Dorothy Rowe

Interview with Hannah Pool Thursday April 05 2007 The Guardian

Dorothy Rowe is a clinical psychologist and the author of 12 books, including the bestseller Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison. Born in Australia in 1930, she now lives in London.

Your new book is about sibling relationships. It's called My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend. What do you mean?

Sibling relationships fall into three groups: There are very close relationships and absolutely hostile distant relationships, but the bulk of them fall into a kind of anxious attachment. There is always a tension. One woman said to me, "When I am with my sisters I am serene like a swan but underneath I'm paddling like mad." And that sums up a lot of sibling relationships.

You describe it as a pleasure/pain relationship.

It's a fact that your sibling knows you very well and when we know someone that well, we know just how to please them but also how to destroy them.

I'm in my 30s, I've got a brother who is 19 and a sister who is 14, and when I go home I get wound up about the fact my dad drives them to school and he didn't drive me. Why?

It's simply because it's not fair. Children acquire a sense of fairness very early on in their life and they are struggling to survive. It's only quite recently in terms of history that a child being born into a family can regard itself as being secure, that the family won't dispose of it.

You talk in the book about your own childhood, about your mother having had an abortion three years before you were born, and that making it hard for her and your father to love you.

 My mother never mentioned it - it was my sister and father who told me about my mother's abortion, and my father who said how disappointed he was that I was a girl. My sister said, "Aren't you lucky to be alive? You ought to be very grateful." As for my mother, she was depressed, and when you're depressed you don't feel love.

 How do you think we are doing in the battle against depression?

 Last year, without any publicity at all, the Royal College of Psychiatrists abandoned the notion that chemical imbalance causes depression. It's not what happens to us that leads us to be depressed, but how we interpret what happens to us. Lots of people suffer terrible disaster but they interpret it as a challenge that has to be mastered. They don't say, "Oh, I'm such a wicked person. I deserved it." It's the interpretation that determines whether depression follows or not.

 What do you think of Prozac?

 The whole theoretical basis for drugs like Prozac is that there is a lack of serotonin in the brain and that has never, ever been demonstrated.

 So why do people given Prozac feel better?

 Because with some people - not everybody - it relieves the mental pain, and it eases some symptoms. But it can be a terrible drug for other people. David Healy, the psychiatrist, has been able to show that a small but significant number of people on Prozac very quickly become suicidal. I've often had it said to me, "I've felt better when I took Prozac, so that must show that I had a low serotonin level", to which I say, aspirin cures headaches. Does that mean that headaches are caused by a lack of aspirin? No.

 What is the difference between unhappiness and depression?

 When you are depressed, you feel that there is an invisible barrier between you and the rest of the world and nothing gets through that barrier. It is a prison. When we're unhappy, even if the most terrible things happen to us, we can be comforted. Someone who is depressed will actually move away from a hug because they don't want it. So it's a very distinctive feeling.

 Do you object to the expression "self-help"?

 It's the only help you've got. Even if you find the best therapist in the world, a therapist with whom you can have a great relationship, you've got to do the work. A therapist can help you clarify your thoughts, can help you look at all the alternatives, but you've got to do it. It is self-help, and if you are not prepared to take responsibility for yourself, then you are going to stay in that misery.

 My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: Making and Breaking Sibling Bonds, by Dorothy Rowe, is published by Routledge, priced £9.99.

 Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited

 'God and mothers keep me in business'

Interview with Dorothy Rowe by Miranda Green

Published in the Financial Times Weekend section: January 26 2007

Amid the darkness and cold of yet another winter, Dorothy Rowe, whosebooks have helped many an occupant of northern climes survive and recover from depression, is in good spirits. This could be because the prolific psychologist is about to produce another volume of her insights, this time on sibling relationships. It is a move her fans hope will encourage the publishing world to reconsider its decision to let most of her 12 previous works go out of print.

Or the cheerfulness may be due to Rowe's long-established routine of flying back to her native Australia every winter to visit her son and avoid much of England's gloomy season. She jokes that until climate change actually creates a beach in her north London garden, she has to make do with the colourful touches of Oz - the paintings and the plants - that adorn the flat.

She points out with patriotic satisfaction: "At the bottom of my garden there are three gum trees, a wattle and two bottle brush, and my oleander's coming on very well, so you see I've got my little bit of bush there." Nationality and national history, as well as family background and ancestry, are important ingredients in Rowe's professional view of life's challenges and how individuals cope - or fail to cope - with them. The theme runs through several of her books, including the bestseller on depression, Depression - The Way Out of Your Prison, first published in 1983 and frequently reprinted.

Her analysis of ordinary human unhappiness is illuminating, and her advice bracing. It is based not only on years of research and practice in the NHS but on her own experiences. She tells me, in a throaty voice still heavy with the accent of New South Wales, that transportation and internment inflicted scars on her forebears, causing indirectly her mother's depression and therefore her own family's "craziness". Rowe can explain but not, I sense, fully forgive the causes of her own troubled childhood and early lack of confidence, about which she writes movingly. A residual anger comes out many times during our meeting, as Rowe, now white-haired and looking very much the part of the wise woman, delivers her caustic observations on how a child's healthy self-love can be undermined.

But finding a way to integrate and understand painful experiences, including the pressures of history, society and political culture, is a key part of her message. Unlike many of the current top-selling psychologists, Rowe tells her readers not to pursue happiness but to acknowledge sadness and face up to the unavoidable negative results of every choice we make.

"Happiness is a by-product, you can't make it, and loss and failure are just part of life," she tells me simply, ridiculing the rash of self-help books that promise an earthly paradise by following a 10-point plan. She also has doubts about the current vogue for prescribing cognitive behavioural therapy, which she believes can be helpful in getting moderately depressed people off the drugs but is far from being a panacea. "Where cognitive therapy has its limits is that there are things in life for which there is no happy interpretation," she says. "If someone who really matters to you dies, then if you blame yourself for that person's death you will be unhappy. But there is no interpretation that leads you to be happy. The best you can do is accept your loss and understand that you have to live with that loss for the rest of your life. And a lot of cognitive therapists haven't got the courage to face that."

In America, the land of optimism, these stark views have made it impossible for Rowe to find a publisher - although she sells well in most other parts of the world. She claims that her book on phobias was turned down by one New York editor on the grounds that it didn't contain a cure for fear. She protests with a laugh: "I mean, if you live in New York you need fear - otherwise you wouldn't survive for six hours!"

Australians and Europeans, she argues, have a totally different relationship with unhappiness and loss because they are steeped in the struggles of the past. "If you have grown up in this country or in Europe, you are with the memorials and the tragedies all the time," she explains. "And if you grow up in Australia .. . you're in a country where the land is indifferent to your existence and there is no way you can make any impression on it."

But even in Britain, she laments, it is becoming unacceptable to express unhappiness in a natural way. "Unfortunately the word 'sad' has become a condemnatory word - he's a sad guy, et cetera. And so people don't use it. The word 'dispirited' has gone out of fashion, and so people say they are depressed. They are not - they are sad, which is often an appropriate response."

Trenchant criticisms of psychiatry and organised religion, together with an intensely political emphasis on the need for an individual to resist the expectations of anyone with authority over them, along with her rejection of the modern happiness industry, have made Rowe both influential and controversial.

Mothers also get a rapped by Rowe as the main origin, along with the church and with old-fashioned teaching methods, of authoritarian attitudes that can belittle the child and instil lifelong feelings of inadequacy. "God and mothers keep me in business," she jokes - somewhat unfairly, it seems to me. Many mothers encourage great confidence in their offspring, and why should the other parent avoid the blame and the responsibility? "Yes, fathers are lucky," she admits ruefully. "Not being there is a great idea."

In print, Rowe's style is forceful. She uses words such as "tosh" to describe the myths and manipulations with which society "bamboozles" its citizens, and a family its children, into obedience. But in the flesh, even when making one of her frequent jokes, Rowe is far more reserved than readers of her bolshie books might expect. Although delighted to find that in this case the interviewer is actually acquainted with her work - "I get a lot of idiotic requests from journalists" is one aside - she seems a little reticent at some points during our conversation.

Perhaps I had not adequately absorbed the recurrent theory in so much of her work about the huge differences between extroverts and introverts - not just in behaviour, but the fundamentally different motivations and interpretations which can lead to so many misunderstandings between the two types.

But here in Rowe's living room, the two of us seem to be proving the theory correct: I'm sitting at the edge of one sofa, desperate to make her like me, and she is sitting back happily self-contained against the cushions opposite, not picking up on my need for greater interaction, and possibly even keen to end this interruption and get back to her desk.

"It's about what is, at base, most important to you, achievement or relationships," she explains. "Because that is the way we operate - we want everything but if we can't have everything and we are wise, we go after what is most important to us."

In Rowe's case, the introvert's drive for achievement has led her on a lifelong mission arguing against treating the mentally ill with incarceration and prescription drugs, as well as trying to help the rest of us understand our lesser miseries. A question about whether the lessons from pathological behaviour can credibly be applied to less dramatic unhappiness or distress draws an animated response about "very insulting language".

"I don't think people who are psychotic are ill. Psychosis is a way of defending yourself when you are really feeling that you are falling apart - with depression and all of those things," insists Rowe. "For example, the kind of person who under great stress and losing all their self-confidence becomes very obsessional and compulsive, before that situation was a person who tidied up and kept things organised."

And here's a rebuke for those who think they are sane: "I'm looking for this normal family or this normal person, but I still haven't met them." An absence of "normal" families to study, along with a serious dearth of academic research on sibling relationships, led Rowe to draw on novels for some of the case studies in her forthcoming book on brothers and sisters - she uses Jane Austen's Bennet girls, for example.

But the subject fascinates her because she has found that almost everyone has an emotionally charged story to tell about their own experiences of the sibling relationship and how it continues to be played out at home and at work. The cut-throat competition within families also illustrates another of her favourite uncomfortable truths - that this is not a just world, and erroneous expectations about what will result from our good or bad behaviour is a common psychological trap.

"Children know that they have to be good in the way their parents define good and sibling rivalry is about who is the goodest - and then the terrible thing is, you might be the goodest but you don't get the rewards."

'My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: Making and Breaking Sibling Bonds' is published by Routledge in April. The third edition of 'Beyond Fear' is published by Harper Collins in March

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

This Much I Know


Interview by Ursula Kenny
Sunday 1 September, 2002


Working as a therapist is a tremendous responsibility because you interfere in people's lives. I don't see clients any more because you get to a point where you feel you're not doing your work very well. There aren't many new plots in people's lives and when someone starts to tell you a story and you know how it's going to turn out then you stop really listening properly. I'm still in touch with a number of people who were my clients years ago. Apart from the fact that I'm really interested to know how their lives turned out, I feel a responsibility to them, I feel that I'm accountable to them.

Madness is a label that other people put on to someone who is suffering immense mental distress, someone who just isn't able to cope. If we understood how we operate as humans then we would understand that madness doesn't exist; it's just a way of feeling when we discover that there's a serious discrepancy between what we thought our life was and what it actually is.

Unscrupulous therapists can keep a client for a lifetime talking about, 'Oh, the terrible things my mother did to me, dreadful things my father did to me.' But the honest therapist moves the person on to the question, 'Why have these terrible things happened to me?' and to the answer, 'Why not?' It's just chance. You're lucky, you're unlucky. That's it. When the person gets to that point, they no longer need therapy.

Happiness shouldn't be a goal. It isn't something you can achieve, it's a by-product of what you do. What you need to do if you want to be happy is value and accept yourself.

Children forgive their parents if they feel their intentions are good. Ideally, parents should see their children as individuals and always treat them with respect and dignity. But obviously there are times when the best of parents don't do this. Children forgive lapses. What they don't forgive is being lied to.

Self-help books invent disorders and then invent ways of curing them. They simplify things in a way that isn't real. The truth is that life is full of dilemmas that can't always be resolved. For example, we all want to be individuals but at the same time we all want to be part of a group. Similarly, we all want to feel free as well as secure, but the more freedom we have the less secure we feel and the more secure we feel the less freedom we have.

What psychiatrists call mental illnesses are just defences that people use when they feel themselves to be under immense threat and have to do something desperate to try and hold themselves together. If you find the world completely terrifying and then become so anxious that you daren't leave home, that anxiety is protecting you, it's a defence. You take refuge in it.

People talk a lot about the high rates of divorce but at the turn of the 20th century life expectancy for women was only about 45, so a lot of divorces now would have been deaths in previous centuries. It's ridiculous to expect people to remain the same and remain together from their twenties to their nineties.

People often ask me where I stand on antidepressants. They don't work for everyone, but what they can do is give a person breathing space. Depression tells you that there's something wrong with the way you're living your life; that there's something wrong with the way you make sense of the world. But drugs don't make an unhappy marriage a happy marriage, they don't turn an unhappy childhood into a happy childhood and they won't make someone that you love love you.

My father had some great sayings, things like: 'Don't let the sun go down on your wrath,' a good biblical saying. He believed it was better to be an optimist than a pessimist, while my mother was devoted to misery.

Most people who go into therapy want the pain to stop. They're saying to the therapist, 'Take my pain away,' but often they're also saying, 'Don't change me.' The hard part is coming to accept that the pain won't go away unless you are willing to change. When a person actually takes that in and starts to contemplate change then they don't necessarily feel happy, but they start to see what the pattern is and we all love to see a clear pattern.

Ninety nine per cent of suffering isn't caused by natural disasters like earthquakes, it's caused by the ideas we hold. And if we believe these ideas are absolute truths then we suffer and we force other people to suffer. But if we understand that our ideas are ideas we have created, then we know we're free to change them.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited www.guardian.co.uk

THE TIMES
Saturday August 24 2002

"The guru of gloom"

Interview with Alan Franks

DOROTHY ROWE is the sort of woman you never see.

The reason for this is very simple, if you believe her own evidence. She is invisible, and has been so since the onset of middle age. As she is now 71, the condition is well advanced; she shares it with the vast majority of women in their middle and later years. She is unnoticeable not only because she has lost her sexual allure but also because she is indistinguishable from so many others in her situation. Yet the woman is a cult figure, which in this instance means more than being revered by a small band of total devotees. People form queues for her lectures on the art of living, they buy her books in large numbers, and some give up all other forms of therapy as being superfluous to her wisdom.

I went to her basement flat in north London to see her, or to see if I could see her. She may think herself unseen, but never unread. She is the author of a dozen very influential books, including Wanting Everything, Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison, and Beyond Fear. This last one, which argued that most of our suffering comes from the fear of vanishing as if we had never been, is being reissued in an updated edition, 15 years after it made its initial impact. I want to know whether this terror has been aggravated by terror itself in the year since September 11; also, whether it will be made worse still by the crisis in the stock market and the sense of impending penury that now laps even at the middle-classed and middle-aged. She is after all the author of The Real Meaning of Money. In the end we find ourselves talking about something far bigger and more significant - her mother, of whom much more in a moment.

It all makes sense, and it all joins up, but you have to be patient. That's the thing about Dorothy Rowe, who was unhappy for most of her first 40 years, and whose subsequent life can be seen as an attempt to turn it to good account for herself and her thousands of readers. One thing she is emphatically not doing is offering you first a syndrome and then its essential manual. You do not buy these books of hers in order to become a Woman Who Runs With Wolves, Loves Too Much or Nurtures Your Inner Child. She is a purveyor of the slow fix, which is probably why she has never really cracked America. You get the books because there is something in her plain-speaking approach which lets you believe, perhaps for the first time, that you don't have to be quite as unhappy, baffled and frustrated about everything as you thought you did. How is this done? At one point in our conversation she says, "You can sum all my work up in one sentence," but as I had to wait for this, so will you.!

When it comes to depression, the subject on which she is an acknowledged expert, the thrust of her argument is that it is not an illness, and should not automatically and routinely be treated with drugs. If we resort to that approach, we may contain the symptoms of the depression, but we will also prevent the sufferer from helping him/herself. Ultimately they (the sufferers) are their own best physicians since it is their own response to that monstrously uncontrollable thing, the world, which has caused them to turn their anger inwards and so induce a kind of paralysis.

Personally I think her success is partly down to being an Australian, a former teacher and child psychologist, seeing and writing with great clarity for a mainly European self-help market eager for enlightenment but notoriously clogged with New Age claptrap. This is her in Beyond Fear, taken at random: "One of the excuses which some people use when they do not want to take responsibility for their actions is that they cannot help doing something because they have been 'conditioned' to act this way. Such an excuse has no scientific basis. Whatever we do follows from a wish, a desire, a need to possess or avoid something. We may not be consciously aware of these wishes, needs and desires, but they are ideas which we have learnt from experience."

Or this, from Friends and Enemies; Our Need to Love and Hate: "No childhood is idyllic and no parent is perfect. All children suffer, but some are fortunate enough to suffer less than most. One of the tasks of adult life should be to inspect the beginnings of our story and see it clearly and truthfully. From our adult perspective we can modify the interpretations of events we constructed in childhood."

To ideas like these, we may well reply that we knew it all along. But did we? Or rather, did we know it well enough to put it into practice? Her style is persuasive precisely because it uses the kind of perception which we feel we might have used ourselves. She does not deal in slabs of truth but in propositions with which we are already half familiar. It is in this way that she manages to speak the reader's language and carry her along - it is usually a her - as an equal member of the journey. Easier said than done.

In person she is similarly free of ostentation. When I ask her what she calls herself - she is in fact a construct-based clinical psychologist - she replies that when she is at a party she might well lie about what she does for fear of the stock reaction...
"Oooh, I expect you can see right through me, then."

Her speech would verge on blandness were it not for the challenging fluency of its content. There's something of Fay Weldon (a fan and fellow Antipodean) about her; canny granny, shrink-basher, conciliatory feminist. Fairly twinkling away while discussing the direst effects of bad depression. This is an unexpected guru of gloom. In conversation she does that rarest thing among the opinionated; she gives way the moment a question comes in, which is generally the mark of a committed listener.

She started life in the town of Newcastle, just up the New South Wales coast from Sydney. Her mother sounds a complete fright although, of course, it is never quite as straightforward as that. The father, meanwhile, a commercial traveller, was the inevitable good guy. In fact, Rowe has done as much as anyone to explode this bad parent/good parent paradigm. "If you have a bad parent," she says, "and the good parent does nothing to try and change the behaviour of the bad parent, then guess what, you have not one bad parent but two bad parents."

Sex was a forbidden topic. So too, apparently, was Dorothy herself in the months before she was born. "My mother didn't even tell my sister about it. She had been the only one for six years and then, on the very day of her sixth birthday, I arrive. Some present. My mother let me put it this way, when we are born, we are quite often presented with a problem. For me this problem was: why does my mother behave as crazily as she does? She could be sweet and lovely, and then have a terrible temper tantrum and retire to bed for months. She was always critical. She had no idea how endlessly critical she could be. She did it like breathing. The world never lived up to her expectations. She was totally dissatisfied with it."

Rowe may be emphatic in her account of the family, but she acknowledges that her sister's version would differ. She, the sister, reads all Dorothy's books and points out what she considers to be errors in family history. But this is just the norm for siblings looking back from adulthood; Rowe says all such memories are riddled with disparities, right down to the facts of who was present at a particular family Christmas. And if there are differences to be found here, then how much more so when it comes to the subjective business of evaluating the parents' behaviour.

In Dorothy's recollection the garden was their mother's safe haven. Her own sisters, Dorothy's aunts, and one woman friend, were allowed there. Neighbours never dropped in. She sounds terrifying.

"Yes, yes, she was. She was dangerous. But she was frightened of people herself, and was passing on that fear. When you are born into a family, you assume all others are the same. It's the only model you have. You don't realise that you might be having bad treatment yourself. When I started writing these books, my sister began talking to me about what had gone on. It was sometimes quite illuminating, but at other times she would just say, 'I don't remember.'

Was this a case of selective amnesia? Or lying? Isn't that what we do when the implications of talking about something big and far back are too troublesome for the present? And isn't this fair enough? Rowe smiles and makes an equivocal noise, and we move on.

The point about all this is that when she came to England and started work here as a clinical psychologist, she kept coming across female patients whose behaviour was eerily similar to her mother's. They were invariably suffering from depression, among other things. Hence Rowe's deduction that this was what her mother had been suffering from as well. Moreover, all these women seemed to have had mothers who had acted in the same fashion. It was an ironic way to be reminded that you never really get away from your mother, particularly since Dorothy had come to England with her ten-year-old son Edward because it was on the other side of the world from her family of origin.

She was also putting distance between herself and her ex-husband, the boy's father, Ted. He by now was on his next and third marriage, to the woman who had been his mistress while he had been married to Dorothy. Now he wanted to invert the arrangement, with Sally as the wife and Dorothy as the mistress. From her description he was an Australian of the kind who would make Crocodile Dundee appear wimpish, but with a peculiar reluctance to pay bills and, therefore, a habit of falling into catastrophic debt. "Even with me," she says, "he would never post a maintenance cheque for our son. I always had to go and meet him at his club, with gin and tonics, and laughing, until, finally and grudgingly, he would give me the cheque. Lots of men do this. I'm not exactly the first ex-wife to be saying this sort of thing. And for a while I went along with it."

Since one of the big recurrent ideas in her writing is that of self-imprisonment and the need for escape, it is hard not to see her own 12,000-mile move as symbolic as well as physical. Yet the England she came to in the late Sixties was in some vital respects more hidebound than the supposedly colonial climate she had left. In particular, she was alarmed at the prevalence of diagnosis-and-drugs in the field of depressive "disorders".

Just as she kept coming across her mother in patient after patient, so she kept running into herself, or rather the woman she had been while she was married. With the significant difference that Dorothy had both the will and the means to quit. Already in Australia she had proved herself to be a top student, gaining an exhibition to Sydney University and studying there while she was working, and married, and raising a child; and, she admits, going through one of two periods in her life when she just might have been suffering from depression herself. She got a PhD at Sheffield University, and from 1972 to 1986 was head of the North Lincolnshire Department of Clinical Psychology.

It was here that her mother was to be found, in the innumerable guises of East England women. "Most of the patients were women," she recalls. "Most of them were depressed, and most of the depressed women were married."

When I ask her how many people, men and women, suffer from depression in Britain today, she says it is difficult to say since GPs, unlike psychiatrists, don't keep figures on their diagnoses. When pressed for an informed guess, she says the figure is probably one in six. So, a serious factor in the national health. In the worst instances it can be fatal, not just through suicide, but because of the physical running down which lowers the immune defences of the body.

"Most of us," she says, "when we have a physical illness, we see the GP, and he perhaps gives us some pills and tells us how to look after ourselves. And most of us do what he says because we want to get better. But when we are depressed - and this goes for all the mental disorders - we don't even try to follow the good advice that may be given to us by friends, counsellors, family, anyone. There is something about the condition that we want to hang on to."

But there must be degrees. Not every headache is a migraine, not every snuffle influenza. "Yes, there are degrees with depressed people. The more they hate themselves, the more deeply depressed they become. The state of depression gives them some protection because they feel, not consciously, that it's a defence which shuts out a whole lot of the turmoil around them." So that's the nature of the prison. But how do we enter it in the first place? So many people who have got themselves "incarcerated" seem to be successful, integrated, popular, worthwhile, healthy, achieving individuals. As my list of adjectives lengthens, so her smile broadens. I am missing the point, which is that these externals count for nothing in depression; they may conceal the self-disgust of people who believe, too deep to show, that they have been living a big fat lie, or else privately violating some unbreakable moral code.

We are getting closer to it. Dorothy Rowe's face stops moving from side to side and starts moving up and down. It looks like a nod of agreement. A disconcerting but rewarding aspect of talking to her is that the lessons she would have us learn are very simple. In her particular trade they have been obscured by the specialist's inventory of terms. Whether she intended this or not, she has removed the mystery from her subject to such an extent that she is virtually inviting the layman to consider his/her own opinion as valid as the next person's.

In the case of depression this is exactly what she is doing. Her reason is that in depression the chances are that no one is better placed to help than the sufferers themselves. "In childhood," she says, "we develop two ideas which are very common and which come out of the way in which most of us were brought up. The first is: I am not acceptable. I have to work hard to be good. Along with that is a belief that we live in a just world where goodness is rewarded and badness is punished. Lots of people may say they don't believe this, but the fact is that most people have had some kind of religious upbringing, and religions tend to teach that this is a just world. Now, as adults we sort of put this to one side. Then we encounter some terrible disaster, outside us or inside, and we ask ourselves why this happened.

"There are only three answers. It is my fault, it is someone else's fault, or it is chance. But of course in a just world nothing happens by chance. So, if you believe in a just world and you suffer a disaster, it's either your fault or someone else's fault. And since good people don't blame others, there's only one culpritI" While we are talking, late into the afternoon, the sky opens and the heaviest rain ever seen falls on to the garden. It makes as much noise as a diesel motor as it hits the conservatory roof. It is National Cloudburst Day, that Wednesday at the start of this month when roads became rivers without warning. The rain is making such a show of itself that you would need to be gravely cut off from your senses not to heed the power of the world beyond the head. It brings me back to what I wanted to ask at the start, when we got waylaid by the eternal Mum. Surely, outside forces have a bearing. If we were in a real flood, and we were clinging to the chimney pots on what remained of Highbury Grove, and all the rescue craft were busy saving the people of Belgravia, and we faced true annihilation - not the figurative kind she writes of - then we would be, well, beyond depressed. Wouldn't we? We would be witnessing our own bereavement. And it wouldn't even be our fault. Neither is the stock market slump, nor the attack on the World Trade Centre - unless you take these things very personally - nor the Asian brown cloud. Yet they all happen, like illness and bereavement, and they all deeply affect the circumstances of our lives. No mood is an island. This is when she says it: "You can sum all my work up in one sentence." I crane for this because the rain noise has gone right up off the volume dial, and fully grown plants are reeling like boxers. Then the lightning cracks the whole roof of Highbury open, and everything is truly wild. She speaks up: "What determines our behaviour isn't what happens to us, but how we interpret what happens to us." There's a pause while it hangs there, and I'm thinking: is this really Wise Old Granny, or is it just Hard Old Thing?

She follows up by going directly on to Northern Ireland, then unemployment: "During the Troubles, depression went down because there was unity of purpose. Anxiety went up, but depression went down. Some people, if they are unemployed, work out how they can get benefit while at the same time making money on the black market. So for them it's an opportunity to lead a happy life. Others have acquired the belief that to be a good person you have to work, so to be unemployed is to be wiped out as a person."

Annihilation again. Then the scene shifts. A fresh story, a new beginning. We are with a poet whom she knows, and the poet's husband. They are visiting friends in a smallholding, where the ewes are being sorted into pens. Pregnant ones this way, non-pregnant ones that way. Now, as a child the poet had vowed that her task in life was to make her mother happy; she knew that she would fail in this if she did not have children of her own. Yet in adulthood she and her husband have reached a thoroughly mature and rational decision not to start a family. The friend sorting the ewes says the non-pregnant ones don't get extra food, but the poet hears this as meaning that barren women starve.

She had failed her mother, explains Rowe. Not deliberately; she just hadn't bargained for the remorse which hit. "Often we make thoroughly sensible decisions without realising that these decisions won't fit. This woman is fortunate in that she can write about it and think it all through."

The rest may not find it so easy. And that, really, is what Dorothy Rowe is for. Like her poet friend, she has thought it all through, has no truck with scapegoating the genome, and condemns the old wisdom that everything can be explained by bodily processes. "What determines our behaviour isn't what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us." So easy if you're doing it, so hard when you're not. There she is, sorted and kindly, on a safe, homely bank, separated from the dangerous place by a fast river. It is a torrent of fear, roaring down from the memory hills, full of things you would rather not see. Come on over, she smiles, it's good here. Many thousands make it.

21 May 2000

LIFE SUPPORT

Tim Lott:
I approached Dorothy for the first time many years ago. I'd never heard of her, which is something of a disgrace considering that by that time she'd written about 10 books. I was writing my first book, The Scent of Dried Roses, about my own experiences of depression and my mother's suicide, and part of researching my book was trying to understand what depression was. I had my own idea of what it was out of my own experiences, simply because when I suffered my nervous breakdown in 1987 I had been brought out of it by taking anti-depressant drugs, so I believed the route to depression was physical and emerged out of some dysfunction in your brain chemistry.

I happened to be reading a newspaper article by Dorothy about how depressed people have to take responsibility for themselves, and I remember feeling quite angered by it. I thought that was a really unhelpful thing to write, because when you're depressed you can't take responsibility for yourself. Nevertheless, I thought I should talk to her about it so I could incorporate it into my own understanding of what had happened.

I went to see Dorothy in her flat in Russell Square thinking she was just a journalist, and noticed all these books by Dorothy Rowe and suddenly felt rather shamefaced. She was obviously a very significant thinker on these matters. Anyway, we went for a walk in the park and I talked to her and listened to her, and tried to understand what she had to say — but I still didn't really buy it. She was quite impatient with me, and I think she thought I was just another hack that had come along to waste her time. I asked her to recommend some of her books to me.

I read her most famous book, Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison and then The Art of Happiness — Wanting Everything, and I was absolutely amazed. It was like discovering someone who was able to express ideas about the way the world was that I had, on some level, understood too but had never been able to find the words to do so. I became intoxicated by these books. Dorothy has wonderful insight —she writes about how people build a picture of their world within themselves and the choices that involves. I began to understand what she meant when she said you have to take responsibility for your depression, you construct your own sense of reality — she changed the way I looked at the world.

Dorothy also writes a great deal about uncertainty, that what people fear in life is not death or pain or age but uncertainty, and once you understand this dread, a whole lot of the world falls into place.

I felt intimidated when I phoned Dorothy a second time, but I thought the books I'd read were absolutely rivetting and I'd got a wonderful opportunity to talk to the author. I liked Dorothy very much. She's a warm woman, though she's reserved and restrained. She's not an easy person to get to know. I don't think she gives out very much about herself— perhaps that's part of her professional training, or perhaps it's a natural distance. We're very different in that way. Dorothy's careful with her thoughts, and parcels them out in packaged bits. I spew everything out constantly —I'm Oprah, for God's sake.

Dorothy is my mother's generation, and I met her shortly after my mother died. Dorothy's nothing at all like my mother, but if I need someone who will listen to me and understand me in a way that perhaps I would have hoped my mother might have, though she never would have, Dorothy is there. It's a great privilege to have her. It's a very special relationship.

Dorothy Rowe:
The first time we met, we went down to the gardens in Russell Square, walked around and had a coffee. I talked to Tim about my theories — they incorporate Buddhist teachings, which say that as we're constructed physiologically, human beings cannot see reality directly — whatever reality is — and what we see is what we've learned to see, and what we experience as perceptions are constructions that our brain has constructed using the only thing we've got to use, which is our past experience.

This means that if you don't understand this about yourself, then you grow up believing the world actually is the way you see it — and that you are fixedly as you experience yourself to be, and if that's what you believe, then sooner or later you'll get into difficulties.

I tried to explain this to Tim, but he just found it all very confusing. Also, he can look sceptical without actually saying anything. After that, Tim went off to read my books, and then he rang me up and invited me for dinner. We went to a Turkish restaurant, and he told me a lot more about his mother, and I remember asking how old she was and talking to him about her experiences. That was where we started to talk, really talk, far more personally.

I didn't find psychology terribly relevant, so when I left university in Australia, I taught for a few years. Later, I trained as an educational psychologist and loved it. I did a lot of work with disturbed children and their families and at night did my diploma in clinical psychology. Then my marriage broke up and my son and I came to England in 1968, and I got a job with the NHS. I didn't leave the health service until 1986 — by then I realised I could support myself by writing and teaching.

It was very interesting that at the same time that Tim was writing his novel about friends, White City Blue [now out in paperback], I was working on my book, Friends and Enemies, so we spent a lot of time talking about friends and friendships and men's friendships. One of the things I found when I was asking people about their friendships was that people would talk about having a group of friends, whereby no one friend supplied everything but the group altogether did. So with Tim, what he supplies for me is that we have really good conversation. Tim is the only person I know who I can talk to about writing and the problems we are having, so we moan together. You need someone like him in your circle of friends, otherwise writing is just too lonely.

Tim and I don't see each other all the time but we send a lot of emails. We don't have to apologise if we haven't been in touch for a few weeks, which is the mark of a really good friendship.

THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN

February 24-25, 2001

Interview with Miriam Cosic

DOROTHY ROWE doesn't look like a bomb thrower. She's grey-haired and motherly. Grandmotherly, actually. She states her case tentatively, in a discursive style full of personal anecdotes and conversational detours, as if she's clarifying her ideas as she speaks.

And yet, this internationally recognised psychologist and author has been chucking incendiary critiques at the psychiatric establishment for years. What's more, she has lived in London for the past 30 years. And we all know what they think of Australians over there. "Oh, when I used to work closely with psychiatrists, they did not like me," she says mildly, and a larrikin grin edges into her voice. "I made them very angry and they made it very clear. But it never seemed to bother me."

Rowe is an authority on depression, among other things, and this grew out of practising as a clinical psychologist and working towards her PhD at Sheffield University in the early 1970s. She became convinced that psychological problems are not biologically based. Instead, she believes, they are caused by the sufferer's experience of the world. "If there are no mental illnesses, if what we call mental illness is just our way of trying to hold ourselves together when we feel ourselves falling apart, if it's the way we make sense of our lives, then psychiatry is irrelevant," she says. "The function of psychiatrists is to deal with those people who are a trouble to society. And when people are a trouble to society, it's decided that they're either mad or bad. If they're bad they get locked up in prison; if they're mad, psychiatrists get called up and they're locked up in psychiatric hospitals. And of course nowadays a lot of the locking up is giving people drugs which pretty much immobilise them."

Rowe was born in Newcastle, NSW, in 1930. Her childhood there was dominated by her mother's chronic depression, though she couldn't put a name to it then. She was the black sheep, her sister the golden girl: "My childhood is just a gold mine that I keep going back to because it informs me a great deal about my work, and provides me with material I can still write about."

She didn't set out to be a psychologist. She studied English and history at Sydney University and became a teacher. Her employers suggested she train as an educational psychologist. "That was great; I really loved that year," she says. "By then psychology had started to relate to real human beings and I could see a real connection between what was happening in psychology and what had happened in my life."

She became a specialist counsellor for emotionally disturbed children, working out of Parramatta in Sydney's west. And then she began to search for a scientific way of studying individuals. She contacted a psychologist developing statistical techniques at the Institute of Psychiatry in London; he suggested she move to England, where psychologists were in demand. "I thought, I can't do that! I was divorced by then, and I lived from month to month on what I earned. I had never been to London and I didn't know anyone there. But I'd always wanted to travel." She cashed in her superannuation and her long service leave, booked berths on a ship for herself and her son, and took an exhilarating, terrifying step into the unknown. It was in England that her career took off. Her growing notoriety in the profession was backed up by rigorous work and enthusiastic support from a small coterie of like-minded psychologists and a grateful public. Outrage set her off on her iconoclastic path. The first psychiatric hospital she worked in, in North Ryde in Sydney, was a clean and pleasant place. "Then I came over here," she says, from her light-filled garden apartment in London, "and I couldn't believe that anybody would put people in these disgusting filthy places. The bathrooms, Jesus! People were crowded into a ward with no privacy. Their own clothes were taken away. And then the drugs.." Rowe gets angry just thinking about the long-term effect of psychiatric drugs on people's minds. "A lot of the strange behaviour you see in people on the streets isn't their madness, it's tardive dyskinesia, an irreversible brain disease caused by the major tranquillisers that they're given."

From Sheffield, Rowe moved to Lincolnshire to set up the National Health Service's first department of clinical psychology and received a grant to further her work in depression. "When I came to write the research up, I realised it wouldn't fit into an academic article, it needed to be in a book."

Her first was Choosing, Not Losing. A stream of books followed, including The Courage to Live, Breaking the Bonds, Beyond Fear, The Depression Handbook and Wanting Everything: The Art of Happiness. Based on anecdotes and easy to read, they are underpinned by Rowe's research and clinical experience and a wellspring of humanity and generosity. More recently, she has ranged further afield. In the late 90s, shè wrote a book called The Real Meaning of Money, which explored the social and psychological background to our ambivalent attitudes to wealth. Her latest book, Friends and Enemies (HarperCollins), is a broad-ranging meditation on the emotions that fuel interpersonal, group and political relationships.

In the meantime, she has kept up with, and kept on about, the latest developments in the medical profession. The latest wonder drug, Prozac, gets her going. "Now psychiatrists talk about depression being a chemical imbalance of the brain. They talk about how Prozac works on the serotonin in the synapses and they draw little diagrams. We can't say what a chemical imbalance is because we don't know what a chemically balanced brain Is."

Which is not to say that. antidepressants should be junked. "People in states of great distress feel very frightened and It can help just to have some of that anxiety reduced," she says. But drugs should be an interim measure to give people the space to figure out their own solutions: joining a yoga class, maybe, sorting a financial problem, or visiting a therapist.

Rowe Is confident that any problem can be worked out with the right therapist. "Good therapists use the metaphor of going on a journey with their client. And neither they nor their client knows where this journey's going to end. But the therapist can read some sign posts, can suggest one path rather than another. And that's a special kind of friendship, a special sense of trust."

Can a good friend, one who is intelligent and kind and courageous, provide that kind of help? Or must the therapist be highly skilled and professionally trained? "Oh no," Rowe chuckles, "the human race would have gone utterly crazy many, many thousands of years ago if people couldn't do that for one another."

Faith in Mind
BBC Radio 4 Series

Broadcast - April 1, 2001

Jesus and the Rich Young Man

Dorothy Rowe

One statement by Jesus which is often quoted but in practice little followed is the advice he gave to the rich young man who had come to him to ask for the secret of eternal life. Jesus told him, 'One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.' The young man went sadly away. This story is told very briefly in St Marks Gospel, but, brief though it is, it is far more than a commentary on how we should deal with our wealth.

There is a tradition in psychotherapy that at some point in the course of therapy the therapist should present the client with two challenges. The first challenge occurs early in therapy and concerns how the client sees the therapist. The client comes into therapy hoping that the therapist has some magical power which will take away the client's suffering but not change him. The therapist has to challenge this and show that the therapist has no magical power and that to give up his suffering the client must choose to change.

The second challenge comes later when a bond has developed between the therapist and the client, and the therapist judges that the client is now strong and confident enough to cope with the challenge. This challenge has the aim of enabling the client to reach the crucial understanding that, while he had always thought that the world and himself were something fixed and real, what he called the world and himself was actually his own construction. When we discover that our perceptions are what we have created out of our past experience, we then know that we are free to change them. We are no longer prisoners of time, place, other people and our own distress. We might not be able to change many of the conditions of our existence but we are free to change how we interpret those conditions.

In the Eastern tradition of Zen, a Zen master presents his young novices with a kind of riddle called a koan. The one most often quoted is, 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' There is no single right solution to this koan, but in contemplating it you might gain the understanding that, if you define the word 'clapping' as the sound of two hands meeting sharply, this definition precludes the possibility of one hand clapping. However, if you define 'clapping' in other ways then many other solutions are possible. The difficulty lies not in reality but in your interpretation of reality. Understanding this is enlightenment.

In the story of the rich young man who wanted Jesus to give him the secret of eternal life Jesus presented the young man with these same two challenges. Whether the young man successfully met both those challenges is not clear from the story. We are told that he became sad and went away grieving. It is often assumed that he did this because he could not bear to give up his possessions, but it could equally be that his was the sadness we all feel when we give up the illusion that someone else will take responsibility for us, and we accept that we have to be responsible for ourselves.

One of the most comforting illusions we can hold is that of believing that there is someone, somewhere, who understands what life is about and who is solidly and reliably looking after us. When we're small children we see our parents as fulfilling the role of our unfailing protector, but we soon discover that our parents are just fallible human beings. We might decide then to look for our protector in one of those religions which teach about a God who is the perfect, infallible parent. Alas, we then discover that God can be absent-mindedly neglectful of our welfare, or at least He moves in mysterious ways which we can't comprehend.

The rich young man who wanted the secret of eternal life was still at the stage of expecting that there must be some parental figure looking after him. The fact that he was a good person, mindful of the commandments, shows that as a child he had had parents who protected and guided him. However, his parents were by now aged or dead, and he was having to assume the adult responsibilities of someone who has inherited wealth. As much as he might enjoy the power that came with wealth, he wished that there was still some parental figure who stood between him and an unpredictable world. When we believe in the possibility of such a parental figure we are likely to see replicas of such a figure in certain of the people we meet. The young man saw Jesus as one such figure. In youthful enthusiasm he ran towards him and knelt at his feet, saying, 'Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?'

Immediately Jesus challenged him. He said, 'Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is God.'

No doubt the young man was shaken by this response. He would have been used to people being flattered by his attention and therefore responding to him warmly. Uncertain of his situation, the young man submitted meekly to Jesus' questions about whether he had always obeyed the commandments.

We are then told that Jesus 'beholding him loved him'. When I was a child this particular part of the story passed me by. However, when I ceased to be a member of the up-coming young generation and moved into the middle-aged and then the old generation the words 'beholding him loved him' shone forth for me. Part of my work as a psychologist has always been concerned with young psychology graduates who were entering the profession of clinical psychology. Few of them realised that I loved them for their youthful beauty, their energy, enthusiasm, and their belief that it was possible to cure all the sorrows of the world. I hoped that they would achieve more in improving the world than my generation had achieved, but I was sad that I would have to confront them with the reality of a psychiatric system which was indifferent to the suffering of the patients and of the patients themselves most of whom wanted their suffering to be magically eliminated without any effort needing to be made by them.

The young man, like these young psychologists, was full of youthful beauty, energy and enthusiasm, and confident that all suffering could be overcome. He already had discovered that there was much in life which was painful and uncertain. Like all young people he had believed that he would never die, but then he'd discovered the inescapability of death. Moreover, events had shown him that no amount of goodness prevents disaster. He wanted his suffering magically to disappear, and he saw the magic that was necessary as the secret of eternal life. This eternal life was very special. No one would want an eternal life which simply replicated the pain and misery of this life. He wanted an eternal life which abolished death and which gave him the unending happiness and security of being looked after by a perfect parental figure who took full responsibility for him.

Jesus' love for the young man must have been tinged with sadness for he knew that the best he could do for the young man was to present the second challenge. And so he did. He said, 'One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.'

The young man wanted everything. He wanted his possessions and he wanted eternal life. We all want everything, and we find it hard to accept that we can't have everything. Many of us waste our lives trying to get everything and by failing to understand the kind of things which we can't have.

The things we can't have fall into two categories.

The first category of things we can't have relates to those things we can't have because of the nature of life. We can't abolish death, nor defy the laws of gravity, nor be in two places at once, and time spent in one way can't be spent again in another way.

The second category relates to those things we can't have because of the way we have defined certain conditions. For instance, if you define your possessions as being an essential part of your identity without which you would be a nothing, or if you define your possessions as being a role and a duty which you have inherited in the same way as you inherited the colour of your eyes, then you have created by your definitions a prison for yourself from which there is no escape.

Many of us create great misery for ourselves because we confuse the two categories. We feel cheated because we shall grow old and die, and we waste time and effort in trying to assure ourselves this will never happen. At the same time we claim that the prisons we have created for ourselves out of our own definitions are a fact of nature and can't be changed.

Jesus' second challenge to the young man concerned how the young man defined his possessions. The usual reading of this story is that the young man made the error of confusing category two with category one. He saw his possessions and the duties and privileges that went with them as part of the nature of life which he was unable to change. He believed that he couldn't survive as a person without his possessions. If this was what he believed he would indeed be sad because the prison of his possessions excluded him from the treasures of heaven.

However, Jesus' second challenge might have enabled the young man to see that what kept him in his prison were the values which he himself had placed on his possessions. He might have seen that, if he failed to store up treasure in heaven because he hadn't taken up the cross and followed Jesus, it wasn't because of the nature of life nor was it the fault of some other person. It was a result of his own choices. In such a situation a Zen master would say that the young man had become enlightened.

Realising that we have to take responsibility for ourselves is always a sad business, for we have to accept that, although other people can give us help, we have to look after ourselves. However, in discovering this, we also discover that we are free to choose our own prisons, and in selecting our prisons carefully we can create the conditions necessary whereby we can be happy. I hope that this was the choice the young man made.

BBC - Radio 4

24th March 2002

"Desert Island Disks"

On the 1st March, Sue Lawley of the BBC interviewed Dorothy Rowe for the popular program called "Desert Island Disks" where prominent people are asked what recordings they would like to have if they were stranded on a deserted island.

Here is the list chosen by Dorothy...

1. Ev'ry Time We Say Good-bye
Performer: Ella Fitzgerald
Composer: Cole Porter
Publisher: Polygram Records
CD Title: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, Vol 1
Band: 11
Label: Verve
Rec No: 821 989-2

2. The Runaway Train
Performer: Vernon Dalhart
Composer: Massey, Robison
Publisher: B Felman Co Ltd/ EMI
CD Title: Junior Choice, Vol. 1
Band: 2
Label: Music for Pleasure
Rec No: CD-MFP 5890

3. The Continental
Performer: Fred Astaire
Composer: Con Conrad, Herb Magidson
Publisher: Polygram Records Inc
CD Title: Steppin out: Aistaire Sings
Band: 13
Label: Verve
Rec No: 5230062

4. Just One Of Those Things
Performer: Ella Fitzgerald
Composer: Cole Porter
Publisher: Polygram Records
CD Title: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, Vol 1
Band: 10
Label: Verve
Rec No: 821 989-2

5. Theme to the Australian television series, Sea Change
Performer: Wendy Morrison and Richard Pleasance
Composer: Wendy Morrison
Publisher: Gotham Music
CD Title: Sea Change
Band: 18
Label: Gotham Music
Rec No: D31872

6. Piano Sonata in C major
Performer: Vladimir Horowitz/ Wilhelm Backhaus
Composer: Mozart
Publisher: Polydor International
CD Title: Horowitz in Moscow
Band: 4
Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Rec No: 419 499-2

7. Andante Con Moto from Unfinished Symphony
Performer: Berlin Philharmonic, conductor Herbert von Karajan
Composer: Schubert
Publisher: Polydor International
CD Title: Schubert: Symphonies No 8 & No 9
Band: 2
Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Rec No: 423 219-2

8. Finale
Performer: The London Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Sir Adrian Boult
Composer: Schubert
Publisher: EMI records Ltd
CD Title: Schubert: Great C Major Symphony, No 9
Band: 4
Label: EMI
Rec No: CDM 769199 2

If Dorothy could take just one record it would be No 8, the Schubert.

Her chosen book, apart from The Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, would be The Oxford Companion to the Body, edited by Colin Blakemore.

Her luxury would be a snorkling suit with prescription goggles.

Dorothy Rowe
On Her Life and Work

Dorothy Rowe is an internationally renowned psychologist whose work has changed how we think about mental health, and whose trenchant criticisms of the psychiatric system has played no small part in liberating many people from the worst abuses of the system. In this video she talks to Frank Wills, counsellor and author, about how her ideas developed both from her academic studies and research and from her own personal experience.

All of Dorothy Rowe's work is based on the understanding that what determines our behaviour isn't what happens to us but how we interpret what happens. She has applied this understanding to many of the important areas of our lives but most importantly to depression. She has shown how depression is not an illness but a defence which we can use when we discover that we have made a major error of judgement and then find ourselves terrifyingly falling apart.

Running Time 68 minutes
UK £40 includes postage
Overseas £40 plus postage, Zone 1 £2.50 Zone 2 £2.50

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or write to School of Social Studies, University of Wales
PO Box 180
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or phone 01633 432305

"Dorothy Rowe's is the calm voice of reason in an increasingly mad world."
Sue Townsend

1978 The Experience of Depression (Wiley)

1982 The Construction of Life and Death (Wiley)

1983 Depression: The Way out of Your Prison (Routledge)

1985 Living with the Bomb, Can We Live Without Enemies? (Routledge)

1987 Beyond Fear (HarperCollins)

1988 Choosing, not Losing (HarperCollins) (2nd edition of The Experience of Depression)

1988 The Successful Self (HarperCollins)

1989 The Construction of Life and Death (2nd edition)

1990 The Depression Handbook (hardback) ( HarperCollins)

1991 Breaking The Bonds (HarperCollins) (renamed paperback edition of The Depression Handbook)

1991 The Courage to Live (HarperCollins) (The Construction of Life and Death renamed)

1991 Wanting Everything (HarperCollins)

1994 Time on our Side (HarperCollins)

1995 Dorothy Rowe's Guide to Life (HarperCollins)

1996 Depression: The Way out of Your Prison, (2nd edition) (Routledge)

1997 The Real Meaning of Money (HarperCollins)

2000 Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate (HarperCollins)

2002 Beyond Fear (2nd edition) (HarperCollins)

2003 Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison (3rd edition) (Routledge)

2007 Beyond Fear (3rd edition) (HarperCollins)

2007 My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend (Routledge)

2008 What Should I Believe? (Routledge)

2010 Why We Lie (HarperCollins)