As I set up my voice recorder on Donald Trump’s desk, my hand was shaking. “Sorry about my hand,” I told him. “I have Parkinson’s.”
“Oh that’s great,” said the future U.S. president. “That gets better as you get older, right? Some of my friends have it—they do great with it.”
Of all the many varied and sometimes baffling reactions from people to news of my neurological ill-health, Trump’s was the most remarkable. Parkinson’s is degenerative? Fake news.
It was July 2014 and I was in Trump’s gilded office, high above New York’s Fifth Avenue, to interview him for the American magazine Golf Digest. I spent 90 relentless minutes in Trump’s PR wind tunnel, blasted by bluster, amplification and foghorn declarations of greatness.
It starts with extreme, absurd flattery: He introduced me to some men in suits as “the finest journalist ever to come out of the U.K.” It swiftly moves on to Trump: “There is nobody more aesthetic than me”; “There’s nobody more environmental than me”; “I have the greatest brand in the world.”
These audacious, breathtaking assertions perhaps explain Trump’s success: “Trump” is a fantasy world where anything is possible, dreams do come true, you will be rich, end everyone loves you—apart from a few “losers and haters.” 
But it also perhaps contains the seeds of what will surely be Trump’s eventual downfall. Norman Vincent Peale was a friend of Trump’s parents, a pastor and the author of “The Power of Positive Thinking.” He had a huge influence on Trump from an early age.
Positivity is great—to a point. ​Over time, however, the positive thoughts can become tyrannical. They turn into exaggerations, spin, irrational optimism, delusions and lies. You start to believe in your own bullshit. You malign and punish anyone who disagrees with you—anyone who dares to say that the emperor has no clothes. You become divorced from reality (for catastrophic examples, see subprime mortgage crisis, Bernie Madoff, Brexit, much of U.S. foreign policy and Trump’s bizarre magical-thinking response to the coronavirus). Your lies drown you.

Who lies?
The truth about lying is that it is and always has been a quintessential element of being human. Kids learn to lie as soon as they learn to talk. As adults, research shows that we lie on average once or twice a day, and while most lies are modest edits to make life’s narrative flow a little better, we do occasionally tell some whoppers too, most commonly to the person that we're closest to. Eighty-five percent of job applicants lie on their resumé.
All governments  lie.
Lying is greatly reduced by guilt and the belief that honesty is a good thing, but lies can beget lies can beget bigger lies: With compulsive liars, the brain gets used to dishonesty. We expect people to be generally trustworthy and honest; we are therefore gullible. These realities are magnified enormously by social media (see The Great Hack for a chilling insight into how elections are manipulated). Beliefs in lies that accord with our worldview—including fantastical conspiracy thories—are retained even when  proven false; sometimes those beliefs even harden on being disproved.
In July, it was reported that Trump had told more than 20,000 lies since he took office, and has averaged 23.8 lies per day since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the U.S. He does not so much lie, perhaps, as regard the quaint notion of truth as an irrelevance.
But it isn’t.
It’s not true: Parkinson’s doesn’t get better as you get older. No, Mr. President, your inauguration crowd wasn’t bigger than Obama’s (and Obama by the way was born in the United States). No, you can’t buy Greenland, or get Mexico to pay for your wall, or ask Ukraine to help your election campaign. No, global warming is not a Chinese hoax, wind farms don’t cause cancer and no, you definitely can’t treat coronavirus with bleach.
I asked Trump about his controversial golf course in Aberdeen—“one of the greatest courses ever built in the world”—and his strong-arm tactics in buying the land and overturning environmental opposition.
Trump replied: “Yeah, look, what people don’t know is that a poll came out, which said I had a 93 percent approval rating in the area. There have been stories about how incredible this has been for Aberdeen. It’s been a huge, huge success for Aberdeen. Everyone’s doing well, because of my golf course. It’s so successful, and the people love me over there. Aberdeen is booming because of me. You can’t get a hotel room because of me. The course is full, by the way, it’s doing record business. I can’t get friends of mine on the course. Look, 93 percent of the people in Aberdeen love me.”
The 2010 BBC documentary All-American Billionaire shows several clips of Trump trumpeting this 93 percent approval rating in a series of interviews. Despite repeated requests, the program’s producers never could find the source of the figure; nor could a spokesman for the Trump organization; nor could I. 
And I called the course the next day, claiming to be a golfer from Edinburgh enquiring about booking a round on the course later in the year. “Come tomorrow if you want,” I was told. “Or come at the weekend. We’ve got plenty of times available.”
A favourite tactic of trumpology is to cite unnamed sources who affirm his brilliance. He referred to some “very important and very powerful political people” in Scotland who told him that Trump is the best thing to happen to Scotland in years.
At one point, growing weary of the unrelenting sales pitch, I decided to employ a bit of trumpery on Trump by citing unnamed sources who disagree with him. I told him that I had asked a few people in the golf industry what they thought the Trump brand stood for, and that one had said: “Ostentatious wealth coupled with poor taste.”
Well, he didn’t like that. The hot air turned cold. He demanded who had said such a thing. Trump said “if you put that in, it’s no longer a good story, it’s not even a fair story.” He added that the unnamed person was “gutless” for not going on the record. 

"You can do anything"
​Trump said he thought golf should be an elitist, aspirational pursuit, a reward for being rich, despite its origins in Scotland as a game of the people. He took a business call (“Absolutely…have them do something incredible there”). He repeatedly chided me for my earlier impertinence, which he described as “do-you-beat-your-wife” journalism. There was a brief visit from his eldest son and family, Don Jr., the one who likes conspiracy theories and killing rare animals.
Then it was time to go. We walked out to the reception area and posed for photos in front of a wall covered in framed magazine covers of Trump. Trump showed me the glossy 2014 Miss USA brochure—he bought the rights to it and Miss Universe in 2002—leafing through the pages, pointing out some contestants that caught his eye. 
In his book Think Big he writes: “The women I have dated over the years could have any man they want; they are the top models and most beautiful women in the world. I have been able to date (screw) them all because I have something that many men do not have. I don’t know what it is but women have always liked it.”
Trump then proceeded to rub the side of his head against the chest of one of his secretaries, half-closing his eyes and making cooing sounds as he did so.
Many women have come forward to accuse Trump of sexual assault; in the famous “locker room banter” tape, he brags about his misconduct.
“You can do anything,” he says.
​He can say anything too, whitewashing his at-times open racism with statements such as "no one has done more for black people than me."
Many have questioned Trump’s sanity.
More than 70,000 mental health professionals signed a petition declaring “Trump is mentally ill and must be removed from office.”
The main Trump diagnosis from afar has been narcissism or, specifically, Narcissistic Personality Disorder: “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.”
Others have diagnosed Trump as a psychopath or having Antisocial Personality Disorder: “A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.” One Oxford professor used a psychometric scale to conclude that Trump is more of a psychopath than Hitler.
Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist and also Trump’s estranged niece, is scathing in her assessment of her uncle, who she called on to resign. In her book, Too Much and Never Enough, published last month, she writes about the “malignantly dysfunctional” Trump family, especially Donald’s parents who were by turn self-serving, absent or cruel.
Trump’s own self-diagnosis is that he is a “very stable genius.”
The best diagnosis, perhaps, is that he has a full-blown, chronic case of being Donald Trump.
Trump is a kind of parody of tycoonery, distillation of capitalism, an extrapolation of what you get when society genuflects at its altar; when the law of the jungle trumps human qualities like kindness, empathy, compassion, trust, integrity, vulnerability, fairness, sharing—and love.
In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, the ruthless pig Napoleon engineers a coup against his fellow revolutionary leader, Snowball. He invents the lie that Snowball—the hero of the Battle of the Cowshed—is in fact a traitor, and that he, Napoleon, is the real hero (Napoleon was nowhere to be seen during the battle). The propaganda, masterminded by the pig Squealer, is successful: Snowball is driven off the land by Napoleon’s dogs, and all the bleating sheep, now living in squalor, see Napoleon as their true leader. Orwell intended the book to be a warning: Beware the megalomaniac who lies, cheats and manipulates his way to the top, spreading fear and manipulation along the way, while lining his pockets, furthering his power, and in his wake leaving any concept of society in tatters, with the populace divided, bitter, afraid and impoverished.
Trump is not the first megalomaniac, narcissist or psychopath to occupy the White House. But he might perhaps be the first president to regard himself as bigger than the presidency.
If he loses this election—“you’re fired”—he will not go gently into a retirement of golf, opening libraries and doing good charitable works; perhaps an annual Christmas selfie with Melania offering goodwill to the world. There may be outrageous legal challenges, injunctions and counteractions. Increasingly paranoid, incoherent tweets. In the Hollywood version, Trump is led away in cuffs, unshaven, his once resplendent mane now a sudden shock of white.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

“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?

Among the tens of millions of deaths resulting from the last great flu pandemic 100 years ago—the so-called Spanish flu—was Sophie Halberstadt, the fifth of Sigmund Freud’s six children. She died on January 25, 1920.

Freud wrote to his mother the next day, informing her of the terrible news, and adding: “I hope you will take it calmly; tragedy after all has to be accepted. But to mourn this splendid, vital girl who was so happy with her husband and children is of course permissible.”

The next day he wrote to his friend, Oskar Pfister, that “sweet Sophie in Hamburg had been snatched away by pneumonia, snatched away in the midst of a glowing health, from a full and active life as a competent mother and loving wife, all in four or five days, as though she had never existed...The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us. Tomorrow she is being cremated, our poor Sunday Child!”

There was no comfort in religion for Freud—famously atheistic, he regarded a belief in god as an infantile need for a father figure. Writing of Sophie’s passing to psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, Freud said: “as a confirmed unbeliever I have no one to accuse and realize that there is no place where I could lodge a complaint.”

Sophie left behind two sons. The younger one, Heinele, was just a baby at the time. He was, wrote Freud, “physically very fragile, truly a child of the war, but especially intelligent and endearing." When he too died, three years later, of tuberculosis, Freud was undone. Another three years on, Freud wrote to fellow analyst Ludwig Binswanger: “This child has taken the place of all of my other children and grandchildren for me, and since then, since Heinele's death, I no longer take care of my other grandchildren and no longer feel any enjoyment in life either."

To British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones he wrote: “Sophie was a dear daughter, to be sure, but not a child. It was ... when little Heinele died, that I became tired of life permanently. Quite remarkably, there is a correspondence between him and your little one. He too was of superior intelligence and unspeakable spiritual grace, and he spoke repeatedly about dying soon. How do these children know?"

Freud had written about grief before as a younger, less blemished man. His landmark paper comparing mourning and melancholia (1917) said the former was a healthy, temporary depression following a loss, a process that when completed successfully allows the bereaved person to live and love again. Melancholia by contrast, more self-defeating, enduring and with no apparent conscious cause, was more problematic. Freud memorably described it as “an open wound.”

But as the losses mount, they can accumulate and sometimes be felt more keenly over time, not less, and the distinction between mourning and melancholia can become blurred by all the tears and the fog of remembrance.

In another letter to Binswanger in 1929, Freud wrote: “Although you know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It's the only way of perpetuating that love which we don't want to relinquish.”

Freud suffered in his life. A perpetual cigar smoker, he had more than 30 surgeries on a mouth cancer that caused him excruciating pain. He and his youngest daughter, Anna—a famous psychologist in her own right—fled the Nazis n 1938 and moved to London. Freud died by doctor-assisted suicide the following year, three weeks after the start of the Second World War—a war that saw his four sisters murdered in the Holocaust.

The death of Sophie, however, and of little Heinele were defining moments in the landscape of his 83 years on earth.
​
Freud learned that we never really get over life’s biggest losses. What we can do is honour the dead by living—and living well.
 

At night, the silence from the deserted streets and boarded-up bars in my neighbourhood in London feels ominous and dangerous. Out there in the darkness, unseen, the Corona virus continues its hideous invasion. It is efficient and unwavering in executing its sole purpose: to infect, to replicate, to spread, to grow.

With astonishing speed, it has taken over our hospitals, our conversations, our news feeds. It has closed our schools and factories, bankrupted businesses, ruined lives. It has made a mockery of our sophisticated systems, our plans, our hopes and dreams. It dominates, controls and threatens our very existence. It is coming for you and coming for me. It lives on death.

Never before has something so large—human civilization—been felled by something so small. Corona is a mini-vampire, sub-microscopic, a life form a hundred times tinier than even bacteria.

The only thing more viral than the virus itself is the fear that it evokes. Fear can divide and diminish us. But when we fight and conquer it together, fear can enlarge us.  The age of Corona: the best of times, the worst of times.

In this way, the human reaction to Corona has similarly been one of extremes: either very small or very large. On the one hand, never before have people been so selfish and stupid, ignoring infection-limiting guidelines, panic-buying loo rolls, even abusing and attacking people suspected of being Chinese. Yet the crisis is also bringing out the best in people. Our doctors and nurses face the daily apocalypse with selfless care, kindness and good cheer. People around the world are volunteering, donating, checking up on the vulnerable, doing what they can.

We are completely alone, quarantined, forced into self-isolation and social distance, yet at the same time perhaps never before have we felt so connected, and in need of each other. Family and community matter more than ever. And increasingly, our family is humans and our community is planet Earth.

We truly are all in this together. However bad we feel today, however afraid, anxious, depressed or bereaved, we are actually not alone.  Instead of “othering” we might focus on “togethering.”  Instead of hating, we can choose to love.  We can reach out and reach in. We can give and receive.

Wouldn’t we expect grown-up leaders to do the same? To share knowledge, ideas, information, best practices, resources? To build bridges, not walls? To unite to fight Corona, not each other?

At such times, nationality recedes. Corona isn’t interested in your country’s borders, its reputation, history or your culture. It doesn’t carry a passport nor respect your own.

Global problems need global solutions.
​
Yet some see this pandemic human tragedy not as an opportunity for solidarity but its opposite. At a time like this, it’s pitiful for governments to blame each other, for the far-right as usual to blame everything on migrants, or for Trump to blame China, Obama, Millennials, the media, and anyone else he can think of. It’s hard to imagine what kind of person responds to the current devastating death toll in Italy with celebratory, deranged Brexiteering.

While politicians prevaricate, bluster and blunder, the virus goes on killing.

History apparently teaches us nothing. The so-called Spanish flu—which probably originated in Kansas—infected a quarter of the world’s population between 1918 and 1920, and killed tens of millions of people—more fatalities than the entire First World War.

Humans and chimpanzees are 96 percent the same, according to DNA studies. How similar then are humans to each other? What is perhaps so striking about our species is not what divides us but what unites us. We are a family. We should act like one. We should respect each other and our planet. We should tackle common problems together. We should care about family members who aren’t doing so well. We might then feel compassion and concern that 70 million of our brothers and sisters are forcibly displaced people, including 26 million refugees, half of them children. We might not feel great about a world where 42 individuals have the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity, 3.7 billion souls.

​In the words of Al Pacino, “Either we heal now, as a team, or we will die as individuals.”

Sometimes, it takes a sickness for healing to happen. ​

Excuse me, are you lost?

You've been shaken by life you say? Your roadmap doesn’t seem to work anymore?

Congratulations. You are having a “midlife crisis.” They can be big or small, can happen at any age, once in a lifetime or many times (or, for the unfortunate, never at all).

Perhaps your existential crisis was triggered by an event—a bereavement, illness, accident, divorce, redundancy, financial ruin or other trauma. Or perhaps it was just life that happened to you. You set out on your grown-up journey in reasonably good cheer, full of hopes and dreams. But sooner or later all that potential and possibility got mugged by reality. And one day you found yourself trapped in an unsatisfying job, marriage or town, struggling to pay the bills, stressed, sandwiched between looking after your kids and looking after your parents. You are miserable. You are at the bottom of the U-bend of happiness. “And you may ask yourself,” as the Talking Heads song goes, “how did I get here?” And you want to be someplace else. So you go, often leaving a trail of destruction in your wake.

Dr Oliver Robinson and colleagues at the University of Greenwich recently presented their research into the midlife crisis, defined as feeling emotionally unstable, making major changes and overwhelmed for at least a year. They interviewed more than 900 adults and found that among people aged 40 to 59, 24 percent were "definitely" having some kind of crisis while 36 percent "maybe" were.

One feature of crises that Dr Robinson identified was an increased curiosity, reflected in a greater interest in people, in one's own self, ideas in general, and the world around.

​Dr Robinson says: “While crisis episodes bring distress and feelings of uncertainty, they also bring openness to new ideas and stimuli that can bring insight and creative solutions, which can move our development forward. This enhanced curiosity may be the ‘silver lining’ of crisis. Armed with this knowledge people may find the crises of adult life easier to bear.”

But a midlife crisis isn't an unfortunate affliction, an accumulation of dark clouds that come with the silver lining of enhanced curiosity while you wait for those clouds to pass. It is instead a journey beyond the clouds, from darkness to light. It is growth. It is something that is often unavoidable.

With the help of therapy, you can transform all the breakdowns into breakthroughs and experience some kind of metanoia; a renaissance.

A midlife crisis is painful. It is a clumsy grasp for a better life. In the darkness you might stub your toe and gash your shins; things can get spilled or knocked over. It can get really messy. People can get hurt. It can involve sports cars, motorbikes, tattoos and unlikely couplings, but does not have to be so dramatic or clichéd. 

​The worst of times can turn into the best of times. Your physiological decline is outweighed by your psychological advance. The death of ambition is outweighed by the birth of acceptance. Instead of trying to live up to other people’s standards or expectations, you fully accept who you are. What Jungian James Hollis calls your “provisional personality” fades away, along with all the delusions of grandeur and internalised “rules” about how you, others and life “should” be.

You start to play your own game—and play it with confidence and purpose and verve.

Your relationships improve. You learn to love—and try to make it up to the people you hurt.

​You start to love life.

Cannabis: scientists call for action amid mental health concerns
The Guardian

There has been a move lately towards some kind of greater acceptance of psychedelic drugs. Travelling in the opposite direction, however, is cannabis. As this story shows, increasingly it is acknowledged that it carries potential dangers—including psychosis—especially for frequent users. Lots of people, especially young people starting out on their journey, venturing into a bewildering, unfair, uncertain adult world, think cannabis is the answer, or an answer. But maybe it might be more helpful to engage with the question. Yes, the world is messed up. This does not mean you need to be, too. Talk to someone. There is help.  

The risks of heavy cannabis for mental health are serious enough to warrant global public health campaigns, according to international drugs experts who said young people were particularly vulnerable.
The warning from scientists in the UK, US, Europe and Australia reflects a growing consensus that frequent use of the drug can increase the risk of psychosis in vulnerable people, and comes as the UN prepares to convene a special session on the global drugs problem for the first time since 1998. The meeting in New York next week aims to unify countries in their efforts to tackle issues around illicit drug use.
While the vast majority of people who smoke cannabis will not develop psychotic disorders, those who do can have their lives ruined. Psychosis is defined by hallucinations, delusions and irrational behaviour, and while most patients recover from the episodes, some go on to develop schizophrenia. The risk is higher among patients who continue with heavy cannabis use.

• Relatedly, a story in Parent Herald highlights the findings by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) on the links between mental health, longevity and smoking: people with mental health problems have significantly lower life expectancies than the general population and much of this can be attributed to smoking.


UK NEWS

Mental health goals may not be met, audit office warns
The Guardian

A government pledge to bring mental health services up to the standards of those for physical ailments will struggle to be met, the government’s official spending watchdog has concluded. 
The National Audit Office has examined the Department of Health’s strategy for bringing a “parity of esteem” to ensure that patients do not have to wait longer for mental health therapies. New waiting time targets for those seeking help with mental illnesses were supposed to be introduced at the start of this month.
Although it is five years since the government first drew up the ambition, a report by auditors has found that the DH does not yet have a grip on how much the policy will cost. 
The report found the department and NHS England have made available £120m of additional funding over the two years 2014-15 and 2015-16.
However, most of the cost of implementing the new access and waiting time standards will be met from clinical commissioning groups’ existing budgets – at a time when the NHS is under increasing financial pressure.
The findings have emerged as more people are seeking mental health treatment from the NHS.


USA NEWS

Lawsuit: Sperm donor lied about mental health
WDSU New Orleans

He was handsome and healthy, with several degrees and a genius-level IQ. On paper, Donor 9623 embodied the best genetics had to offer. At least 36 children were born using his donated sperm. According to a lawsuit filed by three families, it took almost 14 years before the donor's true identity was revealed: A schizophrenic college dropout with a felony conviction. 
Families that used his sperm are suing the Georgia-based sperm bank Xytex Cryo International, saying it should have done a better job of vetting its sperm donors.


WORLD NEWS

Grandmother benches, smartphone apps and other mental health boosts from around the world
World Economic Forum

More than 10% of the total disease burden in low and middle income countries (LAMIC) is due to mental health disorders, yet they receive less than 1% of many of these countries’ health budgets. A striking example of this is in Zimbabwe, where only 12 psychiatrists serve a national population of 15.3 million.
Considering this huge under-investment, a key question is how to provide support for people suffering from mental ill health when resources are scarce.
These five collaborative, low-cost care packages - delivered by lay people who are trained and supervised by professionals - all have the potential to close the treatment gap, and improve the mental health of hundreds of thousands of people.


Education, trauma counseling key to helping Syrian refugees in Lebanon
Catholic News Service

The more than 1.06 million Syrians who remain in neighboring Lebanon face continuing struggles with war trauma, dwindling funds, and a very uncertain and often dangerous future. 
"They have internalized the violence and loss in the conflict in Syria. Perhaps they saw loved ones killed, their houses destroyed in front of their eyes, or even being uprooted from their country has caused trauma," Monette Kraitem, a Lebanese psychologist working the Catholic charitable agency Caritas, told Catholic News Service.
She and fellow Caritas psychologist Christelle Ltief have so far helped 1,500 Syrian refugee children and women sheltering in this part of the Bekaa Valley to process the pain at the Caritas Lebanon Migrant Center in the nearby town of Taalabaya.
"We try to help the children deal with their trauma by expressing their feelings" through "play, art and music therapy, relaxation and respiration techniques, and individual and group therapy, where children can say how they feel without being judged," Ltief told CNS.


Why Pakistan needs to embrace Arts Therapy
The Nation

In the past decade, the field of Art Therapy has gained strong ground in the West and is being taught at the university level, offering graduate and post-graduate programs. In Pakistan, however, the awareness is gradually increasing among masses and the future looks promising. Asim Amjad, Samina Jamshed, Ufaq Ehsan and Shazia Mohamad are some of the iconic Pakistani Art Therapists who often arrange Art Therapy workshops and seminars for kids throughout the country.

VIEWPOINTS

Why do people have affairs?
The School of Life

Do you tend towards clingy neediness? Or cold aloofness? Relationships tiptoe along the knife edge of each person's need for closeness at times, and distance at others. When it gets out of kilter, the spectre of an affair looms (Dumas said marriage is a heavy burden that requires two people to carry it, and sometimes three). This new 3-minute film from The School of Life explains: "A lot of the reason why people have affairs isn’t to do with random excess horniness. It’s do to with issues of closeness and distance."


We need to talk about mental health
Financial Times

The most striking result that emerges from surveys of mental health at work is the awkwardness. For all the progress made in taking the stigma out of mental health problems, a large number of people just do not want to talk about it.
31%
would not feel able to talk to their manager if they had a mental health problem
A survey last year for Time to Change, a programme run by the charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, found that 28 per cent of people in England would feel uncomfortable asking someone close to them about their mental health problems. Why? Because it would make the other person feel uncomfortable, they would not know what to say or because they would not feel able to help.
The same embarrassment surrounds surrounds mental health at work, one focus of the “wellbeing” category of the Responsible Business Awards. In another survey conducted for Mind by YouGov in 2014, 31 per cent said they would not feel able to talk to their manager if diagnosed with a mental health problem. Some 33 per cent said that if they told their boss that they were stressed at work, they felt their ability to do the job would be questioned.


11 things to do daily
Bustle

A good roundup of pretty obvious things we could be doing to feel better. It's common sense...yet not all that common,

When it comes to taking care of ourselves, we often focus more on our physical body. However, maintaining your mind is just as important, and there are things we should be doing everyday to improve our mental health. Just like our body needs to get into a routine, so does our brain, and taking the steps to ensure our optimal mental health can have us feeling just as healthy as eating a good kale salad.

This week saw a new study on global mental health. To no one’s surprise, it turns out that if you are poor, you are less likely to have access to help.

The research, published in Lancet Psychiatry, argues for greater funding, claiming that the economic benefits of treatment greatly outweigh the costs: For every dollar spent on improving treatment for depression and anxiety, the return on the investment could be fourfold or higher in terms of increased productivity and health.
"This analysis sets out, for the first time, a global investment case for a scaled-up response to the massive public health and economic burden of depression and anxiety disorders," write the authors, led by Dan Chisholm of the World Health Organization's Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse.
 
Almost a third of humans experience common psychological ill-health at some point during their lifetime. The vast majority live in poor countries, but clinical care resources are predominantly found in wealthy countries. Low- and middle-income countries spend less than $2 per year per person on the treatment and prevention of mental ill-health compared with an average of more than $50 in high-income countries.
According to Nature: “A teenager in Afghanistan seeking mental-health care does so in a country that has 1 psychiatrist for every 10 million people, not 1 per 5,000, as in, for instance, Belgium. But no country has sufficient numbers of trained mental-health-service providers. Nearly one-third of the US population lacks adequate access to mental-health-care providers. There are similar shortages in parts of countries as diverse as Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Japan, New Zealand and Slovakia. Even in wealthy countries, 40–60% of people with severe mental disorders do not receive the care they need.”
​
Mental health has received very little attention in terms of large-scale global health initiatives compared to say malaria, or HIV. That is slowly changing. There is now some political consensus around mental healthcare, both at home—it was a hot topic in the General Electionlast year—in America, and transnationally. It’s terrific that as of last September, mental health is now included among the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.
There are some impressive programmes that aim to create a more level playing field. The UK-funded Programme for Improving Mental Health Care (PRIME), for example, is a consortium of organisations brought together to scale up mental-health services in Ethiopia, India, Nepal, South Africa and Uganda, taking an informed, integrative approach in these countries with help from community advisory boards that include district health administrators, service users, traditional healers and police.

All well and good. But there are questions. Take 5:
1. Is this all window dressing, a token public relations exercise that diverts attention away from the real business of globalisation—making money and preserving power by and for those that already have it?
2. Do the big pharmaceutical companies have a hand on the lever, attempting to create and colonise large new markets for their patented medications?
3. Is the need for some kind of responsible global governance being served by unelected bodies like the World Bank, IMF and WTO which cater to the “prosperous few” at the expense of the “restless many,” in the words of Noam Chomsky, or like the UN’s WHO which, in this latest report at least, likes to regard people as mere economic units?
4. Could global mental health programmes become a form of cultural imperialism and control, as some have argued, trampling over local norms and practices and instead imposing monolithic “one-size-fits-all” western solutions?
5. If you don’t have access to drinking water say, or your children are starving, doesn’t counselling come fairly low down on the hierarchy of needs? The Indian government offers counselling to help farmers, for example--5,650 Indian farmers committed suicide in 2014, an average of 15 a day. But perhaps what they most need is better financial security. And some rain.

​Overall, the growing domestic, international and global attention paid to mental health is a good thing. But the implementation needs to be done the right way. Culturally-sensitive, local, diverse “bottom-up” mental health programmes are better than imposed, dogmatic, uniform, “top-down” western solutions. The book “Global Mental Health” recommends the liberal use of anthropologists and indigenous experts.
And underscoring all initiatives should be a recognition that mental ill-health is often the symptom, and economic disadvantage the cause. Not the other way round.
Whatever your language, it’s good to talk. Every country on earth could use more counsellors.
But it’s hard to pursue happiness, or perhaps Freud’s rather more modest goal of “common unhappiness,” without safety, food and water, and a roof over your head.
No amount of counselling will take away poverty and inequality.

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