-hatred can take many forms. We can hate our appearance, our gender, our apparent lack of ability. We can feel that other people don't accept us and we don't accept ourselves. We can feel that we have no right to exist and must creep around the margins of the world. The advocates of self-esteem ignore these different ways of hating ourselves and simply declare that a person has 'low self-esteem' or 'doesn't have much self-esteem', as if self-esteem is a thing which can exist in some greater or lesser degree and is lodged in the person like a boiled sweet in a jar.

The dogma of self-esteem advises to parents to shower on their children endless praise and protestations of love. The children of parents who believed in the self-esteem dogma heard little from their parents other than 'You're wonderful darling' and 'Love you darling.' Have these children developed into strong, self confident people ready to be good members of society? Alas no. Continuous praise creates problems just as continuous criticism did.

Continuous praise treats a child as an object just as continuous criticism does.

The parent who uses constant criticism wants to see his child being unhappy because for the parent that is evidence that the child is learning to be what the parent wants him to be. The child's unhappiness shows the parent that he is a good parent. The parent who uses constant praise doesn't want to see his child as being unhappy because to the parent this is evidence that either there are aspects of the child which aren't praiseworthy or that the parent isn't a good parent. A parent may think that he is being a very good parent when he says, 'I don't mind what you do, darling, just so long as you're happy' but what he is actually saying is, 'Be the person I want you to be, that is, a happy person.' The child knows he cannot be sad, or angry, or lonely, even though this may be what he actually feels, because if he is sad, or angry, or lonely he will not please his parent. When a child feels he cannot be the person he knows himself to be he comes to believe that the person he knows himself to be is unsatisfactory and thus unacceptable.

Constant praise from adults robs some children of the opportunity develop a critical, discerning attitude towards their work. If everything you do is supposed to be wonderful why try to improve? Why try to discriminate between those areas of your work where you have a natural talent and interest and those areas where you need to apply yourself in order to meet a standard which other people would call satisfactory? Some children come to see the constant praise as the only source of their motivation. Thus the child works well while an adult is beside him praising him but loses interest when the adult moves away.

Children know that an adult's words are cheap. They know that an adult reveals what he actually thinks in his actions. A child who receives constant praise but who sees his parents act without any recognition, much less consideration of, how he sees himself and his world feels that he is not loved and valued by his parents. He sees himself as unacceptable and valueless and his parents as untrustworthy. In some families the parents do see their child as being praiseworthy and loveable but the child also receives much destructive criticism from others, perhaps from older siblings, or grandparents, or teachers. The parents fail to see this, or fail to see how much the child is hurt by the constant criticism. The child suspects that his critics are right and that his parents are gullible and blind. He comes to feel that he is an impostor who will one day be exposed as a fraud. No matter what he achieves, the feeling of being an impostor can last for the rest of his life.

Some parents want to see their child as deserving all possible praise because they want to see themselves as the best of all possible parents. The child must be a mirror in which they can admire themselves. They don't teach the child to look outwards and take account of other people, and the child grows up to be as self-regarding as the parents are. An example of this kind of parent-child relationship is given in Sarah Harris's novel Closure which is about a group of middle-class thirty-year-olds living in London in the 1990s. Anna is the central character and she and Roo have been friends for years.

Anna agreed to drive over to Roo's house, although she was not in the mood for Roo's five-year-old daughter, Daisy, who, last week, had laughed at Anna's shoes.

'They're ridiculous,' she had said, as if trying out a new word for size. 'Mummy says you dress like a teenager and if you leave it much longer you won't have any children.' She had paused, as if to allow Anna to reflect on her words, before saying, with horrified indignation, 'Why is your hair so straggly?'

 Roo had praised Daisy for the proper use of the word 'straggly'."[ii]

In the USA where self-esteem became a dogma some years before it did in the UK, the first recipients of their parents' continuous praise are now in their late teens and early twenties. Jonathan Franzen portrays one of these people in his novel The Corrections. This is Melissa, a college student who seduces and ruins her college lecturer Chip Lambert and then leaves him when he ceases to interest her. Melissa is a monster. She certainly does not lack self-esteem. When she invades Chip's office it is ostensibly to tell him that her parents had split up but when he suggests that she talk to a college counsellor she replies, 'On the whole I'm doing brilliantly.' She pries her shoes off on the arm of the sofa and lets them fall to the floor. She goes on, 'I had an excellent childhood. My parents have always been my best friends.'[iii]

Chip allows himself to be seduced and led astray by Melissa, but when she makes it clear that she was leaving him Chip ventures to say that perhaps her relationship with her parents was not quite right. Melissa replies, 'I like myself very much but you don't seem to like yourself so much.' Chip comments, 'Your parents seem very fond of themselves, too. You seem very fond of yourselves as a family.' Melissa becomes very angry. 'I love myself,' she said. 'What's wrong with that?'[iv]

Chip is unable to say what was wrong with it. Although he taught literary theory he seems not to have understood how important it is to respect the language we speak and not use it to lie to ourselves and to mislead others. Unfortunately this happens all the time and in all walks of life. Those who work in the self-help industry are particularly prone to do this. The English language is very flexible and has a huge vocabulary so that it is capable of describing every variety of human thought, feeling and behaviour. There was no need to coin the jargon term 'self-esteem' when there was already an excellent word to apply to Melissa and other self-regarding people. It is 'vanity'.

The essence of vanity is not just admiring yourself. It is thinking of yourself to the exclusion of all else. Freud called this way of thinking narcissistic, referring to the legend of Narcissus who was so entranced by his reflection in a pool of water that he could not leave the pool but remained there and, trapped by his vanity, he died. Freud knew from his patients that not all narcissists are trapped by self-adoration. Many narcissists are trapped by self-hatred. They are completely focussed on themselves, absorbing in noting and exaggerating every nuance of their inadequacy and sin while denying every aspect of their competence and virtue, in the same way as Melissa was absorbed in noting and exaggerating every nuance of her imagined superiority while refusing to be aware of how much people disliked her. Self-hating narcissists take great pride in their humility and awareness of their wickedness, while self-adoring narcissists focus on their virtues and their abilities in order to hide from themselves their inadequacies and their hurts. Both ways of being are defences against the fear of being annihilated as a person.[v] Desperate defences like these take no account of other people. If narcissists think of other people at all it is only in terms of other people in relation to themselves. The self-hating narcissist thinks that everyone hates him: the self-adoring narcissist thinks that everyone loves and admires him. Both are wrong.

In the rearing of children relentless praise and rewards produces the same result as relentless criticism and punishment. Both produce adults who are incapable of seeing other people as persons existing in their own right. They see other people as objects, not as persons.

The self-esteem advocates have produced this result because they couldn't bear to examine that complex set of ideas which determine how we feel about ourselves. They also refused to acknowledge that each of us is, day by day, trying to find some optimum balance between being an individual and being a member of a group. Disregard other people's existence and live solely as your vanity and selfishness dictate and you will become ostracised and lonely. Disregard your own needs and wishes and devote yourself totally unselfishly and humbly to others and you will vanish as a person.

How we feel about ourselves is made up of three components, how much we care about ourselves, how much we value ourselves, and how we judge ourselves.

How much we care about ourselves is made up of two parts, how much we care about ourselves and how much we care for ourselves. How much we care about ourselves means loving and liking ourselves. Self-regarding narcissists care only about themselves. Proud of their self-love or self-hatred, they do not care about other people. Lost in self-regard, they can never get to know other people and so they are always lonely. Caring about ourselves should include caring about other people. Caring for ourselves means taking care of ourselves. People who hate themselves fail to give themselves the basic physical care which all people need because they feel that they don't deserve to be looked after. Those people who are lost in vanity have no interest in the needs of other people. When forced to acknowledge the real existence of other people they cannot comprehend why other people hate them so much.

How much we value ourselves needs to be in proportion to how much we value other people. The pride that people who hate themselves take in being humble leads them to overvalue others and undervalue themselves, while those who are lost in their vanity undervalue others and overvalue themselves. The right balance comes with understanding that everyone is special and everyone is ordinary.

How we judge ourselves consists of the dimensions on which we have chosen to judge ourselves and how harshly we judge ourselves on these dimensions. The dimensions on which we choose to judge ourselves come from the conclusions we drew from our experiences in childhood. As children we tried to please our parents and so we studied very carefully what did please them and what did not. For some parents their child's appearance is very important. If the parents continually focus on the child's appearance the child is very likely to come to see her appearance as the most important dimension on which to judge herself. Neither the child who is continually criticised about her appearance nor the child who is continually praised for her appearance can regard how she looks as being unimportant. The only difference is that the child who is continually criticised for her appearance sees herself as extremely ugly while the child who is continually praised for her appearance sees herself as extremely beautiful. Neither child can see herself as she is.

 Most of us judge ourselves on a number of dimensions and we set ourselves different standards on each of these dimensions. For instance, we may choose as our dimensions the quality of our work and the cleanliness and tidiness of our home. On the first of these dimensions we may set ourselves the highest of standards and want to reach near perfection with every task we undertake but in our home our aim to be no more than reasonably clean and tidy. However, some people choose an array of dimensions and demand perfection on all.

The journalist Simon Hatterstone interviewed Jonny Wilkinson, who at 25 is the English Rugby captain famous for the drop goal which won the England side the final of the World Cup against Australia in 2003. Hatterstone described Wilkinson as a 'fearful, obsessive man with a strict moral code'. He wrote,

Wilkinson isn't a religious man, but he could easily be mistaken for one. He likes to imagine he lives his life in front of a 24-hour camera (ironic, considering his desire for privacy) and that at the end of each day he can rest assured that he's not let anyone down. 'It's a kind of religion, a set of standards that you live by. And it's having the pride not to drop below them, regardless of what outside pressures creep in. To say this is the way I am, this is the way I want to be, and to try to stand strong through whatever else happens. There are certain vows and you stick to them.'[vi]

Jonny Wilkinson has chosen a set of dimensions on which to judge himself which gives him a life dominated by what he ought to be. Moreover, the standard of never letting anyone down is impossible to reach as not letting one person down often has to entail letting several other people down for the practical reason that our time is always limited and we cannot be in two places at once. As they get older the problem for children who have been overly criticised and overly praised is that self-hatred and vanity take no account of what actually goes on in the world. Self-hatred is accompanied by a critical conscience that demands the impossible, while, for the overly praised child, as the years pass, the chorus of the external, praising voices dwindles away.

I don't think that either of these fates lies in wait for Louis. Louis' family don't set impossible standards for themselves or for their children, nor do they behave in a way that would encourage him to grow up to be a narcissistic monster like Melissa. After Louis had said goodnight to me his mother put him in his cot and a few minutes later joined us all in the kitchen where supper was about to be served. She brought the baby monitor with her and set in on the table. We could hear Louis complaining that he was upstairs and all the fun was going on downstairs but it wasn't a serious complaint. He knew his parents would come to him if something was wrong so he didn't have to keep checking that he could trust them to come by refusing to settle down and go to sleep. He was learning that other people have their own needs and wishes and that he must always take that into account. Because his family treat him as a person, not as an object, Louis is learning that he has to balance his need to be an individual with his need to be part of a group. With such a beginning I am sure that he will always be able to live comfortably with himself and with other people.

Lecture for Counselling Children and Young People Conference, London, November 24, 2007

My Mother Still Thinks I'm a Child (Published as Not ill but lazy, June 2008)

Long before we are able to define who we are as a person, our parents impose upon us their ideas about who we are. We are given a role in the family, and we are seen as possessing certain simple but unchangeable characteristics. As teenagers we might try to force our parents to relinquish their ideas about who we are, and to see us as we know ourselves to be, but rarely are we successful. When our parents hold fast to their ideas, they are doing so not merely out of mental laziness. They have personal reasons for keeping us in the role to which they have assigned us.

When I was a child my mother saw my one over-riding, defining characteristic as being lazy. Certainly I was not always enthusiastic about the household tasks my mother imposed on her daughters from the day they were big enough to hold a duster, but I was always enthusiastic about learning and doing new things. However, my lungs were succumbing to a disease, bronchiectasis, which made breathing difficult. I wanted to be active but from time to time I was overcome by a peculiar physical weakness brought on by a lack of oxygen. All this my mother ignored. To her I was lazy.

Years passed. I went to university, became a teacher, got married. When I became pregnant I continued teaching as long as possible. My husband had just established his own legal practice and my salary was an important part of our finances. When I did leave work there was a good deal for me to do in preparing our house for the baby. Suddenly my ankles swelled. This could have been the start of toxaemia. My doctor sent me to hospital and ordered complete bed rest until the baby could be induced. Afterwards my mother came to see me. She asked why the birth was induced. I explained about the threat of toxaemia. She asked, 'What caused that?' I replied that my doctor thought it was a result of my working too hard and not taking enough rest.

'That's not true, Dorothy,' she said, 'You never work hard.'

My mother was not a stupid woman incapable of understanding the doctor's explanation. She had her own personal reasons for persisting in her belief that I was lazy.

My mother was the fourth of six children born to two people whom we might nowadays describe as having been inadequately parented. My grandfather, son of a Scottish miner, had been ordered from the family home by his father on the day he turned seventeen, and told to fend for himself. He went as a poor migrant to Australia where he worked, first as a sugar cane cutter and then as a miner. My grandmother was the daughter of a convict. He left the family when my grandmother was four. Her mother gave her away to a family who were prepared to take her in. As we now know, people who are inadequately parented are unlikely to know how to parent. My mother hated her father, an obstinate, bad-tempered man who expected his family, including his wife, to obey him without question. The attachment my mother had to her mother was what we now call anxious attachment.

My mother's birth was soon followed by the birth of a son who became my grandmother's favourite, and he was followed by another girl. Any child in my mother's position would have felt lost and alone. However, my mother, who was called Ella, acquired a means of gaining attention and care. She developed asthma. The attacks of asthma were seen by her family as resulting from her becoming upset. A family rule, which became my family's rule, was, 'Don't upset Ella.' This rule made her very powerful. My father and sister were remarkably healthy, but my state of health was seen by my mother a threat to her position. She dealt with this threat by ignoring it or by becoming angry if I dared to show that I was ill. Dorothy wasn't ill: she was lazy.

By believing this, my mother was defending what we all need to defend, our sense of being a person. The last time I spoke at this conference[i] I talked about how our brain is constantly engaged in interpreting what is going on. I described the sense of being a person in terms of a metaphor of a stream and a whirlpool. Our brain creates a stream of interpretations. A stream of water sometimes encounters an obstacle which causes the water to swirl around in one place. We call such a swirl a whirlpool, and speak of this whirlpool as if it were separate from the stream. In a similar way our stream of interpretations seems to form a kind of a whirlpool which has sufficient permanence to create consciousness and our sense of being a person.

Once we acquire a sense of being a person we try to keep it whole, but, as all our interpretations are no more than guesses about what is going on, the ideas which sustain our sense of being a person can be invalidated. Our ideas can be invalidated by events, but, more often than not, they can be invalidated by other people. In a family like my mother's, where affection was never shown, where anger was sudden, fierce and dangerous, and not forgiving was a matter of pride indulged in for whole lifetimes and in each generation, a small child would have to seize upon whatever defensive method became available in order to keep herself whole. My mother learned to behave in the way her parents and older siblings behaved. In adult life she never reflected upon her behaviour but always had a ready supply of justifications for what she did. When the writer Ernest Hemingway was once asked what a person needed in order to become a writer, he replied, 'An unhappy childhood.' Being the child of my mother was certainly great training for becoming a psychologist.

Parents impose different ideas upon their different children, and children respond in their own individual ways to the ideas imposed on them.  In his novel Seven Lies [ii]James Lasdun showed how two siblings dealt very differently with the threat to their sense of being a person. The novel is set in East Germany in the years leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Life in a communist country with its demands that all its citizens conform to the state was full of threats to the sense of being a person. People had to give up or repress aspects of themselves which were important to them. Sometimes these were central to their very being; sometimes they were conceits which assured them that they were better than other people. Stephan, the child who narrates the story, said of his mother and her brother Heinrich that they 'were of blue-blooded Silesian descent. Naturally this was not something to brag about in communist East Germany, and they had been quick to drop the 'von' from the family name after the war. But in their quietly indomitable way, these two had maintained a sense of themselves as somehow ineffably superior to other people, and moreover they had managed to transmit this sense to those around them, not by any crude arrogance or self-aggrandisement, but by a certain aristocratic froideur , a mixture of haughty reserve and sudden graciousness, which bewildered people, intimidated them, and filled them with a kind of strained awe.'

Stephan's father was a government official who occasionally went abroad with a delegation. The possibility arose that the family would be moving to the USA, but the father made a mistake in protocol and he returned home in disgrace. The mother, needing to shore up her battered self-image, created the fantasy that hers was an artistic family. She developed a tawdry kind of salon where the participants were mediocre artists and writers who were supported by the state.

However, this was not enough for the mother. She was neither an artist nor a writer, so she decided that her two sons would fulfil these roles. Stephan said, 'Mother created a kind of soirée. It was during this period that I first heard myself being referred to as the family 'poet-intellectual' It was done so casually that I didn't consciously notice it until it had insinuated itself into my own image of myself. I therefore didn't react to it with the suspicion or perplexity I should have. As our artistic gatherings consolidated themselves into regular soirées and I heard my mother introduce me as our literary man', our own 'poet-intellectual', often adding, 'He reads all the time. It's impossible to drag him away from a book once he's started; just like I was at his age.' I felt it was one of those immemorial truths about oneself that are so well established they are almost too boring to mention. It was like she's said, He's rather small for his age, or, He's always had a sweet tooth. The fact that I'd never written a poem, and that I never read a book unless I had to for class, was neither here nor there.'

Then his mother tried to turn his brother Otto into the artistic one of the family. He was sent to drawing classes and given a box of highgrade French charcoals. After a few classes he refused to attend any more. 'When finally she threatened to punish him if he didn't keep at it, he broke the charcoals, ripped the sketchbooks to pieces and exploded at her with such savage virulence that she - even she- had been forced to back down. Otto now occupied an anomalous, private, decultured zone within the family: tolerated but not much more.' Stephan said, 'I'm not sure whether I simply lacked his courage to be himself, or whether I'd allowed myself to be tainted by the thought that I might actually be that potent and glamorous things, an artist.'

By refusing to accept the label his mother wanted to impose on him Otto was disposed and virtually expelled from the family. Stephan accepted the label and, in effect, accepted the lie, and went on to create more and more lies, all compounded by the fact that he was living in a state that governed by lying. His life ended in tragedy.

There must be some fortunate children whose self-image actually is the same as that which their parents have imposed on them, but such people are unlikely to become our clients. I have met a number of people who have told me that they are happy to live according to their parents' image of them rather than as they know themselves to be, but I cannot accept such statements at face value. One of the greatest satisfactions in life is to have a friend who sees and accepts us as we know ourselves to be, while there is no loneliness like the loneliness of being with people who see us as being someone who we are not. However, for a great many people, feeling themselves to be virtuous is more important than feeling happy.

Stephan's mother wanted to create a family myth which gave her family and herself status, but the family myth as based on a lie, as family myths so often are. In a workshop I was running on sibling relationships Virginia told how her family's myth was that theirs was a happy family. This was a lie. To maintain the family myth, and its lie, Virginia had to accept the role of 'the good child'.

When I was researching for my book about siblings, My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend [iii] I encountered many people who told me that in their family there was the good child and the bad child. 'Good' in this context does not mean the usual list of virtues but how the parents define 'good'. In one family being 'the sporty child' might be 'the good child', and in another family 'the sporty child' might be 'the bad child', in the way that in a family where the parents value academic success 'the sporty child' might be seen as being unintelligent and therefore 'the bad child'.

Virginia's parents had moved from being working class to being middle class by virtue of their academic success but they did not feel secure in this upward mobility. They saw it as dangerous failure to let their colleagues and neighbours know that their marriage was far from happy. Indeed, the parents had frequent heated, bitter quarrels, at the end of which the father would withdraw to his study and the mother to her bedroom to suffer a migraine. Their son, older than Virginia, responded with rage to his parents' rages. From being a toddler Virginia had seen her role as that of the peace maker. After her parents had retired to their rooms Virginia would go first to her father's study. She would ask him the questions about his work which she knew would please him and bring his rage with his wife to an end. She would then take a tray of tea to her mother and see that she was comfortable. She could never find a reliable means of pacifying her brother, and so the most she could achieve was an uncertain peace. However, she became an expert in maintaining the family lie. She was always smiling and happy, and as 'the happy good child' she proved to outsiders that this was a happy family.

Virginia did not lie to herself. She knew that her family was not a happy one and that she herself was not happy. She also knew why she continued in adult life to be the peace maker. Confrontations terrified her. She had to bring them to an end to make herself safe. Unwittingly, she had become an expert in conflict resolution. Her colleagues saw her as invaluable and did not stint their gratitude and praise. From their comments in our workshop it seemed that they might not have encouraged her to do some assertiveness training and thus overcome her fear of confrontation. Had she done so she might not have been so readily available as a mediator. It seemed that her colleagues wanted her to be 'the good child' for them as she had been for her parents.

As therapists we spend a good deal of time encouraging our individual clients to change in way which would benefit them. We often forget that, if our clients change, their family has to change how they see them. Families often resist changing because any change might upset the power balance within the family. Dalton Conley is an American psychologist who has studied how a family's political and economic balance changes over time. His research has shown that there is no universal pecking order of children in a family. The oldest child is not necessarily powerful and bossy and the youngest not necessarily a spoilt baby.[iv] However, within each family there is a pecking order in which each child has been assigned or has negotiated a certain degree of power and status. The pecking order is a delicate balance which rests in part on the role which each child has been given. For instance, in Virginia's family the brother could indulge himself in bad temper because Virginia had accepted the roles of the peace maker and the good child. Had she been able to express her sadness and her anger, the family might have fallen apart, and the brother would have lost what security he had within his modestly wealthy family.

We should not be surprised when a family who has come to us asking for help for their troubled child resists all our attempts to help the child to change. Nor should we be surprised when, no matter how much we change as the years go by, our mother still regards us as a child.

The Meaning of Resilience.

Psychologists who want to make a name for themselves have found that they can achieve this by taking some word and claiming that it stands for an aspect of human behaviour that has not been recognised until then. For instance, about ten years ago, some American psychologists discovered self-esteem. We were told that it was a new idea and that it was very important. But we soon discovered that self-esteem was just another name for self-confidence.

More recently the same process has been applied to the word 'resilience'. Just as some people don't have much self-esteem and others have lots, so resilience is something that some people have and some people don't. For Mental Health Week I've been asked to talk about how people can acquire resilience.

When I looked up the word 'resilience' in my dictionary I found that it was defined as 'the quality of being resilient'. 'Resilient' comes from the Latin 're, meaning back' and 'salire meaning to jump'. So the first definition of 'resilient' is 'springing back into shape or position after being stretched, bent or compressed'. The second meaning the dictionary gives is 'recovering strength, spirits, etc quickly'.

In this second meaning, resilient is what observers might see in a person who has suffered some disaster. When that person is back at work, leading an ordinary life, being cheerful and not complaining, we remark, gratefully, that the person is resilient. But what is going on inside the person might be something very different. Most of us are very good at presently an acceptable face to the world and not showing the turmoil inside ourselves. However, the way we feel when we're on our own can be very different.

If we want to understand ourselves and other people we need to remember one Golden Rule. This is what determines our behaviour isn't what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us.Thus three people might suffer the same disaster but each interprets the disaster in his or her own individual way. One person can interpret it as a total defeat, another as punishment for his wickedness, and the third as a challenge to be mastered.

Thus it is that some people can feel utterly defeated and hopeless but pretend to be resilient because they don't want others to despise or pity them. Some people can blame themselves for the disaster that has befallen them, lock themselves in the prison of depression and each day, as one depressed person told me, 'put on a face to face the day'. Some people can not only appear to be resilient but actually be resilient because they have interpreted the disaster as a challenge to be mastered.

When we interpret a disaster as a challenge to be mastered we have chosen to draw on two wonderful qualities, courage and perseverance.  Courage means acknowledging that you are afraid but choosing to act as though you were not. Perseverance means that you have recognised that the situation is not going to be put right through one courageous act but that, by keeping on being courageous no matter how long it takes, you might be able to achieve your goal.

How can we acquire the qualities of courage and perseverance?

Before I go on I want to tell you something about myself that relates to what I'm going to say. I was born in Australia in 1930. The Australia I was born into was Northern Ireland without the Troubles. Australian society was divided into two groups, Catholic and Protestant. There were two totally separate educational systems, and two horrible mythologies which each group believed about the other. There was no socialising between the two groups. The only reason we didn't have the Troubles was because both groups had the same economic and political advantages. When I arrived in England in 1968 and began making visits to Northern Ireland I felt I had stepped back in time to my childhood. Australia ceased to be like Northern Irelandwhen the Catholic school system could no longer cope with the influx of migrants from predominantly Catholic countries. The rules were changed. Catholic parents were now allowed to send their children to state schools and Protestant parents could send their children to Catholic schools. Educated together, the children failed to learn the mythologies which had dominated their parents' lives.

To return to courage and perseverance.

We all know what it is like to be afraid. We live in a world where terrible things can happen at any time. The people around us, for no good reason, can be exceedingly unpleasant to us. There are few things which we can control, and so we often feel helpless. When we are humiliated, treated as an object of no importance, or when we discover that there is a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is, we feel our very self shattering ,crumbling, even disappearing, and we are terrified. Sometime we wake during the night full of nameless dread. How can we live with fear and keep on going?

To live with fear and not be destroyed by it, we have to feel that we're valuable simply as a person. We don't have to earn the right to exist. We exist, and so we have the right to exist. We have to feel that we are capable of acting and achieving our purpose. To live like this for all of our life we have to feel that we are capable of keeping on keeping on. In short, we are self-confident.

Babies are born full of unself-conscious self-confidence. You'll never see a newborn baby wondering whether he's acceptable or lovable. But within a few short months the confident baby has becomes a shy, self-conscious, diffident toddler. If he tries to be himself and do what he wants to do, the adults around him soon show him that this is unacceptable. Babies are born neither good nor bad, but the adults around them impose their ideas of goodness and badness on them. Small children learn very quickly that, as they are, they aren't acceptable. They have to work hard to be good. Unfortunately, they're not very skilled at understanding how their family actually defines 'good', and, even when they understand what the adults want, they're not always able to meet the adults' expectations. Unless the parents takes great care to separate what the child does from what the child is, that is, saying, 'that was a bad thing you did', and not 'You are a bad child', the child will grow up believing that he is, in essence, bad and unacceptable. Unfortunately, this belief is enshrined in Christianteaching that we are 'born in sin'.

Over the last twenty years many parents have realised that the way parents discipline their children can destroy the children's self-confidence. They understand how important it is to reward children for what they get right and to explain to a child, however young, why what he has done is wrong and how he can behave better. It warms the cockles of my heart when I'm out and about and I hear parents telling their children, 'well done', and 'good girl' and explaining why it's not a sensible idea to step off the pavement without looking. Here in Northern Ireland, where both religious groups have traditionally been very keen on physical punishment, many people want the law changed so that children have the same protection against assault that adults enjoy. Unfortunately, there are still many people the world over who believe in the biblical adage, 'spare the rod and spoil the child. Many of the children who were beaten by their parent will, in adult life, say, 'I was beaten as a child and it never did me any harm'. They don't realise that the harm they suffered was not to realise that they had suffered harm.

When young children are asked how they feel when they're slapped or hit or beaten they all describe the event of one of intense pain and fear. Children who receive regular physical punishment have to find some way of defending themselves against the actual pain and fear they feel. One way of doing this is to deny that they feel any pain and fear. They refuse to feel any pity for themselves. However, acknowledging our own emotions allows us to imagine what other people feel. That is, we can feel empathy for others. Acknowledging our own pain and fear, and the pity we have for ourselves in this plight allows us to feel empathy for all other people who suffer. Denying our own pain and fear, and the pity we feel for ourselves, means that we deny other people's pain and fear, and their need for our pity, and this denial allows us to be cruel to other people. Thus many of those who were beaten as children go on to beat their own children. It's from their numbers come those who are willing to torture and kill. For instance, Gebhard Himmlerwas a high school principal who believed that sparing the rod would spoil the child. He regularly beat his three sons. The oldest, also called Gebhard, would describe these beatings ironically as being 'liberally rewarded'. The middle son, Heinrich, went on to become the Reichsfuhrer of the SS, who organised the systematic murder of millions of people during the Third Reich.

In his years in power Heinrich Himmler appeared to be supremely self-confident. However, this self-confidence was built on two lies, the lie that being beaten by his father hadn't done him any harm, and the lie that the group he belonged to, the German people, was superior to all other races. As always happens when we build our self-confidence on a lie, when Himmlerfaced disaster his self-confidence vanished. He lacked the courage to face his British captors. He swallowed the poison capsule he carried in his mouth and died.

When, as children, we learn to think of ourselves as being bad and unacceptable, we can try to overcome the problems caused by our diminished self-confidence by telling ourselves that, even though we are not acceptable at least we belong to the best group in the world. This may be a nationalist group, or religious, or racial group. We can build our whole identity on our membership of this group. It can be great fun to support a football team, or, if you're an Australian, to tease the English about always beating them at sport, but, if you believe that it is an absolute truth that your group is superior to all other human beings, you have built your self-confidence on a lie.

Human beings differ in the way they look and in the ideas they hold, but genetically we're not different from one another. Our DNA show different lines of inheritance, but, in terms of the genetic make-up of our species, we're all the same. Moreover, all human beings want the same things. We all want to feel that we are acknowledged by others as being a person, not an object of no importance. We all want to feel that our life has significance, that we have a respected place in society, and that we have good relationships with other people. The more we learn about other people, the more we see how we all strive to achieve, and how we all sometimes fail, and sometimes succeed. We all make the same kinds of mistakes and long for the same things. We all want love and closeness, yet we want to be independent, and we all try to overcome our fear of death. No group has a monopoly on goodness, and no group is completely and irredeemably bad.

Parents describe the world to their children and most children learn to see the world through their parents' eyes. In our teens we often rebel against our parents' ideas, but we have already learnt these ideas and can easily fall back on them when it suits us to do so. If parents teach their children that they, the children, are, in essence, bad, and have to work hard to be good, and that the children belong to the most superior group of people in the world, then what self-confidence the children have is built on these two lies. As they get older some children are wise enough to recognise these two beliefs as lies and so discard them, but many do not. When faced with disaster, their courage may fail them. To be courageous we have to believe that in ourselves we are valuable as a person.

Where does perseverance come from? You may be following a television series called Child in Our Time which is presented by Robert Winston, the leading infertility scientist. In this a group of 25 children, born at the Millennium, have been filmed every year or so carrying out certain tasks. In the last programme the parents and children were asked to do the same task but separately, so that the children didn't know what their parents had done. This particular task has been a favourite with psychologists for many years. Some poor hapless subjects are asked to plunge their forearm into a bucket of ice cold water. In some experiments the psychologist measures different physiological changes but in this particular experiment each person was asked to keep their arm in the water for as long as possible. One father, having ascertained that the maximum time a person was allowed to keep their arm in the water was five minutes, made sure that he kept his arm in the freezing water for fully five minutes. In contrast, one mother put her hand in the water, shrieked, and immediately pulled it out. Can you guess which child in the group of children kept his arm in the water for the longest time, and which child removed his hand the moment he felt the cold water?

Children learn from their parents, but what impresses children the most is not what adults say but what adults do. If you want your child to be courageous, you have to be courageous. If you want your child to persevere at difficult tasks, you have to persevere at difficult tasks. However, children do not just look to their parents to see how to behave. They look at all the adults they meet and observe how they behave. A child might not know the word 'hypocrisy' but they recognise it when an adult says one thing and does another.

Children, like adults, are always busy creating ideas about who they are, what the world is, and what their future will be. Ideas are things we create, and, as we created them, we are free to change them. Our Ideas change over our lifetime, but just how they change depends on not what we encounter but how we interpret what we encounter.

Some situations are so different from anything we have ever encountered that, sensibly, we should change our ideas. But changing our ideas creates uncertainty. Many people fear uncertainty, so they hang on to their old ideas, especially those ideas about themselves and the world they live in. If there was a Nobel Prize for having the courage to change your ideas, the people of Northern Irelandwould win it. You've been courageous, and you've persevered. I might even call you resilient

However, the word resilient worries me. As many of you have discovered, when we suffer a significant personal disaster and feel overwhelmed by grief and confusion, the people around us will, for a short while, give us comfort and support. However, witnessing another person's grief is very difficult, and so, all too soon, those around us will want us to be 'over it' and 'getting on with our life'. They want us to be resilient. They take no account of the fact that we have suffered a loss of something that can never be replaced.

Five weeks ago, in Essex, the body of a 17-year-old girl, Natasha Coombes, was found beside a railway track. Her mother Joanne was reported as saying that the loss of her only child was 'unbearable'. Not long after Joanne's body was found beside the same piece of track where Natasha had died. A few days later the Guardian published an article by Barbara Anderson whose teenage daughter had died from cancer a year earlier. She wrote, 'To bury a child is to confront the reality that no matter how many suppers you cooked, how many stories you read, how many cuddles you gave, you have ultimately failed. Waves of guilt wash over the bereaved parent. I have never found that anything that anyone said made any difference to that acrid, unpalatable feeling. I just had to go with it. In time, the guilt has abated a little, to be replaced with more bearable emotions of loss and longing. . . . I eat, sleep, function and fight against undue negativity. But I remain deeply, profoundly sad, underneath a quite cheerful exterior. I know I am much less psychologically robust than I was.'

Over our whole life span all of us suffer loss. Some people suffer more loss than others, but no one escapes. We can try to be courageous and persevering, but the sadness never completely disappears. The people around us should not expect us to deny our sadness. Instead, we should all use our sadness to inform our talent for empathy, not just for the other members of our group, but for all people everywhere. There has never been a time in the history of our species when the barriers between our different groups have needed to disappear so totally and so quickly. Our planet is rapidly changing to a climatic state which will no longer support human life. To prevent this, the entire population of the world need to work together. The people in Northern Irelandare in a unique position in helping to achieve this. You can show others how to bring a conflict to a peaceful end through honesty, courage and perseverance.

Dorothy Rowe Beyond Fear third edition HarperCollins

Dorothy Rowe Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison third edition Routledge

Barbara Anderson Too Much to Bear Guardian 25.09.07 http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2176481,00.html

Foreword to Clare Jenkins and Judy Merry Relative Grief Jessica Kingsley 2005. 

Death is the elephant in the living room - the huge thing that everyone knows is there but no one mentions. Fear keeps us silent. We fear the physical aspect of death, the body becoming still, silent, cold, and then decaying, but even more we fear the annihilation of the person, what we call 'I', 'me', 'myself', which is what makes us unique. We fear not just the annihilation of the person we love but our own annihilation. Talking of his brother's death, Rony Robinson said, 'You lose a bit of yourself in the process of somebody dying.' 

There's no way of knowing beforehand which bit of yourself will disappear when someone close to you dies. My friend Jean Flanagan had emphysema and I knew she was dying, but when the news of her death reached me I found myself utterly distraught with grief because I suddenly realised that Jean had known about my erstwhile marriage in a way that no one else did. Both of us had married fascinating, entertaining, exciting men who often behaved like wilful, selfish, naughty schoolboys. Jean and I could discuss our husbands in a way very different from the way we spoke about our husbands to other people. There was so much which we didn't have to explain to each other or try to excuse. When Jean died a significant part of my story was lost. I was left like the only speaker of a newly extinct language. 

Each person is unique, and the part of our person which we lose in each bereavement is unique. Consequently, the grief one person feels is quite different from all the different kinds of grief which others can feel.  No text book on 'Death Education' or 'The Stages of Grief' can encompass what each individual endures. By letting each of the people in this book tell their story in their own way Clare Jenkins and Judy Merry have shown the individuality of grief. These stories remind us how wrong it is to say to someone who is grieving, 'I know exactly how you feel', or to say to oneself, 'My grief is greater than everyone else's.' The stories show too that the dead belong to no one. All we possess are those parts of our own stories which we shared with those we grieve for. 

Yet, out of all the unique stories in this intensely compassionate and humane book, comes the understanding that, alone as we are in our grief, such suffering shows us that what matters most in life is the love we have for one another.

Foreword to Linda Hurcombe Losing a Child Sheldon Press 2004 

How do parents survive the death of a child?  

Some don't. Heartbreak can kill when it takes away the will to live. Guilt can kill when it carries the message that the person has no right to exist. Fortunately, most parents go on living. 

Some parents go on living because, despite the pain, their bodies go on working. Some parents go on living because they have other children to care for. Some parents go on living because while they live their lost child is remembered. Some parents go on living because the nature of their child's death gives them a task which they must perform with all their might. 

With the death of her daughter Caitlin Linda Hurcombe found herself with two tasks to perform. The first was to question whether Prozac was the safe and effective drug which the medical profession and the pharmaceutical companies said it was. The second task was to tell the truth about what follows for parents when their child dies. 

In the attempt to make a difficult life more bearable we all lie to ourselves. Another person's grief distresses us, and so we often encourage that person to bear his grief 'well', which means not displaying grief in any way. Widows are often complimented with the statement, 'She's taking it well.' Some women do bear the death of their husband with enormous equanimity because they see widowhood bringing them a happiness that marriage never did. To offer the same compliment to a bereaved parent, as many people do, can give only pain and insult.

We might accept the sight of a parent's grief but protect ourselves from discomfort by taking the long view that grief is a learning process from which the bereaved can graduate with 'closure'. We can hold firmly to the most comforting concept of all, that we live in a Just World where, if we suffer, we inevitably receive recompense and reward. 

None of these beliefs is true. When we grieve for someone we love we are broken into pieces, and some of those pieces go missing, never to be replaced. We want to scream our pain and confusion to the heavens. To be forced to be well-behaved is torture. Over time our grief may become more muted but it never goes away. We never become whole. That terrible absence is with us until we die, and for this terrible absence there is no recompense, no reward. 

If we do not acknowledge these truths we cannot help others bear their grief. Nor can we bear our own grief. Instead we feel guilty because we have apparently failed to deal with our own grief in the way that we should. We have not found 'closure', nor have we been recompensed and rewarded.

Linda Hurcombe confronted these truths through her own grief, and so she was able to write about them very directly and clearly. Moreover, she had discovered that the death of your child does not protect you from the practical issues of living. Indeed, the grieving parent may be quite unprepared for the practical issues that do arise. This is why Linda Hurcombe has included in her compassionate account of parental grief some practical information and advice.

This is a book of great humanity and warmth. Those who read it will discover another great truth, that, while grief can isolate us, sorrow can bring us closer together than happiness ever can.

Foreword to Terry Lynch Beyond Prozac PCCS Books 2004 

Terry Lynch is a brave man. The medical profession does not forgive renegades, and a renegade is any doctor who criticises the sacred dogma of the profession. A doctor who dares to do this is likely to see his career and his reputation suffer. Nevertheless, Terry Lynch believes that he must tell the truth about his experience as a doctor, even if this experience contradicts one very important part of medical dogma. 

This concerns mental illness, or, as it is now called, mental disorder. The profession of psychiatry is based on the belief that there are such things as mental illnesses, and that these illnesses have a physical cause and a physical cure - drugs and electroconvulsive therapy. Nowadays psychiatrists talk of 'social factors' and 'psychological factors' in mental disorder, and a few psychiatrists see such factors as the prime cause of mental disorder, but for the majority of psychiatrists social and psychological factors merely exacerbate what is for them essentially a physical illness. Such psychiatrists expect general practitioners like Terry Lynch to conform to this belief.  

The only way to maintain the belief that mental disorder has a physical cause is steadfastly to refuse to be aware of what is going on and what has gone on in the lives of individual people. Terry Lynch was incapable of doing this. He listened to his patients, and so he came to see that there were direct connections between the form of the patient's distress and the life of the patient. He found too that by listening attentively, encouraging his patients to put into words the teeming mass of thoughts and feelings that brought them pain and confusion, they were able to come to a clear understanding of their situation. Then they could take charge of their lives and create a secure, sustainable way of living. 

From his conversations with people who were planning to kill themselves and from his study of the stories of people who had killed themselves Terry Lynch could see that the theory to explain suicide which psychiatrists put forward, that low serotonin levels in the brain led to suicide, was quite inappropriate. Instead he saw in these stories the recurring themes of lovelessness and loneliness. These suicidal people did not love themselves, and, though they might be surrounded by family and friends, they had no one in their life who accepted them as they were and listened to them. 

Lovelessness and loneliness cannot be explained by chemical changes in the brain and cured by the ingestion of drugs. Lovelessness and loneliness, like anxiety and depression and all the ways of expressing mental distress which are called mental disorder, are part of what it is to be human, but a part that can be understood, diminished and banished from our lives simply by caring wisely for ourselves. Terry Lynch understands and cares wisely for us all. His immense warmth and humanity are revealed on every page of this book. It is truly a book for our time and for all time.