I have just read a brilliant article on The New York Time website by Laura A. Munson in which she describes a crisis in her marriage:
The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s — gazing into each other’s eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny — have for the most part come true.
Two decades later you have the 20 acres of land, the farmhouse, the children, the dogs and horses. You’re the parents you said you would be, full of love and guidance. You’ve done it all: Disneyland, camping, Hawaii, Mexico, city living, stargazing.
Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out.
Her response to this provocative set of statements was a surprise to her husband and exasperating to her friends, and most certainly a stroke of clear-sighted genius. I thoroughly recommend reading the short article.
One of my favourite blogs is The Art of Manliness, a blog that posts on everything from how to mix a martini or trim your moustache to how to make men friends. Sometimes it is a bit tongue in cheek and sometimes it is good advice of the kind your (imaginary) father might give. Today I read a post on experiencing bereavement which definitely fits into the good advice category. Bear in mind also that Freud pointed out that depression is very similar to grief over a loss, he called it “pathological mourning”. Here is an excerpt from the post by Brian Burnham:
Tips for the Grieving Man
Experience your grief in your own way. As long as you are not harming yourself or others, there is no wrong way to grieve. Grief is a unique experience for every man and the way you grieve may not be what others expect or what you expected for yourself.
Permitting yourself to honestly experience grief is an important step towards healing.
Give yourself time to grieve. After the passing of a loved one, there are often many arrangements to be made and others mourners to be supported and cared for. While no man wants to shirk his duty, it is important to allow time for yourself to grieve as well.
Watch out for harmful behaviors. While experiencing anger is normal, it is important to manage that anger so that it doesn’t harm others. Also, grieving men are much more likely to develop problems with alcohol or other substances. Their use should be carefully monitored.
Call on your man friends. Other men, especially other men who have had a similar loss, can be some of your strongest sources of support.
Know when to seek help. For most grieving men, psychological counseling may be helpful but is not necessary. However, if you experience serious thoughts of suicide or self-harm or develop an alcohol or other drug problem, seek psychological care immediately.
A Scientific American article reports that recent ongoing research into creativity has produced an interesting finding. Our ability to be creative is not only determined by our inborn predisposition, but also by the situations we find ourselves in. Some situations increase our ability to think creatively.
One kind of situation that is found to invariably increase level of creativity are situations that allow us to get “psychological distance”. Think of the last time you found yourself in a city or country that you’d never been to before; suddenly all your assumptions about the environment, and yourself in relation to the environment, go out the window and you being to think more freely and creatively. This also has to be one of the reasons that going on holiday is so enjoyable and restful.
There are other ways to achieve psychological distance and I would argue that personal exploration in psychotherapy, or psychoanalysis, provides useful repeated experiences of psychological distance. Psychodyanmic therapists are trained specifically to facilitate the development of internal space, so that two dimensional thinking (me and the world) becomes three-dimensional (me, the world and me in the world) – this is our legacy from Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and Melanie Klein’s elaboration of it.
The therapist through the analytic stance (structured way of behaving in the room with the client), interpretations (insightful and linking) and empathetic feedback (reflecting, drawing out unexpressed feelings), constantly challenges the client’s assumptions and the resistance to changing them. Through this work, the client is afforded an opportunity to experience something akin to the “psychological distance” described in the article. Long-term work in psychotherapy can develop this sense of psychological distance into an internal resource to be called upon spontaneously.
Over the last few years ChildLine has noticed an increase in the number of boys calling the service’s line which is available on 0800 1111.
ChildLine says more than 58,000 rang them with problems such as bullying, sexual abuse and loneliness. That’s more than double the number compared with five years ago. Bullying was the top problem with 12,568 calls in the 2007/8 period. The phone line also received 6,403 calls about physical abuse, 4,780 about sexual abuse and 1,803 calls from boys saying they had been raped.
ChildLine was launched in 1986 to give youngsters a confidential helpline to call if they needed help or advice.
Sue Minto from the charity says they still get more girls calling, but only because boys let problems drag on. “The message we’re getting is that boys leave it until they’re in crisis point before they ring us,” she said.
The UK government has proposed plans to establish a youth mental health service aimed at 14- to 25-year-olds offering a range of interventions tailored to individual needs and delivered in non-clinical settings such as schools and colleges.
The consultation document, New Horizons, is available for download and sketches out the Department of Health’s vision for a higher quality mental health service, with an emphasis on early intervention and more personalised support.
The deadline to respond to the consultation is 15 October 2009.
An article in Defence Management Journal takes aim at what it calls “patchy” mental health services for veterans suffering from combat stress related problems.
Chief executive Commodore Toby Elliott said that the government and NHS provide for less than half of the 9,000 registered ex-servicemen who are suffering from the effects of combat including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
He was praiseworthy of the in-service treatment provided for servicemen, but pointed out that once personnel left the Armed Forces they had to wait on the NHS waiting lists for treatment and counselling. Often this resulted in veterans having to rely on charities for care.
Overall Elliot labelled the care provided by the NHS as a “spit in the ocean” according to the BBC. The MoD and NHS have set up six pilot treatment centres around the UK for mental healthcare treatment for veterans. Elliot said this would result in a “postcode lottery” leaving many veterans unable to receive treatment.
In the US, veterans have access to counselling and treatment through the Veterans Administration. No such organisation exists here, resulting in cases being deferred to the NHS. Counsellors in many instances have said they cannot “cope” with veterans and do no understand the extent of their problems.
In a talk given at TED Cognitive researcher Nancy Etcoff looks at happiness — the ways we try to achieve and increase it, the way it’s untethered to our real circumstances, and its surprising effect on our bodies.
The Future Coalition, an umbrella group, has produced a report recommending that public sector workers, including police and teachers, should be trained to spot and refer people they encounter with mental health issues.
Not suprisingly this seemingly benign recommendation has alarmed some people who justifiably suspect that this traning will simply provide another way for minority groups to be stigmatised and marginalised.
The idea of police being able to label someone as mentally ill is definitely Orwellian, and should be regarded with great circumspection.
Black Mental Health UK (BMHUK) has accused the report’s authors, which includes a group of prominent mental health charities, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, of ignoring black and minority ethnic (BME) communities’ views on the possible fallout of their proposal.
The group claims that, if implemented, the recommendation could increase the chances of people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds being misdiagnosed by amateurs with no professional mental health credentials and lead to further stigmatisation. People from black African-Caribbean backgrounds are more likely to enter the mental health system through the criminal justice system than any other group, and campaigners are worried that encouraging police officers to try to “spot” signs of mental distress could exacerbate the problem.
“There are grave concerns over the suggestion that the police or teachers should be trained in spotting signs of mental ill health,” said Matilda MacAttram, of BMHUK. “Currently black men are six times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts, as such it is unwise to suggest that the police should be responsible for spotting signs of mental ill health. It could lead to catastrophic results.”
One of the assumptions of a number of the more cognitive focused psychological therapies (and self-help books) is that conscious repetition of positive thoughts will counterbalance, perhaps even cancel out negative thought patterns. Recent research finds that this assumption is questionable:
Joanne Wood, Professor of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and an author of the report, said it seemed that repeating positive statements worked only if it reinforced what the person already believed.“It appears that positive self-statements, despite their widespread endorsement, may backfire for the very people who need them the most,” she said.
“I think that what happens is that when a low-self-esteem person repeats positive thoughts, all they do is contradict what is there already. So if they’re saying, ‘I’m a loveable person’, they might then think, ‘Well, I’m not always loveable’ or ‘I’m not loveable in this way’. Then these contradictory thoughts may overwhelm the positive thoughts.”
Professor Wood said that positive thinking might be effective when it was used as part of a broader programme of therapy. “But on its own it tends to have the reverse effect of what it is supposed to do.”
She urged the purveyors of self-help books, magazines and TV shows to stop sending a message that simply chanting a positive mantra could transform a life. “It’s frustrating to people when they try it and it doesn’t work for them,” she said.
Look at this picture. You see Blue spirals and Green spirals? Wrong! The Blue and the Green you see are actually the same colour. Your brain actually tells you what colour you are seeing by comparing the colour to the colours around it. The full explanation is here on Bad Astronomy. Yet more proof that none of us live in the real world, we live in the world we think we see.
