The Wall of Pain.

This excellent blog by my friend Dave got me thinking about what he terms ‘emotional porn’. It’s one of those things that now my eyes are open I have started seeing evidence of it everywhere. Including when I’m least expecting it…

Owen got given some book tokens as a present when he left his last workplace so yesterday we went to Borders to spend them. It was about 6 o clock and eerily quiet which made for some good, if slightly unnerving browsing. Now, I’m not much of a fan of Borders. Not just because it is a huge corporate brand that is pushing the independent bookstores of York out of business, but also because it is often hugely crowded and I tend to find it hard to track down the things I need on the rare occasions I do shop there. It is just too damn big! The vouchers, though, were only redeemable in the Borders franchise, so that’s where we went.

Now we both are guilty of this, but Owen in particular takes hours and hours and hours to spend money. Mostly because we don’t have a lot of it and so when we get some spare we like to be careful that we are spending it wisely. Bear in mind that he has had these vouchers since February and he has been pondering over what to spend them on ever since. It’s actually quite a fun process; that ten pound note that your Nan sends you in the post for your birthday opens up a huge world of possibilities to be deliberated and chewed over during long strolls down the river and lingering coffee breaks. It’s more fun anyway, in our minds, to really give these things some serious thought rather than simply spending it on what ever shiny thing catches your eye- soon to be forgotten about. The Jowen method makes a little go a long way, it makes the anticipation almost as fun as the event and from an ethical and frugal point of view it makes you remember the value of money. It means that whatever you end up with, you know yes I really wanted this. When I have ten pounds to spend, I often think about the implications of the note in my hand; ‘Owen would have to work two whole hours to earn this, so is X really worth that? In five years will I still be valuing this, or at least its memory? I picture Owen’s aching back, his tired eyes and throbbing head, then think ‘Do I need to spend this?’ My antidote to advertising has always been the power of careful thought and a deliberate harnessing of my imagination. But anyway, I am digressing miles from what I was supposed to be talking about. Back to the story…

When Owen finally felt mentally prepared to actually go to the shop and wrestle with the big decision of what to purchase, he warned me when we got there (with that look in his eyes) that it could take ‘some time’. Sigh. So we agreed to meet up an hour later and see how he’d got on. In the meantime I went round the shop. I spent most of my time in philosophy and religion, but also swung by gender studies, erotic fiction, and the cookbook section. In the space of fifty five minutes, I went from Socrates to Jamie Oliver and back again. Then, on my way back to the DVD section to meet O, I noticed the psychology wall. Now, it’s been a while since I last browsed a well stocked psychology section and I have my reasons for that. But something caught my eye. One whole subsection, wall to floor, was covered in a particular kind of book.

You would know the kind if you saw it. They are always white, usually with a blurred picture of a child hunched over looking scared or teary. They have a jagged font and a punchy title. Quite eye catching, really. The craze was started by an autobiography called ‘A Child called It’ and by the looks of it there have now been literally hundreds of spin offs and copycats. I had no idea there was such a market for these hundreds of tales detailing bleak, graphic, horrific abuse. Yet I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. This trend is nothing new. We have always, as a nation, been a bit obsessed by the neglected child. In terms of literary history look at David Copperfield, Oliver Twist or the recent spate of gritty nostalgic biographies inspired by Angela’s Ashes. Even modern day Children’s heroes like Tracey beaker and Harry Potter are renowned for their hard lives and the books don’t skirt around issues of abuse, hardship and neglect. The books I read yesterday, though, take the obsession to another level. I looked at the wall to ceiling display and felt profoundly nauseous. There was something not quite right about all this, not right at all.

I read the back of one of the books. There was one of the most graphic descriptions of child abuse I have ever read. It was a boy having his face pushed in the fire and branded with a poker. Then I read another one, it was a creepy description of a girl about to be raped by her father. I read another; it was the story of a five year old child having their hand smashed with a hammer. I probably read about ten of these dust jackets, each to design to shock and horrify, and… titillate? Surely not. As I read the covers, I became aware of a sort of competitiveness that was going on between the books. There was a definite vying for top dog. Each was trying to be the most shocking, the most horrific, the most stomach turning. I got the distinct impression that the authors and publishers were appealing to a certain audience; the people who were reading these books were enjoying the shock.

When I, as a writer, examined the language, it was written to hook, to thrill, to entice. Of course these are books; commercial entities and the publishers need to sell copies. So there’s got to be some kind of emotional worm dangling as bait. But I think it goes deeper than that. All the while, I was just thinking to myself, this phenomenon is pornographic. Emotionally pornographic. People are getting big kicks out of this shit and not the legendary men in long coats who hide behind school bus shelters but middle aged women who knit jumpers for jumble sales and middle class students who read this stuff on the bus on the way to college. Maybe, I thought, trying to be generous, these books are serving a purpose in educating us about the horrors of child abuse. This is such a taboo that maybe I’m reacting to it in a funny way, maybe I’m seeing it as pornographic when it is just a highly charged emotional subject, one of the highest charged in this society and consequently I’m not being fair. After all, abuse is emotive. Hence the emotional packaging, right? Or maybe the intended readers of these books are the many millions of people who have lived through abuse themselves and reading such graphic descriptions might be, in the long run, cathartic and healing. They might help you to come to terms with the deep wounds and long lasting scars, safe in the knowledge that there are others who have been to hell and back.

I tried to be fair, I really did.

But none of my theories rang true. The display just seemed more and more horrific the more I looked at it. It stank of profiteering, not healing; it was one flea ridden cash cow right there in the middle of the bookshop. And people were lapping it up. Even at such a quiet time at least four or five people came and picked up one of these books in the time I was browsing. They were not reacting to these stories with solemnity and reflection on the evils of abuse and pedophilia, but responded to them like the soulless commodities they were; flicking through, reading the juicy bits, occasionally raising eyebrows, putting them down again.

Then, as I was turning away, one woman reader tutted to herself and shook her head.

And I just thought; 'that just bloody well sums it up, doesn’t it?' Yes, I accept that people read these books for a variety of reasons, but I believe many buy them to gain themselves a hollow victory. Through reading the hardback highs and lows of some poor bastard’s misfortune they attempt to salvage some posititivity about their own lives. People read these so they can be assured of their own morality and so called happiness. They think ‘Thank god my life is so much better than that. True my daughter may hate me and my husband drinks a bottle of wine a night and we hardly speak to each other. I may hate my life, but God, I never poked his eyes out with a nail gun and even though when my baby girl kept me up for two years straight I wanted to throw her out the window because I was so exhausted, I never did. I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person.’

So we fall into the trap that the ruling parties and state apparatus (of which major publishing houses are a part) have set for us. We read, devour (and maybe collect) this emotional pornography rather than facing our own problems or examining the genuine injustices in the world and the systems and attitudes that make abuse such a common place thing in our society. We think poor sod and like the woman in the bookshop we shake our heads and say that’s terrible, maybe rant about it to our friends later. Maybe, in rare cases, we go and give ten quid to the NSPCC. We do this not out of a state of genuine compassion and empathy, but simply to make ourselves feel better, maybe even to make us feel something. After all, as any psychiatrist in the world will tell you; a lot of people go through life feeling emotionally numb and these books which use language so skillfully to drum up deep emotions are almost like drugs to some of us. That is why when I went on Amazon to examine some of these books again, I noticed in the reviews a trend; there are a lot of people out there who are reading a lot of these books. There are people who are ‘into’ the child abuse genre. These people are not sick or depraved; it is much more complex than that. They are just the extreme end of people who are addicted to this widespread emotional pornography and they need help.

As a society we need to learn to face our own genuine emotions, even when they are dark and scary. We need to learn to stop demonizing people and seeing the world in such black and white bipolar terms. Whilst this attitude may temporarily give us an ego boost, the I’m a good person effect, it doesn’t get to the root of the matter and leaves us genuinely unsatisfied. Emotions are deep, complex things. Pornography, by its very nature is surface based and fantastical. That is why emotional pornography is seductive, but ultimately is an empty promise. It never really grapples with the heart of the problem and is designed to always leave you wanting more: the next thrill, the next drama, the next more graphic book. It distorts the deepest truths of human existence and turns deep suffering into a simple commodity, to be sold as fixes to us, the numb dumb masses. We are junkies, plain and simple and as long as we are hooked on this shit, believing the lies, we will never know true compassion, or wisdom. To be happy both as a society and as individuals we need to kick the habit of emotional porn and start to wrestle with the huge complex grey areas of our existence. Human experience is rich in depth and intensity, encompassing a huge rang of emotions. How sad then that most of our focus is on the negative ones, such as sadness, anger, jealousy and endless, endless craving. We must learn to renounce this pornographic quick fix, see it for the trap that it is and settle for the real deal. We must come to terms with our own feelings and not be afraid to express our genuine thoughts. Just as a sexual pornography addict must learn how to enjoy genuine flesh on flesh contact again we also have to learn how to connect. Authentic emotions expressed within connected communities of interdependent people is the way out of this sad situation. Most of all, we must learn to face ourselves; otherwise if we’re not careful our inner lives will be reduced to the emotional equivalent of an unfulfilling and lonely mess in a tissue.

Face Value

I have one thing to say today and one thing only. If I ever get to such an advanced state of delusion and paranoia that I actually invest twenty pounds or more of my hard earned cash in a pot of anti wrinkle cream (or age reversal moisturing products as they’re tactfully labeled to avoid the W word.) If that occurs, then you, dearest readers of this blog, have my express permission to shoot me. I think if I ever sink to such a moral and intellectual low, even if I am starting to have a face like an elephants behind, then I will be so far gone and so far removed from sanity that the only kind thing to do would be to put me out of my misery.

Seriously though, I was waiting for a phone call this lunchtime and eased the hanging around by watching some daytime TV. This is something I have an explicit policy not to do, but hell, I was feeling rebellious and bored and thought ‘fuck it’. In hindsight, I wish I had thought ‘read Shakespeare’ or ‘listen to the new Grinderman album’ (which is excellent by the way) or even ‘go for a shit’ but no, instead I thought “let’s watch ‘This Morning.’ That will kill a few minutes.” Anyway, I didn’t even get as far as watching Fern Whatsherface and Suited Man because when I switched on it was the adverts. In one break there were about three commercials for anti aging products, each more stupid than the last. By the time I turned the TV off five minutes later I had lost faith in humanity. Not middle aged women; in some ways they’re the people I blame the least. They’re just the victims of this stupid manipulative, pseudo scientific, anti integrity, paranoia feeding and hate spreading propaganda. As express targets of this highly charged emotional headfuckery, I feel that sort of diminishes their responsibility to see through it. But why are we, as sons and daughters and friends of these women not attempting to point out the whole stupidity of the ridiculous scientific claims the adverts make, why are we not telling them the truth? Why do we buy them these products for Christmas even when we personally think they are nonsense? At the risk of sounding weird why do I, when I go home to stay for weekends, always sneakily have a sniff of my mum’s moisturiser that she keeps on the bathroom shelf and feel comforted? Hell, why are we not complimenting their wrinkles, they’re only folded bits of skin after all?

I have been thinking about these questions, and whilst things like career advancement, fashion and social pressures answer some of the questions, the answer that cuts right to the heart of the matter is expressed in the following equation

Age + wrinkles= imminent death.

Most people are terrified of death. Most people are also terrified of their wives, their girlfriends, their friends or their mothers dying. We love them, we need them. Wrinkles are a very visable sign of the aging process and therefore transform the hidden taboo of death into an surface marker of decay that nobody can ignore. We generally recoil at things that are taboo. Including wrinkles. What an anti wrinkle cream offers, in a not so subtle way, is a magic potion, complete with a modern scientific formula, that promises to prolong life and maybe even elude death. It’s very, very seductive and cuts right to the core of our psyches. So even if we suspect it might be nonsense we all play ball. Hence the multi billion pound industry. Hence ‘Oil of Olay’ being the number one Christmas present for mums. After all, it’s morbid to dwell on death. Much better to pretend aging and death isn’t happening, and now you have a secret weapon to help you. Much better to act like an ostrich than face the fact that life is, as my meditation teacher jokes, a ‘100% terminal sexually transmitted disease’. There ain’t no potion that’s going to help cure it, let alone a face cream based on ‘Aloe Vera and micronutrients from crushed pearls’.

WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE. YOUR LOVED ONES ARE GOING TO DIE.

YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.

The Buddha said,

‘Contemplate death like your turban is on fire’

I doubt wiser words have ever been said. As a culture we need face our own mortality. We hide signs of aging with creams and under layers of botox, foundation and makeup. Then, as the ‘disease’ progresses we commit atrocities like locking those 'suffering' from its advanced stages in virtual prisons letting them rot unseen and unheard. Rather than doing this, we should listen to the dying man, talk to the old woman, prepare ourselves for what, one day we will all have to go through. If we did it with great urgency rather than telling ourselves we’re Peter Pans, then maybe we would have a more peaceful death and a less delusional life. One thing I can tell you for sure, this Christmas my mother isn’t getting her usual Boots moisturiser wrapped under the tree. And one of these days, when I’m feeling brave enough, she’s going to get a compliment on her wrinkles.

The Birthday Blues

Oh God, how much I love The Guardian. Or The Observer as it is called on this long soapy showering, real coffee drinking, should be eating hot buttery croissants (but actually eating lukewarm ready break) day of rest. And God, how much I love the fact that it is free for me to read on the internet. I truly hope it always stays that way. There are some thought provoking articles in there this Sunday, including this article about Prozac, which got me thinking:

Prozac is twenty years old this week. Somehow I didn’t think it was as old as that, but then don't listen to me, occasionally I still go to write 1999 when signing in the date box next to my name. Sometimes I think I might, on some level, not have fully left behind my A level years. Part of me, somewhere, still longs for a headspace free of responsibilities. I hark back to a time when I carried around volumes of my mispelt stoner poetry that, naturally, was on the verge of getting published. Back then, everything that was happening to me was the first time it had happened to anyone. I was so irresistible that my religious studies teacher was about to leave his much loved wife and kids for me. I just knew I could get straight A’s without doing any work. Of course I could single-handedly bring down conservative Christianity, Patriarchy, and Right wing politics in general just by reading Bukowski, Nietzsche’s ‘The Antichrist’ and Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’ like they had only just been published and were written for me alone. Back then, consuming Marlborough reds, tenner deals of petrol laced ‘rocky’ and whole bottles of Jack Daniels comprised the highlights of my tiny self absorbed existence. Delusion was piled upon delusion but I never quite managed to kid myself. Inside me a tornado whirled and consequently the year 1999, the last of my school career, was also the date I first got treated for depression.

The doctor’s appointment was short. That’s mostly what I remember. I was very nervous, my hands were shaking. I think, although I am embarrassed to admit it, it might have been the first time I had been to the doctors without one of my parents present and I was terrified. In hindsight now I know my symptoms were pretty mild. I wasn’t sleeping well, was feeling agitated and distracted, couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork and was off food. My thoughts, although often intense, had been getting darker and bleaker in nature. In short, I just wasn’t feeling my usual chirpy self. It was like I was trying to run a race with treacle on my shoes. I also was worrying a bit obsessively about some stuff that had gone on in the past, and this was manifesting itself in some ways even I knew were strange; like not being able to sleep unless I counted to a hundred twenty five times without missing a count and if I did then starting back at the beginning (hence the not sleeping). But in no way was I chronic. I was not suicidal, I did not self harm, I was functioning in my day to day life. I wasn’t crying non stop, my mood wasn’t all that low a lot of time, even my attentive parents hadn’t really noticed a dramatic change.

In other words, the weird counting thing aside, most of my symptoms could have just been put down to A’ level stress or teenage angst. Maybe in a different age they would have been. But there are three key details I remember about that doctor’s appointment:

a) There was a Prozac clock on the wall tick tocking away as we spoke.
b) The doctor was writing with an Eli Lilly pen.
c) Her coffee, which smelt nice, was contained in a mug that proudly displayed the word ‘Prozac’.

And less than five minutes later, I left her room, clutching a piece of paper in my hand that said words which amounted to the same thing: ‘Fluoxetine: 20 mg (one to be taken twice a day)’

Questions asked to me in that interview:

What’s the problem? (I told her the above symptoms)
Are you feeling suicidal (I laughed and said no)

Diagnosis after that literally three minute assessment:

Mild to moderate clinical depression. Possible obsessive compulsive disorder.

Treatment:

Prozac for six months to a year. Then come back and see me.

I don’t even think this is a bad diagnosis in terms of our health care system. Something wasn’t quite right with me and I think many psychiatrists and doctors up and down the country would have made the same call. As skeptical as I am about the psychiatric classification system you have to have some kind of guidelines for diagnosis, I suppose. The real beef I have is with the thoroughness and type of treatment that was offered to me and the care that was available. First of all, taking three minutes to diagnose someone with a mental illness, even if it is one of the milder so called common colds of the mental health spectrum is simply not good enough. The patient education and aftercare system was appalling, after being diagnosed with what to me was quite a significant problem, I was just left to get on with my life. Not even a fucking leaflet or a Samaritans phone number. This is worsened further by the fact that I was, technically at this time, a child. I had just turned seventeen years old and I was very confused about the whole thing. I was somewhat educated, I knew from reading bits and bobs on the internet and from knowing friends of the family with similar problems that having this diagnosis didn’t make me ‘nuts’. But no one, not even the doctor checked to make sure I knew that.

When I left that appointment, and for months afterwards, I felt dramatically more ill than I had done before I went in, simply because my symptoms had been given a name and had been categorically brought into the realm of ‘sickness’. It reminded me of when, as a kid, you went to the doctors with a sore throat thinking you might, if you’re lucky get given a day off school and then are told you have tonsillitis and need antibiotics. From that moment on, even if previously you had been feeling okish, for the next week it takes a crowbar to prise you from the sofa, you feel like you have swallowed sandpaper and all you can eat is ice cream and tomato soup. It's genuine, but it is also, to a certain extent, psychosomatic. Firstly, this is a very common reaction to being diagnosed with any illness, but especially mental illnesses, and someone should have been there to talk me through that. Secondly, I’m not saying my symptoms should have been ignored, but by medicalising them and giving me a diagnosis when I was so young, sending me into the wider world with a label (always a dangerous thing to give a teenager), rather than to a counsellor to talk about some of the stuff that was bothering me and thoroughly assessing my case, was, in my opinion, wrong. Also, unhealthy aspects of my life that I now know were having a massive impact on my mental health, such as my bad diet, my excessive alcohol and drug use and lack of exercise, were never even mentioned, let alone explored. If all the ‘common sense’ stuff had been dealt with before telling me I was sick and pouring Prozac down my neck, well things could have turned out very differently.

They talk about cannabis being a gateway drug for heroin and crack. Now, I don’t personally follow that logic, but if I did then I’d have to concede that Prozac was my psychiatric gateway drug. Since that day I got written the prescription, nearly a decade ago, I have not been off psychotropic drugs. In a typical dealer fashion, they have got harder and harder, pushed with more and more force and coercion. As my mental health deteriorated further over the years following that appointment, I moved from Prozac and Seroxat to Lithium and Valium to Risperdone, Stelazine, Beta Blockers, and dozens more. It’s got to the point now where I’m practically a drugs connoisseur.

There are, it seems, two ways of looking at this:

1) The official line. My episode, at the age of seventeen was clearly worrying, with the potential to develop into something disastrous. The experienced doctor who had seen this thing many times before was good to pick up on these signs and treat them accordingly. Drug treatment is the most quick acting and effective treatment for depression recommended by the NHS, and Prozac one of the most effective in this family of drugs, especially considering the OCD type symptoms I was displaying. The doctor followed what was the recommended course of action at the time. It was simply unfortunate that I was resistant to Prozac, and many of the other drugs she and subsequent doctors threw at me, My illness, now rediagnosed as the more chronic and lifelong bipolar disorder is notoriously difficult to treat, and with hindsight, it is unsurprising that a small dose of Prozac didn’t make me better. However, the doctor, not knowing those facts, acted correctly.

Or

2) My line. If I had been offered counseling in that first appointment which had been the course of action I wanted (I was, in fact astounded that it was that easy to get a prescription) rather than the tablets that the drug pushing companies pressure their GPs to prescribe, then I may have got to the root of the problem a lot quicker and never needed drugs. Also, If my symptoms had been treated as normal and teenage, rather than sick and mentally ill, at least in the first instance, then I may have thought of the situation in a whole different light and who knows where it would have ended up. I just have this nagging feeling in my head that without all the mind fucking chemicals that were relentlessly pumped in experimental cocktails and huge quantities into my head at such an early age, my brain could be a very different place right now. Also, from a psychological point of view, without all the confusing (and often conflicting) diagnostic labels being stuck on me like superglue, maybe I would have a better self image and be leading a healthier, happier life. There is something fundamentally damaging to be told your brain and personality isn’t working right before you even hit your eighteenth birthday. After all, self perception is of paramount importance. As a young woman to be told by those in authority that you are sick in the head, with all the stigma and implications of such a diagnosis, could be something that, in itself, makes you sicker. In other words, maybe I’d be better if I’d have never gone to the damn doctors in the first place.

I’ll never prove it of course. The establishment will always argue that I needed the medicine, that it has been good for me, that without it I might even be dead. And maybe they’re right. But I will never forget that doctor sipping from the Prozac mug, and the way she didn’t even pause for thought before signing the brain of a child away to a chemical that, I later learnt, was surrounded even back then by controversy and doubt. So happy birthday, Prozac. You may have saved a lot of lives, but you’ve also helped trivialize and oversimplify a complex and dehabilitating illness, and have changed the face of psychiatry to one dominated by branding, advertisements, and false, false promises. Once, back in 1999, I believed them. Now I can’t help but feel a little bitter. Forgive me if I don’t sing whilst you blow out your candles.