Are you a good person?

Are you kind to fellow humans—and all creatures great and small?

Do you support worthy charities, help those in need, and do good work?

Or do you have a dark side? Is there part of you that wants to lie and cheat and manipulate situations to your advantage? Are you interested in enriching yourself—even if that comes at a cost to others?

The answer is: All of the above. In the fine words of that great philosopher Paul McCartney: There is good and bad in everyone. Humans are capable of astonishing acts of courage and bravery, but under certain circumstances we might be utterly spineless, cruel, greedy or depraved. To deny these things in you—what Carl Jung called the shadow—is to project them unconsciously onto others.

“I’m a good person,” a client said. But all around her—her husband, her children, siblings, parents, neighbours, immigrants, foreigners—were bad. This construction of the world left her lonely and disengaged, holding on only to her sense of superiority. She came to therapy when it came crashing down.

“I’m the bad guy?” says Michael Douglas at the end of the movie Falling Down. Robert Duvall, the cop aiming his pistol at him on the Santa Monia Pier, nods. 
​
“How’d that happen?”
​
A few weeks ago my therapist sent me a link to an extraordinary song that explores these themes. Hi Ren went live on YouTube on December 15 last year. When I first saw it, it had surpassed 5 million views. Today it’s reached 8.2 million and it's rising super fast. Word of mouth: This is the song of our time; a human anthem.

It starts with Ren, wearing a hospital gown, being wheeled into a semi-derelict room by a man with a pig’s head and a bloodied butcher’s apron. Ren is obviously a patient. He too is perhaps feeling derelict and abandoned—and powerless too in the hands of those charged with his care.

He starts playing the guitar.

It’s beautiful. An acoustic guitar. A pleasing melody. The incongruity of the surroundings. But he’s tugging at the nylon strings a bit hard. A bit twangy. Aggressive considering the sweet Flamenco notes that fill the room.

Then Ren opens his mouth and the melody is joined by a wail of wild, high-pitched half notes. It is otherworldly. It is perhaps something like the human mating call before we learned to speak, or the dawn chorus in Hades. We are drawn to this—we willingly enter his beautiful madness.

And then the rapping starts.

In his famous Red Book Jung attempts to commune with his own soul.

“ ‘My soul, where are you? Do you hear me?' he starts. 'I speak, I call you – are you
there?’ ”

In this piece of work, Ren opens with a salutation from his shadow to his ego.

“Hi there, Ren,” he hisses. “It's been a little while, did you miss me?”

This is the opening salvo in a blistering verbal assault from Ren’s inner critical voice.

Replies Ren:
“I’ve been taking some time to be distant,” he explains.
“I've been taking some time to be still.
“I've been taking some time to be by myself since my therapist told me I'm ill.
“And I've been making some progress lately,
“And I've learnt some new coping skills”

The critical voice is extremely skeptical:
“Ren, you sound more insane than I do,” he says.

He mocks Ren for imagining that some standard course of treatment—take another pill, the sound of white noise, a 10-step program—will make any difference, and ridicules his musical ambitions.

The argument hots up until the critical voice thunders his authority. He is the snake in Eden. Lucifer. Antichrist. Mephistopheles. Satan.
“I am you, Ren, you are me.”

Who is Ren actually, this Keats-with-guitar? Where did this guy come from? You could be excused for imagining he just picked up a guitar one day in a psych ward and discovered his madness instinctively knew how to play and had something to say.

Ren Gill was actually a talented musician in his youth. He started out making beats in his bedroom at 13, then went on to Bath Spa University to study music performance. One day in 2009, busking in his hometown of Brighton, he was spotted by a talent scout and snapped up by Sony Records.

The childhood dream swiftly turned into a nightmare however. Ren woke one morning feeling utterly lethargic, drained, and aching all over. He started having panic attacks. He’d stay in bed. He said: “My life changed overnight, I woke up one morning feeling like I'd been spiked—my personality disappeared.”

He entered the mental health system. He was put on antidepressants. Antipsychotics. It's not hard to imagine the kinds of interpretations psychology offered up for his illness—he was probably told for example that he was depressed, suffering from low self-esteem, bipolar, afraid of success, delusional, paranoid, mad. In some cultures he would be considered possessed, in need of an exorcism.

​The truth, discovered many years later, was that he had a longstanding untreated case of Lyme disease, the complications of which still impact him today. Ren’s health problems were perhaps not manifestations of some inner psychic conflict. He was bitten by a tic.

He has struggled. But perhaps the struggle, the suffering, is integral to his genius.

In the final stanza, Ren refuses to back down, and stands to face his demon:
“I go by many names also,
“Some people know me as hope,
“Some people know me as the voice that you hear when you loosen the noose on the rope.”

I’ve watched Hi Ren countless times now, but this passage, this lone shriek in the cold, silent void of a long and desolate night, this absolute guttural refusal to quit, still reverberates. This is courage. And if you going to live, stand in the fire, sing at the top of your lungs! Ferocious, persistent, immortal! 

The Hollywood movies might leave it there. The good guy narrowly defeats the bad guy, the evil forces are vanquished, and the credit roll as a beautiful melody transports us back to our lives.
 
Critical self
I have worked with many clients whose lives are made wretched by an invisible sargeant major who subjects them to a permanent harangue of negativity. It can come as quite a shock to discover that some of the nicest people are often subject to a totalitarian inner form of government—a brutal, relentless inner monologue that is with them 24 hours a day.

Perhaps it is an internalised strict parent, sibling, school bully, racist, sexist, homophobe, ableist. The child who is abused by a parent may conclude that love and abuse are indivisible. Lorna Smith Benjamin describes masochism as a gift of love to the original abuser.

Perhaps you experienced a traumatic event or time in your life, one that was so terrible it couldn’t be processed so was instead dissociated, divided up into images, sensations, stray thoughts and emotions. You bury these fragments in a deep hole at the far end of the garden, but to your great dismay they keep coming back. The past reverberates in the present. Time in itself does not necessarily heal.

I’ve also met people who might have had perfectly idyllic childhoods yet still berate themselves mercilessly for every bone-headed move, bad-hair day or dumb remark. Perhaps your critical voice starts out by alerting you to where you might have room for improvement, acting in your best interests, but over the years it can become domineering and disempowering. 

Incidentally, if “the voice” is more than a thought or a feeling but is experienced as an actual, heard voice, some people might conclude that you must be mad, possessed and probably dangerous. And while such voices may point to the consideration of psychosis, it does not prove it. Many people hear voices at times for a variety of reasons.
​
Therapy might enable a client to develop a greater awareness and understanding of their inner critic. We might imagine it is an actual person—what age, gender? Remind you of anyone you know? The client might have a conversation with their critical voice. It can be useful to think of humans as being made up of multiple “selves,” lots of disparate strands in the tapestry. They all inhabit our being in a loose confederacy. And the client might find some other sentiments in this “community of selves” that can challenge and counter the inner bully.

The shadow
Sometimes, however, therapy attempts to go too far in expunging any negativity or nastiness. Jung argued we not born pure, but whole. We cannot edit ourselves to be merely good. We can never be untethered from our shadow. In Memories, dreams, reflections, Jung called the shadow—“everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge” about themselves (1995: 418).

Pure goodness becomes insipid. Heaven, with no shade, is no place for humans—a place, as David Byrne sung, where “nothing ever happens.”

Anyone who denies their inner propensity for evil as well as good will find that it manifests itself in unanticipated ways.

To make light—to live—is to cast a shadow. This is a chiaroscuro world. 

Artists, poets, writers, musicians, comedians, people who bring light to the world, must also experience darkness. 

And the shadow, by the way, doesn’t always have to be something bad. You might disavow your own brilliance, or talent, or potential for success. The more a person identifies with and invests in one polarity, the greater the opposite polarity grows in the shadow. 

We don't like bad stuff. The child who has not yet learned to tolerate and accept anger will hand it off, screaming at the grown-up: “Why are so angry with me?"

Any emotions, beliefs or characteristics that don't fit with your carefully-crafted, social media-ready self-image are simply projected onto others. Your partner—that's the easiest place to start. Then there are family members—one sibling is often cast as "the bad one"—neighbours, that asshole at work, men, women, black people, white people, those people over there, others.

The targets for projection and scapegoating are plentiful. Twitter is a very shadowy place indeed.

Writes Robert A. Johnson in Owning your own shadow: “Probably the worst damage is done when parents lay their shadow on their children...If a parent lays his shadow on a young child, that splits the personality of the child and sets the ego-shadow warfare into motion."  (1991: 34).

So how do you find your shadow? Ask yourself: Who do you judge? Your enemies, the people you dislike the most, have much to teach you. For they are you.

Projecting your shadow isn't just bad for others. It's bad for you too. Continues Johnson: “To refuse the dark side in one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness; this is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness or unconsciously inspired accidents. We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshipped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us. We must be whole whether we like it or not” (1991: 26).

You want world peace? To start with, stop pointing accusatory fingers every which way, and instead take a look inside.

If we can own our shadow we can develop some conscious control over it, rather than have it unconsciously express itself in disastrous ways. And if we can accept that we are all flawed, vulnerable, insignificant, ignorant, that life is hard but also beautiful, that not one person on this planet knows how or why we are here, then we can perhaps be more empathic, more forgiving, kinder. We can greet each other. The words “human” and “humility” come from the same root, the Latin word “humus,” meaning earth or ground. We are not celestial beings. We return to the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

”No one can escape the dark side of life,” writes Johnson. ”The balance of dark and light is ultimately possible—and bearable” (1991: 15).

Let's dance 
At the end of Hi Ren, this remarkable young man puts the guitar down, looks right into the camera and delivers a powerful soliloquy.

“It wasn't David versus Goliath,” he says, “it was a pendulum eternally swaying from the dark to the light. And the more intensely that the light shone, the darker the shadow it cast.
​
“It was never really a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance, and like a dance, the more rigid I became, the harder it got. The more I cursed my clumsy footsteps, the more I struggled. And so I got older and I learned to relax, and I learned to soften, and that dance got easier. It is this eternal dance that separates human beings from angels, from demons, from gods. And I must not forget, we must not forget, that we are human beings.”

In 1949, in thick fog, Ben Hogan had a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus. On Tuesday morning last week, in broad daylight, Tiger Woods collided with himself.  

At the time of his crash, Hogan was 36, and a late starter in a career interrupted by World War Two. Despite or perhaps because of his horrific injuries, his best triumphs lay ahead: In 1953, on shattered legs, he played just 6 tournaments and won 5 of them including the Masters, the US Open and the British Open. 

We don’t know why Tiger Woods spun off the road—no other vehicles were involved. We do know he was late and tired, and driving on a notoriously dangerous stretch of road. We know he is 45, and was a very early starter in a career interrupted by wild women, sex addiction, scandal, divorce, drugs and severe physical damage brought on by too much wear and too much tear: He’s had 5 operations on his back and 5 on his knee, among many other medical decisions and revisions and incisions.

Ben Hogan had a car crash and then the man became a legend.  
Tiger Woods was a legend and then the man became a car crash. 
 
​Hallowed be thy name
Aside from golfing prowess, and a car crash, these two men have this thing in common; Both were shaped by the extremes of the father.

"The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents,” wrote Carl Jung. 

For Hogan this was literally true: He was 9 and in the house, possibly even in the room, when his father took his own life with a pistol. 

​Earl Woods meanwhile was a college baseball player who spent 20 years in the US Army—including tours of duty in Vietnam as a Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel—before finding his true calling: putting his son on the world stage. 

He put a golf club in his hand at the age of one, had him appear on TV—with Bob Hope—at two and turned him into a kind of child soldier of golf. 

As a newly-minted pro, at a dinner in his honour, the father said of the son: “He will bring to the world a humanitarianism which has never been known before…I acknowledge only a small part in that in that I know that I was personally selected by God himself to nurture this young man.”

Later, he said: “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.”

Sports Illustrated asked for clarification, suggesting he meant sports history. He surely wasn’t suggesting Tiger would be bigger than, say, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Buddha? Was he?

Yes, he was. He added that Tiger would accomplish miracles and was, in fact, the “Chosen One.”

Mental mastery
We are always hearing about athletes’ physical health in great detail. When the England football team captain David Beckham broke the tiny second metatarsal bone in his left foot in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup, it was practically a national emergency.

But very little is said about their mental health, which is odd when you consider how odd their lives are. Studies show that around 35 percent of elite professional athletes suffer from a mental health crisis, in all the usual time-honoured ways: addiction, drugs, stress, eating disorders, sleep disorders, burnout, depression, anxiety. 

These concerns are increasingly being taken seriously by sports’ governing bodies, with a blueprint provided by the International Olympic Committee’s 2018 Expert Consensus Statement on mental health in elite athletes.

But the athletes themselves rarely speak out about their troubles. One exception is Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, who suffered a Tigeresque career meltdown but lived to tell his story. Two years ago he tweeted: “I struggled with anxiety and depression and questioned whether or not I wanted to be alive anymore. It was when I hit this low that I decided to reach out and ask for the help of a licensed therapist. This decision ultimately helped save my life. You don’t have to wait for things.”

In pro sports, golf is perhaps uniquely challenging. Careers tend to be long, travel is brutal—Gary Player has spent years of his life in aeroplanes. You are on the pitch for hours, day after day, and your failures, injuries and other setbacks are many and often painfully public. It can be a solitary existence; research shows a higher risk of mental ill-health in individual sports than in team sports.

Then there is the culture of golf. You play the ball as it lies. You don’t complain. You accept the bad bounces. And above all, you must maintain the image of golf as good and wholesome, a cure for mental ill-health rather than a cause of it. While other top athletes spit and swear and occasionally break someone’s jaw, golf pros are expected to call penalties on themselves, shake hands with their opponents, donate their winnings to the nearest cancer hospital. It’s good for business.

Any famous golfer must surely struggle at times with their idealized public image as a dominant, fearless but ever-polite superhero, a role model, an exemplar of human potential, especially when beset by feelings of internal turmoil or doubt or murderous rage or the vast emptiness that fame and a life on the road can bestow. The more vaunted the image, the bigger the shadow.

When you consider what Tiger Woods has been through—his childhood, the highest of highs, the lowest of lows, the scandals, injuries, accidents, and not least, throughout it all, the endless death threats, trollings, put-downs and shamings from a largely white sport with a racist history—his comeback in 2018 and 2019 is astonishing.

But as he recovers from his horrific injuries—he surely will—perhaps what comes next is not another comeback to the Tiger of old, but a “go forward” to something new.

The real Tiger Woods is neither the world peace humanitarian he was once made out to be; nor is he a sex-addicted junkie. Like anyone, he’s just trying to play it down the middle.

Jung wrote a pretty good guidebook for this sort of thing, called “Modern Man in Search of a Soul.” He writes: “Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
​

“I'm just like my country, I'm young, scrappy, and hungry, and I'm not throwing away my shot”
--a rapping Alexander Hamilton in the musical, “Hamilton”
 
In a fractious, divisive America, on the eve of a presidential election, there is at least one thing the Democratic and Republican Parties can actually agree on: the United States should be governed by a really old, white man.

Donald Trump, 74, was the oldest ever president to take office when he won the election four years ago. (Ronald Reagan was the oldest ever president: he was two weeks shy of his 78th birthday on leaving the White House, after two terms in office, in 1989.)

The Democrats had an opportunity to nominate someone “young, scrappy and hungry,” a new JFK to inspire a nation, build bridges instead of walls, and give Trump a simple message: “You’re fired.” Instead they picked someone even older. Joe Biden turns 78 next month. 

​The unseemly first presidential debate between Trump and Biden was like watching footage of a thrashing, groaning fight to the death of the last two dinosaurs on earth. Why must the president be a geriatric patriarch—in a youthful, optimistic, idealistic land of exuberant energy, innovation, creativity, diversity, opportunity, a land where a rallying cry of a generation was once “never trust anyone over 30”?
 
Father hunger
“America is a mistake,” Sigmund Freud told a friend on his return from a trip there. “A giant mistake.”

It was Freud’s sole visit to America—he was invited to introduce psychoanalysis to the New World in a series of lectures in 1909. It wasn’t a happy experience. He didn’t like the food, the informality, the unfamiliar surroundings. He couldn’t sleep. Perhaps he felt ill at ease among “an alien people clutching their gods.” Freud regarded any god as an illusion, a fantasy born of an infantile need for a  father figure. America is an outlier in this regard: In one survey 60.6 percent of Americans said they are certain “God” exists. For the British the figure is 16.8. (Others results include France: 15.5; Norway: 14.8; Denmark: 13.0; Sweden: 10.2; Japan: 4.3.)

Freud would likely see the current presidential race as further evidence that America has daddy issues; specifically a chronic case of “father hunger.”

There is a “father absence crisis in America,” according to the National Fatherhood Initiative. One in every three American children are now growing up in a home without their biological father. According to the US Census Bureau, only 17 percent of custodial parents are fathers. Of the fathers who live apart from their children post-divorce, 27 percent have no contact with those children at all. One study reports that just 17 percent of American men had a positive relationship with their fathers.

In “Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men," Jungian analyst James Hollis writes that when a parent is absent, the child “carries the deficit throughout his life. He longs for something missing, even as he might carry a vitamin deficiency and crave a certain food…all men, whether they know it or not, hunger for their father and grieve over his loss.” 

Father hunger in women causes actual hunger, according to Margo Maine’s book of the same name, giving rise to “unrealistic body image, yo-yo dieting, food fears and disordered eating patterns.”

Americans look for father figures in teachers, preachers and self-help gurus; in famous athletes, tough guy movie stars, eccentric TV detectives. They turn for reassurance to the “founding fathers,” those quasi-dieties who united the early states, freed them from British rule, and wrote the Constitution.

And they look for a father-in-chief in the White House, in men like Bill Clinton, who never met his father, or Barack Obama, who never knew his, or Joe Biden, whose father struggled at times with poverty and unemployment but was a loving, constant father to the boy. Earlier this year, Biden wished his late father a happy Father's Day, saying, “As my father believed, there’s no higher calling for a woman or a man than to be a good mother or a good father." 
​
Or in Donald Trump.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, likened the last election to a choice between mum and dad, and predicted Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. “The thing about dad is that dad is kind of an a-hole,” Adams told CNN. “But if you need dad to take care of some trouble, he's going to be the one you call. You know, if there's a noise downstairs, you probably are not going to call mom, even if she's awesome. You're probably going to call the biggest person in the room, you're going to call dad. So in our irrational minds, if the world is exploding and we're still talking about nuclear terrorism, I think people are going to say, maybe you want the most dangerous person to protect us.”
 
Psychic mutilation
“What is it with men?” a client said to me recently. Another relationship had ended in disappointment; she was being “ghosted.” Her father vanished years ago. She’s had no contact at all since childhood.

Three-quarters of American men are circumcized, subjected as babies to a barbaric mutilation that belongs in another, more primitive century. The emotional circumcision swiftly follows. Writes bel hooks: “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”

The Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler argued that men will often overcompensate for their fear of vulnerability with a lurch toward stereotypical male aggression and competition. What Jung called the anima, the feminine, is denied; the animus is embraced. (To be whole, said Jung, both must be integrated.) The boy-man is pure animus—animosity—shorn of anything that might be considered anima—the animating effects of emotion, creativity, compassion, collaboration. The most macho are the most afraid.

Adler called this the “masculine protest” and regarded it as an evil force in history, underlying for instance the rise in fascism in the 20th century. To be taken seriously as a leader one must appear devoutly unempathic, unfeeling, uncompromising, unflinching (this is especially true of women, “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher being the obvious, almost-cartoonish example).

We tell our sons to man up or, in the absence of fathers, father figures or modern-day tribal elders, they are told nothing at all; they feel nothing, say little and become numb, inarticulate loners, expendable cogs in a loveless machine. Men make up 93 percent of American workplace fatalities and 99 percent of American combat fatalities. Men are three times more likely than women to take their own life, three times more likely to have an addiction, and they live shorter lives than women—on average a whopping five years shorter.

In many families, the father (if there is one) is like a shy, possibly mythic woodland creature: sightings are rare, and fleeting. Or they become the hapless chump of the household, the doofus dad who just doesn’t get it and can’t do DIY; the lovable loser who is part of the furniture of the great sitcom that is America. He is neutered, like the family pet. He dreams of making his own declaration of independence—of kicking over the saloon tables and riding off into the sunset, leaving women to clear up the mess. Sometimes, he actually does it.
 
Jung's father
Accompanying Freud on his trip to America was his young Swiss protegé, Carl Jung. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was something of a father figure to Jung. Jung’s real father had passed away a decade earlier, when Jung was just 21. Paul Jung was a pastor who was plagued by doubts about his faith and was something of a disappointment to his son as a spiritual guide. 

Six weeks after he died, he appeared to Jung in a dream, telling his son that he was better now and was “coming home.”

For Jung the dream was “an unforgettable experience” that forced him “for the first time to think about life after death.” From that night forward, Jung’s relationhip with his father took off. He learned more from him in death than he ever did in life. Death shall have no dominion.

Freud found such magical thinking intolerable. The two men became adversaries. Having discovered his father, Jung no longer needed a surrogate.

New world order
There’s a small but growing number of young female heads of state who manage to combine caring with capitalism, super-smart social democratically-minded pragmatists who are creating fair, functioning societies and by all accounts have done much better job of responding to the coronavirus than the US or UK. People like Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand), Mette Frederiksen (Denmark), Erna Solberg (Norway), Katrín Jakobsdóttir (Iceland) or Sanna Marin (Finland).
​
Perhaps America, too, is ready for such a president of the future rather than a relic of the past, someone smart, tough, fair, ambitious and multicultural—someone like America itself—someone like Biden’s running mate, California senator Kamala Harris, or, the next generation, 30-year-old New York Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a bartender who took on the Establishment and won (see the excellent Netflix documentary “Bringing Down the House").
 
The father within
Father hunger is far from a uniquely American phenomenon. It is perhaps the wheels of capitalism that mostly spirit fathers away from their sons and daughters. We used to work to live; ever since what Polanyi called the “great transformation,” we tend to live to work, enslaved to a rapacious, introjected Faustian machine. Fromm argued that we are now mere robots, compliant cogs in the machine, concluding: “in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.” 

A pre-coronavirus survey in January showed that three–quarters of UK workers felt stressed about work, almost two-thirds complained of feeling they are always on duty and cannot switch off, with 64 per cent reporting that their job had damaged their sleep patterns.

I see plenty of clients who never met their fathers, or never really knew them, or had fathers or stepfathers who they wished had been absent rather than violent, excessively demanding or abusive in other ways.

Many who have done everything they were supposed to do wind up in therapy in midlife because they feel like dead men walking. Success stories on paper, in person they are ghosts. They are absent from their own lives, never mind anyone else’s.

As Hollis points out, what a father cannot access in himself cannot be passed on.

Jung's “father hunger” was not satiated until he found within himself an inner father, an archetypal energy to protect, guide and offer spiritual wisdom. 

Donald Trump is not your father. Nor is Joe Biden. Nor is Boris Johnson (actually he might be: His Wikipedia entry on his children simply says “at least six”).

Your father is you.
​
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart,” wrote Jung. “Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity.

“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”

• RELATED: What can we learn from Donald Trump?

There was a time when young children were allowed to be children.

​Primary school was about learning how to play, have fun and make friends. Happy children are more likely to learn and make the world a better place than unhappy ones.
Childhood hasn’t been cancelled exactly, but it is under extreme attack, as I’ve written before (“Suffer little children”). Today's subjects: stress, self-harm, suicide.

​This week saw the launch of a campaign for universal access to school-based counselling services.
Reports the story in Schools Week: “A motion being put to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ annual conference in Liverpool, which calls for better promotion of mental health awareness in schools and a campaign for all pupils in England to have access to a counsellor, is expected to pass with the backing of the union’s leadership.”

There is certainly a need:
• One in five children have symptoms of depression and almost a third of the 16-25-year-olds surveyed had thought about or attempted suicide. In Ireland, children as young as five are thinking of suicide.
• A World Health Organisation survey in 2014 revealed a fifth of 15-year-olds in England said they had self-harmed over the previous year.
• An ATL union survey of its own members revealed that 48 per cent of respondents had pupils who had self-harmed, and 20 per cent knew pupils who had attempted suicide “because of the pressure they are under”.
General secretary Mary Bousted said it was “horrifying” that so many young people many are self-harming and contemplating suicide.

Increase paperwork until standards improve!
There is more testing, more homework, and it starts earlier. (Homework for 5-year-olds? Really?). Teachers are overworked and underappreciated (and underpaid), frantically trying to get results, write up reports, check all the boxes and generally enact the latest keep-up-with-China government initiative, all set against a backdrop of cuts in funding and services and in many cases financial hardship at home. The creative, nurturing, qualitative skill of teaching has been turned into a bureaucratic, morale-sapping, quantitative exercise in stress, low-grade trauma and Ofsted reports, one that kills joy in the classroom, erodes resilience and is creating a whole new generation of children who as adults will be susceptible to mental and physical ill-health.
There are roughly 200 governments around the world—200 education policies (or lack thereof), 200 places to look for examples of good ideas and bad ones, 200 petri dishes.
Why fawn over China—do we really want to look to an undemocratic communist government with a terrible human rights record for child-rearing tips? How about looking instead to the more relaxed approach of the Scandinavian countries, especially Finland, where education is free, safe and friendly, school starts at age 7, teachers are allowed to teach, and children are allowed to be children rather than treated as future economic units. Finland’s less-is-more education system has been described as the best in the world.

Mental-health difficulties are the leading causes of disability worldwide—almost a third of people globally will experience mood, anxiety or substance-use problems in their lifetime. The best antidote is a happy childhood.

​As noted philosopher Whitney Houston put it:
I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride 
 
--John Barton

Happiest days of your life?
There was a time when young children were allowed to be children.

​Primary school was about learning how to play, have fun and make friends. Happy children are more likely to learn and make the world a better place than unhappy ones.
Childhood hasn’t been cancelled exactly, but it is under extreme attack, as I’ve written before (“Suffer little children”). Today's subjects: stress, self-harm, suicide.

​This week saw the launch of a campaign for universal access to school-based counselling services.
Reports the story in Schools Week: “A motion being put to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ annual conference in Liverpool, which calls for better promotion of mental health awareness in schools and a campaign for all pupils in England to have access to a counsellor, is expected to pass with the backing of the union’s leadership.”

There is certainly a need:
• One in five children have symptoms of depression and almost a third of the 16-25-year-olds surveyed had thought about or attempted suicide. In Ireland, children as young as five are thinking of suicide.
• A World Health Organisation survey in 2014 revealed a fifth of 15-year-olds in England said they had self-harmed over the previous year.
• An ATL union survey of its own members revealed that 48 per cent of respondents had pupils who had self-harmed, and 20 per cent knew pupils who had attempted suicide “because of the pressure they are under”.
General secretary Mary Bousted said it was “horrifying” that so many young people many are self-harming and contemplating suicide.

Increase paperwork until standards improve!
There is more testing, more homework, and it starts earlier. (Homework for 5-year-olds? Really?). Teachers are overworked and underappreciated (and underpaid), frantically trying to get results, write up reports, check all the boxes and generally enact the latest keep-up-with-China government initiative, all set against a backdrop of cuts in funding and services and in many cases financial hardship at home. The creative, nurturing, qualitative skill of teaching has been turned into a bureaucratic, morale-sapping, quantitative exercise in stress, low-grade trauma and Ofsted reports, one that kills joy in the classroom, erodes resilience and is creating a whole new generation of children who as adults will be susceptible to mental and physical ill-health.
There are roughly 200 governments around the world—200 education policies (or lack thereof), 200 places to look for examples of good ideas and bad ones, 200 petri dishes.
Why fawn over China—do we really want to look to an undemocratic communist government with a terrible human rights record for child-rearing tips? How about looking instead to the more relaxed approach of the Scandinavian countries, especially Finland, where education is free, safe and friendly, school starts at age 7, teachers are allowed to teach, and children are allowed to be children rather than treated as future economic units. Finland’s less-is-more education system has been described as the best in the world.

U.S.A. NEWS
 
Beyoncé: 'Women have to take time to focus on our mental health'
USA TODAY
 
A throwaway line becomes a news story when it is uttered by Beyoncé. Here’s the line:
 
"We have to care about our bodies and what we put in them. Women have to take the time to focus on our mental health—take time for self, for the spiritual, without feeling guilty or selfish."

 
Unusual marriage counseling retreats
PR Newswire (press release)
 
Is your marriage all at sea? In turbulent waters? Do you feel as if you are drowning? Maybe this boat in North Carolina could help. But what an unfortunate name! Even Boaty McBoatface would be better!
 
Love Odyssey Charters has announced that it is ready to start booking new marriage counseling retreats. They have re-launched their pilothouse sailboat "Dragon Lady" after its annual maintenance. The company offers an intensive marriage intervention service for couples seeking to revive their troubled relationships. More than a gimmick, the service is based on sound neuroscience according to Dr. Bryce Kaye, psychologist and author of the book "The Marriage First Aid Kit." He explains: "We keep them moving and out of their stuck roles. We sail them from port to port where they stay in quaint B&B's, explore the historic towns and enjoy the down-east restaurants. They are surrounded by beautiful natural scenery on the rivers and sounds of North Carolina. The marriage counseling retreats take place in a cozy teak-lined pilot house of a Finnish-made sailboat. All of this puts them into an exploratory state in which their minds are more receptive to new ideas."


VIEWPOINT
 
Clare Allan:
Why words matter when it comes to mental health
The Guardian
 
It happens all the time. If not every day then at the very least several times a week. Someone describes someone else as a “nutter” or a situation as “mental”, and, listening, I am faced with a choice: to speak or not to speak.
It happens in the media too. And not just in tabloid headlines about “schizos”, “psychos” and so forth. In arts discussions on BBC Radio 4, I regularly hear the word “psychotic” used as a shorthand for lacking in conscience, or “schizophrenic”, when what is meant is in two minds.

Has the dawn of the internet age been good for our mental health? Or really bad?

There is great optimism: the digital revolution heralds a utopian, democratic, postmodern world where we are all connected, resourced, empowered, heard, transparent, authentic and free to be who we are. There was even a theory that the internet might flatten a chronically unlevel playing field, though perhaps only for those that have a smart phone and good wifi.

There is great pessimism: we’re entering a dystopian, virtual world where a person is reduced to an online profile to be swiped left or right, texts replace conversation, virtual friends replace real ones, “likes” replace activism, emoticons replace emotions (except for anxiety—lots more anxiety). Human intelligence outsourced to machines, vast amounts of time wasted, attention spans worse than a goldfish, retrograde evolution. We plug into a world wide web and watch helplessly as our humanity drains away.

To stay alive, and truly connected, we sometimes have to unplug.
​
One story this week highlights the internet as a problem for our inner worlds; another explores its claims to be a solution:

Problem?
Parent Zone’s report, The Perfect Generation: Is the Internet Undermining Young People's Mental Health?, contains the results of a survey of teachers and teenagers. Among the findings:
• 44% of teachers think the internet is bad for young people’s mental health, compared to 28% of young people.
• 91% of teachers believe the frequency of mental health issues among pupils is increasing.
• Of these issues, schools report stress and anxiety (95%), depression (70%) and self-harm (66%) as the most common issues amongst pupils.
• 84% of schools say they do not have adequate resources to deal with pupils’ mental health issues.

Vicki Shotbolt, CEO of Parent Zone, says: “The internet has destroyed any notions we might have had about keeping some things away from children until they were ‘old enough to cope’. 
“All of the indicators suggest that the prevalence of mental health problems and the severity of those problems are increasing. Some people are linking the internet to the increase.”

​The report concludes that new problems require new solutions, that schools need much better resources for responding to mental health issues, and that tech companies “should recognise both their duty of care and their unique opportunity to create online spaces that are positive and inspiring.”

​Long considered a sexist dinosaur with a cocaine habit and some bizarre ideas—does anyone believe that little boys literally fear castration, want to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers?—Sigmund Freud is enjoying something of a renaissance.

As Oliver Burkeman recently outlined, the therapy Freud invented, psychoanalysis, is at last gaining some much-needed empirical support, while at the same time the default treatment on offer in the U.K., quick fix, symptom-focussed cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), is increasingly looking like some sort of snake oil.

CBT appeals to our common sense. But common sense isn't as common as we'd like to believe.

Freud’s revelation was that we are not necessarily always logical, rational beings making optimal choices as we navigate through life’s vagaries, that we are in fact to a large extent strangers to ourselves.

Therapy today
Freud’s influence was far-reaching and profound. But he was a flawed character. You get the feeling he started to believe in his own myth. Patients often had to fit into his theories rather than the other way round. Any dissent might be met by indignant harrumphing or an ended friendship. He was capable of exploiting his position as a white male authority figure for personal ends. His work was sometimes more to do with furthering the legend of Sigmund Freud than with healing.

Some of his ideas and speculative musings have great metaphorical and symbolic value, yet he invited ridicule by insisting on speaking in absolutes and the rigid certainties of hard science. He was somewhat obsessional, detached, and ironically perhaps not so much of a people person, once writing, “I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience, most of them are trash.” The best they could hope for was “common unhappiness.” In photographs, his facial expressions run the gamut from utter foreboding to grim disdain.

Freud claimed psychoanalysis worked. He would identify unconscious motivations and unhelpful patterns, explain them to the grateful patient and, thus fortified, the patient would make better choices going forward. Except that very often they didn’t.

Today’s therapists who work at any depth will, like Freud, want to uncover your blueprint, your patterns, your unconscious processes. They might explore your childhood, interpret significant memories, analyse your dreams, which for Freud were the “royal road” to the unconscious. But they know that, while self-knowledge is helpful, it only takes a client so far. Lasting change and healing comes from the heart as well as the head, through acceptance, support and love. Research shows it is the therapeutic relationship itself which heals.

Good therapists are not inflated with their own importance, nor blinded by their own certainties. They treat clients ethically, not just because there are codes of ethics to abide by, but because ethical therapy is inherently good therapy. Above all, they are fully engaged with the client, noticing what is happening between them, and always working in partnership with them, in their best interests, rather than lording over them as they lie on the couch, prostrate and exposed (whether as a client or a therapist, I prefer to sit chair to chair and eye to eye). A good therapist cares.

It’s not enough to know and be known. To thrive in this life it helps, too, to love and be loved.