The car window was as open as it will go.

Was that a siren?

No. Because it stopped. But it was followed by more noise. Like someone talking through a cheap pa system.

It was someone talking, a pre-recorded message.

The message is above as title to this post. It kept repeating. The hazard lights of the moving bus were flashing, so this was probably not a prank. 999 is the number we in Britain ring for the emergency services. Unfortunately apart from it being illegal to use my phone while driving, I didn’t have it with me.

Okay so that’s weird, but there was more.

There were many pedestrians near the bus. Most people apart from me carry their mobile phone everywhere; it’s more important to them than their front door key.

But I could see not one person making a phone call.

It reminded me of the time when I was about nine and on the way from school to catch a bus home. In those days schools didn’t lay on special buses, and kids were expected to walk to the bus stop. I turned a corner into the main road and there at one side of the footpath (sidewalk) lay an adult, apparently unconscious.

All sorts of thoughts went through my mind. Clearly I had to do something. But what? At that stage I had no first aid training. Should I phone the police? What if it was a hoax, maybe Candid Camera? And why was everyone else just walking past? They were adults and therefore obviously knew more than me about how to react and stuff – I changed my mind on that within a few years.

So what was going on? Mainly two things. Firstly everyone was doing the same as me, assuming someone else more able would deal with the situation. Secondly we all kept walking because everyone else kept walking.

And the frightening thing is that most of us behave like that most of the time.

There has been a case of a girl being beaten up and killed on the street. The murder was clearly visible, and noisy enough that many neighbours looked out to see what was happening.

Yet not one rang the police.

Were they in shock, or did each one assume everyone else would be ringing?

There was what may have been a reverse example of this recently in Germany. During a Love Parade last Saturday at Duisberg nineteen people were killed when a crowd ‘panicked’. Apparently when the venue became overfull police tried to stop any more people entering, but at the other end of a tunnel they didn’t know what was happening and presumably (I don’t know) just started pushing impatiently.

Something similar happened at the Hillsborough football ground in 1989. You can find a summary of events, as far as they’re understood, here. I sometimes feel quite angry at the idiots trying to get in who decided to push, but then I wonder how I might have behaved had I been there. Some of the people trying to get in had been drinking. Maybe someone influential in the crowd shouted ”What’s the hold up? Let us in or we’ll shove our way in!” (I omit adjectives). Maybe someone else wanting to impress said alpha male decided to start shoving, and others in the group thought, this is a laugh, and I’m fed up of waiting, so let’s all push. Once enough people are pushing you have to be pretty strong-willed and self-assured not to join in. At the very least you keep your mouth shut.

So at Duisberg did we have people keeping their mouths shut during those few seconds between stupidity starting and it getting out of control, leading to panic elsewhere? It would be understandable. Everyone decided to leave it to someone else more capable of taking charge. And how many people panicked without knowing why just because they thought other people were panicking?

Basically we’re all irrational.

But sometimes it would be good if we remembered our weaknesses, so here are a some rules to go on with:

1.  The crowd is often wrong, so check whether their response really makes sense.

2.  Don’t look to see what other people are doing. Think it through and make your own mind up. Be an individual.

3. Everyone else is waiting for you to act, so if there’s something helpful you can do, do it. Emergency services would rather have a hundred calls than none.

Remember, the total IQ of a crowd is in single figures. Even a moron has an IQ over 50.

No, actually that is the wrong question. Knowing where something comes from doesn’t make it accessible; we’ve just had a mild drought and knowing where rain comes from didn’t help.

In June 1965 Paul McCartney recorded what was arguably to become the most successful song of all time, Yesterday. Accounts differ, but he says that crucial parts of the melody came to him in a dream. He got up and made sure he didn’t forget it. Then of course the work began. They needed words  – Scrambled Eggs was fun but hardly fitted the bill. Which instruments would be right for it?

Now there’s a possibility. Could dreams be a good source for ideas? Absolutely, but with provisos.

I’m writing this today because last night I had a dream.

Sort of.

I’m working on a novel provisionally called ‘Sunken Star’. It’s almost complete, but a year ago I put it on one side because I needed some distance before finishing it. Recently I’ve been working through the draft making changes, making it consistent. The opening is still wrong because it’s too slow, but the problem was the ending. Why do certain characters take the actions they do? Would I have to drastically alter the plot before it would work?

And there I was at 3 am asleep with my thoughts turning to this problem. At a guess I was on the edge of waking up, but I wasn’t awake. What you need to do, I thought, is write down the exact questions you want answered. Then brainstorm possibilities. No problem, I thought, the main question is why does he do that? Why? Well, obviously …

I had a complete solution.

Trouble is we forget most dreams.

I played with the ideas in my mind, held them up against scenes I’d already written. They worked. They felt right. It would be good to write something down, but for that I needed to be awake. Ah well, hold on to those thoughts if you can. I was in what I call the twilight of sleep, that extraordinary transition between sleep and wakefulness which alarm clocks tend to deny us. I allowed myself to drift. There was a recurring theme everyone is familiar with, the feeling that it would be nice to visit the bathroom. Finally I woke enough to act, and the ideas were still there so I was able to nip into the study and jot them down.

Now of course comes the work. Writing a novel is one per cent inspiration, ninety nine per cent perspiration. Typing 150,000 words into a computer is hard work, and when you finish what you have is a first draft. You’ll have typed more like 200,000 before you get it near enough right. And all the time you have to reassure yourself it’s worth the effort.

Yes I find dreams can be a marvellous source of ideas, and I’m not alone. Kekulé said he came up with the idea that Benzene molecules have a ring structure while daydreaming, perhaps half asleep; he dreamed of a snake biting its own tail. I often find the most productive part of studying a text book is when my mind wanders, mixing bits of what I’ve just read with all sorts of other things.

So are there ways to get the most out of dream ideas? I think so. Here’s my list. It’s a first draft, so please add your own ideas.

Dreams are rarely literal

Kekulé didn’t think that since he’d dreamed it Benzene must be made up of self-absorbed tiny snakes. Dreams are dreams. The trick is to identify ways in which they speak of wakeful life. Someone (sorry, can’t track the quote) once said we should not fear those who dream at night, but instead should fear those who dream in the day. Beecause it is they who make their dreams come true.

The dream is just a starting point

One of the rules of writing is that a dream used literally will not work. It may give the starting point for a story, but it rarely contains all the elements needed to produce good fiction. Paul McCartney still had work to do making Yesterday ready to record; but probably less than with most of his creations. Kekulé dreamed the kernel of an idea but needed to convert it into possible structures for the Benzene molecule, then devise ways to test these options, and finally find a way to convince the science community.

James Dyson came up with the idea of using cyclone technology in a vacuum cleaner in 1978. It was five years before the first prototype was ready, another three before he started to sell it. Now we’ve all heard of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, and he’s worth half a million which if nothing else makes development of subsequent ideas rather more comfortable.

Ideas cannot be copyrighted, it’s what you do with them that counts

You can’t copyright or register an idea. Only a practical fulfilment of the idea is marketable. Dyson tried to interest various vacuum cleaner manufacturers in developing his ideas, which meant his basic idea was there to be taken. Publishers are not interested in mere book ideas unless you have a well established track record, and even then what they want is a finished book.

Everyone has ideas

They say everyone has at least one novel in them, but few people start to write it and even fewer keep going to the end. After that there’s the major task of knocking that first draft into shape, taking on board criticism, and finally finding a way to sell the manuscript. Successful novelists dream their novels in the day, not just at night. Successful developers of business ideas not only have the vision, but also the enthusiasm and determination to do all the hard work needed to reach it.

At least nineteen out of twenty ideas don’t work

I’ve read that successful entrepreneurs make their fortune out of less than five per cent of what they try. A similar statistic is true for publishers: most of their books make a loss. Joanne Harris (author of best seller Chocolat) made about £1,000 from her first novel, and I was astonished it did even that well. Her second did slightly better. The next two failed to sell. Then she wrote Chocolat (Actually I prefer her next publication Blackberry Wine which I think she wrote earlier.)

It helps to build up experience

I sometimes have great ideas for songs. Trouble is I lack the level of musical talent required to really develop them. I can’t even write my idea down or record it because my knowledge of musical notation is too limited and I can no longer play a musical instrument fast enough to make it sound right. Now Paul McCartney, he’d invested thousands of hours in developing his musical talents, both creative and practical, before dreaming up Yesterday. In Hamburg the Beatles were performing live for full working weeks. James Dyson already had some experience of engineering the development of an idea, the Ballbarrow.

In his excellent book Outliers Malcolm Gladwell suggests that truly successful people spend at least ten thousand hours mastering their chosen direction.

Afterthoughts

Okay I’m going to stop there, do a quick check for typos and publish.

This is my first post in six weeks because I’ve been feeling rough, lethargic, finding it hard to doing anything constructive for more than half an hour at a time and maybe an hour a day. Short walks if brisk have left me feeling weak and maybe a bit achy for at least a day. I’m sleeping too much. I don’t think it’s ME (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) but you never know. Maybe I’ll have the energy soon to write about what I think it is: a vicious clash between retirement and chronic depression.

I know this article could be improved dramatically. I know the points overlap. But I need to publish something, and nothing is ever perfect. Maybe I’ll be lucky and some of you will suggest ways to knock this article into better shape. I just need the feeling of having done another post.

The short answer: NO.

The slightly longer answer: YES.

Once upon a time (late nineteenth century) it was discovered that barbiturates have interesting medical effects. After a while they started to be prescribed for anxiety and insomnia. Fifty years later it dawned on people that not only was it easy to overdose, but also they were addictive. Let’s put that another way: they had been freely prescribed but were dangerous. Enter the saviour of everyone on barbiturates: the benzodiazepines. Not heard of them? Try some of the types: diazepam (aka Valium, Pax, Apzepam, Stesolid, Vival, Apozepam, Hexalid, Stedon, Valaxona), lorazepam (Ativan, Temesta, Tavor, Lorabenz). I’ve picked those two because they’re the ones I know for certain I’ve used. If you would like the full list try here.

In the seventies as part of my treatment for depression I was prescribed a tranquillizer – no idea which one. I was assured it was completely safe and not addictive. It made me feel a great deal better and made it far easier to sleep. Fantastic. The new wonder drug.

Then I tried to stop taking it and weird things happened. I felt strange, depressed, had major panic attacks, couldn’t sleep. It was unpleasant. So I kept taking the tablets and went back to my family doctor.

“I’m addicted.”

“No you’re not. The clinical research quite clearly shows that tranquillizers are not addictive. You’re imagining it.”

I tried another doctor. Then another. Then a psychiatrist. They all told me the same thing. I was deluded. Well thanks, I’m suffering chronic depression and you help me by saying I’m deluded.

Why did so many doctors refuse to listen to their patients? It doesn’t make sense. All clinical trials are limited in what they can say. All have limitations. I wrote about some aspects of this in my last post. Even now, with medical training much improved, I am meeting medical professionals who are far too trusting of summaries of clinical trials.

Hey guys, the biggest clinical trial of all is when doctors start prescribing the medicine to the rest of us. Only then does the full story ever come out! One month in the early eighties I was put on a new antidepressant which made me feel better than I could ever have imagined. The psychiatrist phoned me and said stop taking them at once. I argued. He said they had been withdrawn on safety grounds. I said I don’t care, they work. He said best to stop now because people were being killed by them. And clinical trials had missed it.

Back to tranx.

Come 1981 I saw a new psychiatrist. It helps when you move towns – they have to reallocate you. He looked up from my medical notes and said, “I see you’re taking a tranquillizer. Did you know they’re addictive?”

I didn’t hug him, but it was a close thing.

As I understand it all the original trials on tranquillizers had been conducted by drug companies. They have a financial incentive to find new medicines are safe. Did that influence the nature of the research? I don’t know. But when they came to test for potential addictive properties they used a strict medical definition of addiction which was then current.

Now to you and me we’re addicted if we can’t stop without experiencing unpleasant side effects. It’s that simple.

In the seventies addiction had to be physiological. There had to be a physiological problem which cropped up when you tried to withdraw.

Now heroin is addictive in those terms. I understand that coming off it involves cold turkey which feels like a fortnight of raging flu. That’s kind of a nice form of addiction because you grit your teeth, it hurts for a while, and then you’re okay. Although of course heroin addicts rarely get off that lightly because there are other factors.

Some people – perhaps increasing numbers, particularly of young people – are cutting themselves to feel better. To me it doesn’t make sense. To them it does. Now clearly cutting yourself cannot be addictive, but it is. When it is repeated as a means of coping it starts to include the production of opium-like substances in the brain. If you delay the actual cutting this deadens the physical pain, and of course also makes you feel better. But these chemicals are addictive. You may not be swallowing or injecting them, but you are causing your body to create them. Would this have been classified as addiction in the seventies? Probably not. In those days addiction was a physical dependence on a drug. You could not in those days become addicted to playing computer games – not that there were any till late in the decade. Now you can.

Tranquillizers are not physically dependent. What finally dawned on those medics sufficiently well educated to listen and observe was that patients were becoming seriously dependent on them in some other way. I’ve been told that trying to come off them causes the very problems they were being taken for in the first place. My own experience suggests it’s not the simple, but that is a fair guideline.

So what is the difference in feeling between the two types of addiction? Let’s compare two drugs I’ve been to some extent addicted to: alcohol and tranquillizer.

I finally came off tranquillizers a couple of months ago after thirty five years of addiction and a number of failed attempts to stop. I no longer experience withdrawal effects from the tranquillizer. I rarely have any wish to take them. Three times since stopping I’ve had a fraction of a tablet to help me sleep, but I’ll be discussing that with the doctor soon. Taking some again was nothing special. It helped me sleep, left me feeling dopey the next day, and that was it.

Some years ago I stopped drinking alcohol. Completely. I was becoming addicted with weekly intake gradually rising and already over health limit. For months, perhaps a year, I longed for alcohol every day. I didn’t care what sort of drink just so long as it had alcohol in it. Even now I sometimes catch the aroma of someone’s glass of beer or wine and want to grab it from them. That’s pretty spooky. Even more frightening is that twice at social functions I’ve been persuaded to take just a sip of alcohol; after all, what harm can that do? In both cases the alcohol hit the sensors in my mouth like a sledge hammer. Something flashed through my entire body, a feeling of joyful recognition. For several minutes I had to fight the desire to drink more. This was nothing like having another tranquillizer. Alcohol is physically addictive. Once addicted you are never free. If you go back to using it the addiction returns worse than before, as if you’d never stopped.

Medical note on barbiturates and benzodiazepines

Both these types of medication continue to be prescribed effectively for specific patients. They can be of great value, but they are used with great care. Do not be scared of them if your doctor suggests their use. The doctor will ensure you only use them in safe ways and do not become addicted.

the old-fashioned type

So there I was cleaning my teeth with the trusty old electric brush when quite naturally my thoughts fell to sleeping tablets.

Sometimes I collect Jenny’s prescription from the Doctors’ surgery and fetch the medication. Last time the duty pharmacist, trying to be helpful, warned me about the number of sleeping pills included.

“She’s being given rather a lot. You need to be aware that clinical trials show this medication ceases to have any effect if you take it for more than three weeks.” (I think he said three weeks – thereabouts anyway).

“That’s okay,” I said, “that’s just clinical research. She gets them on repeat prescription and they work for her.”

He looked at me oddly. You’re not supposed to question the findings of clinical research, just take the raw findings as fact. “She may think they’re helping but they’re not. She really should stop taking them.” he said.

I smiled, hopefully in a warm rather than condescending way. “Actually research is limited in various ways. The tablets definitely help her sleep because if she doesn’t have any she doesn’t sleep at all.”

He seemed an intelligent guy and was clearly educated in some senses of the word, yet looked at me first blankly and then with mild annoyance. He, after all, was the qualified pharmacist.

The trouble is that research into the effects of medication is bound to be limited. Usually the number of people in the test sample is small. Also the people devising the test are handicapped by the limits of their own experience and imagination. I could ramble on about research into use of sleeping tablets but that’s a rather obscure area.

So let’s think about whether electric toothbrushes are more effective than non electric. Now all of us I hope use a toothbrush of some sort.

The electric ones were marketed in part as being more efficient than hand brushing. This claim has been tested, up to a point. The conclusion I’ve encountered several times is that they are not more effective. Common sense, and natural laziness, baulks at this outcome. As I brushed my teeth I’d been thinking up possible reasons why the research might have been flawed. And this applies to research into the use of sleeping tablets as well as (for a later post) whether or not tranquillisers are addictive.

So you take a random group of people and split them into three groups. One group must use electric brushes for the next, what, six months. One must brush by hand. The third carry on as normal. At the beginning and end of the period experts check everyone’s teeth. Surprise: no significant difference between the first two groups. In fact in one study the electric group showed more deterioration.

What happened?

As I brushed my own teeth I got to thinking about what I was physically doing, and what my attitudes to cleaning my teeth have been at various ages.

The brush has a timer. If you spend long enough on each tooth then shortly before you finish the motor stutters. If you don’t spend long enough then the brushing is far less effective.

Add this to one of the great advantages of the electric brush – it does most of the work and half the thinking for you. With a hand brush you not only must consider which part of your teeth to brush first, but also how you brush them. Brushing horizontally will miss a lot of enamel, so you need to use some sort of up and down motion. I was taught to start with edge of bristles on gum and roll so they sweep the whole length of the teeth, then repeat a couple of times before moving on – spend at least a second on each side of each tooth.

Now imagine a normal person being given an electric brush by the researchers. This requires a completely different technique. Were they taught how to use the brush effectively? I don’t know. I wasn’t. I just bought it and away we went till the first time the motor stuttered and I thought it must have broken. Then I read the instructions.

So people in the first group may not have been using their brushes correctly, but there’s a more compelling problem. We’re lazy. Given a dish washer, who hand washes the dishes? Given a car, who walks? You can feel how much faster the electric toothbrush is working. The busy buzzing tells you it’s more efficient. You can get carried away and just move it slowly across the line of teeth, but it also needs to move up and down in order to clean each tooth from gum to tip. It is so easy to halve the time with electric and actually leave your teeth inadequately cleaned.

And this had to be a long term project. The researchers were not observing their test subjects every time they brushed – simply not practical. How many of the electric people lapsed into lazy habits? We’ll never know. But it could dramatically affect the conclusions.

The only valid way to draw conclusions from scientific research is to read the full report, not just a summary. This is not easy, but unless you know exactly how the research was designed, how the data was processed, and what the exact statistical values were, you’re too likely to draw false conclusions. We trust experts to do this for us, but what if the ‘expert’ is a journalist in a hurry, or a scientist who doesn’t really understand the limitations of research?

Mr Leech in the library with the sleeping tablets, obviously

sleeping tablets in fiction lol

In fiction, especially murder mysteries, sleeping tablets receive their own dose of poetic licence. How many times has the villain mixed powdered sleeping pill into someone’s bedtime drinking chocolate and the target has not only dozed off as quickly as if hit over the head with a railway sleeper but also stayed dead to the world for eight hours while noisy events happened round them? The pills don’t work like that.

A general anaesthetic does because it is more powerful and is injected straight into the main blood stream so it reaches the brain in seconds. Sleeping pills first have to be absorbed by the stomach lining. This is a slow process. There is a significant time lag while the concentration in the blood stream rises, and the person who took the tablets gradually feels more sleepy. Effectiveness of the medication is also influenced by whether or not you’ve used it recently, and what frame of mind you’re in – which can be affected by mental illness. Taking a dose does not force you to sleep. With luck it should make it easier to sleep.

Never mind, there are so many other factual inaccuracies in murder mysteries but we still enjoy them. Which real police force would allocate just an Inspector and his trusty Sergeant to investigating a murder? But we love the Morse books and films. Mind you I don’t think Colin Dexter ever has his characters supping a nightcap of drinking chocolate.

I was reading about Marconi’s experiments to prove that radio could be used to send information a long way.

Clearly you can because we do, but in 1901 we knew less about the world. To most scientists it was obviously impossible to send meaningful radio waves across the Atlantic for the simple and very obvious reasons that the earth is a sphere but radio waves are a sort of light and only travel in straight lines. Here’s the kind of picture they might have drawn if they’d had computers – but even I know they didn’t.

Put the receiver far enough round the earth and obviously radio signals won't reach it - they don't travel through the planet you know!

Fortunately young Marconi was rich enough to indulge his fantasy. He set up a transmitter in Cornwall (most westerly point in mainland Britain) and then travelled to the nearest place across the Atlantic (Newfoundland) to try to receive the signal. His aerial was just a long wire. He tried lifting it with a balloon but bad weather ripped the balloon from its moorings. His team then tried a number of kites. How big is the aerial in your mobile phone? Marconi’s was five hundred feet long. That would be a big phone to carry around.

The signal being transmitted from Cornwall was just the letter S in Morse Code, three dots (say “dit dit dit” out loud to get the idea).

Now at first this puzzled me. Surely the scientific way to test the system was for Cornwall to send a signal he had to identify such as a random letter of the alphabet. But this was a pioneering experiment: he just wanted to know if it would work at all. Then he could focus on improving the signal. And at that stage it was hard enough to pick out from the static even something he was expecting as simple as three dots. Many people on hearing he’d succeeded assumed he was either mistaken or lying.

That was also a key reason for using Morse Code. In those days of messages being sent long distances by cable the technology was basic: even cable signals were filled with static, so a message needed to be encoded in some fairly foolproof way. By 1901 Morse Code was a worldwide standard, and probably tens of thousands of people could translate it as easily as they could read a book. Amusingly, in order to transmit high quality music without interference we now use digital radio which is for all practical purposes a very fast adaptation of Morse Code processed by computers.

So, I read, after hours of straining his ears Marconi got lucky. The atmospheric conditions improved long enough for him to make out the three evenly-spaced dots. Was he excited!

Wow, I thought. He needs to phone his team in Cornwall and tell them they can relax it’s worked.

Talking about fools …

… of course he couldn’t. He was inventing the technology which would make telephones possible. Couldn’t he bounce the signal off a satellite? Yeh, right, in 1901.

An existing system

Actually there was a transatlantic communications cable, but it only worked intermittently. Bit of history here you can skip:

The telegraph system of sending messages by Morse Code down electrical cables was introduced in 1839. Running a cable across the floor of the Atlantic was an immediate and obvious idea, but hard to put into practice. A working cable was run across the Channel from England to France in 1850, but that was a trivial distance compared with the Atlantic (a hundred times further under a far more violent stretch of water with much deeper sections). Cables laid across the Atlantic kept breaking. In 1857 one was successfully run and a signal received, and people were tremendously excited. Until that day messages could only be sent by ship which took days, and you had to wait for a ship. Mind you the first telegraph message was also slow by modern standards taking ten minutes per word to transmit. The first working cable broke within a few days. In 1866, despite attempts at sabotage, a new cable was laid. Other cables were laid over the next decades, and by 1901 the system was slow but reasonably reliable. It was of course still very expensive, and Marconi did not have access to it from his research base in Newfoundland.

Opposition to his announcement of success

The sources of opposition were money, power and image.

If he made a wireless system work it would probably replace the cables which had cost a lot of money to run. Actually the demand to communicate (part of which we call the Web) has grown so much that we still use cables. Of course now they’re fibre-optic ones, and far stronger.

If wireless took off then the controllers of the cables stood to loose influence and therefore power.

And many scientists had looked at the proposal, been unable to think of any way wireless signals could get past the horizon, and stated categorically that it was impossible.

They were right that Marconi’s initial experiment was not convincing, but he soon arranged for an independent test to confirm his result. Then, of course, began the long slog of improving the technology. For another example of the work required consider looking at my post: Thomas Edison, one of the greatest failures of all time.

So how did it work?

At the outer edges of our atmosphere is a layer called the ionosphere. In 1901 it was not known about, but was there able to partially reflect radio waves at some wavelengths which fortunately included the radio band Marconi used. Here’s a sketch to illustrate:

A radio signal being partly reflected by the ionosphere

Trigger for this article

Recently I was browsing the books at an Oxfam (charity) shop in Reigate and picked up a second hand copy of the Reader’s Digest book “When, Where, Why & How It Happened”. The first article I read was about Marconi’s 1901 experiment. Sadly as I understand Reader’s Digest are no longer trading. The book was first published in 1993.

I found myself partially in 1901, and yet suddenly realised how stupid my ingrained thinking could be when looking at fresh situations.

Perhaps this article should have been titled No line on the horizon. On the other hand U2′s latest album is in my view better

Our town has many charity shops selling cheap but smart second-hand clothes. Whether or not you feel happy buying this sort of clothing for your family is just a matter of attitude. You don't have to be rich to be well clothed. You do have to be less concerned with the latest fashions or exact styles and colours. Happiness need not be about money, provided you have enough for the basics.

Yesterday I attended a ‘Child Protection’ course. It was good, clear, informative, helpful, and threw up one alarming oddity. This was one of the many statistics provided to give us a sense of the extent of child abuse in the UK. Most of the statistics were relevant, but one stood out.

Apparently 2.8 million children in this country live in poverty.

A horrifying statistic.

Until you check the current definition of poverty.

Poverty is defined as living in a family with less than 60% of the national average family income.

Right.

That’s a seriously unhelpful definition which risks bringing the rest of the data into disrepute.

It reminds me of when my wife, many years ago, worked part time as a Social Welfare Officer. She was sent on a training course, which was good. However after being told to observe signs of families living in poverty they were advised to look for such indicators as only having a black and white television. Well excuse me, she thought, but we only have a black and white TV and do not consider ourselves to be living in poverty. We just made the decision not to waste extra money on a colour set when what we have is fine and cash is fairly limited.

Happiness is all too often related to where we perceive ourselves to be relative to other people. A major world problem, and a growing one, is that modern technology shows people in poor countries how rich those of us are who live in more fortunate countries. This “causes” unhappiness. Clearly if your family has a low income relative to most in your country – say below 60% of the national average – you are at serious risk of feeling jealous, and as a result feeling less happy. But should happiness really be about relative income? Should a crude statistic like this be offered as an indication of child abuse?

No, I’m sorry, but happiness is not about how much money you have. Yes it’s nice to have spare cash, but it is not an essential for a happy life. We need enough food, clothing and shelter. We need to feel loved. It helps if there is a little to spare for luxuries such as a black and white television, but it’s not essential.

Some decades back I was struck by two families I visited in the USA. One lived in an affluent suburb of a wealthy city. They had colour TV, and back home in England I knew no one who had that. They had a dish washer. A what? I’d never even heard of a dish washer. Over dinner there was little conversation. After the meal Mum reminded one of the daughters it was her turn to stack the dishwasher. There was an immediate display of petulance. What an imposition, to expect her to stack the dishwasher.

The other family lived in a small wooden bungalow on the wrong side of a small town. The father worked at a manual job which he did not complain about. They split food for four between the five of us. It was a simple but adequate meal in a warm family atmosphere. As soon as we had finished the two children sprang to their feet, cleared the table and washed up. There was no doubt in my mind this was the happier family, and no doubt that their children were having a good childhood.

We’re now living on my pension, but I’m happier than when we had my salary as a teacher. I miss teaching, but I’m physically healthier and mentally far less stressed. We have the luxury of two cars – may have to sell one soon to reduce outgoings but that will be no real hardship now, just mildly annoying. We never have to worry about where the next meal is coming from. We’re careful about how we heat our home in the winter, but not anywhere near panic that we might not be able to afford heat. We’ve only had a few foreign holidays over the years – too busy paying school fees for the children – but that’s okay. Britain has a marvellous variety of scenery and atmosphere which we will never exhaust and the people speak our language. Okay so we’d like to go and visit friends in New England one summer and can’t afford to unless I place a book or two with a publisher, but that’s no reason to feel miserable.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the people deciding on such matters as a definition of poverty would turn their backs on trendy ideas, maybe go out and look at real life, and come up with sensible and helpful ideas for a change.

Hardly likely I know, but we’ll survive.

Yes, I was traumatised for many years. The abuse was merely emotional, but it hurt. Like it or not memories of those days dogged me for years. They simmered just below the surface and distorted my thinking and my behaviour. They made it far harder to learn how to cope with my own depression. They made it less likely I’d make a good parent myself.

I was exceedingly fortunate. Over the years I made a number of friends who listened attentively as I rambled on about how bad things had been. Some experiences I recounted again and again. Gradually I got used to them and they lost their power.

We all have painful memories. By and large they can be left alone because we’ve grown beyond them, but sometimes there’s one worth dealing with because it’s having a damaging effect now. In a previous post I described some NLP work I did with a student which enabled him to recreate an alternate version of a true memory. In the alternate version he handled an embarrassing situation as he would now with his increased maturity and understanding. If the bad memory surfaces he has the option of switching to the modified version. Which version is true? In a sense neither. The actual events happened, but they do not describe who he is now. He is able to relax and shrug off the embarrassment because he knows he has now used that experience, he has grown up.

Some memories are like feuds between families or nations. What triggered things happened long ago and we should move on, but somehow we can’t. Someone, perhaps a parent, treated us in some unfair way which has crippled us, and we continue to resent what they did and suffer the after effects. This is frighteningly normal, but hardly rational and certainly not helpful.

The trouble is that we may need more than friends loving enough to listen to our memories. We may need the skills and expertise of a counsellor trained and experienced in working with destructive memories.

Psychodynamic counselling does far more than just deal with memories, but it is one approach that might prove useful. I suspect Post-Trauma counselling could also be useful, though I’ve not experienced that kind. A competent NLP practitioner should also be able to help.

A triplet of warnings:

• You need to let go of destructive memories, yet if you’ve been hanging on to them grimly for decades that will not be easy. Approach this with your eyes open: it will be hard work, and it may prove very painful for a short time. It is worth it.
• There is evidence that some hidden memories which are affecting you now may best be left alone. Dragging them to the surface and experiencing them again can make matters worse. I suspect whether or not this happens has a lot to do with the relationship you and your counsellor have with each other.
• There are examples of counsellors looking for repressed memories, and phrasing their questions so badly that false memories are created in the client. Beware of a counsellor who asks closed questions such as “did your father abuse you” when they should be asking open questions like “thinking back, do you think any part of your childhood might have been worse than it should have been?”. Police are increasingly being trained to interview witnesses using only open questions and non emotive words because otherwise they run a high risk of altering the witness’s memories just by how they phrase the question. Loftus and Palmer did a neat experiment on this in 1974. Google ‘Loftus and Palmer 1974′ or check out this site which describes the research.

If you know of any other types of counselling which includes constructive reprocessing of bad memories please let me know. Thank you.

There’s a well-known saying about how to help people in poor countries: give a man a fish and you feed him for today, give him a fishing rod and he’s set for life. 

Of course if he’s too weak with hunger to fish for himself then a fish to eat first makes sense, but after that it’s wise to show him how you use the fishing rod to catch more fish, and then give him the rod.

In the previous post I described how I was helped after my first breakdown. I was referred to a doctor who specialised in student mental health problems. He first of all established a suitable relationship. Then he prescribed something to help with the immediate symptoms. After that he told me to try one possible strategy which should help, and it did. Since then I’ve been learning how to resolve many subsequent problems, and sometimes I’ve had guidance from counsellors – some of them doctors – on how to set about doing this.

The long-term target has been that I become someone who knows how to set about solving his own problems.

Arguably this should be a part of any type of counselling. It may not be an obvious part; if it’s there it may be hidden. Sometimes I’ve only realised afterwards that I’ve learned something by simply paying attention, observing the counsellor at work. This facet of their work might have been more effective if it had been conscious.

Everyone has problems; they’re a part of life. We start by passively letting someone else solve each problem for us. As we grow up we begin to understand how they have helped us. We begin to listen and to try things out for ourselves. Gradually we develop a stock of possible strategies to look through and experiment with. At this point we’re still immature. We need to learn how to deal with a fresh problem for which we currently have no solution: we need to learn how to solve problems ourselves. We need to move from being entirely dependent on other people like a baby to being independent.

Warning: independence is not the final goal. Adolescence is about becoming independent of our parents, finding out who we are. Full maturity requires us to move even further and to recognise the need to be interdependent, a member of society who helps and is helped by other people, a member of the family.

If you suffer the crippling effects of depression, or are human in any other way and face problems which appear insoluble, look for people who can help you. But don’t be passive. Do not look just for help with the most obvious current problem. Look beyond today and find out more about how you may be able to help yourself. Gradually begin to accept some responsibility for your own treatment. And if you are receiving counselling from someone who wants to do it all for you …

I was 21 when I had my first breakdown. I’d been suffering teenage depression on and off for six years but not known what it was, never questioned it. Suddenly I was too ill to go to lectures. In those days there was no specialist student health care, but a local GP (family doctor) had become increasingly concerned by the mental health problems he saw in his student patients. A year or two earlier he had decided to specialise in treating this epidemic. I was lucky enough to be referred to him by my own GP.

I don’t know what he prescribed me. Almost certainly a tricyclic antidepressant (this was autumn of 1970). I’ve just looked them up on the net and I certainly gained several recognised side effects: increased heart rate, drowsiness, blurred vision, dizziness, confusion. Mind you I was pretty confused when he first saw me.

The first consultation was weird. Okay so he sat behind a large desk and I had a traditional upright surgery chair. But he offered me a coffee, which was shrewd. It worked in much the same way as being given a drink when you arrive at a party. I had something to hold on to, something to take sips from as if I felt confident and purposeful.

His overall approach was way ahead of its time, perhaps because he had not been trained as a psychiatrist so came at the problem with fresh eyes. The starting point was medication, but he made it clear that the antidepressant was only to give me the opportunity to work hard at learning to cope with depression. So that’s what this was. Depression. Hmmm.

“The trouble is that when you feel down you have only the one escape route: running.”

I was a keen member of the university cross-country and athletics teams, and hell I enjoyed running. Best of all was ten or fifteen miles at relaxed pace through the beautiful countryside around Durham. That’s Durham England. If I felt a bit rough I went for a run. But if I felt seriously rough any attempt to run would be frustrating because the energy was gone. Clinical depression affects you physically. I would try to train and fail. The harder I worked at it the worse I got, which was absurd. Races were a waste of time.

“You try to escape by running and find that route is closed to you. What do you do? Nothing. You do nothing because you have no other escape routes set up apart from friends who are usually not available because they’re working or having a life of their own.”

I must have looked blank.

“When I get home from work I’m often feeling pretty rough. What do I do? I knock hell out of the garden. Do I like gardening? Sometimes. Not always. But I do it anyway, and it helps me feel better even when I don’t think I’m enjoying it. But some evenings it’s too dark or it’s raining heavily.”

What did he do then? Sorry, I can’t remember.

“Now you’re too depressed to run what other hobbies do you have?”

- I write.

“When was the last time you wrote?”

- well, er, I wrote a novel two years ago …

“Are you well enough to write?”

- er … well … I read a lot. I listen to music.

“You just told me you’re picking up books, trying to read them, and giving up after just a page or two. You said music isn’t doing anything for you anymore. In fact you have nothing but friends to fall back on when you’re this ill.”

I doubt I nodded, but he was right.

He told me I must find at least one new hobby. How? Well I could try browsing the local bookshop to see if anything caught my eye.

“This is your homework. You find one new activity to try. I don’t care what it is so long as you try it. No matter whether you find a new hobby first time off, the key thing is to try something. And then something else. And we keep going till you have a battery of escape routes to fall back on when you’re depressed. See you next week. Good luck.” He smiled and shook my hand firmly.

I went to the local bookshop (these days a Waterstones but not then). It was an Aladdin’s cave, but cold and dark and grey with the air like treacle. I kept wanting to cry but I made myself work through every single shelf of non-fiction. I read every title. I took some books off the shelf for a browse.

I have no idea what activity I picked, but I do remember the faint glimmer of light that doing something, anything, left me feeling ever so slightly better. No, I didn’t feel happy. No, I still couldn’t think straight. No, the future was still black. But something eased just a tiny bit, barely enough to notice. I had made a crucial discovery: when you’re depressed doing anything is better than just sitting around thinking about how bad you feel.

Actually there were two other long-term results: a lifelong love of browsing bookshops (which fortunately my wife shares, though it’s cost a lot of money over the years), and a tremendous variety of interests. To focus enough on writing to produce the next book for my agent to try and sell I’ve had to be brutal in sidelining many hobbies.

The doctor cum counsellor I saw in Durham from 1970 through 1972 used a range of techniques. The one I’ve described above would probably now be called solution-focused therapy. It was exactly what I needed at the time, and has benefited me ever since. I’ve sometimes used it with people I’ve tried to help, but rarely as forcefully as it was used on me: once I had a really bad weekend and made an appointment to see this doctor. What was I supposed to do when I realised I was getting worse? Anything but sit around moping. What had I done over the weekend? Sat around moping. There’s your answer so next weekend have stuff planned and do it no matter how you feel. Just do it. He then warned me that if I ever came back complaining of being worse yet had not followed this strategy then he’d not see me again. Hard words, but spoken forcefully at exactly the right time. The next weekend I had planned in detail, and I stuck with the plan. I didn’t feel okay. But I didn’t feel worse. Success! Often success for a depressive is entering a bad situation and simply not feeling worse than before.

If your counsellor proposes some action on your part then you have only two rational choices: you can give it a go, or you can stop seeing that therapist. And what harm is it going to do trying out their suggestion? After all, it might work. You’ll be sure it won’t, but give it a go. Give it a serious go, and in so far as you can when ill be open minded. Not every suggestion will work, but you can be almost certain that when you first hear of something that can help you’ll try to reject it; that is part of depression.