Dorothy Rowe

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND

November 2002

RECOVERY AND ILLNESS IN THE PSYCHIATRIC SYSTEM

Dorothy Rowe

I am old enough now to be an historian of the psychiatric system. Ask me how it has changed since 1965 and I can tell you.

I first encountered the psychiatric system when I went to work as a liaison psychologist linking Sydney schools and the children's ward in a psychiatric hospital. This hospital had recently been built, and was simply an array of single storied wards, all light, airy and clean, set in large grounds overlooking the Parramatta River. This place did not prepare me for the horror of Middlewood Hospital in Sheffield, nor the other psychiatric hospitals I came know only too well after I arrived in the UK in 1968. All of these were dark, miserable, dirty prisons, where their inhabitants, the patients, were shown very clearly by the buildings themselves and by the staff that they were the scum of the earth.

I wrote about these horrible places in my book Beyond Fear which was published in 1987. By then I knew that all those forms of mental distress which psychiatrists called mental disorder had the same cause - that the person had lost all self-confidence and had found that he and his world were falling apart. These mental disorders were actually desperate defences where the person tried to defend himself against annihilating fear. I also knew that most of the evil in this world comes not from wickedness but from stupidity, usually the stupidity of well-meaning people who believe that they know what is best for other people.

It was such people who designed and built the asylums, crowded them with distressed people, ignored the causes of this distress, and proceeded to humiliate and degrade these helpless individuals. Such treatment was the absolute opposite of what these distressed people needed.

Most of these prisons of degradation have now closed, and the buildings which have replaced them are, on the whole, relatively clean, light places, but, as contributors to Openmind have recorded, patients are still being treated with little respect and dignity, and this has not helped them to regain their self-confidence.

By the time I set about writing the second edition of Beyond Fear many of the people who had been so mistreated by the psychiatric system were fighting back. I think this is wonderful. We should always fight against being degraded and humiliated because, if we do not, we become maimed, crippled, even destroyed as a person.

At last people who are too distressed to speak up for themselves have advocates who understand how they feel and how obtuse and difficult, even cruel, the psychiatric system can be. Users of the psychiatric system have now become a significant political force. Many of the institutions within the psychiatric system have come to understand that it is politically correct to invite a user to join certain committees. This is still very much at the token level, but token users can do what token women and token blacks have done, get a toe-hold in the system and change it.

Users have challenged the drug regimes in psychiatric care and insisted that the system should include an increasing availability of different kinds of therapy. Marius Romme had a very wry way of telling the story of how his patient Patsy Hage forced him to take account of the meaning of her voices, and thus to set in motion the Hearing Voices movement, the biggest change in the care of people diagnosed as schizophrenic since Kraepelin announced that he had discovered dementia praecox.

The dogma of psychiatry, which is as immutable, unquestionable and holy as the dogma of the Catholic Church, stated that schizophrenia was a life-long disease and that endogenous depression could be cured only by physical means. When I worked in Lincolnshire psychiatrists there would refer people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or endogenous depression to us psychologists with the message, 'Dorothy, as a last resort, could one of you see this patient.' This meant, 'Take this troublesome patient off my hands.' If, as we often did, we reported back some months later to the psychiatrist to say that this once deeply distressed patient was now leading an ordinary, happy life, the psychiatrist would immediately make a retrospective diagnosis. The patient had had a transient drug-induced psychosis or a mild reactive depression.

There are now too many people who have extricated themselves from their particular hell for psychiatrists to be able to perform this dishonest trick effectively, though many of them still try to do so. Some of these people who have saved themselves, people like Ron Coleman, Brian Davey and Rufus May, have written publicly about what they did. A large number of other such people have written to me privately to tell me about their life, how they have changed and what helped them. It was never drugs that had helped but talking to people and working out things for themselves. From the experiences of so many different people I can now say that there is no mental disorder which has to be a lifelong illness.

The proof that people can recover from mental disorder should be cause for universal rejoicing, but, as far as the psychiatric system is concerned, it has not happened. This system has many well-practised techniques for ignoring or denying all evidence for recovery, beginning with the denigration of R.D. Laing's work in the 1960s. Psychiatrists who, like Laing, criticise the system are treated by the system in the same way that every powerful religion treats its renegades. Laing cannot be burnt at the stake or made the object of a jihad, but he can, and is, spoken of as, 'Poor Ronnie, such promise, such a terrible waste.'

Peter Breggin, author of Toxic Psychiatry and a psychiatrist of tremendous courage, has endured an unbroken stream of abuse in the USA for his exposure of the dangers of the drugs used in psychiatry. When on the rare occasions he lectured to psychiatrists in the UK, he found that their response was the same as that of parents who physically chastise their children, 'What else can we do?'. This is a rhetorical question which demands the answer, 'Nothing else.'

The largest volume of research evidence that recovery is possible from all the mental disorders comes from cognitive therapists, but such research is never presented as a refutation of the medical model. Though most cognitive therapists are psychologists they take their lead from Aaron Beck, a professor of psychiatry who has always been very careful not to upset his colleagues by publicising the fact that, while depressed people treated only with drugs and ECT are unlikely to recover in their lifetime, depressed people treated with cognitive therapy can get better and stay better for the rest of their life. Beck does not want to follow Thomas Szasz and Loren Mosher into the wilderness. (Szasz rejected the idea that schizophrenia is an illness, while Mosher resigned from the American Psychiatric Association (APA), saying that it had become the American Pharmacological Association.) As a result cognitive therapists are taught to regard the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as their bible. I despair of my profession when I see psychologists labelling, distancing and denigrating their fellow human beings with all the enthusiasm of a trainee psychiatrist wishing to please his consultant.

The DSM had grown from a simple list of the forms of mental distress which prevent an individual from living an ordinary life (ie., depression, phobias, mania, obsessions and compulsions, schizophrenia) into a massive volume which classifies every kind of human behaviour as a mental disorder, whether or not it is a natural reaction to the situation in which a person finds himself. It is natural to feel anxious when we doubt that we have the ability to deal with the situation confronting us, but in the DSM such anxiety is considered to be Generalised Anxiety Disorder or Anxiety Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. We all subscribe to that old saying, 'All the world's mad except me and thee, and even thee's a little mad,' but in the DSM the oddness of our friends becomes Personality Disorder Not Otherwise Specified.

Herb Kutchin and Stuart Kirk's book Making Us Crazy, which won the Mind Book of the Year Award in 2000, leaves the reader in no doubt that the DSM is a political, not a medical document, a bid for territory and power. The committee of the APA which decides upon the contents of the DSM can eradicate a mental disorder with the stroke of the pen, and create a new one, usually one for which the pharmaceutical industry can immediately find a 'cure'. No psychiatric drug can cure, but these drugs can reduce awareness of pain and fear, and thus give a distressed person a breathing space. Unfortunately, aggressive marketing by the drug companies has meant that many people, facing situations which naturally lead them to be anxious or sad, are offered drugs to blank out the very emotions which they need to feel in order to work their way through the situation.

Life is difficult and no one has it easy for all their life. What we all need to understand is that, in any difficult situation, there are the actual events AND our interpretations of these events. Sometimes we can change some of the events, but always we can change how we interpret the events. Mastering the situation, that is, recovering control of our life, is achieved by changing in beneficial ways those events which can be changed, and by changing our interpretations to ones which give us self-confidence, courage and optimism. People have always known this. Recovery is simply the gaining of wisdom.

Dorothy Rowe - "Beyond Fear" second edition, HarperCollins, £12.99

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND

March/April 2002

CHILDREN ARE UNBEATABLE

Dorothy Rowe

Why do the British want to beat their children? In 1979 Sweden prohibited all corporal punishment of children, and since then Norway, Latvia, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, Denmark and Israel followed suit. In 2000 the German government passed a German Civil Law which stated, 'Children have the right to be brought up without the use of force. Physical punishment, the causing of psychological harm and other degrading measures are forbidden.'

German lawmakers were impressed by the body of research which shows a clear link between childhood experiences of physical punishment and violence and other forms of anti-social behaviour in adult life. In 2000 a study of the impact of Sweden's ban on physical punishment showed that over the preceding thirty years crime, drug use and alcoholism in young people declined significantly. Moreover, between 1980 and 1996 only four children died at the hands of an adult, and, of that four, only one at the hands of a parent. Each year in the UK some 68 children die at the hands of an adult, usually a close relative.

In the UK individuals and organisations concerned with the totally unacceptable effects of physical punishment formed an umbrella group called Children Are Unbeatable in order to press for children to be protected by the law from assault in the same way as adults are protected. Resistance to this change in the law, particularly at government level and amongst the more fundamentalist Christian churches, is very strong. Such people believe that parents have to right to inflict 'reasonable chastisement' on their children no matter what the consequences. Why is this so?

There are three basic reasons.

The first is the fear instilled in many people by the Fifth Commandment, which states, Honour thy father and mother, so that thy days be long in the land. Criticise your parents and you're dead. Choosing to bring up your children differently from the way your parents brought you up is an implicit criticism of your parents.

The second follows from the fact that an effective defence against physical pain is a way of thinking which separates yourself from your body. Many of us do this in order to keep calm in the dentist's chair. However, if we make a habit of separating our mind from our body we lose our ability to feel pain, and, if we cannot feel our own pain, we diminish our ability to empathise with anyone else's pain. Boys who are subjected to much physical abuse can easily become men who are indifferent to the pain they inflict on others. Such indifference is actually the harm suffered by people who claim, 'I was beaten as a child and it didn't do me any harm.'

Third, the easiest way to bring up children is to terrorise them into obedience, and the easiest way to terrorise children is to hit them. Research has shown that what parents call 'a tap' children experience as a hit which hurts and frightens them. The hardest way to bring up children is to listen to them, reason with them and take their point of view into account. If you do this you'll find that, when you're in a busy supermarket and your two-year-old, overwhelmed by it all, throws a wobbly, no one come to help you, but all around you'll hear people saying, 'If that was my kid I'd give him a good hiding.' Worse, your children will constantly criticise and argue with you.

However, everything we do has consequences. One of the consequences of physical punishment is that fear drives out love. As adults your children don't visit you, or do so grudgingly. Your children might think they love you, but what they call love is guilt and a wistful longing for what might have been. Some adult children ruin their lives by clinging to their parents anxiously, desperately hoping that one day their parents will show them unconditional love, something which the parents might be quite incapable of ever showing. Such adult children are constantly anxious and often depressed when they blame themselves for their parents inability to love them.

For parents who treat their children as their equals, and see them as individuals in their own right, the consequences follow from the fact that the children learn to see their parents as individuals in their own right. This perspective allows the children to understand, and thus forgive, their parents' mistakes and limitations. Such acceptance, understanding and forgiveness mean that parents and their adult children are the best of friends, and there is no greater reward for hard work than that.

Children Are Unbeatable Alliance, 77 Holloway Rd, London, N7 8JZ

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND

Nov/Dec 2001

SWEET DREAMS

Dorothy Rowe

On September 4 television news pictures of the Ardoyne in Northern Ireland showed terrified young girls being ushered by their parents along a path lined by troops in riot gear, behind whom were men and women screaming abuse and threats and throwing bottles and planks embedded with nails at the soldiers, the children and their parents. I wondered how long it would take for memories of this to cease to inhabit the dreams and nightmares of these girls.

Memories of events which aroused intense fear can last a very long time. In Australia when I was eight years old nothing stood between us and the advancing Japanese army. When I went to the beach I stepped over the only defence my home had - a single strand of barbed wire. At the cinema I saw newsreels of Japanese planes dropping bombs and strafing refugees.

I was in my thirties before my 'the Japs are coming' nightmares ceased to trouble me, but another nightmare garnered in my early twenties competed with them and finally took their place. This was a dream where the class I was teaching went out of my control.

The terms of the scholarship which took me to university condemned me to teach in a school where the adolescent girls had no interest in learning and where the headmistress demanded absolute silence from the pupils in the classrooms and corridors, and woe betide the teacher who did not enforce this silence. I struggled hopelessly to impose this ridiculous discipline. When I was offered the chance to become an educational psychologist with special responsibility for emotionally disturbed children I took it with alacrity. One mentally distressed child is easier to handle than 36 normal teenagers.

The nightmare of my class going out of control gradually faded as had the invasion dream because I was creating a new and satisfactory life. However, there was, and still is, one dream which has troubled my sleep for as far back as I can remember. In it I need to go to the toilet, but I cannot find a lavatory with a secure door. Each one I find has no door, and strangers come in and out, refusing to leave when I demand they do. I always wake up suddenly feeling more anxious than the dream itself warrants.

The actual places in my dreams are bizarre and impossible to describe in accurate detail, so I have never found Freudian or Jungian dream analysis relevant to my experience, but I know that we can learn something from our dreams. They do not foretell the future, but they can show the significance of the past and present.

My dream of my search for privacy comes from my early childhood. My parents saw it as imperative that the bowels should be emptied every day. My father had special food rituals while my mother resorted daily to Epsom salts and, if they were not effective, to a fearsome enema contraption. The only aspect of my health that concerned them was my digestive system. They stuffed food into me at one end and took a keen interest in what came out the other end. I found this to be a terrifying intrusion into not just my privacy but into my sense of being a person.

A threat to our sense of being a person is the greatest threat we can know. It is worse than the threat of death because with death we can imagine some important part of ourselves - our soul, our children, our work - continuing on, but if we are annihilated as a person it will be as though we have never existed. We shall vanish just as a rain drop vanishes into the ocean. We are threatened with annihilation as a person whenever other people treat us not as a person but as an object on which they can impose their own ideas.

Dreams about annihilation are more likely to recur than dreams about other fears. At worst the Japanese army could have killed me and the riotous schoolgirls could have lost me my job, but when the conditions of my life changed markedly such dreams faded. However, I am, like all of us, often faced with the threat of the annihilation, so when I am anxious about something in the present this old dream can recur.

However, at least now I know where it came from and what it means, and that it is only a dream. I hope those young girls in the Ardoyne come to know this too.

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND

November 2001

WHY WE HATE

Dorothy Rowe

Hatred has been in the news. We've seen pictures of Muslims in the Middle East and in Indonesia demonstrating their hatred of the USA, and Americans plaintively asking, 'Why do people hate us?' Both kinds of scenes are examples of the virtue we associate with hatred. If an enemy attacks our national or religious group we are allowed, indeed expected, to hate our attacker. In the Second World War the British were encouraged to hate the Germans and Japanese, and in the Cold War Americans were encouraged to hate the Communists. However, we are not allowed to hate anyone within our group, especially our parents, so we try not to hate those close to us, and, if we do, we try not to acknowledge this hate. We can demonstrate our virtue by saying, 'I don't hate anyone, so why should anyone hate me?'

Hatred is an emotion, and emotions are one way that we give meaning to our experiences. Emotions are meanings which we create immediately, without consideration, and in that moment they are our own truth. The emotion, be it hate, love, fear, anger, joy, tells us how we see that situation. We can then destroy our truth by mislabelling it, by calling our anger fear, or our guilt love, and we can lie to ourselves by telling ourselves that we aren't angry, aren't jealous, don't hate.

All our emotions can sustain and protect us, even hatred. Whenever other people threaten us, not just physically but as a person, that is, when they demean, belittle, humiliate us, treat us as an object, not as a person, we feel threatened, and we defend ourselves by becoming angry. If we have any power we strike back, one way or another, but, if we have no power and the threat goes on and on, our anger turns to hatred. This hatred serves to defend us from the threat of being annihilated as a person.

The history of the Middle East from the Crusades onward shows how the people in the Middle East have been humiliated, first by the major European nations and later by the USA. For millions of people, especially those who have lost their loved ones, their homes and their livelihood, their hatred of their enemy is their only defence, their only source of pride.

We all know what it is like to be humiliated because we have all been children, and children are humiliated by adults. Children, being powerless, can defend themselves only by hating. However, children are forbidden to hate their parents, and thus many children, though given good reason to hate, feel that they must deny their hatred. However, to deny an emotion does not dissolve it. An unadmitted emotion grows stronger and reveals itself in many ways. Hatred is present in all those forms of mental distress which psychiatrists call mental disorders.

In depression hatred for others becomes hatred for oneself; in agoraphobia, it becomes fear; in mania, it becomes that from which the person must flee into greater and greater activity; in obsessions and compulsions, it becomes murderous fantasies; in schizophrenia, it becomes vicious, torturing voices; in anorexia and self-harm, it is directed at the body; in addiction, it is that which must be dulled and silenced. Many people kill themselves in order to express their hatred, not just of themselves but of the people whom they feel have failed them.

Hatred which goes on and on, whether acknowledged or not, becomes part of the person's sense of identity. The person sees forgiveness and compromise as a despicable weakness. His world is structured by his enmity, divided into good and bad, his territory and his enemy's territory, and his every decision takes his enemy into account. His enemy becomes more important to him than his friends and family. Such a person comes to feel that if he gives up hating his enemy he will lose his identity. This is why many people in Northern Ireland reject the peace process even though a successful outcome to the process will increase their security and wealth, and why many people refuse to examine, much less give up the mental distress they suffer.

We cannot deal with our hatred unless we acknowledge it, and from that go on to understand its origin in our sense of being powerless. When we don't value and accept ourselves we feel weak and powerless, and so we resort to hatred. To give up hatred we have to accept and value ourselves.

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND

July/Aug 2001

RESCUE REMEDY

Dorothy Rowe

Two years ago my friend Anna went through a very bad time. Up till then she had been happy, and with good reason. She had an interesting, responsible, well-paid job, a light, airy modern loft, a glamorous social life and Nick, her handsome, loving partner. She and Nick were talking about marriage and a family. Then suddenly it all went wrong. Her firm was taken over by a large organisation, Anna was demoted, and her new boss issued orders and didn't listen. Then Nick left, saying that he wasn't ready for commitment. What he was ready for, as Anna found out accidentally, was a much younger woman. Anna's social life vanished because it was based on couples, and Anna couldn't bear being the odd one out.

Anna withdrew into herself. Her mother phoned me and asked me whether I thought Anna was depressed. I said I didn't know. Anna insisted to me that she was fine, though her eyes told another story.

Six months went by, then out of the blue Anna phoned to tell me that she had changed her job to something completely new, and in another city. She had a buyer for her loft, and I must visit her once she was settled in her new home.

Which I did. She'd bought a little house with a garden. She'd taken up gardening and cooking, and, most astounding of all, she whose longest walk had been fifty yards to her favourite bar, had joined a rambler's group.

Anna talked to me about the changes she had made. She said, 'I did go through a really bad time, and then one day it dawned on me I was waiting to be rescued. I thought, "That's not me, I'm not that sort of person," and so I rescued myself, I suppose.'

We all long to be rescued. We want that a good parent to banish everything that oppresses us and makes us frightened, to fight our battles and make sure we are safe from harm. Some of us when we were little did have a parent like that, and some of us longed for a parent who did look after us, but, whichever, we all came to know that parents are fallible and no parent can rescue us from every danger and disaster. Some of us put our faith in a God who would watch over us, but then we discovered that even an all-good and all-powerful God doesn't protect us from suffering. Some of us went on believing the fairy stories we were told as children, that, if we were good, one day Prince Charming, or a powerful king, or a beautiful woman would see our goodness and save us. It was a hard lesson for us to learn that, though other people can help and support us, the only person who can rescue us is ourselves.

Some people refuse to learn this lesson. They cannot bear to let go of the illusion that one day they will be rescued. They look to this drug, this day centre, this therapist, this self-help group, not as a tool which they can use to rescue themselves, but as a rescuer. When this particular would-be rescuer fails them they feel betrayed yet again, and at the same time they blame themselves for not being worthy of rescue.

Some people enjoy the process of being rescued and they become quite skilled in attracting would-be rescuers. There are always lots of people around who want to rescue poor unfortunates, and getting attention from such people is easy and can be pleasurable, but would-be rescuers never get it right. They never understand just what you want to be rescued from. You don't want to leave your partner who's so horrible to you. You just want him to become nice. You don't want to become self-confident because then people will expect you to do things. Would-be rescuers don't understand that, while you enjoy being rescued, you don't want to change. You want to go on just as you are, only not being miserable. These rescuers suggest changes - think well of yourself, get out more, take up yoga - and sometimes you carry out one of their suggestions, but, as you know it will, it all turns out badly. Then you can have the pleasure of complaining about how you've been let down and how other people don't understand you. 

It takes courage to recognise that the only Prince Charming who is going to save you is yourself.

Openmind July, 2001.

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND

July/August 2001 issue

LOW ON SELF-ESTEEM?
BUY NOW WHILE STOCKS LAST

Dorothy Rowe

How's your self-esteem? Getting a bit low? Why not pop along to the self-esteem shop and stock up for the summer?

Well, why not. Self-esteem is always talked about as if it's some commodity. You've got it or you haven't, or you're brimming over with it, or you've let your supply run a bit low. Or is low self-esteem like low blood pressure, something that goes up and down like mercury in a barometer? People are always talking about self-esteem as if it's something you really must have, but how do you get it? What exactly is it? People talk as if they know what it is, and they say very worrying things, such as how parents can damage their child's self-esteem, but if you don't know what self-esteem is, how can you make sure that you've got enough of it or that you don't damage someone else's self-esteem?

That's the trouble with jargon. It sounds good but it's empty of meaning. There's a word, self-esteem, but it doesn't refer to anything real. You don't have a lump of self-esteem inside you that can grow bigger or smaller. 'Self-esteem' is one of those words created by people (here psychologists and therapists) who can't be bothered to think about the complexities of being a human being. They know vaguely that something is important but all they do is think up some catchy jargon and sell it to people who are trying to work out what's going on in their lives.

We don't have self-esteem but we do have ideas about ourselves and these ideas are central to every decision we make. We have one set of ideas which together gives us our sense of being a person, what you call 'I', 'me', 'myself'. Then we have another set of ideas about our sense of being a person. This second set of ideas is what we can call 'how we feel about ourselves'. Asking yourself whether you have self-esteem is a pointless question, but asking yourself how you feel about yourself is an extremely important question.

However, how you feel about yourself isn't simple. It's made up of three equally important parts.

The first part concerns how much you care about yourself. By 'care' I mean both liking and loving yourself, and taking care of yourself.

The second part concerns how much you value yourself. Where on a line between 'utterly priceless' and 'utterly worthless' would you place yourself?

The third part concerns what attributes you judge yourself on and how kindly or harshly you judge yourself. For instance, if you judge yourself on the quality of your work, do you tell yourself that only perfection is acceptable?

A person doesn't necessarily have the same kind of score on each of the three parts. Someone might judge himself very harshly on the quality of his work but see himself as being very valuable. Another person might think of herself as being valueless in society, but she's fond of herself and looks after herself. People who love and value themselves, who look after themselves and judge themselves realistically and kindly find it easy to get along with other people and they cope quite well with life. People who hate themselves, neglect and harm themselves, set themselves unrealistic targets and punish themselves harshly when they fail make sure that they live very miserable lives.

Every decision we make is determined by how we feel about ourselves. Suppose your shoes are getting old and shabby and you wonder about buying a new pair. If you care about yourself, you'll want to look after your feet and give yourself the pleasure of having some smart new shoes; if you value yourself you'll want to have shoes that reflect the value you place upon yourself; if you judge yourself in terms, say, of wanting to appear attractive, lively and friendly without having to be perfect, you'll want new shoes that suggest that you are attractive, lively and friendly but are still comfortable to wear. But if you don't care about or value yourself and you judge yourself most cruelly you'll just say to yourself, 'You don't deserve new shoes.'

So, if you're worried about your self-esteem, get three sheets of paper. At the top of the first write, 'How do I care about myself?', the second, 'How do I value myself?' and the third, 'How do I judge myself?' Take plenty of time in answering these questions, but in the end you'll know what might be worth changing in how you feel about yourself.

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND

May/June 2001

The Protestant & the Catholic Conscience

Dorothy Rowe

In an article in the Guardian the Irish playwright Conor McPherson wondered why, with a population of only 4 million, Ireland had produced so many great playwrights - Synge, O'Casey, Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, Friel, Tom Murphy, Billy Roche, Sebastian Barry and so on. His answer was in terms of the Catholic and Protestant conscience. He wrote,

"Irish plays tend to explore the inner workings of the human being, how it feels to be alive, and the difficulty we have in communicating our feelings. British plays veer toward journalism: 'Look at the state of the NHS/British socialism/what Thatcher did/drugs among our youth/Aids/power struggles in the home/police/my flat/London ect.'"

Not all Irish playwrights were Catholics but they grew up in a Catholic culture. Conor McPherson wrote,

"When I started school at the age of four, I was educated to believe that I was a bad person. I was told I'd be lucky if God forgave me. Every week I was made to confess to a priest. Until I was nine, corporal punishment was legal. I grew up in a working class area and the same teachers who taught us religion also physically attacked us.

"As a kid I became used to being hit by an adult every day. Some used their hands, some sticks of wood. I remember the exhaustion in a teacher's face after he'd lined up the whole class and beaten each one because we were talking to one another while he left the room. I was eight at the time.

"If this constant reinforcement of your badness and guilt happens to you at such a vulnerable age, it seems that you are going to start thinking about the quality of your character. Am I a good person? And that starts you thinking about character in general."

Raised as a Presbyterian, I can say that being brought up in a Protestant culture is no easier. Nowadays children might not be beaten by their parents in the way I was beaten by my mother, and teachers can no longer deal out a sharp slap with a ruler for every mistake a child makes, as my teachers slapped me, but the Protestant conscience is still forged with the unequivocal message the child receives, 'You must try harder and do better. Nevertheless, no matter how hard you try, it will never be enough.'

Protestantism demands that we be keepers of our own conscience. No priest can pardon our sins, so we carry our guilt until Judgement Day. Protestantism began as a protest against Catholicism, and so Protestants are allowed to protest about the conditions of their life. Many Protestant playwrights - Pinter, Hare, Brenton, Edgar, Wesker - as McPherson said, 'argue that their work has political validity' whereas 'Irish writers are a bit scared.' For Catholic playwrights, 'If there's a message, it's a simple one: "I know you're afraid of dying alone in a ditch. I am too. Let's be together."'

When we are depressed we both fear and long for death, but also in depression the differences between the Protestant and the Catholic conscience are very marked. To become depressed you have to turn against yourself and see yourself as being unforgivably wicked. The precise form this wickedness depends on the way wickedness was defined in the religion in which the person was raised. Catholic wickedness resides in the essence of the person's being, while Protestant wickedness is the failure of the person to meet the demands of an implacable conscience.

Thus the Catholic person who is depressed can feel himself to be at the mercy of an all-seeing, all-knowing God who might at any moment pluck him from the earth's surface like a flea off a dog's coat and fling him into space. The Protestant person who is depressed has become his own insatiable judge, demanding greater and greater achievements along with greater and greater punishments for the person's failures.

Depression reveals the extremes of the Catholic and the Protestant conscience. To escape forever from the prison of depression a person has to recognise that these cruel, excessive demands by his conscience originated in his childhood when he believed without question what the adults around him told him, but that now, as an adult, he is free to question and to change his beliefs. He can now form a conscience which is supportive and kind to him and which recognises that we are all fallible people living in a world where nothing is can be perfect because every event and idea has both good and bad implications.

Conscience is necessary to create a society, but only a kindly, realistic conscience allows us the understanding and empathy necessary for us to care for one another.

Dorothy Rowe

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND

March/April 2001

FORGIVENESS and DEPRESSION

Dorothy Rowe

When I was in Pietermartizburg, South Africa for New Year, 1999, a brother and sister, James aged twenty and Kate, eighteen, were murdered on their way home from a party. Shortly after their father, the Reverend Lawrie Wilmot, issued a statement saying that, as Christians, he and his wife had forgiven their children's killers.

I thought, 'Who are you kidding?' If the Reverend Wilmot had not loved his children forgiving their killers would be easy, but if he loved them how could he forgive so quickly?

Of course he was following what Jesus had taught. Jesus knew how futile the Old Testament teaching of an eye for an eye was, but in the Bible it seems that He did not take into account that forgiveness, if it comes, takes time. If we tell ourselves we have forgiven when we have not we soon find ourselves caught unaware by feelings of intense rage about which we can then feel very guilty.

Perhaps what Jesus was actually saying was that we should not try to create the emotion of forgiveness but simply act in a forgiving way and hope that eventually the feeling of forgiveness would arise. The emotion of forgiveness is not a feeling of love for those who have injured us but a feeling of peace as certain past events cease to be important to us and the passionate emotions that those events provoked disappear.

Whenever someone injures us we have a choice about how we shall act in response to the injury. We can choose to seek revenge, or we can choose to dwell upon the injury and the wickedness of our adversary to the exclusion of everything else in our lives, or we can choose to try to understand the reasons for our adversary's action and to seek a way forward which will cause no harm. If we choose revenge we can choose either to do something which annoys and humiliates our enemy and which amuses onlookers, or we can chose to damage, even kill our enemy. The first kind of revenge can bring the matter to a close, but the second kind leads only to pain and destruction. In choosing to dwell on our bitterness and resentment we ruin our life. To choose to act forgivingly we only have to see the wisdom of this choice. A feeling of forgiveness is not necessary.

Forgiveness is a major issue in depression. To get depressed all we need do is to see ourselves as being bad and unacceptable, and then blame ourselves for everything that has gone wrong in our life. When we believe that we are bad and unacceptable we feel weak, and we can fear to forgive an injury lest we become even more vulnerable. So we harbour hatreds while blaming ourselves for not forgiving.

We can feel that, while we should forgive other people for whatever injury they inflict on us, we must never forgive ourselves. We see ourselves as being too wicked ever to deserve forgiveness. Believing this, we cannot not unpick the pattern of events in our life and see how we got to where we are and how we can change in order to lead a more satisfactory life.

The old saying 'To know all is to forgive all' is an exaggeration. To know all about the hideous childhood which Hitler suffered does not lead us to forgive his terrible crimes. However, when we seek to understand ourselves and other people we soon discover that we are all fallible human beings.

Whenever we see someone as our enemy we treat that person as an object. When we hate ourselves we treat ourselves as an object. Objects are things which we use, abuse and destroy. If we choose to act in a forgiving way towards ourselves or towards someone who has harmed us we choose to see that person as a person. We might then discover that that person has feelings similar to ours. Or we might discover that we actually know nothing about that person's feelings, and so we try to remedy our ignorance.

Either discovery could lead to us feeling the emotion of forgiveness, but, more often than not, what actually arises is the feeling of tolerance. We can still deplore what the other person has done, we can still see our ways of thinking and acting as being better than those of the other person, but we have no urge to destroy that person. We should not set ourselves the impossible goal of forgiveness. Just aim for tolerance.

Dorothy Rowe

Dorothy Rowe's latest book Friends and Enemies is published by HarperCollins.

In the first 38 years of my life when I lived in Australia there were floods and droughts but they came in a roughly regular pattern of about five years of floods, or at least a lot of rain, and five years of drought. Occasionally there was a serious flood like the Maitland floods of 1955, but there was nothing like the floods at present in Queensland that cover an enormous part of the state. Back then the words 'El Niño' and 'La Niña' were unknown to us. Now these words and 'Southern Oscillation' feature in our news almost every way. 'Much of the variability in Australia's climate is connected with the atmospheric phenomenon called the Southern Oscillation, a major see-saw of air pressure and rainfall patterns between the Australian/Indonesian region and the eastern Pacific.'

Something else we didn't know was that the world's climate is under the influence of the Jet Stream, a current of high altitude air. In 1945 American B-29 bombers were flying at such an altitude over Japan so that they could drop their napalm bombs on Japanese cities that were full of wooden buildings which burned very fiercely.  At that altitude the bomber pilots could avoid the Japanese fighter planes, but they found their plane being buffeted by the powerful stream of air that we now know as the Jet Stream.

When it was first discovered the Jet Stream was consistently in the northern latitudes. One of the results of climate seems to be that the Jet Stream shifts its position and sometimes loops back on itself. In the winter of 2009 - 2010 the Jet Stream shifted southwards and let the Arctic air flow into northern Europe. It did the same in the winter of 2010 - 2011, only earlier, and Europe froze. In its new position the Jet Stream altered the pattern of the monsoon rains in Australia. As well as cyclones bringing rain to the west and east coast, the rains came from the north in outback Queensland and NSW. Dams that hadn't contained water for years filled up, and then overflowed. Torrents of water flowed down what had been bone-dry river beds.

Most Australians now are very familiar with all these new words. Only the die-hard deniers refuse to see the evidence of climate change that is all around them. Even before climate change, Australia was a harsh country, utterly indifferent to the human beings who tried to impose their will on it. Outside of the cities the inhabitants have learnt that to survive they have to look after one another. Daily news bulletins about the floods use phrases like 'sticking together', 'watching out for one another'. Each state has its own State Emergency Services (SES) made up of volunteers. In NSW the SESis 'the response agency for floods, storms and tsunamis. More than 10,000 volunteers give up their time in 228 locations throughout NSW to assist their communities during floods, storms and other emergencies.' It was not for nothing that that the popular Australian soap was called 'Neighbours'.

Queensland's Premier is Anna Bligh, a very sensible woman with none of the airs and graces that politicians usually adopt. She's been touring the flooded areas, meeting people, finding out at firsthand what is happening. Julia Gillard, PM, has been working out how much government money will be available for re-building, and when and how it will be available. Even her arch-critic, Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition, has not criticised her, though no doubt, once the immediate danger has passed, he and others will. Criticism of others is one thing Australians are good at. Their slang is replete with suitable phrases for dingbats and drongos.

Meanwhile we watch the news and see each night a message from the government warning us of the high fire dangerin other parts of the continent. While one part of the country floods, another part burns.

31st August 1997

Money: a Telling Lore

Money isn't real. It may be a very important means whereby we maintain our sense of identity, but it isn't real. It's simply a set of ideas some of which we share with other people and some which are our own. We might both agree that this piece of metal is a pound coin, but is it a lot or a little to pay for a pint of milk? Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

So too are risk and confidence, those ideas on which the market turns. I don't risk a pound on a lottery ticket because I think 1 in 14 million to be poor odds, but many people don't. Confidence is the opposite of fear, and the greatest fear we can know is that of a threat to our sense of identity. If we want to understand why the market does what it does we need to understand ourselves, that is, our own private logic.

It we want to understand why the market does what it does we need to understand ourselves, that is, our own private logic.

Nothing pleases me more than when I find some scientific research which supports my theories, especially my theory that to understand why people behave as they do we need to discover each person's private logic which is, in effect, their sense of identity. Research reported by the Guardian recently did just that. Here researchers used artificial life methods to create computer software working as robotraders to examine classic market theory.

Classic market theory or the competitive equilibrium model assumes that buyers and sellers behave rationally and thus, in a free market, produce an equilibrium between supply and demand. In real life markets might produce something like an equilibrium, but they also produce much volatility, bubbles and crashes, events which classic theory finds difficult to explain.

Economists, like psychologists, have always been strong on theory. Again, like psychologists, they have steadfastly ignored what real people actually do, because real people ruin theories. Some people might do what the theory predicts, but many won't. Instead of asking why this happens, economists and psychologists, right from the beginning of their disciplines in the nineteenth century, have seen their task as being that of scientists, of uncovering the orthodox truths which are immanent in nature. In the search for such universal laws, what individuals think is irrelevant. For psychologists no word implied such complete rejection and scorn as subjective. The ideal of science towards which they strove was physics, but in such striving they managed to overlook Heisenberg who, in describing his uncertainty principle in 1927, said that the experimenter was always part of the experiment.

What this means in terms of theory is that the particular theory which a person creates or espouses may or may not reflect the real world, but it will always reflect the individual personal meanings created by those who hold it. In psychology and economics theories are never proved or disproved. They simply come into and fall out of fashion. Freud's theories used to be all the rage while Jung's were seen as the product of an unworldly nutter. Now Freud is deplored or ignored while Jung is extremely popular. In economics Maynard Keynes went out of fashion and Milton Friedman came in, but now Milton is on the wane and Maynard is becoming increasingly fashionable.

By ignoring the essence of how we live our lives - the personal meanings we each create - economists and psychologists have developed theories about the world and the people in it from which all sense of personal experience has been removed. Psychologists have developed models which represent us as being nothing but puppets manipulated by the strings of behaviourist stimulus-response, or of genes, or of unconscious drives. Economists, wrote Paul Ormerod, an economist who is extremely critical of classical economics, see the world as a machine. A very complicated one, but nevertheless a machine, whose workings can be understood by putting together carefully and meticulously its component parts. The behaviour of the system as a whole can be deduced from a simple aggregation of these components. A lever pulled in a certain part of a machine with a certain strength will have regular and predictable outcomes elsewhere in the machine. The Science Museum now houses a model of such a machine made by Bill Phillips, an engineer turned economist. This wonderful contraption has levers to pull, buttons to press, sluice gates and liquids of different colours which, representing economic forces, would rush around the system's tubes. Now, alas, the liquids have been removed and only the skeleton remains.

Such economic machines were not assumed to be thinking. Computers might not think for themselves, but they can contain software which simulates thought. This is what the robotrader computers did, or, at least, these were models of how their makers, the computer programmers, thought people thought. They gave their robotraders the ability to adapt to market conditions by using learning algorithms which allow them to try out different buying and selling strategies to optimise their portfolios. They each reacted individually to events using the trading rules with which they'd been programmed. These rules corresponded to what we can call shared, public logic. However, these robotraders also had a kind of private logic.

We all share a public logic, but each of us has our own private logic which is the set of conclusions which we have drawn from our own individual experience. No two people ever have the same experience so why no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way. The robotraders' programmers created a kind of private logic for their robotraders by running a genetic algorithm, a technique which creates a kind of Darwinian evolution in the software, cross-breeding sections of the code to create new strings, some of which then made changes in the external logic rules. We human beings do this all the time. Your mother might have laid down the rule, On your way to school cross the road only at pedestrian crossings. You then change that rule to, Use a pedestrian crossing only when Mother can see you. Your changed rule is part of your private logic.

We use our private logic all the time. These robotraders could do so only when the researchers used the genetic algorithm. The researchers ran their experiment 25 times, involving each time some 250,000 trades. The results were clear. Under certain conditions the efficient market of classic theory emerged. Under other conditions the market which emerged was just like real life, lots of activity, lots of changes in prices, prices bubbling up and then crashing down, the kind of market which pension fund managers and market watchers find so hard to predict. And what were these different conditions? The classic market emerged when the robotraders were using only their external logic, but when the genetic algorithms were used frequently this private logic produced a market very close to real life.

This is a simple scientific replication of what goes on all the time in real life. In dealing with money, as in dealing with every aspect of our lives, we use both the shared, external logic, which is contained Aristotelian logic, scientific method and laws, mathematics and agreed rules and laws, and our own private, individual logic of the structure of meaning which gives us our sense of identity.