Dorothy Rowe

The Guardian Monday 9 September  2002
 
Would you be willing to humiliate yourself on national TV like the has-beens on the celebrity survivor show that reached its climax last night? Or queue for hours for the chance of being slated by a panel of Popstars judges? Or would you let your privacy be invaded, as in Big Brother, by millions of prying, critical eyes? "Never!" you'd probably reply, "I don't crave that kind of attention." But few of us realise that those who seek fame in these seemingly abhorrent ways are no different from the rest of us.

We all need to be noticed, and this need is as important to us as is air, food and water. We each have our own way of getting noticed but, whatever ways we use, it is imperative that other people acknowledge our existence. Air, food and water keep us alive physically, but even more important than that is our survival as a person - what we call I, me, myself. Faced with a situation where there is a conflict between surviving physically and surviving as a person, most of us choose to let our body go. If we don't make this choice, if we go against ourselves, we suffer. We might plunge into a burning building to save a child because we think of ourselves as someone who cares about children. If we survive and someone commends us for our bravery, we say: "If I hadn't done that I couldn't have lived with myself." 

We need to be the person we know ourselves to be, and we need to have other people acknowledge this. Not to have such acknowledgment is extremely painful, even to the point where we feel that we shall disappear. It will be as if we never existed. We find this utterly terrifying. It is a fear we knew only too well as children when adults ignored, belittled and humiliated us, treated us as objects to be used and abused. Loving parents cannot always protect their children from such experiences at the hands of teachers, other adults and older children, and so every child grows up with the fear of being annihilated as a person. Our every action and decision is to some degree a defence against this annihilation. 

All of us have ways of getting ourselves noticed. If we're lucky we do well at school, get good jobs and our work is praised and has lasting beneficial consequences. If we're unlucky, we have to find other means of being noticed. If the teachers ignore you when you're good, you get their attention by being bad. Such attention might be painful, but the teachers do learn your name. Appearing on television, however briefly, can give you status in your own community. If such means fail and you feel totally alone and ignored, acquire an enemy. The blessing of paranoia is that someone, somewhere is thinking of you. 

Some people don't mind who notices them, just as long as they are noticed, while other people have definite preferences. It might be the people that we admire, or the people who could advance our career, because such people not only confirm our existence but they enhance it by showing us that we're admirable. Or our passion for recognition might be directed at our peer group, or the parents who never gave us the attention we needed when we were children. Most of us grow up with fantasies of "showing them" - of becoming rich and famous and of returning home to confound our childhood critics. 

No doubt one of the reasons for the success of the website Friends Reunited was the desire to gain the acknowledgment from peers that was denied in school. All that some people long for is that their parent will acknowledge them by saying, "I love you, I value you." The absence of such parental acknowledgment can be the loss that precipitates a person into depression. 

The less we value and accept ourselves, the more intensely we need to be noticed. The more we value and accept ourselves, the less we need to draw attention to ourselves. We can tell ourselves that anybody who doesn't like us is a fool, and we have no time for fools. However, the fear of being annihilated as a person is never far away. Be ignored by a waiter, be treated with disdain by airline staff, be patronised by junior doctors, be regarded by relatives or friends as a doormat or just a body to fill an empty chair at a social function, and the fear resurfaces, usually as anger fuelled by pride, with: "How dare they do that to me!" 

This fear makes us vulnerable, and so we never talk about it. But we actually acknowledge it in our interactions with one another. There is an unspoken pact: "I will notice you as long as you notice me." 

This pact is the basis of what we regard as good manners. It is implicit in the relationship between a lecturer and his audience, a writer and her readers, politicians and their constituents, and everybody in the media and the general population. The millions watching Popstars and Big Brother are not just acknowledging the participants' existence but hoping that one day the roles will be reversed and the participants will acknowledge them. 
 
To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

Letter to the Guardian March 29 2007

In 1985 Don McPhee and I spent a wonderful afternoon together, so he could photograph me in relation to my then latest book Living with the Bomb: Can We Live Without Enemies?  After a long search for a suitable location, we managed to get into Waddington air base and Don took a very stark photograph of me with a delta-wing bomber looming over me.  Don's photograph accompanied an article by Walter Swartz about my book.  The large spread and the photograph attracted the attention of HarperCollins editor Michael Fishwick, and this began for me a long and very fruitful relationship with Michael and the publisher.

After our meeting, Don sent me a photograph that he had taken of me in my garden.  It is quite the loveliest photograph I've ever had taken and I treasure it.  Ever since that afternoon I've been hoping that I'd meet Don again.  Having to relinquish that hope is very, very sad.

Dorothy Rowe

London

Stephen Hawkings set the cat amongst the defenders of religion when, in his new book The Grand Design he said that God was 'unnecessary'. He explained, 'Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7976594/Stephen-Hawking-God-was-not-needed-to-create-the-Universe.html No doubt he expected that the defenders of religion would be offended by this, and they were. Most people working in the media don't understand what the basic difference between religion and sciences is, but they know a good story when they see it. They immediately contacted those who would supply the kind of quote the media love.

Mark Rice-Oxley's article in the Guardian (ref) was entitled 'Depression - the Illness That's Still Taboo' (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/02/depression-mental-health-breakdown). This was an account of Mark's first experience of depression. On the night of his 40^th birthday 'I really knew something was wrong. . . . A tide of panic was rising.' During the following nights he felt 'small and frightened'. Two weeks later at his parents' home, 'the house I was born in, the place I still love - I disintegrated.'

He wrote, 'They used to call it a nervous breakdown. Now it's depression. . . Depressive illness isn't like that Monday morning feeling, or getting back from holiday to find that the cold water tank has burst. It's medical fact, like breaking an arm, only the broken bit is in the chemical circuitry of the brain.'

If there is a special place in heaven for magazines that encouraged freedom of speech Openmind is on its way there. The next issue of Openmind will be its last. It will be replaced in May 2010 by, according to the Chief Executive of MIND, Paul Farmer, by a 'lively, engaging and thought-provoking magazine that will work alongside an interactive members' area of our website.' This will provide 'the dialogue between service users, professionals and providers so valued in the current publication.' Thus the one beacon of light in the murky world of the lies and misinformation in the psychiatric system will disappear. However, when historians come to research how thinking about severe mental distress has changed over the twentieth and early twenty-first century, the archives of Openmind will be a vital resource.

Who is David Cameron? We know the facts of his life but not who he is as a person. 'More spin than substance,' say many voters. Close friends and colleagues say that they have no idea why he wants power. Is he merely a vacuous politician, or is he a front man for those Tories who are planning a return to the Friedman market-driven, small state economy once they are in power? Cameron's ideas of 'the broken society', and 'the Big Society' and the parent-run private school could come from the Milton Friedman Handbook. A sudden, savage cut in public spending would create the shock that is central to the Friedman programme. A hung-parliament that was incompetent and divisive would give these Tories the chance they need.

 . . . . . . and What Psychologists and Psychiatrists Don't Know. This is a lecture that I gave at the British Library on June 1, 2010.

I started thinking about writing a book about lying in those months when we were being told about the certain existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction. But, of course, in the years I was working as a clinical psychologist in the NHS I was dealing with lies all the time. There were the lies we tell when we want to defend a much-loved theory, such as, 'Depression is caused by a chemical imbalance.' And there were the lies my clients had been telling themselves since they were small children. The most common lie was, 'I am, in essence, bad and have to work hard to be good.' If you want to get depressed, this is the lie you need to tell yourself.

For the last two months I have been out on the road publicising my new book Why We Lie. It was not so much on the road as on trains or waiting at stations to see if the train I need to get is actually going to run. If you are thinking of writing what will be your first book here is something you need to know. Writing the book is the easy part. Then come finding a publisher and, having done so, preparing and checking the text. Then comes the really hard part. Unless you are an A class celebrity, your publisher will have no money to advertise your book. You have to do that by accepting every invitation, however insignificant, to do something that will let people know that your book exists. According to Wikipedia, in the UK in 2005 some 206,000 books were published. It doesn't matter how good your book is, if people don't know about it, they won't buy it. So when your publisher's publicist says to you, 'You've got an invitation to Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh's Literary Festival,' you go. If your publicist says to you that the radio station 7ZH (audience figures 12) want to interview you about your book, you turn up on time and give your wittiest and most entrancing performance.

My two cataract operations are over and the soreness in my eyes have just about disappeared. In that time I've learnt a lot, little of which I had expected to learn.

I had planned to spend the week before the first operation resting and practising my relaxation technique for the operation. On the Sunday evening at the beginning of that week I went into the kitchen, switched on the light, and found a rat on the worktop. I have lived in this ground floor flat for 14 years and have never seen as much as a mouse in it. The next twelve days I spent leaping out of bed early so I could be ready for for when Tony from Rentokil arrived, and on other days for when Manuel the builder arrived to repair what Tony had needed to demolish and to block of every place where a rat might squeeze through. The first four days of these twelve days I spent sharing my home with the rat and trying to outwit this cunning, devious and ingenious creature. When there were no more signs of the rat, Tony waited a week before deciding that the rat had finally died from the massive amount of bait it had eaten. By the time I got to hospital I was so glad to have a chance to lie down.

When I started this blog my aim was to write a post each week. So far I've met this aim, but the next ten days might prevent me from finishing the posts I'm working on now, one on the continuing drama of Lehman Brothers and one on the work of the psychologist Stanley Milgram. Tomorrow, Monday March 22, I'll be having the first of two cataract operations. The operation itself, so everyone tells me, is nothing to be concerned about, but after the first operation I'll have one eye that sees the world clearly but requires reading glasses and the other eye that continues to see the world as sort of smudged and out of focus. The second operation on March 30 should give me two eyes that see clearly, but then I'll need to find the reading glasses that will suit my two new plastic lenses.

I suppose there's some sort of irony in all this when you consider that I'm always pointing out that our physical make-up does not allow us to see reality directly.