personal

Everyday madness

Do you ever get days where you look at a chair, and then say the word “chair” to yourself and wonder how those things can be connected, the object and some random sound we make with our mouths? Or you are driving down the motorway and suddenly think “I’m propelling myself along in a metal box in some arbitrary location on a big blue sphere that is in itself a tiny arbitrary point floating in a massive pattern of spheres that make up the universe” and then wonder why it is we’ve developed such a complicated and unequal society that fills all its time with busy work in the pursuit of status and possessions? I do. I’m pretty sure lots of other people do to. But I’m not sure I’ve ever checked. It isn’t an easy conversation to start as our thoughts are so subjective that there is always the possibility that explaining them to someone else they would just assume we were a bit crazy, whether in the informal lay use of the word, or in a mental health setting as being symptoms of disordered thinking. So what is normal and what isn’t?

Do you ever feel a compulsion not to tread on the cracks in the pavement, or to salute a magpie to ward off bad luck? Do you feel a sort of temptation to set off fire alarms, pull the emergency stop on trains, or open the emergency exit on planes? Do you feel a compulsion to reply to your satnav? Do you ever lie in bed wondering if you locked up for the night? Do you ever go back to check if you locked the door or turned off the cooker or your hair straighteners after you’ve left the house, or phone home to hear the answerphone to be sure the house is still standing? Do you get transitory urges to drive off the road, or into pedestrians or obstacles? Or to jump in front of trains or traffic? Or to throw your keys or phone off a bridge or out a window? Or have a transient desire to do something shocking like swear in church, laugh at a funeral, flash at your boss, stab someone when you are holding a knife, throw your drink in someone’s face? Get images of the harm or death of a loved one? Or unwanted thoughts about sex? If you do, you are far from alone as these are commonly experienced intrusive thoughts that are reported by 90% of the population.

When we had a thread about normalising unusual thoughts, members of the forum gave even more random examples. One person didn’t like the way sunflowers looked at her and once threw her chips at one and ran away laughing. One person heard music coming out of the back of her head, whilst another heard the doorbell repeatedly ring. Another person warns her husband that she might have an urge to kill him during the night. One person can’t shake the idea that cows are just playing dumb and have been gossiping about her before she arrives and will continue when she leaves. One imagines flying insects are like dirty old men rubbing their hands on their thighs. Another sometimes has to put her hands out in front of her to check for glass doors she hasn’t seen when walking down the pavement. Many report urges to do cartwheels, handstands or forward rolls at work or in public. One constantly made bets with the devil in his head in which the wager was years of life-expectancy. One shouts obscenities loudly into the wind whilst cycling along. Quite a few of us anthropomorphise inanimate objects, from imbuing toys with personalities, to feeling sorry for dented tins, weak seedlings, or the families of insects we kill.

Three people feared seeing dead bodies when opening toilet cubicles, and one would imagine worst case scenarios like people dying in fires. One had the sense a person was standing next to them that they could catch glimpses of out of the corner of their eye. One asks ghosts to disappear before turning on the the lights if she returns home after dark. One can’t look in the mirror in case something comes out and eats her, and quite a few can’t look out of windows after dark. Several adults are afraid of monsters under the stairs or bed, or snipers/wasps hiding in low windows. And many people have particular rules about counting or numbers, such as wanting the volume to be on an even number or a multiple of five. Many people have strong desires for neatness or order, including one with a desire to tuck in other people’s clothing labels if they are visible.

Three people report that “If I’m somewhere important where my phone really does need to be on silent I wont just turn it to silent mode. I don’t trust it. I’ll turn it off completely, take the battery out and store the battery and the phone is separate compartments of my handbag. Just in case the battery decides to be sneaky, ‘falls’ into the phone, the phone switches itself on, turns to loud mode and horror of horrors – rings”. A fellow clinical psychologist explained that as a child “I wouldn’t look through a dark window once I was in bed, as I believed that we were experiments/pets and that the world got rolled up when we were asleep for cleaning, and that if any of us pets/subjects found out about it we would be removed from the world/pet enclosure/experiment”. Another was convinced he had telekinesis and could make his lampshade rock from side to side.

And then there are numerous sensory distortions. Some people reported feeling their time was going faster or slower than the rest of the world, or feeling like they were very small or large compared to usual. Quite a few people reported synaesthesia (sensations from other modalities, like seeing the months of the year as having a shape, or letters as having colours). Many people get “earworms” where particular pieces of music play repeatedly in their heads at certain times. Some have a continuous internal radio station of music, which they walk, chew or tap along to.

Personally, I get what I used to call “sicky vision” as a kid. If I have even a mild fever I don’t like the textures of certain things, so wallpaper with vertical bits of string or wood-chip can look ‘itchy’ or things that are crinkled can look ‘spiky’. I don’t really quite have words for it, but they become uncomfortable/stressful to look at. It is an exaggeration of the trypophobia I get at other times (an exaggerated disgust sensation from looking at organic holes – but please don’t google it unless you have no problems with disgust at all, as you may also get an unexpectedly strong reaction). As a result I struggle with the appearance/feel of my own intermittent and fairly mild pompholyx eczema, and when I had to put ointment on my children and husband’s extreme outbreak of chickenpox a few years ago I could see/feel the texture every time I shut my eyes for weeks, and it even prevented me from reading text comfortably as it would distort into bobbles!

So what is it that distinguishes all of these odd thoughts, compulsions or sensory distortions from those which get labelled as psychosis or OCD? I think there are a few distinguishing features. First, the impact of the thoughts and experiences on us: If we are otherwise functioning well in our lives, and are able to notice, accept and dismiss the thought or experience, then they are not intrusive enough to be framed by us or others around us as problematic. Second, the meaning we give to them: If we understand them as transitory, or as a reaction to stress, exhaustion or particular circumstances (or substances) we can apply more self-compassion and are less likely to be scared by the experience or to feel they are outside of our control. Likewise the variation in meaning given to unusual experiences in different cultural group (whether a source of insight, or a sign of possession or black magic, for example). Thirdly, these thoughts/experiences are more likely to be present and construed as symptoms in people who have already got complicated lives and multiple stressors, or are subject to prejudice. With a history of trauma, a lack of coping skills, the stress of socioeconomic deprivation or within certain cultural groups, the response to such experiences may be more overt or distressed, and may compound other problems. Finally, some people are already visible to professionals or in medical settings that make diagnostic labels more likely.

When a CP from the forum described the experiences and behaviours I have listed above to various professionals working in adult mental health services, the assumption was that the person described would surely be a patient with psychosis or OCD. Many were surprised to hear that these were descriptions from healthy adult professionals working in mental health who have never had diagnostic labels applied to them. However, interestingly, when the same question was asked of carers, they were much more empathic and less judgemental and made no such assumptions.

I was reminded of the seminal Rosenhan study in which eight researchers were admitted to inpatient services as pseudo-patients to study the environment. The admissions were triggered by describing auditory hallucinations, but as soon as they were admitted they no longer feigned any symptoms. Nonetheless, all were given psychoactive medication, and seven of the eight were given a diagnosis of schizophrenia that was assumed to be in remission by discharge (the other was diagnosed as ‘manic depressive psychosis’). Again, the patients recognised that the researchers were imposters, but the staff pathologised ordinary behaviours to fit with their pre-existing beliefs about the nature of psychosis (including describing the researcher’s note taking as “pathological writing behaviour”). Rosenhan and the other pseudopatients reported an overwhelming sense of dehumanisation, severe invasion of privacy, and boredom while hospitalised. Interestingly, a hospital then challenged the research team saying they could recognise any fakers easily. Out of 193 new patients in the study period, the staff identified 41 as potential pseudopatients, with 19 identified by two or more members of staff. However, no pseudopatients had been sent at all. Rosenham concluded “it is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals”.

It is another salient reminder of how easy it is to make negative judgements about people according to very superficial distinguishing features, and how much it is part of human nature to fear difference. Whether we are judging “schizophrenics” as a group, or Syrians, or Republicans, or Muslims, or benefits claimants, or European immigrants, or the people who voted Leave in the EU election, it is easy to make assumptions about people that we outgroup and to forget that we are all human, and all trying to do the best we can in our own circumstances and based on our own experiences.

Our own quirks of thought and behaviour are another good reminded that we are not so different. Mental health diagnoses are convenient labels for clusters of behaviours and reported differences in how people think and feel. But they reflect much bigger stories than just our biology. And people are still people.The baby pulled from the rubble in Aleppo could grow up indistinguishable from my child, if they had the same life experiences. The person with the label of psychosis, the scars from self-harm and substance misuse and the long stay in the mental health unit, would have had a different life path if they had been born into different circumstances. Likewise you and I would likely show equal levels of distress if we experienced similar trauma. As Jo Cox put it so well, we have far more in common than that which divides us.

Exploiting the ignorant: From quack cures to the rise of Trump

I was reading today about a man called Braco (pronounced Bratzoh) who is the centre of a personality cult that believes his “gaze” (looking out into a crowd and not speaking for 5-7 minutes) can heal health problems and have a positive impact on people’s lives and the lives of their loved ones. He does free online gaze sessions, and cheap or free local events all around the world in order to market books, DVDs and items of jewellery containing his golden “sun symbol” (many for $500+ each). I see nothing more than a man who learnt how profitable it was to be a fake healer from a mentor in a similar line of work, and took on his audience and methodologies (but without the stress of having to give any advice, or the risks of making any claims about himself that could be proven false).

Yet, nonetheless he has a plentiful audience of believers. People claim remarkably diverse experiences and attribute all kinds of random positive events in their lives to his gaze. One contributor believes that Braco cured the hearing loss of a newborn whose parent and grandparents went and gazed (and bought the $500+ trinket). Unknown to them, 13% of children identified with newborn hearing loss spontaneously recover, without any superstitious interventions. It reminds me of Tim Minchin’s fantastic song Thank You God [link contains swearing] that describes alternative explanations for a “miracle” in which a lady’s cataracts are “cured by prayer”. These include spontaneous remission, misdiagnosis, a record-keeping glitch, a lie or misunderstanding. He mentions the power of confirmation bias, groupthink, and simplistic ideas of causality based on temporal correlation (as was the case with autism and MMR). On the internet there is also the significant possibility that the review is fabricated.

The same story repeats all over the world. People are paying something for nothing more than woo in numerous seances, palm readings, psychics, mediums, crystal therapies, quack nutritionists, chiropractors, reiki, all energy therapies, coffee enemas, homeopathy, reflexology, magical weight loss products, Bach flower remedies, most vitamin supplements, magnetic items making health claims and anything that promises to “detox”. In fact, any one of us could invent our own snake-oil or novel form of quackery. And then we could invent some titles and qualifications and go on TV as an “expert” to promote them. The trade is worth in excess of £500 million per year in the UK alone. Quackwatch is a good reference point – I check doubtful health claims there, just as I check doubtful internet stories on Snopes.

We are 250 years past the enlightenment in which the ideas of reason and science supposedly gained supremacy over superstition and liberty progress and tolerance gained traction over dogma. Yet here we are in so many ways believing in magic and witch hunts. The public doesn’t understand science, is wedded to superstition, or simply has overwhelming credulity and a lack of critical thinking. This is the same culture that created plausibility for Andrew Wakefield’s weird “measles immunisation” recipe that contained his own blood and goat colostrum and that pushed an appropriately skeptical professor of complimentary and alternative medicine into early retirement because he wouldn’t endorse homeopathy and reflexology on the NHS.

No wonder in the Brexit campaign and in Trump’s electoral campaign there has been such wide deviation from the facts. The public have been told to disregard experts and go with their gut feelings, or with the guy who they could imagine meeting in the pub. That is a very poor way to judge the evidence base, and (as we have discovered with Brexit) a very easy way to be sold a pup. I can’t understand why it is not a crime, or even a disgrace, to lie to the public. Why were there not enquiries and reprimands for people who knowingly lied about the £350 million pounds a week extra that was supposed to go to the NHS if we left Europe? The answer is because we have better protections against a drink being sold with false weight loss claims than we do over vote-changing political claims.

It is interesting to explore why people don’t trust experts, and here it seems that there are a few dimensions that are important. Knowledge is only trusted if it is coupled with a perception of benevolence, and presented in words that people understand and don’t feel patronised by. It is all too easy for people with expertise to use jargon or technical terminology that makes sense in their field, for readers of the journals they publish in or in conversation with their peers, but that makes the content inaccessible to lay people, who then think of the expert as being part of an intellectual elite who are sneering down at them from a position of superiority.

And some people seem to deliberately manipulate any show of expertise to make it seem that particular commentators are not connected with the experience of ‘the man on the street’. Michael Gove (linked above) was probably the pinnacle of this, but Trump also directly appeals to this distrust of experts, and seems to bank on his audience not caring about his content being proved to be factually incorrect later down the line. Tim Minchin captured my feelings and frustrations about this rising anti-intellectualism (and Brexit and even Donald Trump in passing) here [contains swearing, I’d recommend watching from 24 to 35 mins in].

But it is becoming more and more common. I was listening to the radio earlier this week and flicked over from Radio 4 to Radio 2 to hear the host Vanessa Feltz tell a labour party spokesman that the word “narrative” when used in context, with four repetitions of the word “story”, was jargon that was beyond her and her listeners and proudly proclaimed that it was similar to the teaching that went over her head at university (listen at 15:00 for just over a minute). She seemed to want him to pitch his vocabulary lower, whilst showing her own insecurity about wanting to be clever by using the word “elucidate” herself in her instruction to him to do so! It was particularly notable in contrast to Radio 4, where the words that she criticised, such as “managerial”, “technocratic” and “narrative” would not stand out in the discussion or require definition. Maybe it is just a mark of my age and changing listening preferences, but I would always prefer to have conversation pitched at the level that I learn from, than patronisingly dumbed down.

It is also a reminder that, despite a natural tendency to consider ourselves pretty much average at everything, very often we fail to recognise our own levels of skew within the population. My politics are left of average, my income and intellect above average, just as my physical fitness is below average. But this deviation from the norm does not stand out to me as I have sought out a peer group of other professional, intellectual lefties. In my peer group, the remain preference was so strong that the vote to leave the EU was quite a shock!

Similarly, despite having written a book to try to make the scientific knowledge around attachment and developmental trauma accessible to care givers and professionals from other fields, and working hard to make psychological knowledge available through this blog and various forum posts, not everyone finds my writing accessible. For every ten positive views of the book there is one person who feels I pitched it too high. I’m sure I’m as guilty as the next person of knowing the meaning I intend to convey, and therefore not always recognising when I have not communicated this effectively. So please do point it out to me!

 

 

Starting over: Selecting offices and staffing

After the stress of my last blog about problems with the offices we were leaving in Milton Keynes*, I was keen to make sure that we set up a base I felt really comfortable with up in Derbyshire, and gather a great team up here. I viewed a lot of potential offices and tried to really get a good gut feeling about where we would belong. The plan is to rent an office or set of offices that has scope to expand if we secure the grant we have applied for, or other external funding that lets us expand more quickly.

The first place I viewed was a serviced office centre. The rooms were pleasant and good value (less than half the price per square foot that I had been paying further south) but the site was quite generic and a looked a bit warehouse-like. More importantly it was on the far side of a market town with quite a lot of traffic, and further from the motorway. I then viewed an office suite in a pretty restored station building on a quiet branch line. Despite this being my favourite option, it turned out only a single room was available there, and the tenants who had the rest of the building were spilling out into all the public areas, which were filled with their storage and materials. Plus the room didn’t have an individual lock – and I’ve learnt to be wary of that!

The next two places advertised were full, despite having road signage, listings on Rightmove and vacancies marked on their websites. The next place was a dilapidated shop with offices above, but transpired to be under offer, and to need a lot more work than would be possible in our timescales. The next a single room retail space, with no sink or loo unless you went into the next door building, that was quite a walk from the nearest parking. A small office building for sale, but cramped in a back street in a town slightly further from my preferred areas. Then a lovely large set of rooms in a very smart building with dedicated parking and reception facilities, that became less attractive as the already high rent then gained a service charge, and charges for the phone/broadband and was then ruled out by access only being permitted when members of staff from the main business were present, and the building being locked up at 3.30pm on a Friday!

Then a small set of offices that were a bit too far away and had a contract with an excessive notice period. Next was a bright but slightly run down set of rooms over a letting agent, at a good value inclusive price, but with slightly dingy rear access. Then we viewed another office building that was for sale, but was too big, over priced and came with only a single parking space. Then another serviced office building in a massive complex that contained function rooms and all sorts of entertainment facilities, but had limited parking and was rather dirty and dated looking. Again there were all sorts of extra charges for phone/internet, insurance and a per person charge per month for furniture. However, some of the rooms were nice, and they did come with two parking spaces right outside. Whilst viewing we also met a potential business advisor and heard about the exciting collaborations within the complex, but somehow it just didn’t feel right.

It is always very interesting when your head and your guts give you different messages. Logically the last place had the most to offer, yet it was the rooms above the letting agent that gave me the best feeling, and the owner talked the least and was the most straightforward. A bit of negotiation later, and he had agreed to redecorate the rooms, provide some furniture and jet-wash the rear access, as well as hanging a door so that we could still access the toilets and kitchen, but other staff and customers could not come up to our offices uninvited. Having learnt my lesson, this time the repairs will be specified on the contract as being completed before rent is due!

I also interviewed for a new assistant psychologist for our Liverpool contract. The project is going to be in collaboration with my peer supervisor, so that feels like an extra benefit to me, as I get to spend more time with him. We even had fun interviewing, in the lovely Quaker building in the town centre, and ate delicious food at Mowglis. When it came to the applicants we interviewed, we were really pleased to be spoilt for choice. We felt that three of the candidates would have been great for the job, and were able to select someone we are really comfortable to add to the team.

I have also put up an advert for a new administrator. Having had both brilliant and awful experience of non-clinical staff in the past, I wanted to make sure we recruit the former. This person will be the hub in the centre of the business, around which the rest of us rotate, and they need a mixture of administrative, financial and interpersonal skill, with the ability to keep me and the business organised! So I put a lot of effort into the job description and person specification. It is the first time I have used online recruitment advertising, so fingers crossed we find the right person. The applications seem to be numerous and impressive, so we are off to a good start.

Also during the summer I met an inspirational potential collaborator, so I am hopeful that I can negotiate a productive way we can work together, whether he joins us as a part time COO, or whether we make a service level agreement between our two organisations. I only hope that I can find a few more clinical psychologists to join the team, as we continue to have more requests for our input than we can fulfil.

Finally, keep your fingers crossed for me, as I will hopefully hear back soon about the DfE grant that I applied for to expand our pilot of outcome measurement and our psychologically informed care pathway!

*Thankfully I have now resolved the issues with Regus, so I have edited the previous blog to reflect this. I don’t normally edit things I have posted, because I prefer to write honestly and leave what I say on the record. However, it was a condition of the resolution that I did so. I thought long and hard about it and concluded that this blog and my social media is not the right place for making an angry noise, and that I could tell the story equally accurately in a slightly less detailed and more dispassionate way.

Reflections on renting an office from Regus

Regus rent serviced office buildings. If you want the short version of this blog it is this: I had a really bad experience and it took far too long for them to resolve it, so I would never use them again. I therefore recommend that you think very hard before you sign up with them, and ensure anyone you know who ever considers renting an office in a serviced office building does likewise.

However, they have now resolved my complaint, thanks to their head of customer service, Suzanne Jackson. So if you aren’t getting anywhere with anyone else, I’d drop her a note instead. Unfortunately it was a condition of the resolution we agreed that I would remove the majority of this blog and my other negative social media comments about them. But I’ve left the gist of the story below.

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At the time of viewing, the room offered to us was being used as a sales area and opened onto the reception with glass doors (transparent, with no lock, and a foot wide gap from floor to ceiling where a glass panel was missing). It was also full of Regus sales materials (they filled the only storage cupboard in the room, and were also in several boxes on the floor and piles on the desks). I explained we needed a room immediately in which to base some of my staff, that was suitable for conducting psychological therapy and specialist parenting assessments for the family courts (ie highly confidential work). I was told that the room would be perfect for this use. We even discussed how my administrator could move out to use the work pods during therapy sessions, so there is no doubt the sales person knew the nature of the work we undertake.

I was told that the room would be properly boxed in and secured and emptied within a fortnight, and then I’d get the first month rent free to settle in, if I signed for a year. All wifi use was included, even during the free period until the office was complete and the “moving in month”. The salesman told us to store our furniture, computers and files in a cupboard in the building from that day, as the office would be available imminently.

Unfortunately it was not. It was left open with no visual or auditory barrier to the reception and no lock. And they started to bill us for rent, and wifi, and late fees even though the work was not done and we were promised free wifi, and had never had prior invoices to make the later ones “late”. So I complained repeatedly. Still, none of the required work was done for the whole of May and the whole of June and most of July.

In total Regus took 11 weeks and 17 complaints from me to put a lock on the door and seal up the gap, but over the whole 16 weeks before we gave up on it and rented rooms elsewhere the office was never made confidential (even by something as simple as opaque sticky-back-plastic on the glass) so my business was unable to deliver an essential component of our work and we had to move out before they completed the promised repairs. They threatened to lock in my notes and materials, and sent threatening letters and emails about unpaid bills, despite the fact that no money was ever due and they had failed to live up to the contract we agreed of the work to be completed before any rent was due.

Over time the lack of access to a suitable office became a critical issue for the company, and as this coincided with me moving to a different area of the UK I was forced to conclude it was no longer viable for my business to continue to work in Milton Keynes and I had to restructure the company. Thankfully I have a trusted colleague to pass therapy cases onto, so no clients will be left without a service, but for the business it has been nothing short of catastrophic.

Regus made it very difficult to leave, and tried to say that we not only owed rent but were bound in contract for 12 months. Invoices were never amended. Complaints were not responded to, or maintained the same unreasonable position. However, after I wrote this blog, became noisy on social media and contacted the head of customer services, things were finally resolved to my satisfaction at the end of September. They accept that the room was not ready for use quickly enough, and have confirmed in writing that I am no longer in contract with them and no rent is outstanding.

There is more to the story (and a whole other story about the first time I rented a room there and was subject to a sophisticated robbery and fraud scam) and I am far from alone in having negative experiences (check their twitter feed and google for reviews). However, although I might be stubborn I try not to hold grudges and at least it has a happy ending now. Hopefully I will never have to deal with them again.

Update: They continued to try to chase “unpaid rent” for several months after we left, despite me referring them back to their own decision that nothing was due. They even referred the matter to a debt collection agency. However, Suzanne Jackson did eventually resolve this, and as of Feb 2017, I think this whole episode has been closed.

Folding Stars – a blog about loss

Tomorrow is a promise to noone

I would do anything for another minute with you because
It’s not getting easier, it’s not getting easier

I hope that you’re folding stars

Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro sang these powerful words about the death of his mother, Eleanor, in the song Folding Stars (I’ve always assumed the title is a reference to her doing patchwork). And this week I’ve been thinking a lot about people who have died myself.

I think it started because I watched the songaminuteman videos and read their facebook page in which a man about my age, Mac, is singing with his 80 year old father, Ted, who has dementia. Mac described on their justgiving page (which has nearly reached £100,000 for the Alzheimer’s Society) how difficult it is for him and his mother to cope with Ted’s aggressive and disoriented behaviour, and how singing has been a great reprise from that. Ted has been a club singer and Butlins host for much of his life. Singing is clearly something he loves and shares with his son. You can see from the videos that as soon as the backing music starts, it is something he immediately connects with, recalling the lyrics of a huge range of songs, and the banter and demeanor that used to accompany it.

That reminded me of my paternal grandfather, Jack, who died in 2009. He was also a talented singer, who had the opportunity to make a professional career from it had he been willing to emigrate to America, although he chose to remain in South Africa and have a more conventional lifestyle, running a shop and later working in commercial real estate. I didn’t ever get to know him very well, as my parents had emigrated to England before I was born, and so we would typically spend two to four weeks per year with my grandparents, alternating visiting them in South Africa with them visiting us in England. After I was twelve and needed an adult seat on the plane, the cost of flights became prohibitive and we only visited South Africa once when I was a teenager, and I can only remember them coming to visit twice more. When I got married in 1997 they were unable to come to the wedding as my grandfather had recently had a stroke, so they sent us the airfare to come and visit them the following year. I took my husband to see South Africa and meet my grandparents, and my parents overlapped with us for a week during the trip to show us some of the places they had grown up. We also visited Cape Town and the Kruger Park.

After that trip I heard about their decline  through my parents. My grandmother sank gradually into Alzheimer’s style dementia, to the point she is now almost non-verbal and needs constant nursing care, and my grandfather had the stepwise decline of multi-infarct dementia, with Lewy body type hallucinations, until his death 7 years ago. I don’t have a very clear sense of Jack as a person from my childhood. I can recall his wry smile, the habitual sequence of cleaning out and restocking his pipe with fresh tobacco and the pungent smell of him smoking it. I can recall the paranoia and acceptance of racism that years of living in South Africa had normalised contrasting with the fact that they had been very much ahead of their time in how they had supported Ben, their black “garden boy”, to have accommodation and paid employment in Johannesburg, rather than having to commute from Soweto (the nearest “township” or black slum). I can recall the taste of sugar coated dried fruit sweets in various colours and flavours, and the enormous avocados that would fall from their tree. I remember trying to explain how to use their new video recorder and remote control. I can picture the pale blue of the air letters he used to send to us regularly, and the way we would all take turns to talk on the phone to them when it was the birthday of any member of the family, long before the internet and skype made the world seem smaller. Overall I remember him being a bit of a grumpy man, who was anxious about single lane country roads, and didn’t like my grandmother’s religious rituals.

I also remember being unkind to him once as a child, and being told off by my parents. The memory is of being quite young and making a den with my cousin out of blankets hung between furniture in my grandparents’ back room. We would have been about seven or eight years old, and we were pretending to be cats. I don’t remember what my grandfather said exactly, but I remember that he said something mean that implied he thought our den was stupid. We wrote him a note that said it didn’t matter what he thought because he was a big rat who wasn’t welcome in our den, and signed it “the two cats”. As a kid it seemed like a fair response in kind, but my parents said that although he was grumpy it was a mean thing to do because he was old and had arthritis, and I remember feeling ashamed. As an adult I gained another layer of empathy, as I learnt about how much happened during my grandfather’s lifetime. How as an infant he had to flee persecution in Eastern Europe with his parents and move to South Africa where they had to learn English as a third language and live in a single room. He used to study by torchlight so as not to wake his father who worked night shifts. As my grandparents reached adulthood and got married, Jack had to do military service, and there is a photograph from when he was a fitness instructor in the army. They lived through the second world war and heard about how two thirds of the Jews in the world were murdered in the holocaust, including 91% of the Yiddish speaking Ashkenzim to which they belonged. They saw the inaction of the world turning a blind eye for far too long. Then after the war, as they became parents, they saw the survivors return to their community with tattooed numbers from concentration camps. Having been brought up as a British atheist I have no idea how that must have felt, but it can’t have been easy.

I heard about my grandfather dying two days before I gave birth to my twin daughters after a very complicated pregnancy, at a time when I had enormous other stressors in my life and I was caught up in a protective bubble. And I just accepted it as a fact and got on with everything that was going on. I don’t think I had cried about it before this week. But I am sad that I didn’t get a chance to ask him more about his life or to hear more of him singing. Nor did I express my thanks for how much he changed the path of my life before I was ever born. It is an impressive achievement to progress in a single generation from being immigrants in a single room learning English as a third language to owning a home and a business and funding your child to complete university and travel to England for postgraduate study. He was probably the reason that my parents were able to choose their own path as London hippies, and therefore a big influence on my sense of identity. I’d like to think he’d appreciate how badly my Dad sat shiva with my much more devout aunt, given his disdain for religious ritual.

I had also lost a colleague and friend who had died unexpectedly a week before the death of my granddad. Phil was someone I had worked closely with for several years, and had great respect for. He was in his fifties and had teenage children. It was a mark of my great trust in him that I had cried twice when talking to him – once about seeing a small deer get run over and killed on my way to work, and once when he told me about the death of a child I had been working with. And yet, like with my granddad, when I heard he was dead and I would never see him again I just processed the news as a fact, and felt no emotional response to it. As with my granddad, it has only been over time that I have been able to mourn his passing. I think of Phil each time I travel to a new country or walk on a beach, because of his habitual request to “bring me back a stone” if you went somewhere far away, and the pile of stones he would bring back from the most northerly beach in Scotland. I have often made stone towers or arches, written his name on a stone and thrown it into the sea or photographed the stones thinking how much he’d have liked them.

Death is an enormous topic to even try to think about, perhaps because it is connected with such painful experiences of loss, but also our own mortality and the inevitable eventual death of all those that we care about. As an atheist, I believe death is the end. Trying to imagine death is like staring into a black hole – somewhere in the uncomfortable abyss between terrifying and impossible to conceptualise. Having children has made me much more aware of my own mortality, and more fearful for theirs. I always text before takeoff whenever I fly for work, and I tell them I love them an extra time every night as they fall asleep, because I’d want them to be sure of that if I ever don’t return. But I remain of the opinion I expressed as a five year old to a babysitter, that even if a butterfly lives only for one day that isn’t a sad thing if the day was a happy day, because all they would have known is happiness. And I feel the same about my life, that I’ve already had a huge measure of happiness from a wonderful family, good friends, and amazing experiences, so even if it were to all be over tomorrow I couldn’t feel short-changed.

My Mum’s father died before she was born, and her mother died when in her late forties, when I was an infant. In my childhood my Mum felt it was likely that she would also die young, and I remember her having life insurance to protect us from the financial repercussions if that was the case. She was the only person I know to be grateful to have greying hair, as it was a marker that she had lived long enough to go grey. She is now retired, with fully grey hair and is thankfully still in good health, but she has been a good role model of appreciating the time you have got. And that is such an important thing, to savour the present. We are taught to invest for the future, in terms of putting our time and energy into long-term plans, focusing on building our careers, saving money, accumulating possessions. But as Alan Watts so neatly explains, we need to make the most of now, and dance while the music is playing. We need to have time for relaxation, creativity and fun. I’m trying to change things around a bit, so I do that more. I’ll give the last word to Biffy Clyro also (from Machines):

Cause I’ve started falling apart I’m not savoring life
I’ve forgotten how good it could be to feel alive

Take the pieces and build them skywards
and
Take the pieces and build them skywards
and
Take the pieces and build them up to the sky.

 

Rape culture and blame

I blogged a couple of months ago about the Brock Turner sexual assault case, and intended to write this post then, but I left it as a draft for some time – perhaps out of discomfort for the personal disclosure involved, or a sense of distance from the incident that made me want to post about my own experience. But it has never really gone away, because it is so prevalent, both in the tip of the iceberg of individual rape cases, and the massive underlying mass of the pervasive cultural acceptance of male sexual coercion of women (eg the horrifying statistics about misogynic beliefs and rape myth acceptance amongst male college students, particularly those involved in sports that I shared in a previous blog). It seems that just as racial tension has come to a head in America over police shootings, rape has come to a head with the Brock Turner case – with 1.3 million signatures on the petition calling for the judge to be sanctioned for his decision to go for a sentence well below the ordained minimum. And this week debate about whether the olympic diver proposal was romantic or inappropriate*. It seems that themes of sexuality and gender have become fault lines, showing wider problems in society.

Of course there have been many other cases making headlines since my previous blog on the topic, and rape and sexual assault are rarely out of the news. A woman who was raped in Qatar was found guilty of the crime of having sex outside marriage and given a suspended prison sentence and fined (I suppose we should be grateful that she didn’t get the 140 lashes that her rapist got, given they were nominally convicted of the same crime), whilst a woman in Argentina was convicted of murder for possibly having a miscarriage (though the only proven miscarriage in the case was the miscarriage of justice). Here a photographer lured young men to his home for photoshoots where he drugged and raped them. Another victim of campus rapists from athletics teams. This man used a woman’s desire to protect her children as leverage to stop her resisting his rape. This 7 month pregnant woman was raped at gunpoint. The list goes on and on and on. And there is evidence of systemic problems in how US police handle rape cases. Meanwhile lots of people have been brave about talking about their own experiences of “rape culture”. For example, this one, and this one.

I thought I might share some of my own experiences, to talk about both what it says about the culture, and the blurry line around consent. To give this some context, I’m not an extraordinary woman. Nowadays I’m a middle-aged mum. Non-smoking, rarely drinking, overweight and a bit of a workaholic, with that boring but comfortable lifestyle that many families fall into of school and work and supermarket shopping and homework and swimming and weekend outings to parks and historic places, with the occasional family visit or trip to the cinema. I’ve been happily married for 19 years this month, and I lived with my husband for 3 years before that. But even before that, I wasn’t extraordinary in appearance or behaviour, and I wasn’t reckless.

So when I say there were two occasions in my life when I felt I was at significant risk of rape, I’m pretty sure that other people have had similar experiences.

The first was when I was sixteen and had just started at sixth form. I would go out socially drinking with a particular group of friends from school most weekends, but I usually just had two or three single shot drinks with a mixer to make them last longer (vodka collins was a favourite, and much like a Smirnoff Mule now). One night I was with a group of friends outside a pub and one of the lads bought a bottle of “Thunderbird” fortified wine from a shop. He was pretending to drink himself and with nothing more than encouragement and peer pressure, he effectively persuaded me to drink more than I wanted to. I was a very innocent 16 and when he walked me away from the group and down the dock road out of sight I hadn’t expected more than a snog and a fumble.

However I suddenly became aware of my own vulnerability once we were away from the group. I was wobbly on my feet and nearly fell over, and in an amazing demonstration of both his strength and sobriety he practically picked me up and walked me firmly down the street. A minute later he put me on some concrete ground up a few steps from the road, hidden from sight by a lorry. It was then it became apparent that he was very determined to have sex and started taking my clothes off. I was putting them back on as best I could, but I didn’t know him well and didn’t want to risk him becoming violent (he was a foot taller than me, and I was too drunk to run away) so from his point of view I didn’t give a clear ‘no’. I was still kissing him to buy time to pull my clothes back up and trying to figure out whether anything else would appease him or whether there was a means to escape. But there was nobody in sight, and he was bigger and stronger than me, and this was in the days before mobile phones, so I felt completely on my own. Thankfully after half an hour or so he gave up and walked off. He left me dishevelled and alone, down the dock road of a town that was closed up for the night, having missed my lift home. But even as I stumbled back to the phone box, called my parents for a lift and made excuses about being drunk, I was feeling relieved that things hadn’t gone much worse. I look back and feel it was a lucky escape as no form of penetration occurred.

It was a frightening but in retrospect enlightening experience. Firstly, I learnt never to be drunk enough to lose my ability to run away or plan an escape with my full faculties. Secondly, I realised that from his perspective he was just trying to persuade me to do with him what another guy had lied and said we’d done at a party. He thought that it was just a matter of persuasion and persistence, which are socially acceptable aspects of the interplay between potential sexual partners – and importantly I never said no. Maybe if I’d have said “look Chris, I don’t want to have sex, stop it” he would have. However, maybe he’d have been angry that I was leading him on. Maybe if I’d have said “stop it, I don’t consent, if you force me to have sex it will be rape” he’d have been horrified and reconsidered his behaviour. I have no way of knowing. If we’d have been interrupted or I’d escaped and I hadn’t experienced him leaving of his own volition without sex, I think I would have felt it was a near miss. I don’t know if I’d have ended up reporting an attempted rape, but I certainly felt that repeatedly pulling my clothes back on was a pretty clear indication of lack of consent that he should have respected but didn’t.

Finally, I learnt that within that group of mutual friends he had done nothing wrong. They saw me leave willingly with his arm around me, and therefore everything that followed was presumed consensual. When I tried to steer clear of him they wanted me to make up with him as he was part of the group, despite the fact that I found his behaviour pretty sinister. However, for a teenage boy, plying a girl with drink, getting her to go somewhere private, trying to take her clothes off and ignoring the signals that she did not want to participate seemed a legitimate strategy, both to him and our mutual friends. He wasn’t a stranger, or someone menacing, and he was accepted within my social network. This made him very hard to avoid (and meant that on a later ocasion he cornered me at a party, put my hand on his genitals and used it to masturbate). Yet to everyone else was an ordinary guy who was above average in appearance and intelligence. He has gone on to have a successful life and now manages IT services for a bank.

The second time I felt at risk of rape, was after the tragic abduction and murder of toddler Jamie Bulger. A friend of a friend at university came to my door and said he was from Bootle and really distressed about it and wanted to talk. Although it was clear he had been drinking, in light of his distress I let him in, and we went up to my room as other people were in the sitting room of my student house. We later heard them leave, and after that his topic of conversation changed to how, despite having a girlfriend, he wanted to have sex with me. He tried to kiss me, but it was unpleasant and unwanted so I moved away. He started to undress, and try to grab at me. I realised I was cornered in the attic room of a house by a drunk man of substantial build with nobody else within shouting distance. However, this time I was sober and a bit more streetwise, so the balance of power was different. I told him that I wasn’t interested and wouldn’t be taking any of my clothes off. I suggested he get dressed and go back home, and I kept myself out of reach until he acquiesced. He knocked at the door the next day to nominally apologise in order to ask me not to tell his girlfriend.

Again, when I told my friends (and this time they were my friends, as opposed to mutual friends) they didn’t really see it as a big deal. I’d guess they didn’t see the story I recounted as having any bigger emotional connotations than “Drunk guy embarrassed himself. Assertive girl put him in his place”. And that wasn’t an entirely unreasonable perspective on the story, particularly given they were male friends and this was back in 1993, long before the days of #metoo. But it’s never quite as simple as that. Because even if it is only for one moment, the awareness that somebody else in your social network could force you to have sex against your will is a pretty stark realisation, even for an extraverted assertive girl. And however you think about it, it has an impact.

Whether by coincidence or subconscious drive, I put on weight after those two events, adding 40% to my bodyweight over a four year period that has stayed with me ever since. At the time I didn’t connect the dots. I thought it might be due to the contraceptive pill, or a less active lifestyle at university. But it seems more likely looking back that I just didn’t want unwanted sexual attention, and a fat suit is quite good at narrowing your appeal and not conforming to the socially accepted norms for attractiveness.

But it does feel like the psychological equivalent of wearing anti-rape pants. That sucks because anti-rape pants are a terrible idea that I object to in the strongest terms**, because they place the responsibility for not being raped onto the individual women. Rather than stopping a few men being rapists and a heck of a lot of men feeling so entitled that they act like overcoming the woman’s resistance is a normal and acceptable part of the process of dating, it makes women take the responsibility for not being raped. Why should it be that we need special pants to indicate we are not accessible for non-consensual sex, rather than the default position? And why should I feel that being a more attractive version of myself would make me more vulnerable to unwanted sexual advances?

I should perhaps state the obvious here. I’m not a man hater, and I’m not tarring all men with the same brush. I don’t think of men as Schrodinger’s Rapist or at least, I don’t want to, because the vast majority of men I know are lovely human beings who care about other people. But yet, our survival instinct is a powerful thing. One fall down the stairs 20 years ago, and I am still careful about stairs and escalators. Two situations in which I felt vulnerable to sexual assault (and a fair few clinical cases in which I have heard stories of rape, sexual abuse and/or domestic violence) have made me see risk in men that I don’t know well, and to view being perceived as sexually attractive to those outside my trusted circle as a potential vulnerability. It is a troubling conclusion, and one I don’t know how to resolve.

*We’ve got men today saying it is ridiculous that people have questioned the romantic gesture of the Chinese diver proposal, even when the recipient of that proposal looks uncomfortable about it. They’ve been led to believe every woman wants to get married and is just desperate for her long-term bf to propose, rather than that deciding to get married and how to tell everyone about is should be a mutual agreement, or recognising that there could be duress involved. For me, the seed of doubt is in the body language and facial expressions when I watched the video. Of course, it might be a cultural difference, or the amount of adrenaline and anxiety about being in the spotlight with cameras all around her, but her face doesn’t suggest delight. It suggests hesitation and uncertainty. Quite the opposite of the rugby player and stadium manager involved in the proposal the previous day. From the silver medal diver’s reaction you could imagine the subtitles of the whisper in her ear, or the sentence after holding up the ring being “I don’t want it to be over, please say yes, don’t shame me in front of all these people” just as easily as you could imagine it being “I love you so much I want everyone in the world to know it, please forgive me for doing this in public”. And her response involved no grins, no kisses, no seeking physical closeness, just discomfort, tears, a delayed nod and then acceptance of his actions. Whilst we may never know the answers about the specific example, the themes have echoes in how gender roles are perceived across the world. So I believe the discussion is worthwhile and should not be shut down.
**I should also add that there is no evidence that these pants are effective. Instead it seems likely that a man motivated to remove the underwear of a non-consenting woman would play out in other forms of sexual assault or violence if he was thwarted by her pants. They also add to victim blaming of anyone who doesn’t use the product; “but if you didn’t want to get raped why didn’t you wear safer pants?” Similarly, a rapist might threaten the woman to get her to remove the pants, and this might then be twisted by defence lawyers to imply consent. I think this product shows a profound mis-reading of the problem. Most rape is by someone known and trusted by victim, not the kind of opportunistic attack by a stranger that will be thwarted by her wearing lock up knickers. Some thought about who will buy them, and how they will change behaviour suggests problems too. It seems to me that their main customer base will be women who are anxious about being raped who probably won’t put themselves in a position where stranger rape is possible, whilst women who buy these pants to mitigate a risky lifestyle might have false faith in their ability to prevent negative outcomes (eg if they wear them so that they can drink to unconsciousness they probably aren’t addressing why they are making themselves so vulnerable, or the risk to physical, emotional and financial well-being that this might lead to). It made me wonder about when you would wear the pants? Every day to reinforce helplessness and anxiety or just when you feel likely to be raped? If the pants are a means to say no to a partner when sex is not wanted that says something very disturbing about relationships that needs to be addressed in more than just her choice of underwear. Finally, would another person such as a partner or controlling relative ever make the woman wear the pants like a chastity belt?

Spreading too thin

In general I’m a frugal person. I buy foods that are reduced because they have reached their best before date and most of my clothes and shoes in the sales. I collect coupons and shop around for good offers. I try to waste as little as possible, and to recycle as much as I can. So I can understand wanting to get good value for money.

On the other hand, I like doing things properly. For example, when it comes to a sandwich, I like a thick slice of granary bread, fresh from the oven, with generous amounts of toppings. As it happens I’m not a big fan of butter or margarine, perhaps a symptom of being overweight in the 1980s and 90s when fat was literally seen as a cause of fat, whilst the carbs underneath were seen as relatively healthy. But whether it is soft cheese and cucumber, avocado and salad, cheddar and chutney, hummus and roasted veg, or toasted cheese and banana, the topping needs to cover the bread, with sufficient depth to make the sandwich proportionate. If the cheese has nearly run out, I’ll have half a cheese sandwich that tastes good rather than a mean whole.

So when it comes to services, I can see the motivation to get value for money, and to ensure that resources are being used in the most cost-effective way. I’ve developed pathways, clinics and groups to meet needs more effectively, and I’m happy to delegate less complex work to less experienced or less qualified staff. I can’t see the justification for paying psychiatrist salaries to deliver therapy, when a member of staff with half the hourly rate can be an equally good (if not superior) therapist. I can see the importance of capping the cost of agency staff, so that this money can be invested in increasing the substantive workforce. And when it comes to staff who are not pulling their weight (my record being a member of staff who had spent a whole year with a caseload of four clients, whilst colleagues in the same job had five times that along with other responsibilities) I can see the need for performance management.

However, there comes a point that too much pressure for efficiency actually makes services less effective. I saw this happen gradually over the 16 years I worked in the NHS. If we cut out all the conversations between cases, all the informal supervision, all the CPD opportunities, the time to bond as a team and to reflect and process information between appointments, then clinicians are less able to be empathic and individualised with clients. If you also give people tougher and tougher cases to work on, expecting faster throughput than with the more mixed caseload that preceded it, and couple this with cuts in admin despite there being more and more paperwork to do, you increase burnout and time off sick. Add some pay freezes, lose a proportion of posts, put people in smaller premises and tell them to hot-desk or become mobile workers and they no longer feel valued. Make it a set of competing businesslike trusts rather than one amazing non-profit organisation, tender out services like cleaning and home visiting to allow them to be done on minimum wage without the terms and conditions of the NHS, allow private companies to win contracts, and keep people in a perpetual state of change, then morale falls. Nobody has any loyalty or job security and it no longer chimes with the ethics of the people who work there.

The sandwich has been eroded down to bread and butter, and then to crackers and margarine, and then to a value brand version of the same that is 30% smaller. It might look like costs have been driven down, but the price is a reduction in the quality of services, and in the wellbeing of staff. It reduces the willingness to go above and beyond that has been the backbone of the NHS, and increases presenteeism – the tendency to feel that you need to be at work longer, and look like you are working harder, without this making meaningful impact on the work you get done. The UK has lower productivity than most other developed nations, perhaps because we have longer working hours, and work expands to fit the time available.

All over the public sector at the moment I see services trying to spread their resources thinner and thinner, and I’m acutely aware that this means they can’t do the whole job. Social Services departments have barely the capacity to maintain their statutory role, so supporting families in need goes by the wayside. Some good staff find other jobs. A proportion of the remainder go off long-term sick, leaving an ever bigger burden on those that remain. Teachers are forced to teach to tests that assess primary school pupils on aspects of English grammar that graduates struggle with that have little relevance to daily life, and squash the rest of the curriculum into less time. Children’s centres, youth clubs and leisure facilities are disappearing at a time when it is clear that parenting support and exercise are critical in improving well-being and decreasing long-term health and social care costs. We’ve been feeling the cost of ideological austerity bite, even before the financial shock of the Brexit vote, so I am struggling to see how things can improve in the foreseeable future, let alone once any steps are made to implement the extraction of the UK from the EU.

It is hard in this climate not to feel overwhelmed by pessimism. Staff are not pieces of equipment that can be upgraded or replaced at the click of your fingers. I can make a plan for how to cover a remit that needs 12 staff with 7, but I can’t then tell you how to do it with 5. I can only tell you that if you want the job doing properly it needs 12, and if you go below 7 it won’t be fit for purpose. If I sticky plaster over the cracks, you can pretend that paying for 5 is enough, and that it is the clinicians who are failing, whilst we burn out trying to do twice the amount of work each. But no matter how hard I work, I can’t be in four parts of the country at once, or do recruitment, service development, supervision and provide a clinical service in a part-time job.

Maybe the problem is that I am stubborn. I won’t just toe the line whilst covering my eyes and ears and going lalalalalalala when it comes to everything that isn’t being done. Like my exit point from the NHS, there comes a time where I’d rather leave than do things badly. And where the only efficiency available for me to recommend that fits the prevailing rationale is to pay two cheaper staff instead of my time. I’m teetering on the edge of the plank they’ve made me walk, and I’m increasingly tempted to jump. Maybe in retrospect they’ll recognise how much was getting done with such limited resources.

Hope out of chaos

I’ve written a lot about how distressing I’ve found the vote to leave the EU, the increase in overt racism, and the move to the right politically. In fact I’ve been quoted more widely than expected on this topic, with my letter published by the Psychologist website, a quote in a fantastic column in New Scientist and even this blog being quoted on Buzzfeed because I used to work with one of the Conservative Leadership contenders. Theresa May has just become Prime Minister, and my feeling is that she was the best of a bad lot. However, what saddens me at the moment is all the in-fighting in the labour party.

Let me nail my colours to the mast. I consider myself to be political, but not party political. I’m significantly left of centre when it comes to the political spectrum, and believe in progressive policies. I’d like to reduce the wealth gap, strengthen public services and reduce inequality through improved education and opportunities (including properly funded legal aid). I want to remove donations and corporate lobbying from our political system, and replace them with a fixed fee for membership and proportionate central funding. I believe in taxation on inheritance and property, bonuses and the top 1% of wages, but also the Robin Hood tax on financial transactions. I don’t believe in taxing sanitary products, heating, e-books, or any services provided to support free-at-the-point-of-access health or social care.

In terms of current political parties, I have a lot of admiration for the Green Party and the SNP, but I’ve never been in a location where there is an option to vote for either of them. In fact, I have always lived in safe Conservative seats. Until the death of John Smith I would probably have considered the Labour Party as my closest match politically. After that I felt homeless. I voted for the Lib Dems once, but felt betrayed by them entering the coalition with the Conservatives and supporting tuition fees.

Authenticity, empathy/mentalisation and reflective capacity are skills that I look for in the parenting assessments I do for the family courts. I consider them to be essential attributes when it comes to forming human relationships, so whether or not I see them in a politician really is make or break for me. And they are much rarer than you would hope.

John Smith was the last place I saw authenticity in the Labour leadership. I never could trust Blair, because his smile never reached his eyes, and his body language never seemed congruent with his verbal content. It was as if he had been so carefully schooled not to give away his true feelings that there was a hint of the uncanny valley. Likewise, Brown looked as forced when he smiled as May and Leadsom’s recent grimacing contest, like early models for Blade Runner style replicants. Milliband was so socially awkward that he was hard to feel any connection with (though in the pre-election interview with Russell Brand he seemed to relax a little and I saw a glimpse of something likeable and real that I’d not seen before).

The millionaire cabinets filled with chums from Eton and Oxbridge that have formed the last two governments have all looked to me like posh teenage boys that had teleported into adult bodies and, like the plot of a formulaic film, were trying to pretend to be grown ups doing responsible jobs and hoping they got to have sex before the switch was discovered. Bumbling Johnson and Trump have both learned to mask the threat they present by modifying their body language to appear ridiculous enough not to be taken seriously.

In short, politics has become a world full of phonies. The exception to this has been Barack Obama. His election gave me hope for the world, and I think he has been pretty authentic throughout his two terms (though any real power to create change, such as gun reform, has been leached away by the broader politics around him). I have particularly enjoyed him as he has become less guarded and shown his sense of humour more as he reaches the end of his term in office. His books are high up on my list of reading material next time I go on holiday, or if I ever have more time available.

And now there is Jeremy Corbyn. Since the death of Tony Benn, I see him as the one authentic option amongst a sea of vested interests and spin.

If I’m allowed to metaphorically liken the political changes around Brexit to a flood, then it has felt like we are wading through knee deep brown water contaminated with the sewage of repulsive opinions that is pooling in the homes and buildings all around us. Much of the established political road network has been flooded or washed away. My every instinct is telling me to get as far away from the mess as possible. However, the only person not being swept along with that tide has been Jeremy. He’s just been quietly organising teams that are going around door to door checking if people are okay, and trying to plan what needs to be done to clean up and repair the damage. He doesn’t have the uniform or back-up of the emergency services, but nobody has really seen them doing anything beyond trying to divert the water around the corporate skyscrapers, so he’s become something of a local hero. The news is blaming excessive rainfall up river, and congratulating the emergency services for keeping the businesses dry, whilst criticising “have a go heroes” for interfering, and saying it will take many years before flood protections or repairs can be organised.

Some people say Corbyn is too far left, and unelectable. To that I’d say you don’t need to be electable to be an effective opposition, and to change policy and the scope of discussion. UKIP have demonstrated that brilliantly over the last five years! Opposition has changed policy in a number of key ways over the last few years (making a series of government u-turns over cuts to benefits). If we had a coherent labour party giving a unified voice to this opposition we could achieve even more, whether or not we achieve a Labour government. It seems that the goal of gaining power has become of higher priority to some PLP members than the goal of making a difference for the constituents they represent.

I think Corbyn is one of the few people that understands that British politics is broken at the moment. Too much influence is purchased with party donations and sponsorship, and too many rich people are right at the top and making decisions with self-interest at the core. We need to reform that, and get genuine representation of the people. We need to reengage the people who are not voting more than we need to fight over the middle ground. We need to help people identify as working class and fight for their rights, despite the tide of propaganda getting them to blame immigrants, the EU and the vulnerable. Again, Corbyn is as close to that as I’ve seen in my adult life. He has no affiliations or financial interests outside of his job as a politician, and he has refused to kowtow to wealthy donors.

I fully accept that he hasn’t given his opinions in snappy soundbites. But I can’t see that wholly as a bad thing. Issues like leaving the EU are complex, not black or white, and they merit reflection and discussion not just a yes/no answer. So I think that whilst people say he is losing the game, he is actually trying to play a different game, and one I think is a damn sight better.

If he can find his voice as a leader, I think Corbyn is a breath of fresh air in British politics. So I am very sad to see the way he has been treated by the PLP. Whilst complaining that he cannot lead, they have refused to follow him, despite his inclusiveness when it came to selecting the shadow cabinet.

To stretch another metaphor, I see it like an artist agreeing to make a mural with 200 aspiring young artists from local schools, and then finding out that 140 of the names on the list are of kids who are not engaged in mainstream education and have no interest in art. The way I see it, the artist’s only option is to try and make everyone feel included, select widely for those who are to take each role in making the mural, and then when kids don’t turn up, to fill the gaps with those who are keen to get on with the project. Sure, the artist can try to go out and meet with each kid who doesn’t turn up and try to engage them in the joys and challenges of the project, but that will mean they give a whole lot of energy to fruitless battles and will sap away the time for actually creating the art. The artist can’t fix the system that was stacked against them within the time given, so it makes sense to just get on with the art itself, in collaboration with the kids who want to work with them.

The only difference is that all labour MPs should want to create this piece of art, because in the terms of my metaphor they are art students and it is the course they signed up for, even if the style of the artist isn’t the familiar commercially driven billboards they were expecting. The result might still be surprisingly beautiful.

I believe the Leave campaign had massive appeal because it became a way to express dissatisfaction with the status quo, when the neoliberal hegemony meant that people could hardly see the difference between the mainstream political parties. Voting leave became a way for people who were feeling disenfranchised to thumb their nose at authority, to try to disrupt the established political systems. If that conclusion is correct, then I believe that this desire for change could as easily swing left as right, if the media and prominent voices from that side offered targets to blame (eg bankers and millionaires who buy politics) and promised easy solutions (tax bonuses and top 1% salaries, robin hood tax, fixed funding and no donations to political parties). The Labour Party need to unite to harness this desire for change, and to show that they can deliver it.

But not only have they not connected with the people or the media, they have allowed Theresa May to seize their territory by making a speech claiming that the Conservative Party can serve the working class (despite almost every claim directly contradicting with her voting record), whilst the only Labour news is about how the PLP don’t have faith in their leader, and have shown this in less and less dignified ways. The in-fighting has become increasingly ugly. Watching charismaless Eagle squirm whilst Leadsom’s resignation stole the press from her launch may have been the most cringe-inducing moment so far this year. But it is clear from the lack of policy or answers to any questions that she stands for nothing apart from not being Corbyn. I also suspect she has been goaded into being a stalking horse to allow other members of the party with leadership ambitions to come forward with less risk.

Meanwhile 130,000 new members have joined (or returned to) the Labour Party because they like Corbyn’s approach to reforming politics, and share the hope for change. And instead of being welcomed with open arms, they are having the door slammed in their face by the PLP, who assume (wrongly) that they represent militant left-wingers rather than members who lapsed during the New Labour years but have now returned because of seeing a return to principles, young people who have engaged with politics for the first time, or the disenfranchised members of the general public that they should want to connect with. Nearly 600,000 members could be an amazing force for changing politics in the UK – that’s just over 1% of the voting population, nearly four times the Conservative membership, more than ten times the membership of UKIP and the largest membership of a political party in modern times. In my opinion, making exclusionary rules as to who can vote for the party leader and chasing the centre ground is exactly the wrong move to make, and will end in anger, legal challenges and a split in the party. But it seems that touch paper was lit before the referendum, and emotions are only getting higher, so I doubt the insight to avert it will arrive now.

If there is any hope we can make politics more authentic, and/or bring it back to the basics of representing the electorate, then that could give some meaning to all of this chaos for me. The one advantage of chaos and disruption to established systems is that change is possible. So here’s hoping that we can make something positive out of the ashes of the current firestorm. I would welcome positive change right now, in whatever form it takes!

 

Terrorism revisited

I feel very very sad about the referendum results, but not entirely surprised given the previous election results.

I think the campaign has been fought on dishonest ground that didn’t represent what we were voting for, and the referendum and the Brexit campaign were the culmination of a particular message being pushed by vested interests in the media and politics for many years. It is part of a bigger problem of politics becoming ever more a game of the super-rich, corporate lobbying and propaganda, and less about representing what the majority of the electorate actually want. I think it is a sign of big trouble with the democratic process when two thirds of the cabinet are millionaires, and that demographic represents only 1% of the population, whilst they are supposed to speak for the breadth of the UK.

I’m not convinced that concerns about immigration are the unspoken elephant in the room, so much as one of a number of targets that keep on and on getting vilified and scapegoated for all of society’s ills. To paraphrase the metaphor: An immigrant, a voter and a millionaire politician are sitting at the table with 10 cookies. The politician takes 9 to give to his chums and then tells the voter “watch out, the immigrant is going to steal your cookie”.

What is unspoken is the responses we need to challenge these poisonous messages and to remind us that there but for fortune we could be in the shoes of an economic migrant, an asylum seeker, a single mother, a person with disabilities, a parent of a child with special needs, someone who loved that child that died because we didn’t have proper health and social care services, someone without legal representation, unemployed, the victim of racism/sexism/homophobia, the generation that live through war, etc. We should want to protect human rights and public services, legal aid, benefits and victims of crime, and to prevent war because we are them and they are us.

But somehow the talk was all focused on the money, and the immigrants, and the pointless bureaucracy of the EU. Maybe I am naive or cynical, but I think that a group of people have been actively driving that narrative for a long time, I don’t believe it is an organic grass-roots concern that has spontaneously bubbled up. I think there are vested interests pushing us towards greater income disparity, blaming of the vulnerable, and encouraging prejudice, selfishness and nihilism. I don’t think people are stupid, I think people have been drip fed right-wing propaganda for many many years, that blames all ills on “immigrants” and “benefits scroungers” so that we don’t look too hard at austerity politics and see all the vested interests. If there was a credible alternative, they’d as easily target that rage against the bankers, the corporations dodging tax and using zero hours contracts, and those using tax havens to hide their cash – all of which I consider to be much more legitimate targets.

As this article in the BMJ eloquently explained, the less people feel they have to lose, the more willing they are to take a gamble on a potentially risky outcome. And the results of austerity politics mean that large swathes of people are suffering financially, and feel powerless, hopeless, disenfranchised and exploited. At the same time as the referendum we have seen an even more tragic set of events unfolding that I think have the same underlying cause.

With the Miami mass shooting and the murder of Jo Cox (and longer ago, the shootings in Paris), I think that we have seen the ugly underbelly of what happens when people feel desperate and voiceless, and are radicalised by hearing poisonous messages blaming particular people for their unhappiness or lack of success in life. Both were horrendous acts, targeting people who had done absolutely nothing wrong in order to convey some kind of political message. Both were incredibly distressing to hear about, let alone for those who were personally involved.

Jo Cox was my age to within a fortnight and had a similar family configuration, so it has really hit home that her husband and kids will never see her again, just because she spoke out for compassion and inclusiveness. She is someone I had never heard of before she was attacked, but the more I read about her the more I like and admire her. She was taking action for the good of others, and she was a great example of our democracy. I have donated to the fund in her memory, and the fact it topped a million pounds in just a few days, suggests that I am not alone in wanting to take some kind of positive action in the face of such awful news.

And with that in mind, and the clear indications that this was politically motivated terrorism with a far-right agenda, I wanted to say something about all the references to mental illness. Being mentally ill doesn’t mean you kill people and killing people doesn’t mean you’re mentally ill. Doing something awful that we can’t understand is not the same as being mentally ill. One in four people has a mental illness, a characteristic as widespread as blond hair. The vast majority of them will never hurt anyone, and are at no greater risk of doing something awful than anyone else (although they are disproportionately the victims of violence). It is abhorrent to stigmatise all those people because of the actions of one person, even if he may have had mental health issues. He didn’t kill Jo Cox because he had mental health problems. He killed her because he wanted to promote his repugnant fascist beliefs.

I posted on Facebook about the causes of terrorism earlier in the week when the discussion was about the Miami mass murder, and this is exactly the same. This was what I wrote:

Just a reminder, but mental illness is not a cause of terrorism. There is pretty good research that has disproved this popular myth. People do awful things. We can’t understand that and we want to feel like they are different from us, so we assume their mind is broken. In fact the research says that it is a combination of a strong need to belong, coupled with a sense of marginalisation and injustice, dehumanisation of enemies, group processes where beliefs get hyped up into extreme actions and strong religious beliefs. Intelligent men who underachieve are particularly at risk for this radicalisation. That is, ordinary people with no genetic or mental abnormalities get pulled down a particular path by their experiences and social networks.

From a paper by Silke after 9/11:

“It is very rare to find a terrorist who suffers from a clinically defined ‘personality disorder’ or who could in any other way be regarded as mentally ill or psychologically deviant (Silke, 1998). Ultimately, the overwhelming majority of terrorists (and this significantly even includes suicide bombers) are average, normal individuals who in other circumstances would be quite unremarkable. Their involvement in terrorism is not the result of psychoses, inner traits or aberrant personalities. Rather, in most cases it is an understandable response to a series of life events.

The causes of terrorism need to be focused on – not just the actors. Once you are forced to throw away the ‘terrorists are different’ model, then attention must be given to other areas. An important realisation here is that becoming involved in terrorism is a process. Nobody is born a terrorist. Neither does anyone wake up one morning and decide abruptly that on that day they are going to start planting bombs in public streets. Becoming a terrorist is in the first instance an issue of socialisation. Any given society will possess some minorities or disaffected groups who rightly or wrongly perceive that the world is treating them harshly. In some cases there are genuine and very substantial causes for grievance. Individuals who belong to or identify with such disaffected groups share in a sense of injustice and persecution. It is from such pools that individual terrorists emerge”.

Western politicians will easily condemn muslim extremists, but in America in particular they find it much harder to look at terrorism fueled by prejudice, in this case racism (but previously by homophobia and religion) – because, like the gun lobby, it has so much popular support. I don’t have any solutions for that, but we do need to name the problem, and the problem is the rise of right wing regressive ideas, fueled by prejudice and religion, blaming every vulnerable minority whilst turning a blind eye to the rich and powerful exploiting the rest of us.

I want my country back from all this hatred and fear-mongering. We need to stop blaming the vulnerable, and start looking at the political system that has created an increasingly divisive and selfish society.

Reflecting back

I’ve been archiving the files for a lot of my past court work this week. I moved office base and I don’t want to be cluttering up my new space with lots of old case information I don’t need any more, when it can be securely stored and eventually shredded. So far I’ve boxed up the files for 115 family court cases for which I completed an assessment and wrote a report, leaving only records that have been updated since the start of 2013 in my filing cabinet. As I check that each of the newer cases has been completed and invoiced, I will put those into storage too, and use my filing space for other things. It is another step in letting go of my role as an expert witness, and the huge weight of responsibility and emotional demand that entails.

As I put each case away, I added the family names to an index in order that I could locate them if it is ever required. I am supposed to keep files for seven years, or until the child is 21, so they stay with me a long time. As I record the names I realise I can remember the stories of many of the families, and I wondered how they were doing now. There were lots of traumas in those stories, that I heard and described in my reports, and felt in my bones. Many parents whose own childhoods meant that they couldn’t parent in a safe and nurturing way. Many of them dealt a hand full of adversity, who had no resources to cope with the stresses of their chaotic lives. Over and over again I saw children who were harmed by the care they were given, both in the children I had to assess, and in the histories of their parents and grandparents. Themes repeating across two or more generations.

It has always felt terribly sad that in order to give their children a chance at a better life, the courts have to intervene in ways that further wound the parents. But an expert’s job is to advise on what is best for the child, and sadly that is often contradictory with what is in the best interest of their parent. And I hope that I have always kept what would be best for the child paramount in my thinking, but whilst holding some compassion for the other family members. I think about the cases where I didn’t do the story justice, and the courts made decisions that I didn’t agree with. I worry about the cases where greater experience or new knowledge from the literature would have given me a slightly different perspective. I think about times I was threatened, or parents refused to talk to me, or I was cross-examined for five hours straight. Then I remember a time when a parent I assessed approaching me after I gave evidence, and feeling wary she was going to be angry that I recommended her child was removed. Instead she said thank you to me. “You were the only person I’ve met in all this that was always honest with me, and understood how I got here. I can see why you said what you did about me, and I think you are right that he will do better being adopted”. I’m still blown away by that. What an amazing gift to give me at a time that was so painful for her. I hope that she got the therapy she needed to put that reflection, empathy and kindness into practise in her life, and get out of the run of destructive relationships that had dominated her life.

I put the files into the box and lock them away. I am glad to let them go. It isn’t just physical space they take up, but mental space. Being an expert witness for the family court is a tough job. The hourly rates might seem high, but there are other ways to earn the same without the emotional burden. There have been pros and cons for me. I’m a different person now than I was when I began doing that work. I’m more observant and analytical, better able to ask the right questions, to deal with uncertainties, and to spot inconsistencies and triangulate sources. There have been rewarding moments too. I have had a lot of positive feedback about the quality of my assessments and evidence, and thanks for the impact of my work. But I’m also more cynical and I’ve seen a very dark side to the world. I’m more aware of the risks, and of how prevalent maltreatment and poor care are, even in our supposedly developed nation. I think I’m less trusting of people as a result of doing this type of work, and my norms for what levels of problems require professional help have shifted towards the more severe end of the spectrum, making me less sympathetic to people who feel very disadvantaged by more minor difficulties. I’ve also acquired the bad habits of work that has a strong pattern of boom-and-bust in demand – working through the night to make deadlines, putting in 80 hour weeks to meet demand, and generally taking on too much to leave enough of myself for other tasks and life outside work. It has also shown me that I can be a total control freak about the standards of work contributed by other members of my team, because my own standards are meticulous and I take this type of work – that can change the course of people’s lives – particularly seriously.

Letting go of court work is difficult, because it glitters. There is always demand, and it is nice to feel needed and held in high regard by other professionals. It feels as if you have genuine influence in the legal process (and I generally hold the UK justice system and public law professionals in high regard). The pay, although much reduced since legal aid cuts, still seems somehow more attractive as an hourly rate than the reality should be (given you can’t charge for much of the time these cases actually take, nor for administrative support such as typing or arranging appointments, nor for venues or materials it actually works out to be less than I make from other activities like therapy, training or consulting). It also has the kind of attraction of rubber-necking at a car-crash, as the cases each have their own grim story, are more complex than most clinical cases seen in secondary and tertiary tiers of service provision, and are often both acute and chronic in nature. I find it hard to say no when my skills are needed. But I must learn to delegate this work to others, or to decline, because I want to have my time and emotional energy back for other things.

And so it is good to archive my files, and to catch up with my invoicing, and to clear the decks of old ways of working to allow myself space for the new. It feels like putting down rocks I have been carrying for a long time….