I’ve always found human behaviour fascinating, probably because of my strange family. But I think that as I’ve got older I feel I understand less, or rather I am more aware of the enormous gulf between understanding and intervening. I am a great believer in the listening ear. And I’m very non-directive which is not fashionable today. It’s probably due to my analytic training. We all fall into traps, old familiar patterns of responding that we never learnt to change. I feel that therapy is like walking together though a maze and occasionally saying “perhaps not”, but never suggesting where to go. There are no models of health, only of pathology.
When I was working at UCL, one very influential book for me was Psychology as Metaphor. It was about qualitative science (or the feminist critique of science) and contrasted the white male approach of control and measurement (in order to predict and exploit), with the alternative approach of interaction and understanding. Of course the latter is embedded in language and its truths are rhetorical. If I can persuade you of a particular theory, then it at least has some temporary and local validity.
Wind forward to today where rhetoric is everything. In psychology/psychiatry, diagnosis is no longer just the prerogative of professions, we all can identify illnesses in ourselves and others. A proliferation of labels, pathologising, self-diagnosis, victim-hood, disability and entitlement. We all had bipolar disease after Stephen Fry (who has a narcissistic/cyclothymic personality disorder). Last week on Loose Ends, Jack Monroe was talking about her “autism”. What?! All these terms have been hijacked and now have some positive status in terms of identity politics.
I could claim I’ve got dyslexia and a touch of Asperger’s, but I don’t, I’m just me. The danger of diagnosis, of pathologising, is that it absolves people from personal responsibility. It’s not me, it’s my illness, I can’t do anything about it. So I have a very tight definition of mental illness. The rest of mental health is just the human condition. It is the stuff of literature… And maybe in a way, psychology gets caught between being the (frequently denigrated) experts of objective science and the free-for-all pedlars of popular opinion.
Perhaps I’ve become more idiosyncratic as I’ve got older. I certainly feel more passionately about things, about what to me makes sense and is true. I find myself shouting at the radio! But I think there is a danger of caring too much, of becoming distressed about the way the world is going, of feeling that there has to be something to do that will make a difference.
I remember a couple of years ago I was down at Compton Abbas airfield and met a guy who had been flying for 40 years. I had only done 16 hours. He asked me what I did, and I said I had been a psychiatrist for 40 years. “Too much caring”, he said, and he was right.