I've been looking at www.juniorcycle.ie instead of getting a life and enjoying the holidays. I mean, I am enjoying the holidays but feel compelled to season this enjoyment with the piquant sting of looking at where Irish education is headed. I blame the Twitter. We really should have a gentleman's agreement to suspend school-related content, at least for August.
One thing - among many - that strikes me about juniorcycle.ie is the recurring reference to students as "learners". For example:
-"learners' overall well-being must be supported alongside their intellectual development."
-"This skill [working with others] helps learners develop good relationships and to appreciate the value of cooperating"
-"The learner's junior cycle programme builds on their learning to date and actively supports their progress in learning"
I've been asking myself where I stand on this. On the one hand, I'm all for it. It's not ungrammatical and it reinforces the idea that that's what school is for: learning stuff. Learning is also something students do for themselves, so the emphasis on learning and learners should, in principle, recognise the responsibility of students for their own effort.
So far, so positive. A little doubt niggles away at me that the intended benefits of renaming students as "learners" may soon be lost. I'd say it'll be lost the day they start referring to themselves as "learners". For example we might soon hear "We, the learners, demand that our individuality be recognised and catered for through personalised learning" or more likely "We, the learners, object to the removal of Lucozade from the vending machines". When we make "learner" a synonym for "student" the word no longer implies that the learner is doing any learning. Soon all you will have to do to be a learner is enrol in, and perhaps attend, a secondary school. I can think of a few pupils I've had, particularly early in my career, whose school life was unfortunately not characterised by learning but by other activities.
You might say the same about "student", which implies that the person does some studying. Again, this term is presumptive but nowhere nearly as much as "learner". You can study without learning anything, if you study badly. For example you could read a chapter of "Discover History" ten times the night before a test. You'd have studied but it's unlikely you'd have committed anything to your long-term memory. I would say, in fairness, that all those in secondary school do some study, at some point. If you're studying you know you're studying but if you're learning you don't necessarily know you're learning. I don't mean this in an "I'm having so much fun in this engaging, group activity that I didn't notice the stealth fact-attack". I mean learning happens at a subsensory level and we only really know we learned something when we try to remember and succeed. "Trying to remember" itself could be a sign of partial, or imminent, forgetting.
Learning is hard. It takes a lot more than just showing up for school (though that's a start that far too many are failing to make).
When I was in school "students" attended third level. We were "pupils" as we were still in prison at school. As far as I know that's how children in primary school are still referred to. I can see why we've moved on from there as the term, at least to my mind, does not recognise the input a person should, by the time they're a teenager, be able to put into their own education. I'm sure there was an analogy in "First Aid in English" that said "Teacher is to pupil as shepherd is to sheep", or "Pupil is to teacher what shrub is to gardener". So I'm fine with "student" as long as it means secondary student and not "young adult who's entitled to wander in with a take-away coffee and take an
à la carte approach to the timetable".
I've noticed that I've begun to use "learning" quite a bit, especially in language classes where methods of acquiring and practicing new vocabulary are taught as a matter of course. I talk about becoming an "effective language learner", as acquiring another language requires effort and technique. But the key word here is "becoming". MFL is one of the few areas that the phrase "learning to learn" has meaning. The skills of language-learning are almost infinitely transferable, a reason why there's absolutely no need to worry if a student chooses a language other than their parents' preferred option.
Really though, "learning to learn" is a misused aphorism that confuses "learning to drive" and "learning to swim" with what students do in school. Students in school learn (hopefully) and the more you know, the easier it is to learn new things. "When it comes to knowledge, those who have more gain more" Daniel Willingham writes in "Why Don't Students Like School" There are more and less effective ways of studying but learning itself, thankfully, is an innate ability of the human brain. You don't need to learn to learn, any more than you need to learn to think
"Learning to learn", if interpreted as it is here by former Minister Ruairi Quinn at 2 minutes in, has the potential to seriously damage education. The phrase can be used to suggest that it doesn't matter what students learn in school as long as they're learning the skills of learning. Quinn for example states that "learning to learn" has taken over from "learning to remember". This new definition of learning does not seem to involve memory, which is extraordinary. Students can leave school with no knowledge as long as they have acquired the skills of learning. Of course, as teachers, we know this is nonsense as you can't acquire the skills of learning by any other method than practice and if you've learned something you remember it. Nevertheless the concept of learning without remembering persists. Take today's call from the ESRI, for " a greater use of project and team work to equip young people with the type of skills they need for lifelong learning and the labour market". Whether it's Chinese or Klingon, programming or origami, European geography or the Enneagram- so what? School is really only an apprenticeship for the adventure that is life-long learning. As such it doesn't really matter what learners do or if they do it badly. We'll allow for false starts and abortive attempts. If a child does a project on earthquakes and still can't tell the Richter scale from the Beaufort, does it really matter once he or she has selected an area of interest, done some collaborative research and produced a nice multi-media presentation? After all, we don't have teenagers in charge of monitoring these things.
Does this change in language matter? I'm not sure. I know that teaching in a single-sex school obviates the need for a term for our charges as we universally refer to them as "the girls", and our counterparts in the other-gender school across the road refer to "the boys" or"the lads". Colleagues at mixed schools do tend to use "students" more often. Very few use "pupils". Will "the learners" catch on, outside of official literature? I think it could be case of the Department attempting to make something so, by saying it is so. If we phrase things so it sounds like children are taking responsibility for their own education, they'll step up to the plate. And if we call all the young people enrolled in our schools "learners", well they must be learning something.
We have been told for a few years now that "teaching" is a bit of an old-fashioned idea. It was a kind of custom prevalent in less civilised times, but will soon be relegated to its rightful place. It won't be eradicated but will exist beside the much more important "learning". Like many teachers, I've had the pleasure of a Whole-School Inspection. Ours, which took place last year, was of the MLL variety. That is it looked at the quality of management and teaching in the school, and also at the quality of "learning" that was going on. I have sat at a conference where a school principal asked everyone in the room to consider, then pair n' share, what we felt good learning looked like. I've attended a Learning Schools Project event where the chairman of The Teaching Council admitted that he doesn't like talking about "teachers" and how in the future, we will distance ourselves even further from this arcane idea. "Teaching" to "teaching and learning" was only the first step and in future we will refer to "learning and teaching". I think there will be a fourth step and can guess what it is.
Talking about learning is important, and the more we know about the subjective experience of learners, the more it appears we are mistaken in our belief that they hear what we think we're saying. Recategorising pupils and students as "learners" is welcome if it in recognition that their own efforts are as crucial to their achievement as the is the quality of teaching they receive. But sometimes I feel this focus on "learning" is less about student behaviour and more about a profession that is gradually assimilating public opinion that sees teachers as irrelevant and possibily obsolete.
I bring this up because I've been reminded lately of a thought I had following an inschool talk ( you know the ones) that informed us that we needed to stop thinking we knew more than the learners did, and that we had to move towards being "guides on the side", that everything now was on google anyway and that we would need to be developing twenty-first century skills. Imagine if a UFO landed outside a bingo hall and that was the aliens' first experience of human society. Well this was our first experience of EduSpeak Bingo and we didn't even recognise it, let alone have our cards and markers ready.
"Wow" I said after the speaker had departed, "Now I know where I'm going wrong with my Ordinary Level fifth years." I didn't really think I was going wrong at all. My OL fifth years were a lovely group of co-operative individuals whom I taught in the library for want of a free classroom. While good-natured and diligent, self-starters they weren't and motivating and inspiring them could be a challenge. "Wow," I went on " I know now that I should just stay in the staff room. In no time at all they'd be tearing the books off the library shelves, eager to teach themselves all about poetry, and then they'd be so excited they'd start writing essays comparing the books they'd read".
Now we did use the library, and I'm a huge believer in school libraries. They are a fantastic resource and should be funded, supported and used. Every few weeks the students would take out books. We used to spend time in class reading silently, me along with them and I'd try to get a discussion going about which books they liked and which they'd recommend to the others. It was a struggle but a worthwhile struggle and I wasn't overly bothered that the first chapters of all the books were much more dog-eared than the final chapters. The library was for pleasure, and I wasn't going to dilute that pleasure with admonitions about finishing what you'd started or seeing things through to the end.
Now I learn that my school is to introduce "library classes" across the school from next September (as we teachers are fond of calling the third week of August). We are not alone in this: I know of at least two other schools in the area that are introducing, or have introduced, such classes. Students will be obliged to keep a log of their reading and it is yet to be decided if further proof of finishing the books will be required. The students will be supervised during this time in the library by a teacher. The rationalisation is that by being invited to read for pleasure during the school-day, students will become hooked on reading and will read for pleasure at home as well. The motivation for the initiative is to promote reading, to raise standards of literacy and by doing so raise academic standards because we all know the French got it right when they said "Un enfant qui lit, est un enfant qui réussit" (a child who reads is a child who succeeds).
I'm delighted with this, as it means I will no longer have to give up precious English class time down in the library. But I wonder if we might have a bigger impact on the literacy of our students by adding not a library class to the timetable slot - that has become available due to the withdrawal of a one-class-a-week subject from the curriculum - but a regular class. A class where they would learn about a subject, under the expert guidance of a specialist teacher in that subject. It could have meant an extra Maths class, or an extra Modern Foreign Languages class or a History or Geography class. I would love an extra English class of course, but the school is thankfully already generous in our allocation. There was a time when schools could include study classes on the timetable; a time for students to get ahead on their homework and benefit from an extra forty minutes of evening freedom in which to watch television, walk the dog, chat to their siblings or even read.
Study classes are now verboten, as all students must be gainfully engaged in active learning for the entire school day. So why is it okay for students to go the library and read books? It is because of the belief that reading books is an important factor in academic achievement.
Last year a colleague and I attended the first round of in-service training linked to Junior Cycle English. The facilitator was adamant that silent reading, and the promotion of "reading for pleasure", was worthwhile and should be a priority for schools. Her rationale was that studies had shown that children who read a lot of books for pleasure are likely to achieve more academically than children who don't do much reading. She didn't have any of these studies to hand. (I have noticed that, as humanities graduates, English teachers are expected to believe anything if it's prefaced by an authoritative "research shows....".) A few present tried to argue that there all sorts of reasons that reading and academic achievement go hand-in-hand. Their reasoning was that correlation is not causation and having lots of books at home, fewer televisions and more interested parents was likely to lead to both more reading and more learning. They got nowhere as promotion of reading as a strategy to raise literacy and facilitate achievement is now Policy. The Specification for Junior Cycle English has a specific Learning Outcome that students will "engage in sustained private reading as a pleasurable and purposeful activity".
I remained silent because I couldn't formulate my own objection. On the one hand, I believe part of the appeal of reading promotion stems from the covert realisation that the Specification for Junior Cycle English does not cater for the able student. I don't mean students on the G&T spectrum, I mean any student of even slightly above-average ability. An emphasis on private reading allows these students to make progress at their own rate as they can read books more suited to their reading age and interests in addition to the material covered in class. They can read whole books rather than excerpts, and can read long novels. (I'm not suggesting that long novels are better or harder than short ones, just that texts read in class will now be short novels only as the stipulation is to read so many). By making the teacher responsible for the private reading for pleasure that students do at home, it appears that these students are being challenged and developed.
However, my greater objection is that my friends may have been mistaken in their insistence that "correlation is not causation". What if there actually was a causative link between reading and academic achievement? But what if that link were in the opposite direction than that supposed by the SLSS and the NCCA? What if those children were good readers because they had learnt lots of stuff, including the meaning of lots of words and how words work? How then does private reading for pleasure foster academic achievement? Might it be the other way around? As I listened to the facilitator enthuse how private reading would expand the horizons and aspirations of unmotivated students and how reading would lift children who had more electronic devices than books in their bedrooms into the realms of the "word-rich", I got a funny feeling in my stomach. Somewhere, something was missing. I had been an avid reader as a child. and as a young adult and I was able to read hard books because I knew enough words and I'd learnt enough about history and other subjects to make sense of what I was reading.
I knew from reading Doug Lemov's "Teach Like a Champion" that enthusiasm for reading as a panacea for low achievement was not universal. It was this blog-post by David Didau however, that articulated and shed light on my misgivings.
On the blog, and again in his practical book, "The Secret of Literacy", Didau writes the following about silent reading as a school practice:
...Pupils who are good readers experience more success, which makes them want to read more. As they read more, they become even more successful at reading. their vocabulary and comprehensions grows. Hey presto! a virtuous circle. Readers who struggle with decoding or who have poor vocabularies are unlikely to want to expose these weaknesses by picking up a book. they get much less practice and the gap opens and widens. Silent reading is a lovely experience for the word-rich...For the word-poor it becomes an exercise in trying to disguise the fact that they're holding the book upside down....Silent reading looks like a good idea because it gives pupils the space and time needed to read. What it doesn't do is help poor readers become more fluent, and is therefore doomed to failure."
"Doomed
to failure" seems a bit strong but is justified if the promotion of
private reading is considered a device to lift literacy across the board. I
have heard reading classes credited with increasing vocabulary but
Didau claims elsewhere that a reader must understand at least 95% of the
surrounding content to be able to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Thus
reading becomes a vehicle for the
Matthew effect, whereby the rich become richer and the poor become poorer.
So how far do the library classes, wherein students choose their own books and read them under the supervision of a teacher who may or not be a teacher of English enforce the Matthew effect? Let me say first of all that the wealth and poverty alluded to in the Matthew effect are not quite analogous to economic wealth and poverty. Vocabulary is not a commodity. If a class encounter a new word and only three students learn its meaning, their learning is not tenfold what it would be were the whole class of thirty to learn it.
However, if we say that the most capable students learn the most in library class, is this at the expense of their classmates? It is at the expense of some, who would be better served having a normal class. And the learning in library class is at the expense of students who are find reading exceedingly difficult. Being given free rein in the library is an experience of confirmation that reading's too hard and not for them. It comes down to proportions and how confident we can be that a significant number of students has reached a reading level where they can benefit.
I am not against library classes, along as certain caveats be observed. One is that the teacher in charge of the class is there not just in a supervisory capacity but encourages the readers and when necessary, nudges students towards books that are hard enough to challenge or easy enough not intimidate. The other is that these classes be targeted as opportunities for Resource or Learning Support provision where appropriate. And lastly, library classes should not be a given on the timetable but should be reviewed annually and revert to normal classes if appropriate.
School management everywhere are under pressure to max out teachers' timetables before another teacher can receive as much as a minute's employment. Cuts to the pupil-teacher ratio and the abolition of allocations for most special programmes mean that principals and deputies have less and less wriggle-room. Library classes, or any class where a teacher can be deployed regardless of subject speciality, can make things slightly easier.
Do we view reading as a factor of achievement, rather an achievement in itself? A factor that has been weighed and valued, along with background and motivation, and now it seems to be ranked above teacher instruction. I prefer to think of reading as a product. I don't mean "product" in its industrial sense, but in the sense of the eventual outcome of our endeavours. I want my students to achieve academically, I'm in favour of the retention of an exam system and I want my students to do well in their exams. I do not, however, see encouraging reading as a factor in their success. I see what they've learned in the process of studying for exams as a factor in their reading development, a development that can continue long after they have left school.
So when students go the library, as they will be doing for forty minutes every week, I don't want them to see what they're doing as an academic supplement. I'd rather they see it as a taster for the freedom they will have, after school, from the constraints of lists of prescribed texts and enslavement to the teacher's preferences. And I wish we'd stop telling children, and their parents, how important reading is. "Important" is taken to mean "important to learning" when really it is learning that is important to reading.
Reading, at least to my biased English teacher's mind, is important to life. And life is much, much more important than exams.
Next month is May, mental health awareness month. Already green ribbons are appearing in my Twitter feed and my blood pressure is starting to rise. I originally called this post "why I won't be wearing the green ribbon" but then I looked at the website www.greenribbon.ie and thought, if all you're looking for is people to talk about mental health, then I'm up for the challenge. I think we do need to think about mental health, but we need to think critically about what we're told, and we need to be scrutinise how the mental health agenda is promoted in schools and to young people generally.
At least they remembered the apostrophe
I can't understand how so many people, including people whose views I normally admire, are so gung-ho on the notion of mental health and the need for mental health awareness campaigns. How can I be so wrong and so out-of-step? Don't I care about how many people are dying by suicide? Don't I care about the numbers of children in adult psychiatric care? What about stigma: don't I want to reduce the stigma around mental illness? Aren't these all important issues? I do care, what I don't do is share the conviction that mental health awareness campaigns are the answer to any of these issues.
Suicide, adult units and stigma
Reducing the number of people who die by suicide is a hugely complex area, as the reasons people take their own lives are myriad and all these reasons are have to be dealt with separately. I am not an expert in this area so will confine my comments to suicide among psychiatric patients and recent psychiatric patients as this was the category I fell into at the time of my own suicide attempts. Better services are key, and by better I don't mean "more". In fact less is often more; in particular the practice of prescribing anti-depressants to those aged under twenty-five must be curtailed as much as possible. By better services I meant services whose goal is to minimise the long-term contact the patient has with mental health services over his or her lifetime. A real recovery where patients leave the system altogether, rather than a recovery approach that orients them to a lifetime of patienthood. It is good to see DBT being rolled-out nationally and this, I believe, is a step in the right direction. I take issue of course with the Irish Times' inaccurate description of DBT as a "new treatment". It has existed, in more or less its current form, for the past twenty years. Imagine if the HSE suddenly made a life-saving drug available to Irish patients after it has been on the market and proved to be safe and efficacious in other countries for twenty years. Would we call that drug a "new drug"?
While the admission of children to adult psychiatric units is certainly a problem, we have to avoid the simplistic conclusion that the country needs a raft of dedicated child-and-adolescent inpatient psychiatric facilities. Hospitalisation should be a last resort and if it is decided there is need for such a facility I would favour a national centre of excellence rather than have children treated in small, paediatric units in adult facilities.
What about the stigma surrounding "mental health"? I don't like the word "stigma" in this context as it suggests something attached to the sufferer. "Prejudice" might be a better word, as in the public are prejudiced against people with mental health problems. I certainly experienced prejudice, most notably from the college radio station who told me I couldn't volunteer there any more because I was "a psycho". I would call them from the locked psychiatric ward several times a day, begging them to take me back. I can see that my enthusiasm seemed bizarre under the circumstances and also that the fact I was heavily medicated and locked up was all the proof they needed to confirm their fears. In my own experience the more educated people believe themselves to be in relation to mental health, the more prejudiced they were towards me, and the most prejudiced of all were the health-care professionals tasked with looking after me. To me, improving services is the most vital step in combating stigma. There is no point in Kathleen Lynch giving out about how we should be nice to the mentally ill when her own department denies "voluntary" patients the right to sign out AMA, and insists on the right to administer ECT to patients "able but unwilling" to give consent.
What about educating the public? Mental health campaigners put great store on this. We are all familiar with "facts" about mental health such as that one in four of us has a mental health problem, that everyone is vulnerable to mental health problems, that mental illnesses are all real illnesses the same as cancer and heart disease, that your GP is your first port of call if you suspect you have a mental health problem and that there is an epidemic of mental illness among young people. You may also know that there are safe and effective treatments for most mental illnesses, that will not cure you, but will make life more manageable and that help is always available. But are these facts beyond dispute or do they just reflect current, dominant thinking among journalists and health professionals? To me, the science of mental health is not yet advanced or conclusive enough to warrant the attention and column inches it receives. Take for example, the role of self-esteem in mental health. Raising self-esteem continues to be a key objective of mental health promotion and the phrase features heavily in last year's Well-Being in Post-Primary Schools Guidelines. But there are some psychologists- such as Kristen Neff in the video below - who argue that our obsession with raising self-esteem is partly to blame for the continued prevalence of bullying in our schools.
Promoting Positive Mental Health
My past life, as a psychiatric patient, and my current existence as a teacher converge on the issue of mental health education in schools. To many people this is a no-brainer. Surely if we can get in there, into schools where young people are, after all, a captive audience and educate the hell out of them around mental health, all will be resolved. I mean, on the one hand they can learn the scientific facts around mental illness and decrease their prejudice. We can expose them to real life stories or even class visits by sufferers of mental illness, thereby increasing their empathy and reducing stigma. We can educate them about the importance of doing things to protect their mental health, like eating well, exercising and reducing stress and also instil the importance of help-seeking behaviours. If we could only improve their emotional literacy, teach them how to look out for each other and how there's no need to fear mental illness, or the mentally ill.
I've always felt queasy about this sort of thing. Firstly I agree with Daisy Christodoulou that before we commit content to the curriculum we need to be careful that there is consensus among experts that the information is correct. To me, almost all of the discourse around mental health is not there yet. That's not to say that this theory or that theory is right or wrong, just that I would far rather students spent more time studying biology and chemistry, and that they would develop empathy through the time-honoured practice of reading fiction. Also, we have to ask questions about who is delivering this content. Recently there has been much justified scrutiny of what kind of groups are delivering sex education to Irish teens. I think similar scrutiny must also be applied to the many groups, voluntary and otherwise, who are giving mental health presentations in Irish schools every week. For example, World Mental Health Day is celebrated every year in Cork by a conference where in recent years students have received lectures such as one on nutrition by Patrick Holford.
Much mental health promotion is indistinguishable from health promotion generally. Activities like sleeping, exercising and eating healthily might be promoted as part of looking after your mental health. But why would we believe the students will do these things to protect their mental health but not be motivated to do them to protect their physical health? If we really believed menssana in copore sano why bother with mental health promotion at all? I would argue that we don't need the mental health tagline and it is enough to educate students about how their bodies work, including the need for sleep and the benefits of exercise.
The Fear
Mental health promotion goes beyond this and promotes what I can only call fear. The fear is the idea that your own mind is probably faulty and not at all to be trusted. Your emotions are not a guide to your situation but instead are alien things that must be managed and suppressed in the case of anger or vented in the case of sadness. Students are still being taught about "negative" and "positive" thoughts, even though one of the first interventions of mindfulness and DBT programmes is to encourage patients to stop labelling thoughts and feelings as negative or positive. Mental health promotion often calls itself "positive" as in positive mental health. But this adjective is misplaced. Their view of the human subject is anything but positive. In fact they believe in what Ecclestone and Hayes call "the diminished human subject."
Young people are actively encouraged to see aspects of their own personality as maladaptive and possible pathological. Take this campaign for SpunOut.ie , entitled "Ditch the Monkey". The monkey in this case is the young person's own negativity. Negativity which is wrong. We must all be happy! We're sure that all teenagers invite all their friends to parties, just like in junior infants. No teenager ever has to sit at home on a Saturday night because being a teenager is all about having fun, fun and more fun.
They also learn that a healthy teen is a confident teen. Better iron out those insecurities and develop a healthy body-image and high self-esteem. This is despite research, as referenced here by Kelly McGonigal that "stress, anxiety and self-doubt are not necessarily a barrier to your ability to succeed." In fact, they're not even a problem. What about exam stress? Again according to McGonigal, not a problem. "You don't need to get rid of it and it's not a sign that something's going wrong". In fact academic pressure is only a problem when it is fear-driven and the biggest fear driving students is fear of letting down their parents. The problem stressing out students is not lack of mental health awareness. The problem is unrealistic and/or unhelpful parental expectations. Another fear students have is not getting into a particular course. I think all teachers are familiar with students who become fixated on courses for which the points are beyond what the student will realistically achieve. This is a harsh lesson for a young person to learn, particularly a young person raised on positive, cheerleading messages like "if you believe it, you can achieve it", "you can if you think you can" and "no negative thoughts allowed".
There are attempts by mental health promoters (or "ambassadors") to square this circle with slogans like "it's okay not to be okay". The idea seems to be to worry young people about their mental health but not to really scare them. Along with the checklist comes the assurance that if they don't make the mental health grade, help is available if they just "reach out". No-one seems to have any qualms about the effects on young people of entering into the mental health system. Even while those who work in the system complain that it is stretched to capacity, it still advertises for clients. Any reluctance among young people to engage with services is attributed to "myths and stigma" rather than mistrust of the service or concerns about its quality or relevance.
I speak from my own experience of how easy it is to be side-tracked into a futile, expensive and traumatising quest for better mental health. I was a sucker for the kind of things now being taught in classrooms all over Ireland. Time and again when a crisis would hit my life I would turn to psychiatry, my GP, my counsellor-du-jour and every time the approach was the same; I needed to fix myself. I needed to improve my mental well-being, normally either by taking medication o alter my neurotransmitters or by talking endlessly about my early life experiences, and then life would improve. I know I was not alone in this experience. Others have told me they had similar experiences of seeking help and finding themselves mired in the quicksand of the mental health system. The only thing that actually worked for me was radical acceptance and mindfulness of what actually was and is. The less time I spent worrying about, and working on, my mental health the more I was able to achieve and do in my life. And the more I did, the better I felt.
But what about people who really are ill? I'm not denying that these people exist. The brain is an organ like any other in the body and must be susceptible to malfunction and disease. I can also appreciate that many people benefit from psychotherapy, particularly those who have suffered trauma and abuse. But the mental health agenda in schools does not deal with illnesses that will surface no matter how much we mind ourselves. Students, and the public, love inspirational happy endings and remain ignorant of lifelong struggles with psychiatric illness. Neither does mental health awareness tend to deal with the trauma and abuse that so many children suffer. From talking to the many people it has been my privilege to encounter in inpatient and outpatient units throughout the years, I can definitively say that mental health problems do indeed discriminate, despite what we're told, and are much more likely to affect individuals who were abused as children, neglected as children, were exposed to violence in the home and/or who grew up surrounded by addiction. No amount of mental health awareness can counter insufficiencies in our child protection system.
The Worried Well
So while mental health awareness does nothing for children who need help, it risks creating a cohort of the worried well. These are anxious students, or students going through a rough patch, who are encouraged to pathologise their experience and "seek help." For some students, being asked to think about their mental health leads them down a path of anxiety, where they miss out on the real education that would allow them to achieve academically and live independent, fulfilled lives. Mental health issues can seem like a get-out-of-jail free card to stressed teenagers but focusing on their mental health might be doing more help than good. Repeated attempts to "ditch the monkey" will fail if the monkey is an integral part of their personality. Here is another quote from McGonigal
If we put our attention on inner experiences..and we try to control these inner experiences it almost always backfires. It tends to strengthen those experiences and we feel even more self-doubt and more stressed and more anxious...energy gets pulled away from the energy we need to simply take action in the direction of our goals.
I have written about people who take the message of mental health awareness to heart and start to doubt their own mental health status. There are also students whose faith in their own mental health is bolstered by what they learn and whose already robust self-esteem is further enhanced. They also are susceptible to the idea inherent in Staying Well that mental health can be conserved if we only mind ourselves. I fear that this idea must inevitably lead to a lack of empathy with those who didn't follow the programme and didn't stay well. I teach Senior Cycle English and one thing I have noticed in the last few years is pupils frequent lack of sympathy for the poet, Sylvia Plath, who took her own life. Why did she not just ask for help? they wonder. Why did she give in to her negative thoughts?
I would hope that the emotional development and well-being of students is important in all schools and to all teachers. I would also hope that where students develop mental illnesses they are treated with kindness and understanding by staff. I would hope that staff members are approachable and that listening support is available in schools. We can do all these things without putting mental health on the curriculum.
Kelly McGonigal addresses education-related stress at around seventeen minutes in.
Last Friday I attended Marsha Linehan's lecture at University College, Cork. Dr. Linehan is Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, Seattle and is best known as the originator of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy. She has recently opened up about her own struggles and how they led her to develop the therapy, which is largely based on mindfulness, acceptance and the facilitation of change.
Professor Marsha Linehan
DBT and me
It's more than ten years ago that I came across the work of Dr Linehan. I had been hospitalised in St. Patrick's in Dublin and had been held for five days in the euphemistically titled "Special Care Unit". I took the opportunity that the nurses' station was unmanned to have a peek at my file, that was lying on the counter. I got the shock of my life when I saw that the box marked "diagnosis" was marked "borderline personality disorder". At this stage I had been a mental health patient for eleven years and a psychiatric patient for six years. This was the first I'd heard tell of borderline personality disorder. I was vaguely aware that such a diagnosis existed but knew little else.
I came down to Cork that weekend and took myself to Q+2 and the medical section of the UCC's Boole library. I took a couple of books on borderline personality disorder and started to read up but it wasn;t until a second visit a couple of weeks later that I took out Linehan's book "Skills Training Manual for Borderline Personality Disorder".
This slim, A4 book, comprised mostly of photocopiable worksheet changed my life, as it has changed the life of thousands of others. The change was twofold. On the one hand, for the first time ever, I felt some-one got me. Up until that time my diagnoses had been schizophrenia, anorexia or depression (although my last consultant in St. Patrick's did concede that he could find no evidence I suffered from any of these conditions). I had read books on all these conditions and while some of it fit, most of it didn't. Linehan's descriptions of the borderline patient struck a resounding chord. So did her discussion of the invalidating family. Looking back, I don't think I fit the prototype nearly as neatly as I thought I did, and of the three family types Linehan describes, I'd say mine fell mostly within the "Normal" parameters.
The essential was that here was some-one saying that the way I was acting was understandable and explicable, instead of merely deviant, mischievous or psychotic. And she offered hope that I could change. Change had never been a possibility within my treatment within the psychiatric system or from any counsellors I had attended, There was a polarity in their attitude towards me. On the one hand I was nuts, seriously ill and in need of constant medication and frequent hospitalisation. On the other, I was totally in control of myself and should just do what I was told and stop being such a nuisance. There was no future. There was no reality. The problem, as far as they were concerned, was my reluctance to obey, to concede and to comply.
DBT Venn diagram
Here, in DBT I found tools that I could use to make things better. The whole thing was structured around four key skills : mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation and distress tolerance. I followed them as closely as I could. I made homework cards for myself and completed them, even though no-one ever corrected them. I photocopied all the worksheets and filled them out religiously. I copied sheets like "Cheerleading statements for Interpersonal Effectiveness" and pasted them on the inside of my bedroom door. I made myself do something daily from the Adult Pleasant Events Schedule. I tried to practice willingness instead of wilfulness.
It's debatable how well I succeeded in all of this, given that I had no-one to guide me. It was hard but this was another benefit of the book; the book acknowledged that this was hard. Up until that time things I had been expected to do, or wanted to do, fell into two categories A) Easy, I should be able to do them, and B) Impossible, I should just give up. Living at home, staying away from certain people, giving up things I enjoyed, staying in hospital, being grateful: these were easy things. Going back to college, living independently, being medication-free, going back to the radio station where I had been a volunteer: these were impossible things that I should give up on.
DBT gave me a handle, a manual to do things that were hard but worth doing. The immediate impact on my quality of life was dramatic, although it would be some years before I actually moved out of home. Most of all was the inward comfort and confidence I gained from the knowledge that some-one, somewhere, even though it was half-way around the planet, understood my situation. Some-one knew that things other people found easy, I found hard, and that it was this difficulty and not some faulty wiring that made my life the mess it was.
I ordered Linehan's other book, "Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy of Borderline Personality" on-line and found even more comfort there. Take for example Linehan's debunking of the assumption that borderline behaviour is "manipulative."
"my own experience in working with suicidal borderline patients has been that the frequent interpretation of their suicidal behaviour as "manipulative" is a major source of invalidation and of being misunderstood. From their own point of view, suicidal behaviour is a reflection of serious and at times frantic suicide ideation and ambivalence over whether to continue life or not. Although the patients' communication of extreme ideas or enactment of extreme behaviours may be accompanied by the desire to be helped or rescued by the person s they are communicating with, this does not necessarily mean that they are acting in this manner in order to get help."
Somewhere else in the book (I can't find it but am sure it's there) is the line that has influenced me most of all. I'm paraphrasing because I can't find it but I'm fairly sure it goes something like. "All attempts by the patient to use "mental illness" to explain or justify her behaviour should be rejected".
UCC Lecture
So imagine my excitement when eleven years later I hear that Dr. Linehan's coming to UCC. I had to attend the morning session for "service users" rather than the afternoon session for mental health professionals. (I wonder if my consultant attended the afternoon session. He was the head consultant in the Cork hospital that I attended and at our last meeting in out-patients I told him I had found a new approach that was working. I said I was reading the work of Marsha Linehan. "Who's she?" he asked. "An American psychologist". "Hmmph".)
The title of Dr Linehan's lecture was "Real Change is Possible". Here is something that works. That takes people out of the psychiatric system. That builds lives worth saving. That if the HSE implemented properly would save hundreds of thousands of euro and potentially millions. In fact I will say millions as the saving involved in giving people effective treatment - as opposed to prescriptions, out-patient appointments and infantilising OT - is threefold. Less is spent on inpatient stays, less of visits to A&E and less on medication.
DBT costs more in the outset. Patients receive psychotherapy from a trained professional and also attend meetings where they are coached in the key skills. Having both individual and group sessions facilitates one of the dialectics of the therapy's title; the dialectic between being flexible and responding to what's going on at the moment and being consistent and following protocol. DBT also has a specific and prescriptive response to suicidal behaviour protocol, which rarely involves locking the patient in the nearest secure psychiatric ward.
The difference between Linehan's approach and the Irish model is striking. She said at one point "I wouldn't let fear rule my treatment" when I remember fear being a major driver in policy. Fear of us killing ourselves, fear of their being sued if we killed ourselves, fear of our committing criminal or quasi-criminal acts, fear of us, fear that we'd escape, fear that we'd stop taking our medication or object to taking our medication.
"I Have the Right to be on Earth"
Linehan defines this concept of having a right to be on Earth as "essential validity" and said that affirming it is of major importance. Again, when I think back, even though my psychiatric team were very strong on the idea that killing myself was a bold, inconsiderate thing to think of doing, their behaviour towards me did nothing to instil the feeling that I had a right to be on Earth. They didn't recognise my right to be free, my right to wear clothes, my right to autonomy over my body, my right to fresh air and the feel of sun on my skin.
In the original "Skills Training Manual" Linehan writes that DBT is not a suicide prevention programme but a life-enhancement programme. This distinction is crucial and linked, I feel, to the concept of essential validity. Suicide prevention sounds vaguely coercive. It's about stopping some-one doing something, forcing them back into a life that may not be worth living. A life where you don't feel you have the right to be on Earth is no life.
A part of the lecture I found particularly interesting was when she discussed suicidal thoughts. Thinking about suicide is extremely common, far more common than parasuicide or completed suicide. "Thinking about suicide" is a behaviour in and of itself. It's a behaviour that is practiced because it is soothing. It is soothing because it presents an alternative reality and also because while you're thinking about suicide, you're not thinking about your problems. Linehan compares the practice of thinking about suicide to a drug. I can relate to this; when things get bad I find myself thinking about suicide. Not that I'd do it, just that thinking about it brings relief.
I didn't ask a question at the lecture but if I had, it would have been this, and I'd appreciate your views on this in the comments. Can we apply the idea of thinking about suicide being a displacement activity to society as a whole? Take the recent RTE coverage of suicide, something I've referred to in a previous post. This coverage was embarrassingly simplistic and made several unwarranted assumptions: that all suicides are calculated choices, that undiagnosed mental illness is a major factor, that there is plentiful "help" available were people not too feckless to bother asking for it. Take also the plethora of voluntary organisations with suicide in the title. The awful radio ads urging us to choose life, not suicide as though one were Tesco and the other Lidl. We have anti-suicide cycles and anti-suicide bumper stickers and are told frequently that we need to "break the silence" and have lots of chats about suicide.
But I wonder; when we talk about suicide are we putting off talking about our problems? When we shake our heads and mutter about how awful it is that so many young people don't just ask for help, or think of their families, are we avoiding asking the hard questions. When we put the entire responsibility for reducing suicide onto the shoulders of GPs and the psychiatric system, are we abdicating our own responsibility? I lost count of the number of tweets I received over Christmas telling me to call the Samaritans. That could be because of the type of tweeter I tend to follow, but still.
Hard questions might include what is wrong with our psychiatric system when involvement with it is a factor in so many suicides? Other questions might be how we look after children in their infancy. Are we too quick to refer troubled teens to the GP? Might it be a good idea to reverse the cuts to school guidance counsellors? Is anyone ever going to come out and categorically say that children should not have televisions or internet access in their bedrooms? Why are we still so slow to acknowledge the scale of child sexual abuse? Why does our economic system leave so many able-bodied, capable young people surplus to requirements?
Success
The fundamental goal of DBT is not to prevent suicide but to build a life worth living. When you consider how much is involved in this, how long it takes, the costs involved you see that by side-stepping "suicide prevention" DBT faces up to some of the problems and indirectly, saves lives. It isn't a panacea of course and has had very limited success with, for example, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There may also be patients for whom it will never replace medication, but can still help them lead a life worth living. Its major successes, apart from the original borderline personality application have been in Substance Abuse (87% success rate), major depression (68%) and eating disorders (64%). Interestingly, Linehan sees depression mostly as a behavioural issue, like taking drugs or being anorexic, rather than a mysterious fog that descends for no apparent reason.
A pilot project is currently running in Cork and there is hope that DBT will be rolled out across the country. I would hope that it is not customised too much to fit in with current (mostly dreadful) practice. I hope it will not be adopted in a lacklustre fashion on the grounds that "nothing works with these people". The fact that so many clinical trials have been conducted will hopefully bring the medical people on board. This could be a huge shift in psychiatric policy. Let's hope so.
According to Chambers we need to have a "positive conversation" about mental health. As opposed to one that says that health is bad, and a thing to be avoided. We need to be positive about our mental health, but also worry about it and be constantly "minding ourselves". Positive is tacked on here as a buzz-word, something being used to sell us a product; the concept of mental health.
Chambers writes that "Too often, mental health equates to mental illness in the public consciousness." He's right there. Headlines often proclaim that Celebrity X "struggles with mental health". The reason for the this confusion is due to semantic squeamishness on the part of editors. No one wants to write the words "mental illness". So now we have "mental health problems" or "mental health issues" or even "mental health", as in "she suffers with her mental health". We all know what that means.
Attempts to bisect the coin that has health on one side and illness on the other are well-meant but illogical. "Positive mental health" does not mean the blessed state of being free of psychiatric illness. Rather, it is a large sub-section of the wellness and well-being industry, a concept brought to us by self-help books, motivational speakers and life coaches.
"The trick, when it comes to changing attitudes, is to convince as many of the population as possible that mental health is personal to them." The trick, indeed. Read that sentence again, and ask yourself if you're starting to feel tricked, misled or misinformed.
"Through the internet, we have the potential to market mental health as a fundamental part of being human." Chambers is right here; mental health is a product and we are being persuaded to but into the concept, to invest our time, effort and often money, into gauging, maintaining and repairing this new product. A product that, like the internet about which Chambers enthuses, is now so part of our daily lives that we take its existence for granted. It's hard to remember a time before "mental health" was not a given term in our lexicon.
The article ends on a positive note, telling us all to use an Australian-developed app to send each other "cyber-cuddles". World Mental Health Day is "about all of us". Or is it? For all its positivity and celebration of the fun of mental health, the article is followed by an "If You've Been Affected List."
The list includes the Samaritans, Pieta House, Console and Aware. Now if positive mental health is the harbinger of a new happier way of life, then why are these help-lines for those affected by distress, suicide and mental illness?
Because the idea that mental health is a product, available to all who invest the right resources, and simultaneously as a vulnerable state that is as prone to decay as depleted uranium, has contributed to an increase in distress in the population. In particular it has convinced thousands of young people that they have a health problem, and need "help". It has convinced their parents of the same.
A report from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland...indicates that one in three young people in Ireland is likely to have experienced some form of mental disorder by the age of 13.
This rate increased to more than one in two young people who had experienced some form of mental disorder by the time they reached the age of 24.
Based on international evidence, this means up to one third of Irish adolescents and over one half of young Irish adults are at increased risk of mental ill-health into their adult years
As commenters on thejournal.ie are so fond of saying, correlation is no proof of causation. But I wonder if there is any link between the numbers of young people who feel they are mentally different from others and how mental health is promoted. The report lists risk factors for mental health disorders but have these risk factors increased? Or has our detection rate increased, in which case this should be a good news story instead of an opportunity for the wringing of hands.
In cases of genuine mental distress, I think we are better at picking things up than before, but that progress has been slow or non-existent in the area of child protection. By the time a teenager presents with a mental health disorder, most of the damage of abuse or neglect has been done. These young people will not be saved by "cybercuddles" but a properly resourced and efficient social work system would be a help.
And while family problems have historically been under-reported in Ireland, do we really believe that half of all Irish young people are from dysfunctional homes? One in two, that's half. A pandemic. Are all these young people really mentally ill, or have they just failed to meet the standards demanded by "positive mental health"? A standard that I've described as approaching perfection.
Helen Coughlan, clinical research fellow at the RCSI, is quoted in the Irish Times as calling for services to support young people in need before they reach a crisis. So far, so sensible but she goes on to assert that "Mental health literacy should also be highlighted more within the education system".
Why? The majority of children are not at risk. Those that are, are at risk because of circumstances they cannot control, circumstances that it is our responsibility, as the adult members of society, to rectify as much as possible.
I'm going to leave you with an extended quote from Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes' book "The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education".
"Far from creating a more balanced and rounded personality, therapeutic education promotes the emotionally diminished human subject and promote a life focused on the self and self-fulfilment rather than with understanding and changing the world. The paradox of therapeutic education...is that an obsession with the self means that you will not change the world, and nor will you change yourself: it is active engagement with the world that leads to confidence, self-esteem, fulfilment, or to used the latest piece of therapy-speak "happiness and well-being" The wish and will to change the world characterises humanity; to turn humanity inwards is to diminish all our selves."
Finally, on the sixth day of the month I get around to writing about this month's theme: time. This tardiness is not a result of poor time management; rather the opposite as, in fairness, writing the blog comes way down the list of things to do. And I've been sick. Too sick to type.
Andrew Marvell. I'd be coy too.
Three weeks ago this Monday my watch stopped at seventeen minutes past three. And it was Friday (the day before yesterday) before I replaced the battery. Yes, that was as poor as time management gets. Of course the delay in getting to the jeweller's was exacerbated by my lack of a working watch. I was late leaving the house every morning. Even though all our classrooms are equipped with functioning clocks, I found it hard to get into the habit of consulting them instead of my wrist, and class after class has been timed awry. I know there are those who get by without a watch, who rely on clocks and mobiles, but really -how do you people manage?
Losing and regaining the gift of accurate time-keeping has made me conscious of time itself.
"Make Time for the Things that are Important"
This phrase has been running through my brain for a few weeks now. It's one of the answers to my constant question "how do avoid similar f**k-ups in the future?" And sometimes life seems like one fuck-up after another. The answer to "how did I let this happen" is "you were busy doing stuff that doesn't matter"more often than not.
To say time is our most precious resource is a clichéd understatement. Time is not a resource, but one of the most important dimensions in which our lives are lived. Even though the path I've taken so far in life has taught me lots, and shown me some good places and great people, I feel that an appreciation of time would have helped me be happier. For much of my adult life, time has been something to be endured. I suffered from chronic FOMO. Weekends were deserts to be crossed instead of two days crammed full of lovely time. I was hanging on in there, and hanging, and hanging...until letting go and falling became a fantasy.
Time is precious even when I'm alone. Time is precious even if I don't have children. Time is precious even when I'm tired. Because there is always something to be done. There are always things to do.
My first hospital admission. I remember it coming to me. Clear, clear as day. There was no need not to eat. There was no need to worry about money. Because the world was full of food, and the world was full of money (even if little of it was within my possession). But time. Time was scarce. I felt an incredible urge to live life. To do things. To make use of my time. I was twenty-one, and in hospital on my first psychiatric admission. By the time I got out again, and free again, it was many years before time stopped being painful. Empty hours were the worst and I became adept at keeping busy by doing inconsequential things really slowly.
You'd expect this theme, of making the most of time, to generate resolutions, productivity tips and trigger lists. I've tried these and concluded they're mostly other people's systems that work fantastically for them, but don't translate into my life and probably not into yours. I even borrowed a library book with the title "How to Make More Time" but realise I might as well have read "How to Turn Back Time" because none of us can add the twenty-fifth hour to the day. The one where I could've popped to the jeweller's or cleaned the car or had a nap before going out.
So this month there is no Resolutions Chart or small daily goals. There is only the mantra in the back of my head, always, to Make Time for What Really Matters. Not to fear its wing'd chariot, but to to live every minute, and appreciate every hour.
It's been a stressful, tiring week and I sat down yesterday evening to post my thoughts on the reform on Junior Cert English. I'd left my hard copy of the Draft Specification in work and went to look it up online; I couldn't find it on the NCCA website but found something called the Draft Syllabus for English. That was quick, I thought, as consultation on the Draft Specifications only closed last Thursday. I went ahead and gave my assessment of this document without realising it dates from 1989 and is actually a draft of the current syllabus. No wonder it looked nearly the same!
Seriously, am seriously red in the face morto. For one thing, I should have recognised the draft as being almost identical to the syllabus I'm teaching, though thank God when it came to composing the real thing they left out Writing a Letter of Condolence. Imagine if that came up in Functional Writing? Knowing the capricious minds that compose the Junior Cert paper, it's probably something I should be covering.
So back to the Draft Specification, which, as Evelyn O'Connor writes here http://leavingcertenglish.net/2013/09/j-c-consultation-conference/ is an impressive document. It's impressive mostly in its documentalism, being put together by people who really know how to write a document, but who might seem a bit removed from the English classroom. The document runs high to psychobabble and is full of assumptions and low on facts. One generalisation that particularly infuriated me was "Education systems across the world are increasingly supporting teachers to get beyond marks and grades to more detailed feedback that focuses not just on how the student has done in the past but on the next steps for further learning."
I don't know any English teacher whose only comment on student work is a mark out of x. But the real point is the idea that we'll all jump at the mention of "education systems across the world". We need examples, real references, real studies and footnotes or links to research that we can verify to our own satisfaction.
An example of psychobabble in the document is the link between English and Key Skills. (Everything to do with the new Junior Cycle involves keys.) Under the skill "staying well" we learn that in English students will learn to "be confident". Big Pharma has indeed done its job in defining shyness as an illness. That is not to say that I hope my students won't be more confident writers, readers and hopefully speakers, but I don't fool myself that I can actually make them confident in themselves. And I don't see my shyer, less forthcoming students as less well or healthy than their outspoken peers.
The new course is incredibly broad and ambitious. Here is a selection of tasks students are expected to master
-Engage in extended and constructive discussion of their own and other students, work. ( Not just "discuss", mind you, but "engage in extended and constructive discussion").
-Demonstrate how grammar, text structure and word choice vary with context and purpose.
-Be creative with syntax
-Read for research
-Appreciate how the meaning of sentences can be made richer through the use of grammatical and/or syntactical manipulation
-Write their responses in a "personal voice" as their individual style is thoughtfully developed over the years.
-Search a range of texts, including digital texts, in order to locate information, to interpret, critically evaluate, compare, synthesise and create text.
It's difficult to see how all this is going to be achieved with a cohort who have difficulty knowing quite from quiet or there from their and who frequently write "a lot" as one word. And it's hard to see how students' writing will improve so much when we're being told to spend less time on literature and more time listening to soundtracks and multimodal texts.
The document promises "a wide range of study" but you cannot broaden, broaden and broaden and not expect to compromise on quality. Just as you cannot increase and increase teachers' workload and expect us to bound into class brimming with enthusiasm.
The downgrading of literature within the English classroom is particularly worrying. I was quite pleased with the inclusion of oral presentation in the specification. It's an important skill and one that ties in with English. However, I learned on Monday that it would be unacceptable for a student to pick a literary topic as a subject for his or her presentation. Favourite authors or books are out. The point of oral literacy seems to be less about encouraging expression and oratory, and more about training mini-middle-managers in the art of props and PowerPointlessness.
Like all initiatives, the new Junior Cycle English will be modified and made more realistic on the ground. It's coming and we'll have to get used to it. But this strikes me as an exercise in formatting students as products; well-adjusted, self-centred and unchallenged by anything irrelevant to their own lives. Nowhere in the specifications does it mention how English can bridge gaps between ourselves and others, between us and other cultures, between our time and other times and how it can deepen our sense of what it is to be human.
I have decided to practise gratitude. I nearly wrote "started a gratitude practice "; I need to read some real books. You know, ones that don't come from the self-help section.
This is a serious defeat for my inner cynic. Not my inner skeptic, I'm still friends with her. I wrote before how I've always resisted the idea of counting my blessings. Was this because I was, as Brené Brown would say, waiting for the other shoe to drop? She calls it the notion of being afraid to acknowledge your own happiness "foreboding joy" and writes
"Scarcity and fear drive foreboding joy. We're afraid that the feeling of joy won't last, or that there won't be enough, or that the transition to disappointment (or whatever is in store for us next) will be too difficult."
That's part of it, but in my own life, I've dismissed all thoughts of actively cultivating gratitude on the basis of one memory.
I had a GP at the time who's not my GP anymore. He was youngish and laidback and I kind of liked him. Other people liked him too and he had a busy private practice but I was one of his public patients. I was in the surgery one day getting my prescription and we were chatting.
"Why don't you go home, Ellen, and make a list. Write out all of the good things in your life."
I can understand now, the judgement behind his words, and the implications that I was an ungrateful, spoilt brat who couldn't grasp how lucky she was. "Ungrateful" is a word I've often had levelled at me. There I was with my parents still living and healthy, my educational opportunities, my prospects, my youth. What right did I have to be miserable?
I couldn't see that judgement then and, because I respected him, I went home and wrote my list. I'll dig it out next time I'm down in my parents' house but I'm fairly sure what was on it. My degree, my masters, the fact I was working on a PhD, my youth, my family, the friends I was sharing a house with, my active social life, the radio station I was volunteering at, the local paper for which I'd started to write reviews.
Within months my family was mad as hell with me, I'd lost my place in the house and was back living at home with no nights out at all, my friends weren't talking to me, I'd thrown in the PhD, the radio station wouldn't have me on the premises. I thought that all was lost. The only way I could get through it was to pretend it wasn't happening.
So when the books would talk about gratitude journals I think they're a dangerous idea. The one time I counted my blessings, most of blessings flew away like birds in the winter. But is gratitude the same as counting your blessings? I'm beginning to think they aren't the same. Certainly we can be grateful for blessings, but counting them implies that somewhere there is a massive chart, where all our scores are recorded and adjusted. Being told to count your blessings means "Take a look at the chart there and see there are people with far lower scores than yours. Get over yourself."
Katherine Baldwin
I've decided to be conscious of my blessings without counting them or keeping score. I'm going to pick three things each day to be grateful for. Typing those words feels really uncomfortable which might be a good sign. I'm following the guidelines from JustCharlee, that I got from Katherine Baldwin via Twitter https://twitter.com/From40WithLove . These are:
Three Little Steps
Commit to writing three things you’re grateful for, for 21 days.
1. Commit and share
Whether that means posting on facebook or buddying up with a friend, making it public means it’s likely to happen rather than go the way of many a gym membership.
2. Choose a fixed time
Make it a habit like brushing your teeth. First thing in the morning and last thing at night are great because they set you up for sweet dreams or create a positive start to your day. Three little things. You have time for that!
3. Keep track
To find out what difference it has made, keep a note of changes you notice.
This is, incidentally, almost identical to the gratitude journal kept by Gretchen Rubin in "The Happiness Project" www.happiness-project.com . Rubin writes
"Gratitude brings freedom from envy, because when you're grateful for what you have, you're not consumed with wanting something different or something more."
That makes sense to me, and is what I hope to achieve. Not to stop wanting something more (relationships, children) or something different (writing) but to not be consumed by that want. Rubin only kept her journal for two weeks but found by then she was able to integrate gratitude into everyday life. Unlike the morning pages, which are an open-ended commitment, I'll just do the writing-down of the three things for three weeks and then see. I will let you know the outcome here.
So what were my three things for today?
1. Seeing my washing flapping in the wind on the clothes-line. I'm in love with my clothes-line. Seriously.
2.Spending almost two hours catching up, in person, with some-one I hadn't seen in ages.
3. Posting my entry to a local short-story competition.
The last is quite a step towards the mountain of being a writer again. A tiny, baby step but definitely in the right direction. And I have twenty-eight more days off in which to do little else but potter around, fix up my house and write. A happy day :-)
This article by Jean Twenge appeared in The Atlantic on 19th June and has been much shared, discussed, leapt upon and derided. Twenge has written a book "The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant" in which she argues against age-related fertility scaremongering. Scaremongering is not a good thing, but neither is the "But Ellen, you see people in their forties having babies ALL the time" speech I often get. The article is called "How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby". Here is the link:
Let me deal first of all with the phrase "wait to have a baby." Yes, I've spent the last ten years waiting to have a baby. If I'd gone for it ten years ago, I'd have had a better chance of getting pregnany quickly and more chance of an optimally healthy baby. And more chance that that baby would have at least one, and preferably two, siblings.
So why have I been flying in the face of scientific fact? I base my lifestyle on the health section of the newspapers and every online magazine going. I eat loads of fruit and veg. I wear factor 50 winter and summer. I run. I used to do yoga. One of my Gretchen-Rubin-inspired-recommendations for this month is to use body lotion every day and I've gone for the paraben free kind. But in two big areas I appear to be ignoring the experts' advice. One is that I drink three or four (okay, most days four) cans of Diet Coke a day. The other is that I've yet to have a baby.
Is it because of my gambling gene? No. Is it because I've been waiting to be financially secure? No. It's because of probably the most common reason for delayed motherhood of all: I'm single. And I've now come to the roundabout conclusion that a factor in my lack of a mate is the sorrow I've felt from really early on that time was running out to have a baby. We're talking thirty here, not thirty-five.
I felt useless as my friends got married and began to pop out their bundles of joy. As the weddings started I felt lapped and every pregnancy announcement felt like another runner coming up behind me then passing me by, cruising despite having run 800 metres more than I had. It seemed so far. The gap was so wide and before I knew it second babies were arriving. The race was over and I was still running for nothing but the dignity of not being seen to give up. Except I wasn't running, but limping.
I had a big, bad villain to blame in all of this: my psychiatric history. That was why I was missing out. How could I start at twenty-nine, for God's sake? Every decent man seemed taken. Now I think of twenty-nine as practically neonate. There was, in effect, nothing stopping me. If I added up all my hospitalisations, they'd come to around four months. What was I doing the rest of the time? I was sitting around the house at home, in love with unavailable men or having nervous breakdowns.
Even now I have a hard time with the idea that I'm responsible for my own happiness. I used to go to an eating disorder support group years ago and the leader was very fond of saying things like "you're responsible for your experience" and "you create your reality". It made no sense to me. In fairness they took it to illogical levels, being heavily inspired by the books of Louse L. Hay.
I had no sense of agency. Things happened to me. My priority in life was to keep my parents happy. I was the goodest, bestest daughter in the world. Family gatherings are now painfully ironic as I'm the one who hasn't brought them any of what I can see are their greatest happiness; their five, soon to be six, grandchildren. I was the one who was good. I was the one who made no decision, none, without considering their reaction.
I was the best-behaved, but I was also the worst. I was the one who broke their hearts with my mad behaviour. Even more worryingly, I got myself "in trouble with the law". It was like a pendulum swinging. I'd go from being good to being bold and then, for the last eight years, it's been good as gold all the way.
Should I Aim to be Pregnant by Tea-time?
What use is panic? Thoughts of scarcity- too few men and those available of dubious quality, too few eggs and those available of dubious quality - lead to poor decision making.
This article in The Atlantic says the news is not as grim as I'd feared. It says "with sex at least twice a week, 82 percent of 35-to-39-year-old women conceive within a year, compared with 86 percent of 27-to-34-year-olds. " The crux here is "with sex". Without sex, my chances are slimmer than none, unless I take the donor insemination route. (I've looked into this. The straws alone are over 1,300 euro. Yes, thirteen hundred euro for a teaspoon of the most common substance on earth after salt water. Maybe next year).
You might be thinking what the hell is your-one complaining about? Two posts ago I was describing my time locked and medicated in a psychiatric unit. I've admitted all forms of uselessness and madness. And here I am, a home-owning, gainfully employed individual who has no contact at all with the mental illness services. I'm doing great, considering. There's the rub: considering. I don't think I'm doing great. I feel, not that I've failed, but that I'm in the process of failing. I'm afraid that right now, today, is the crucial time and that I'm not doing enough. The whistle has blown and I should be doing my utmost to score that golden goal.
Why can't I be happy? Why do I resist practices like gratitude journals and counting my blessings? Because somewhere in me, something kicks up and says "not fair". I'm as worthy as anyone of the Full Package; the job, the husband, the house, the children. (Now I know that this is an illusion. That many of those who look like they've ticked all the boxes live in misery.)
I can see now why I'm not married and why I've no children. It's the "who am I?" mentality. It was enough that I wasn't in hospital or on drugs. I was satisfied with far too little. I might have seethed with resentment while holding friends' newborns, but it was the resentment of "when will it be my turn", not realising that the dating-and-mating playground is unsupervised. A friend of a friends broke off her engagement and the next time I saw, her, a few months later, she had a new man. I thought why am I not like her? Nothing's stopping her. I put the blame on who I was , rather than what I was doing.
What I was doing was refusing to accept the reality that I was deeply dissatisfied with my life, and instead going along with the "she's doing great, considering" consensus. Now I can face reality and it's hard, it's painful. I fill my days up with outings, lunch-dates, correcting and calling down home but I turn off the lights every night and go to sleep alone. I'm doing internet dating and all my messages are from men ten years older than me. I don't know what the story is with my fertility. I could be fine; but I'm entering the phase where months count, rather than years. I like this article, it gives me hope. Hope may be no more accurate than desperation but it's much more useful.
I loathe exhortations to "stay positive" but I suppose that's what I'm trying to do. I think "hopeful" might be better than positive. It doesn't carry the same connotations of expectation and certainty. So that is my step for today: to live in hope.
Today is the 24th day of the 7th month and that is why it has been chosen by Samaritans as their main annual day of raising awareness of their service. I always thought of the organisation as "the Samaritans" but notice that now they seem to style themselves as Samaritans without the definite article. I'm not ashamed to say that I have called Samaritans in the past and think they're a worthwhile cause to support. I'm not going to say I recommend calling them right now this minute wherever you are. Just bear them in the back of your mind.
I've come up with ten reasons why I think the Samaritans are a beacon of sense and humanity in a world crowded with helplines and awareness groups.
1. 24/7
Like it says on the tin, the Samaritans really are there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. While the centres are open for anything up to ten o'clock at night, there is still always some-one in the building to answer phones in the middle of the night.
2. Confidentiality
Whatever you say to Samaritans stays within the organisation. Volunteers are forbidden from divulging information about callers. They're not going to call your mother, or your spouse, or your GP. They're not the thought police and won't shop you for disclosing suicidal thoughts or even plans
3. Non-directional support
This ties in with number two. The Samaritans believe adults are responsible for themselves and do not tell callers what to do. This holds true for the big decisions in life, such as whether or not to leave a spouse or partner, as well as the small things, such as should I go home for the weekend? The impulse to offer advice is very strong among humans, and some people attract it like a magnet. I spent years of my life being told what I should do, by my parents, my siblings, my doctors, my friends, fellow patients, people on the bus and even the guards. There's nothing wrong with wanting to help people but the thinking necessary to formulate advice can inhibit empathy. The advice-avoidance also recognises that the volunteer and the caller are equals. Neither is an expert on the other's life.
4. Variety of Contact Options. The phone is the best known option for contacting the Samaritans but they also run an email and text service. While I can see the point of emails, I'd be a bit ambivalent about the value of the texting service. I'm sure they thought it out before they introduced it but wonder how much emotional connection you can cram into 160 characters. There are twenty centres around the country that are open for most of the day. Imagine; a person can walk in off the street and sit down with a real, life person who'll sit with him or her, listen, connect and impose no kind of conditions and charge no fee.
5.Diversity
I don't have figures available but from what I know the Samaritans recruit both men and women, gay and straight, across as wide a social spectrum as possible. Not only is the organisation itself diverse but it recognises and respects diversity in its users.
6. Responsible Marketing
I once emailed the Advertising Standards Authority about an Aware campaign that stated how many had died in Ireland by suicide the previous year and exhorted listeners to send them money and "stop this pain". It reminded me of the American magazine that in the 1980's had an issue with a puppy on the cover and the headline "Buy This Magazine or We'll Shoot the Puppy". In recent years I've heard radio ads for other helplines that include dramatisations of families hearing the news that their son has taken his own life. There is also the indirect marketing whereby some organisations write articles for newspapers or sites like www.thejournal.ie hyping up the "epidemic" of mental health problems among young people or among men. In contrast to these, the Samaritans explain the nature of their service and never claim that their service "saves lives" although they hope, indirectly, that it does.
7. Listening
The Samaritans' core value is listening. In a complex, fast-based world it is easy to underestimate the importance of something so simple. Listening sounds like a passive activity, but can be extremely powerful.
8. Independence
The Samaritans won't diagnose you with any kind of health problem. They're unaffiliated to the mental illness industry. This is perhaps the most common misconception about them; that they're a mental health charity who offer support to those with mental health issues or who work to promote mental health. They do no such thing. When I called the Samaritans I was never asked had I taken my medication or told that I was catastrophising or that that my brain wasn't working. They just listened.
9. You Don't Have to be Suicidal
There's a sign up down the post office with a number for the HSE that you're supposed to ring if you're suicidal. Presumably so they can talk you out of it. I've always kind of looked at it funny, thinking, from my own experience that if you're suicidal you're unlikely to call some-one whose paid job it is to stop you. The poster also implies; don't call us unless you're suicidal. We don't want to hear about your pain, or your grief, or your disappointment or how you feel life's been unfair. We just care about bringing down the numbers because they're making us look bad. The Samaritans' "here for everyone" approach takes the heat out of the situation. There's no drama. You just call.
10. Normality
In the end, I did struggle to come up with ten reasons. I'm going to pick normality for my last one. There are 2,188 current volunteers in Ireland, who are normal people from all walks of life, not purported experts. They got 412, 167 calls and visits last year. We live in a world where emotions and painful feelings are increasingly pathologised. We also have more and more of what Robert Putnam calls "bonding" or special interest groups, but fewer "bridging" groups where that bring people together based on location. This can lead to splintering, and the fear of being different can become the belief that one is abnormal. In all their work, the Samaritans stress the normality and universality of human emotions, although our stories and prolems can indeed be unique to us.
