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May 03
2018
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Helen Whitten
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I had cause to take the tube at rush hour two mornings last week – a rare event now that I am retired. It was packed, of course, but I was so struck by how companionable we were as we stood pressed next to each other like sardines. Men and women of all nationalities stood up for pregnant women and I was offered a seat several times (it has taken some adjustment to accept I look old enough to be offered a seat!). I accepted with the graciousness with which it was offered.
The journey from the tube door to the escalator at Oxford Circus was a slow one through the endless tunnels and up the steps and yet everyone slowed to an orderly snail’s pace. All colours and creeds cooperating, no pushing or shoving, just individuals quietly in their own space yet acting as a united crowd.
It occurred to me that the experience of being on the tube has changed radically since I first came to London in 1967. The number of passengers has increased exponentially and yet the good will remains, bar the odd bad behaviour. The diversity of the passengers travelling has also altered exponentially and yet my feeling was that although people inevitably find the experience of travelling on very crowded tubes or trains more tiring and stressful than travelling on empty ones, it didn’t seem to matter who these crowds consisted of. They could have been any colour or background. It was the number not the ethnic diversity that caused discomfort. Everyone on those tubes seemed perfectly amicable with one another, perfectly comfortable despite the environmental discomfort.
It surprised me, therefore, when I read an interview in The Guardian with the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson who said that he felt that “racism is in the DNA in the UK since imperial times”. Of course there are pockets of racists here as there are anywhere and everywhere else in the world but this blanket statement of racism didn’t ring true to my experience. What it doesn’t allow for is the fact that there are tribal factions, alienations and enmities in all kinds of areas of human life and that the concept of friend or foe is buried deep in our unconscious threat-alert system whether we are black or white or simply of a different creed or tribe. It is a natural human function to be wary of strangers and difference.
We too can feel like a minority and this change has happened within my own lifetime. A recent report has shown that the number of pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds in English secondary schools has soared by more than fifty percent in a decade. Figures show that black and Asian children account for 17 per cent of pupils aged 11-16 and in inner London white British pupils are now in the minority. A considerable number of schools have more ethnic children than English in several areas of the country. And yet, on the whole, daily life is companionable despite the odd flare-up of bullying or problems (and one mustn’t forget that bullying can occur white on white or black on white as much as white on black or ethnic).
The outrage at the treatment of the Windrush Generation came from a sentiment that these people are now one of us, as are so many others who have come here from Asia, Uganda and many other parts of the world. And interestingly some of those immigrants also voice their own concern at the numbers entering the country today. I have known ethnic families who were not at all happy when a son or daughter brought home a potential spouse who was white English! Wariness of change works both ways.
When I have travelled in Nigeria, Egypt, India, the Middle East I am inevitably the one who is different and endeavour to align my behaviours to the culture in which I am living or working. In the area of London in which I have lived I rarely heard an indigenous English voice in recent days and did rather wonder, as I got older and more vulnerable, whether anyone would be able to help me or know how to phone 999 if I fell in the street. Perhaps silly of me but nonetheless a consideration.
A programme on Radio 4 this week discussed the 1970s-80s policy introduced by the Labour party of ‘bussing’ ethnic children to white schools, with the intention of supporting greater integration. Some had seen this as having the unintended consequence of ethnic children feeling singled out. Others said that although it had been difficult they had, in fact, learnt a great deal more about English life and had integrated better with the culture as a result of this policy. Today some head teachers are concerned that the changing demographics of English secondary schools are leading to a kind of unhealthy separation and that perhaps there should be a return to a policy of positive integration where there is an imbalance of ethnic mix. Certainly we all need to work out the best way to help people feel at ease with one another.
My own interpretation is that the British are a reasonably tolerant lot but do want to feel this is a fair two-way relationship. Where, as can happen in some schools, the English parents can equally experience hostility or isolation, where their way of life or culture is criticised (despite there being things to criticise in all cultures on earth) then there can be division. At the school gate you can sometimes see that groups band together, like with like. Perhaps it is no one’s fault but it does require openness on all sides for people to properly integrate.
And yet most of the time we muddle along and I don’t go along with Linton Kwesi Johnson’s belief that we are innately racist any more than any other nationality – you only have to look at the Far Right movements now in Austria, Netherlands, Poland, France, Italy, Germany, Hungary and beyond to realize that despite the impression that Brexit has given of us being insular, many other countries are also struggling with the numbers of new people entering their country. Getting visas to enter Canada, Australia, Hong Kong or the US can be a very challenging process. It doesn’t excuse it but it does signify that these concerns go far beyond our own borders.
Of course we can always do better and need to keep our awareness tuned to problems or bias. Reading a few pages of Cicero’s On Duties the other morning (as you do!) I was struck by his belief that each human being is a spark or splinter of divinity and that therefore treating another person badly was doing the same to ourselves. He wrote of how absurd it is to treat one’s family well but treat others badly as it is a denial of obligations, ties or common interests and this can disintegrate a society. He wrote that those who did not have a strong regard for foreigners “would destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind” and that the aim of life is “to contribute to the general good by an interchange of acts of kindness, by giving and receiving, and thus by our skill, our industry and our talents to cement human society more closely together, man to man.” He quotes Plato in saying that “we are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims a share of our being, and our friends a share.” It helps to remember that we are social animals and need one another.
Any speedy change of scene, population or behaviours is inevitably going to challenge any human group, wherever they are. It takes time for people to adjust. We have not seen the “rivers of blood” of Enoch Powell’s speech but we have had sporadic problems and in an era of austerity we have to work all the harder to embrace those around us when hospitals, schools, roads and tubes are crowded. In my observation people may resent the numbers of people but generally not the colour or ethnicity of those people – unless they themselves are resented. Where all parties make an effort to get along and to respect one another’s ways and values there is really no reason to fall out.
On You and Yours on Radio 4 this week it was quoted that some 70% of people in this country are anxious about mass immigration but that this anxiety does not translate to ill-feeling for individuals. A spokesperson also expressed the view that freedom of movement does make it difficult to predict or plan infrastructure such as schools and hospitals – and access to jobs, education and the NHS are people’s major concerns.
I believe it is time to move away from the focus on division and of what has gone wrong in the past or on the old resentments on both sides. Is it not time to celebrate the fact that most of the time we all live together in a reasonable if not perfect society, and this takes continued good will and benevolent action on the part of every single person within it. I felt I witnessed this benevolence on the tube last week.
Apr 18
2018
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Helen Whitten
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It can be difficult to appreciate those things one has not actually fought for, experienced or created. It can be difficult for a younger generation to imagine how basic or how difficult life was for their parents or grandparents, especially with so much in the media stating how tough life is for the young today. It is easy for them not to appreciate the advances that those of us living today in the UK are experiencing. Without understanding these developments it is all too easy to take them for granted.
In the recent BBC2 television programme ‘Living with the Brainy Bunch” two young students, Jack and Hollie, who were struggling at school, were placed within the families of two students who were doing well. Jack and Hollie seemed to have given up hope and were sabotaging their futures by not putting much effort into schoolwork and by being rebellious. They found it difficult to see the point of cooperating and working hard. Hope is an essential ingredient for galvanising people into action.
It was only when the Sri Llankan mother who was hosting Jack told him of her own struggles of leaving war-torn Sri Llanka, crossing the seas for eighteen hours in a container with no air with thirteen other people, not knowing whether she would survive, that he seemed to turn a corner. “You have a very fortunate country” she said. “I ask you to use it. Do you feel you are fortunate?” Jack reflected and replied “I suppose I grew up with everything being there for me … this has made me realize how lucky I am to have the situation I am in, with the country I am in and the opportunities I have, which before I didn’t realize…” He began to listen when she told him why she felt education was so important, why it provided the key to a successful future, “with good study you can do anything you want… Do it for yourself.” In the next maths test he achieved better marks and his attitude seemed to have changed.
In relating this snippet of another life Jack had his horizons broadened. Perhaps he had never been encouraged to look outside his own life experience, so how could he necessarily know how fortunate he is if no one has explained this to him? The philosopher John Gray, speaking on Desert Island Discs recently, said he could well imagine that we would lose some of the rights and freedoms that we have gained over the last decades because those who had not experienced the changes that have taken place could take them for granted and potentially let them slip through their hands. What a terrible shame this would be.
So perhaps we can make more time for sharing our life stories with our children and grandchildren. They may not choose to listen or may roll their eyes but perhaps somewhere some of your journey might give them an inkling that life doesn’t come easy most of the time. That life is, indeed, what you make it. And, also, that with the rights we enjoy in this country come, equally, responsibilities – a sense of balance between what we receive and what we give back.
Often one’s children only become aware of parents as individuals later in life – post teens – and by that time it can be that one has created a reasonable life, home and career. So they aren’t aware of the struggles we may have been through as young adults. Likewise they only see their grandparents in later life and it can be really helpful for grandparents to describe what life was like for them growing up. I wish I had talked to my grandmother about living through two world wars. I wish I had questioned my father about his journey through his working life as I think it would have given me more understanding of the difficult decisions he had to make and how hard he had to work to take care of us children.
Certainly life is transformed in so many ways for the better since I was born in 1950 and I do wish these positive changes were broadcast more widely. The endless negativity propagated by the media is likely only to disempower the young whereas if they realize how fortunate they are then perhaps this can help them seize the opportunities that exist here.
If anyone doubts me then please read Hans Rosling’s book FACTFULNESS which details in many statistical graphs the amazing advances we have experienced in the last forty years. Since the mid 1960s an incredible number of improvements have been achieved – reductions in poverty across the globe where only 9% now live in extreme poverty compared to 50% in 1966, medical advances that have increased average lifetimes through eradicating so many childhood diseases, a world where 80% of children are vaccinated, fewer deaths from natural accidents, fewer deaths from violence or warfare, a population that will not necessarily increase disproportionately as women are educated and make choices about family and career. The fact is that in most parts of the world the majority of people live within a middle bracket but selective reporting emphasizes the extremes of rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, developed or undeveloped, which are, Rosling argues, generally inaccurate.
Surely we can only build on our success by recognising it and by making decisions based on facts rather than on erroneous assumptions. We need to help the young understand that within a period of some fifty years many laws, policies and behaviours have changed and these have brought us to the not-perfect but-not bad society we have today. And importantly, as Hans Rosling points out in FACTFULNESS, that if we say that life has got better – because my generation has seen these changes – it does not mean that we are suggesting that there should not be further improvements.
We all need to understand that we only hear the negative and over-dramatized stories and that the everyday progress in medicine, living standards and equality are not reported because they are slow advances and are not news-worthy. So we receive a distorted view. Politicians focus on negatives so as to criticize other parties, as do charities who wish to fund-raise. Social media has sadly become a platform for people to share negative stories that breed division, intolerance, hatred and anxiety. We must help our young to realize that life is not binary, that it isn’t black or white, good or evil, that you aren’t with us or against us. That most of life sits in the subtle grey areas in between.
So how do we create an integrated society here where people appreciate what they have? How do we help young people to see that they are sabotaging their own future by hooking into gang violence, division, resentment? How do we prevent them disempowering themselves through lack of appreciation for the opportunities they have? Perhaps by sharing more of our own stories of the good times and the bad, the importance of pushing through challenges and also how, if we are lucky enough to be the recipients of free education, social services and an NHS health service we need to take responsibility for playing our part by not taking these services for granted. Call me old-fashioned but with a welfare state don’t we also have a responsibility to turn up for medical appointments and do what we can to plan our families, plan for old age, participate in schoolwork, plan for the unexpected disasters that might invade our budgets? If we drain the coffers by abusing and not valuing what we have then we are in danger of losing the privileges we currently enjoy.
So let’s share stories with our young and with others who may not know how life was in this country even just 20-40 years ago. Just as the Sri Llankan mother hosting Jack shared her story, we need to explain the improvements we have seen in our lifetimes. It brings perspective which can empower the young with that essential ingredient of hope plus the determination to build on what has been created thus far – for their own sake and for the sake of others.
What could you share about your life journey, or your parents’ or grandparents’ lives, this week that would give insights into how life today is better than it was in your youth?
Hans Rosling: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
See also previous blogs:
https://www.helenwhitten.com/thinking-aloud/being-grateful-for-the-change-around-you/
https://www.helenwhitten.com/thinking-aloud/lets-shake-ourselves-out-of-this-gloom/
https://www.helenwhitten.com/thinking-aloud/our-humanity-binds-us-so-lets-not-allow-ourselves-to-be-divided/
https://www.helenwhitten.com/thinking-aloud/my-lucky-generation-dont-let-girl-power-slip-away/
Mar 14
2018
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Helen Whitten
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“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” Benjamin Franklin
I wonder if you have ever spent a few days in hospital? I have been in hospital for 7-10 days a few times in my life and have always been interested in how difficult it was to plan the simplest things when I came home. What has always struck me is how, even after a very short time of dependency, one immediately loses the ability to think, problem-solve, plan and make decisions. It can feel quite a relief not to have to think about small daily decisions such as what and when to eat, what to wear, what to do, how to spend or save one’s money, etc. But lack of practice incapacitates us. And just imagine how much more so if one has been in prison, in mental hospital, or the services for extended periods, where one’s life is organised by others. How hard to adjust to making those daily decisions again. How important to re-engage one’s executive brain and develop once more the ability to be independent of others and manage one’s own life.
It is not surprising that many ex-service people end up on our streets, homeless. Nor that many mental hospitals and prisons become a revolving door where people exit but all-too-often return. People do need help to plan their lives, their health, their work, their finance and their relationships. It doesn’t happen automatically, particularly when you haven’t had to use that part of the brain for a period of time. I believe the importance of planning skills is underestimated. Without planning people have no route to success.
This applies in so many areas of life. I was talking recently to a friend who works in a food bank. The food banks were set up as an emergency resource but those running them are finding that some people can become habitual users of the service. So some food banks now offer help with learning to budget and take control of the small details of expenditure, so as to prevent the building up of dependency.
We have a great deal of personal debt in this country. Something that happened less when I was young as there weren’t credit cards, and loans were hard to come by. Our parents had come through the war and rationing so there was a strong message that one should budget and only buy those things that one could pay for. Writing a cheque made it easier to calculate what was left in one’s account but few people write cheques these days and keeping track of what’s in the bank is much harder when you use a debit card. What with compound interest, interest-only mortgages and working out the meagre interest on savings, it’s all so much more complicated now! We need help. Being in debt is miserable. Getting out of it is tough. Personally, I found the books and programmes of Alvin Hall helped me think about where my seemingly small daily expenditures were adding up and draining my ability to save. I suspect many of us would benefit from reading his book You and Your Money.
You may have heard reports during the recent cold spell of how surprised people were that quite a large number of homeless refused the offer of a warm refuge. It was too big a jump of trust and habit. They know what to expect on the streets, however uncomfortable. And they have often built up a solidarity of social life with others in similar situations. Learning to socialise in new groups after being institutionalised or on the street is a major challenge. Helping the homeless make the journey back to work and a life within four walls is more complex than it might sound and is a step-by-step process.
When I was running Positiveworks we were involved in a project with Business in the Community to help coach homeless women into the workplace. It was through this work that I became aware of how difficult these women found even small decisions, such as working out when to leave in order to get to a job interview on time. Maintaining the daily disciplines of time-keeping and planning was challenging for them. They had lost the capacity to keep on top of things and could easily become overwhelmed by the number of things they had to think about. We helped them to take a step back and consider the small steps they needed to take each day to gain employment and then to keep the job. Each achievement built their confidence but it did not happen overnight. Managing to return to the challenges of everyday life often took several months.
Just as parents move children from dependency to independence, we can often rather assume that the life skills of planning and decision-making are integral to humans but I found that when I used to coach teenage and adult students in revision-planning, few had been given any formal development in planning time, exams, or thinking about a future life or career. These skills have to be developed, honed and practised. As does financial prowess. When I was managing company and personal accounts I realised, too, how easy it is to depend on one’s partner, business or personal, to manage money. But then, aged 42, I read Smart Women Finish Rich, full of stories of women who had relied on others – often to their detriment! It taught me that one must always take responsibility for one’s own financial position, even should one’s partner be an accountant! It also helped me ratchet up my core beliefs about how much money I could make in business and how to plan for retirement. Invaluable.
But the people who really need help are those whose lives have been disciplined by other people – teenagers growing into adulthood, those who have been in prison, in hospital, mental hospital, on benefits, or in the services. When your everyday activities, including meal times, are organised by other people the part of your brain that does the planning deteriorates – and surprisingly quickly!
I have found that the four-quadrant template below, created from the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, can be applied to provide a practical model for planning.
Once some or all of these questions have been answered, identify specific measurable goals and identify when they are to be carried out and achieved. What is most important, though, is to ensure that the question ‘why should I bother to do this?’ is answered, as unless a person can perceive a tangible benefit and see a positive outcome for themselves they are unlikely to feel motivated to follow through. I suspect we can all think of examples of goals we have set but without sufficient emotional will to complete them!
Don’t underestimate how useful a practical model can be in helping someone make the journey towards regaining control of their lives. Do try it and share it.
Some books that helped me:
Alvin Hall: Your Money or your Life; You and Your Money; Money Magic and You-tube
Napoleon Hill: Think and Grow Rich
David Bach: Smart Women Finish Rich
Stephen Covey: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Helen Whitten: Cognitive-Behavioural Coaching Techniques for Dummies (Wiley, 2009)
http://www.herrmannsolutions.co.uk/
Mar 02
2018
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Helen Whitten
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As many of you know, we are selling our Hampshire house looking to move to Kew for the next stage of our lives. [See https://search.savills.com/list/property-for-sale/england/hampshire#/r/detail/gbwnrswns170335] So, as the snow falls outside, I am gradually working my way through a fairly massive job of decluttering. Between us, having come together at the ages of 60 and 67 respectively, we have a good 40-50 years of adult hoarding, family photos and memorabilia, and life history hidden away in our offices, filing cabinets, sheds and attics. I am usually reasonably good at clapping my hands and getting on with a transition but this process of letting go has been more challenging than I had imagined.
When I sold Positiveworks to Jackie and Chris of Sixth Sense Consulting in 2016 I naively assumed that it would be both easy and liberating to go to the filing cabinets and dispose of the 25 years of papers, presentations and articles that I had filed away in various cupboards and filing cabinets. And especially the accounts and VAT books (sorry Jeremy!). Of course – as those of you who have done this before me will probably know – it’s not quite as simple as that! When I finally started looking through the papers, slides and the various brochures that took me from 1992 to 2016 I found I was far more emotionally attached to things I had created and to the memories of clients, presentations, and geographical places I had visited on this wonderful Positiveworks’ journey than I had thought I would be.
And so, gradually, I have made myself shred this, chuck that, bit by bit. It does clear the mind somewhat. I am now on my third stage of going through the files, each time more capable of being a little more stringent than the time before. “Will I really ever need this again?” I ask myself. I know I won’t but I am also sort of aware that in later life, when I am perhaps in my 80s and more vulnerable, I might need the confidence boost of looking back at the books, articles and programmes I produced and feeling a little more pleased with myself than I might if I only have a rather elderly face to look at in the mirror every day!
I know that David is experiencing the same hesitancy, the same rerun of old memories in his head, the patients he has seen, the research papers he has written and the good work he has done. Ultimately, it’s about identity.
But there’s no way there will be space for all these old boxes and papers when we move to a three-bedroom terraced house in Kew!
And of course at our stage of life there is also what they are, I believe, calling the ‘death declutter’ – eg going through papers and items to ensure that your offspring aren’t (a) horrified by what they find of their parents’ past (b) not overwhelmed by the amount of clutter they may have to go through when they are anyway extremely busy with work and family and (c) wondering where on earth you have put your wills and bank details.
I don’t want to put them through that. My own parents were wonderful – I think the paperwork had come down to one small file of banking, accounting and insurance documents and that was it. It made it so easy for us. Luckily, though, my mother had written some pages documenting her memories of childhood since her birth in 1918, snippets about the war, her life with my father in Portugal, and beyond. Invaluable social and personal history.
So I believe we should all leave our children a little glimpse into our lives as younger people, to give them an insight into how, socially and politically, the world has changed. There is a real danger, with computers and passwords, that much will get lost. Where will be the love letters when so many are written as disposable emails and texts? Where will be the diaries, poems and photos?
As a probably rather over-sentimental historian I have assembled a photo album each Christmas of David’s and my year, alongside another annual album tracking the events of my children and grandchildren. They give me such joy to look at. I have also had the love poems that David and I wrote to one another assembled into a printed book. And when I get the chance and inclination I am also pulling together poems and the odd paragraphs documenting my own life, which I have so far entitled the Life and Times of a Baby Boomer, with memories of the 60s, seeing the Beatles and Stones in 1964-5, powdering Elton John’s nose in 1976, and more! Far more, of course.
And the trouble is that these items in my desk – my History finas essays and notes (I kid myself I might use them again), my sons’ old school reports (why?), the contracts of house purchases and sales (*** taxmen), the collection of Positiveworks’ papers (ah) – represent so much of what helps me to piece my memories together. The adventures, the lonely moments, the transitions, the many countries I have visited with my sons and with work.
My father’s family tree goes back to a Roger de Buckenhale in 1327 and continues up to the latest additions of my granddaughters and great nieces and nephews in 2013, though it doesn’t yet record the birth of my latest grandson, born in January 2016. But there are the names and places of family members long gone. I don’t know enough about them and have a note in my diary to go up to Staffordshire to get a feel of the place my ancestors came from. It is heart-warming, too, to be reminded of grandparents, aunts , uncles and cousins of whom one has distant memories. We recently took my granddaughter to see the rather spooky cartoon movie Coco, which is set in the Mexican Day of the Dead. Its rather deep message was that once there is no-one alive who remembers the dead members of the family, their spirit fades. Made us think! I have a vague recollection of my great-grandmother and my maternal grandmother but no grandfathers…
Last week I came across my mother’s memoir again, and also the small brown envelope she kept in her desk containing philosophical and spiritual quotes that represented her view of life after death, or the lack of it. I found again the notes I wrote to my parents as a small child, the cards I had written on my father’s death, her letters to me in difficult moments of my own life. They bring tears to my eyes but I wouldn’t be without them for anything.
I don’t know what my own sons will think, or my grandchildren. I don’t want to burden them with memories but equally I don’t want to deprive them, when the time comes. And so the slow but steady progress of letting go carries on and more must go before we move. It’s hard work and yet it is also a wonderfully poignant experience to touch once again many happy and fulfilling moments. Even memories of the difficult times are precious.
I still haven’t made any major dent in the massive paperwork filling the cupboards of our filing room, let alone the outside shed – I had better go and do another half an hour now. Downsizing certainly focuses the mind on that hard decision of what is clutter and what is not! And that, I guess, has much to do with who one thinks one wants to be in the next phase of one’s life. How are you doing, on defining and managing clutter I wonder?
Feb 21
2018
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Helen Whitten
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How do we distinguish between the normal emotional upheavals of life and something that can be defined as a “mental health” problem? I recently heard the jockey Sir Tony McCoy speaking on the radio of his difficulty in adjusting to retirement after horse racing. The headline of the report was that large numbers of people facing retirement are suffering from mental health issues. I know that many of my friends and clients have found it difficult to adjust, as McCoy has, to retirement. They miss the structure, purpose, social life and status of work. However, this is generally a fairly natural period of bereavement when there will be an inevitable cycle of loss. And what I am questioning is the ease with which people seem to be given labels of mental illness these days. Could it not be that they might be experiencing the fairly typical emotions of just being human and going through a difficult patch?
Don’t get me wrong, I am delighted that mental health issues are being spoken of in a more transparent way. I remember a close family member who had recovered from a nervous breakdown saying that she wished people had been able to see her illness in the way they can see a broken arm. Luckily we are now gaining more understanding, although a cure for psychological problems is still quite hard to find.
But at the same time, I worry about the burgeoning number of mental health labels that are given as diagnoses of emotional problems. The number of disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the diagnostic tool published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), increases year by year. In the United States, the DSM serves as a universal authority for psychiatric diagnoses but according to recent surveys some 46.5% of Americans will have a diagnosable mental illness in their lifetimes, based on this manual. Really?
Let’s look at these labels – grief can be packaged as ‘Adjustment Disorder’, a child’s temper tantrum as ‘Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder’, shyness can be defined as a mental health illness, where it was a totally natural, if uncomfortable, experience when I was a child. Three to five people in every 100 are estimated to be diagnosed with ‘personality disorders’ in the UK, with one to three in every 100 living with ‘schizophrenia’. Are these diagnoses accurately differentiating real mental illness, which can be life-threatening, from a transitional period of emotional disturbance? Is it that people are now expecting to feel ok all the time? Is there some new intolerance to feeling miserable, uncertain, sad, uncomfortable that leads people to seek a fix that in previous times they might just have to have accepted as a phase of life? A pill for every ill rather than accepting emotional distress? Have we always been mentally sick or are the labels increasingly embracing what would previously have been perceived as normal?
In her new book “It’s OK That you’re not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture that Doesn’t Understand” Megan Devine emphasizes that grief is not a problem to be solved or resolved. Rather it’s a process to be accepted, tended and lived through. The suggestion is that those going through bereavement, redundancy, retirement or teenage anxiety could benefit from accepting that they will feel bad some of the time and that this is perfectly normal. Having experienced bereavements myself I endorse the view that the pain is very real and difficult to bear but I don’t believe it would have helped me if someone had tried to medicalise it. Being upset when someone you love dies is absolutely natural. Time is, as the saying goes, a great healer but if grief becomes long-term and overwhelming it is at that stage that someone may need help, not necessarily by handing out anti-depressants before.
I personally believe that we need to communicate more realistic expectations of life. Young people are bombarded on the one hand by celebrity ‘perfection’ on social media and on the other by angry ranting politicians and news media complaining of everything that’s going wrong. So it is hardly surprising that people end up feeling aggrieved that they sometimes find life difficult. But when has life ever been easy? With all the money in the world you can still get ill, lose a child, be struck down by war, natural disaster or terrorism. Life is and always has been challenging and it is surely more helpful to enable people to accept this and learn the tools of resilience to support them in managing these ups and downs. One of the insights I gained recently about the statistics that suggest Scandinavian countries are happier than we are is that they have different expectations of life and so are not so disappointed by it.
The other problem with labels, if given too readily, is that they can ramp up anxiety about a condition, both in the individual and also in their family, and so become a self-fulfilling prophecy. There can be a negative pay-off in the fact that the person can be treated in a special way and allowed to retreat from the responsibilities and challenges of life. This is certainly a very difficult balance for families to manage.
Research has also shown that clinicians can tend to box those whom they have labelled with a mental illness. They can wrongly assume tendencies and behaviours associated with the label that may not actually be present in the specific individual. Patients have reported being told that they will never recover – a real ‘nocebo’ effect. Experiments have also shown that a label can immediately change the perception of those interacting with them – in experiments someone introduced as a ‘patient’ was seen as having serious psychological problems whereas someone introduced as a ‘job-seeker’ was seen as ‘well-adjusted’. The mere use of the word ‘patient’ can encourage a more pathological view of someone’s behaviour, and so can trap the person within the label. Consider the weight of negative associations connected to a diagnosis of depression.
I remember watching the BBC Horizon programme How Mad are You? where a team of psychologists observed a group of people, some of whom had been diagnosed with mental health conditions such as schizophrenia, anxiety, depression and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The team of psychiatrists were tasked with identifying which individuals had which condition. They frequently got it wrong, diagnosing normal people with conditions they didn’t have and missing the signals of bi-polar in another participant. In the end, participants were delighted that their condition could not always be detected, even by experts. It helped them feel more normal.
The programme demonstrated that mental health is something we all experience on a spectrum – after all we all have some quirks and neuroses, don’t we? As Freud said, “Every normal person is, in fact, only normal in part”. His suggestion is that most people are relatively unhappy most of the time and – contrary to the aims of the celebrity social media age – “The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside”.
The Horizon programme also demonstrated that the stigma that the individual associates with their condition, and which is transferred so readily to those around them, can negatively impact their ability to recover. As an article by Chris Langer, an integrative counsellor, argued, the label of a mental health illness not only stigmatises but also isolates people, creating an artificial divide between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. Langer suggests that once these perceptions become embedded, the patient can become institutionalised in a framework of healthcare to the point that the label reinforces, rather than alleviates, the presenting symptoms. It also pigeonholes people in the same box when the reality of one person’s ‘bi-polar disorder’ symptoms may be very different to another’s. Interestingly, Carl Jung believed that a correct diagnosis could only be made at the end of treatment.
Of course a specific diagnosis or label can be helpful, in the understanding of an individual’s predicament, the potential support of network groups with similar conditions and information about medications and actions to alleviate symptoms. What one doesn’t want to do is infer that what might be the normal but uncomfortable experience of, for example, being a teenager means that the person is mentally ill. Last week there was a report of numbers of girls ordering, from the internet, Xanax as a self-prescribed medication for anxiety. The teenage years are always difficult ones, full of angst and anxiety about the future. It is inevitable that teenagers get worried about how it might pan out – will they pass exams, will they get into university, will they find a job, will they find love, will they get married and have kids, etc. Nothing is certain and at the same time the neurons in their brain are doing a major rewire and their hormones are rampaging around their bodies so it is not surprising that they feel unsettled. And the endless headlines about increasing numbers of them suffering from anxiety, loneliness and depression hardly help, in my view. Being sad and lonely sometimes can be part of life. Being alone is not necessarily being lonely but it can become so if someone tells you it is and if you don’t take action to get out and create new connections.
Surely it is more helpful to provide resilience tools to those going through such transitions, to help them manage the uncertainties and changes of life? Don’t we need to learn to accept that emotions, however uncomfortable, are part of the rich and deep experience of being a human being in a complex world?
Of course there are those who have serious conditions who absolutely need clinical support and medication. I just worry about the tendency of medics and journalists to dish out quite so many labels to quite so many people when maybe those people are just going through a normal, if difficult, stage of life.
Further Reading:
Bath University: Mental Health Labels can do More Harm than Good http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/news/2015/08/18/negative-impact-mental-health-labels
The Guardian: “How TV show turned the spotlight on stigma
https://www.theguardian.com/society/joepublic/2008/nov/19/how-mad-are-you-mental-health
250 Labels used to stigmatise people with mental illness by Diana Rose, Graham Thornicroft, Vanessa Pinfold and Aliya Kassam
Understanding Grief by Jane E Brody, New York Times, 15.1.2018
National Health Executive: Be Wary of Mental Health Labels, 7.4.16
http://www.nationalhealthexecutive.com/Comment/be-wary-of-mental-health-labels
Emotional Healing for Dummies: Dr David Beales and Helen Whitten, Wiley, 2010
It’s OK that You’re Not OK by Megan Devine, available on Amazon
The Almost Nearly Perfect People, Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia by Michael Booth.
www.thelostconnections.com Johann Hari
Feb 08
2018
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Helen Whitten
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My goodness what a muddle we seem to be getting into around men and women and what is offensive and what is not. When I heard that Manchester Art Gallery had removed the pre-Raphaelite painting Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse in case, in the current climate, modern audiences might find it offensive, I exclaimed, like Victor Meldrew, “I don’t believe it!!” I gather I wasn’t alone and, thankfully, the painting has been put back. See https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jan/31/manchester-art-gallery-removes-waterhouse-naked-nymphs-painting-prompt-conversation
But where are we at, on this centenary of the Suffrage movement? Are we getting distracted up misguided alleyways that potentially do a disservice to the intentions of the suffragettes? Actions like removal of a historical painting diminishes the aim of equality with men. Paintings depict our history, male and female, good and evil. The wonders of humanity and its bestialities. We can’t just wipe it out, however distasteful some people might find it today.
Personally I worry that acts like taking down the painting in the Manchester Art Gallery does little for women’s rights and freedoms. In fact, to remove a painting feels like a worrying step towards some puritanical purge. After all it is dictatorships that ban culture, paintings, music, dance and – often – remove women’s rights. Are we now to remove all paintings that depict nude figures? What about so many mythological paintings – masterpieces depicting rape and kidnap? Do we wipe the myths from our history books? What about Botticelli, Titian, Picasso, to mention just a few? What will be left in our art galleries? Bare walls probably because the thought police can find offence in almost everything if they think hard enough.
At the same time we heard, this week, that the female models who accompany the Formula One drivers on the grid will be replaced with ‘grid kids’. This seems totally pointless when several of the girls who used to be employed to escort the racing drivers were perfectly happy with the way they earned their money. And why shouldn’t they be? Surely these kind of high-handed decisions lead to limiting women rather than empowering them? Surely this creates some prescriptive model of how women should behave, which could take us back a few centuries rather than forward?
But while we get into a predicament about whether to remove nude figures of women from the walls of art galleries and museums there is a serious point to remember. This is that huge numbers of women around the world are less fortunate than we are in the developed countries. That many women still don’t have, or don’t dare use, the vote. That many women are routinely abused by men and the system in which they live. That we still have a long way to go to enable women to be recognised as a valid and equal part of the human race (which of course we are if you are brave enough to challenge religious texts and outdated habits of thought and behaviour).
So when I hear comments such as “feminism has gone too far” and “there’s going to be a backlash against feminism” I disagree, because so many women are nowhere near equality. But I do question whether some of the arguments being used are less pertinent than others and perhaps are being presented in ways that can alienate people, which is unhelpful.
OK, so the painting shows naked nymphs tempting a handsome young man to his doom – but who is powerless in this? Is it really the young nymphs? Surely they are using their power to lure him in? Are the young women really represented as passive decorative creatures or are they actually using their subtle art of seduction for their own benefit?
But this is where the muddle lies and where there are such confused messages. After all, alongside this puritan movement we are also living in an era where celebrity models strut their stuff wearing very little and where we regularly have television dramas that broadcast horrifying scenes of rape and violence against women. Not to mention the porn and sadism of some video games. Surely there’s a balance to be had here as this seems to be in direct contrast to discussions of whether advertisements or paintings are “sexist” or objectify their subject.
But I am wary that what is being done in the name of protecting women is actually removing the freedoms that we have battled so hard to achieve. These freedoms could be removed in the blink of an eye if we were subjected to a dictatorship or religious movement and so we have to be watchful, however well-intentioned a suggestion might appear to be.
The female or male body should be allowed to be displayed, whether on canvas, screen or at a party. As long as it is a choice. As long as no-one has been bullied into doing something that makes them feel uncomfortable.
What will make a difference is education. A World Health Organisation survey revealed that “men are more likely to perpetrate violence if they have low education, a history of child maltreatment, exposure to domestic violence against their mothers, harmful use of alcohol, unequal gender norms including attitudes accepting of violence, and a sense of entitlement over women”.
So we have to teach children to identify the boundaries within which they feel safe and in control. We have to alert them to the dangers of being lured into sexting photos of themselves or being groomed into doing things they don’t want to do through social media or bullying. This requires teaching girls to be more confident and assertive of their rights and to rehearse the words they may need to speak in order to say no. We have to help boys and girls to understand that every one of us has a responsibility to manage ourselves wisely and also a responsibility for our impact on others. I also believe it will help for everyone to learn more about the sexual arousal system and the way that testosterone hijacks rational thought, leading to increased risk behaviours.
But taking a painting off the wall isn’t going to provide those skills. Great art demonstrates the command of observation, creativity and painting, depicting philosophical ideas, social and religious concepts. Namely, it educates us and broadens our minds.
Let’s keep the focus on making sure that women’s voices are heard and taken seriously. If the conversation revolves around concepts of powerlessness and victimhood it taints the reputation of women. Women come in all forms. As the playwright David Hare commented recently when asked if he would have “strong women” in his new television series Collateral , “I have the right to portray all kinds of women without being called misogynistic… I want to be free to portray silly women and weak women and clever women; I want to be able to portray all women. When we can portray all women equally, that will be equality.”
This feels right to me – after all there are silly men, weak men and clever men and we all add to the rich diversity of human life. Let’s make sure that our freedoms of speech and creative expression are not limited by the “I can’t be offended” brigade. We have come a long way and it would be nice to feel that in future education will have brought about further change in many more areas of the world.