Dorothy Rowe

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND Openmind November / December 2003 BLAME THE CHILD Dorothy Rowe In Jonathan Calder's excellent article on ADHD and Ritalin (issue 123) space didn't allow for a discussion of the role of boredom and fear in the behaviour of those boys given the diagnosis of ADHD. When they are bored or fearful, both children and adults become restless and inattentive. We become bored or fearful in response to the situation we find ourselves in. Those professionals who believe that ADHD is a real medical condition seem little interested in the child's situation the child, and in how that child sees that situation. In the early 1960s before ADHD and Ritalin were invented, I was an educational psychologist working in Sydney. If a teacher felt concerned about the behaviour of a particular child I would be summoned to examine the child and decide whether the child had some emotional need which was not being met by the school. By far the majority of my referrals were boys aged between 6 and 14 who would not or could not conduct themselves in the orderly, obedient, hard-working manner which the teachers required. I was able…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND May 2003 THE KEY TO THE PRISON Dorothy Rowe Isn't it curious how a small event can change your life? In 1983 I was asked to give a lecture, and after it someone asked me a question, and, as a consequence my life, and the lives of some other people, changed. At that time I was head of the Lincolnshire Department of Clinical Psychology and had written two books, both rather academic. These books were a result of my research into depression, something which interested me because I had been born to a depressed mother whose difficult behaviour had been the bane of my childhood. When I'd first trained as a clinical psychologist I'd been prepared to accept the medical view of depression, that it was a physical illness, but as I listened to my depressed clients, came to realise that they, like my mother, had certain strongly held beliefs which predisposed them to becoming depressed. I had reached a stage in my work where I could see a direct connection between these beliefs, a disaster in a person's life and subsequent depression. Such a view of depression wasn't acceptable to…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND March 2003 WATCHING YOU WATCHING ME Dorothy Rowe The Metaphysical Poets were a group of seventeenth century poets, including John Donne and George Herbert, who wrote complex, beautiful poems about life, death, God and salvation. In the BBC television drama Wit Emma Thompson played the role of Vivian Bearing, the 50-year-old Professor of Metaphysical Poetry who learns that she has advanced ovarian cancer which her surgeon proposes to treat with a new and 'aggressive' procedure. Vivian is always very calm, very rational, a woman of very few words. No matter how much pain and discomfort she is in, when her doctors ask, 'How are you?', she always replies, 'I'm fine.' However, she confides in us, the audience, and we see the interweaving of her experience of her progress towards death with her increasing appreciation of the wisdom of the poets whose work she knew so well. We also see her face as she watches the doctors as they assess the progress of the cancer and the effects of their treatment while ignoring her. Just from her face we get a good idea of what she thinks of these men. However, these…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND January 2003 ARE YOU SUITABLE FOR THERAPY? Dorothy Rowe Jonathan, who'd read one of my books, wrote to me to tell me what had happened to him when he'd asked his GP to refer him to an NHS psychology department for therapy. He was sent an appointment, but when he went along he was told that this was an assessment, not the start of psychotherapy. A week later he was sent a letter which stated that he was 'not suitable for psychotherapy'. He was very distressed by this and wrote to me to ask, 'Does this mean I can never get any psychotherapy?' This happened about four years ago, and I hope that by now all psychology departments have worked out much kinder ways of letting some of the people referred to them know that they will not be offered an appointment because they, the psychologists, don't have anything to offer them. However, there is a long tradition in the psychiatric system of blaming the patient for the failures of the professionals. Nowadays psychiatrists call those patients who fail to respond to the psychiatrists' treatment 'treatment-resistant patients'. In the olden days,…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND November 2002 RECOVERY AND ILLNESS IN THE PSYCHIATRIC SYSTEM Dorothy Rowe I am old enough now to be an historian of the psychiatric system. Ask me how it has changed since 1965 and I can tell you. I first encountered the psychiatric system when I went to work as a liaison psychologist linking Sydney schools and the children's ward in a psychiatric hospital. This hospital had recently been built, and was simply an array of single storied wards, all light, airy and clean, set in large grounds overlooking the Parramatta River. This place did not prepare me for the horror of Middlewood Hospital in Sheffield, nor the other psychiatric hospitals I came know only too well after I arrived in the UK in 1968. All of these were dark, miserable, dirty prisons, where their inhabitants, the patients, were shown very clearly by the buildings themselves and by the staff that they were the scum of the earth. I wrote about these horrible places in my book Beyond Fear which was published in 1987. By then I knew that all those forms of mental distress which psychiatrists called mental disorder had the…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND March/April 2002 CHILDREN ARE UNBEATABLE Dorothy Rowe Why do the British want to beat their children? In 1979 Sweden prohibited all corporal punishment of children, and since then Norway, Latvia, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, Denmark and Israel followed suit. In 2000 the German government passed a German Civil Law which stated, 'Children have the right to be brought up without the use of force. Physical punishment, the causing of psychological harm and other degrading measures are forbidden.' German lawmakers were impressed by the body of research which shows a clear link between childhood experiences of physical punishment and violence and other forms of anti-social behaviour in adult life. In 2000 a study of the impact of Sweden's ban on physical punishment showed that over the preceding thirty years crime, drug use and alcoholism in young people declined significantly. Moreover, between 1980 and 1996 only four children died at the hands of an adult, and, of that four, only one at the hands of a parent. Each year in the UK some 68 children die at the hands of an adult, usually a close relative. In the UK individuals and organisations concerned with…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND Nov/Dec 2001 SWEET DREAMS Dorothy Rowe On September 4 television news pictures of the Ardoyne in Northern Ireland showed terrified young girls being ushered by their parents along a path lined by troops in riot gear, behind whom were men and women screaming abuse and threats and throwing bottles and planks embedded with nails at the soldiers, the children and their parents. I wondered how long it would take for memories of this to cease to inhabit the dreams and nightmares of these girls. Memories of events which aroused intense fear can last a very long time. In Australia when I was eight years old nothing stood between us and the advancing Japanese army. When I went to the beach I stepped over the only defence my home had - a single strand of barbed wire. At the cinema I saw newsreels of Japanese planes dropping bombs and strafing refugees. I was in my thirties before my 'the Japs are coming' nightmares ceased to trouble me, but another nightmare garnered in my early twenties competed with them and finally took their place. This was a dream where the class I was…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND November 2001 WHY WE HATE Dorothy Rowe Hatred has been in the news. We've seen pictures of Muslims in the Middle East and in Indonesia demonstrating their hatred of the USA, and Americans plaintively asking, 'Why do people hate us?' Both kinds of scenes are examples of the virtue we associate with hatred. If an enemy attacks our national or religious group we are allowed, indeed expected, to hate our attacker. In the Second World War the British were encouraged to hate the Germans and Japanese, and in the Cold War Americans were encouraged to hate the Communists. However, we are not allowed to hate anyone within our group, especially our parents, so we try not to hate those close to us, and, if we do, we try not to acknowledge this hate. We can demonstrate our virtue by saying, 'I don't hate anyone, so why should anyone hate me?' Hatred is an emotion, and emotions are one way that we give meaning to our experiences. Emotions are meanings which we create immediately, without consideration, and in that moment they are our own truth. The emotion, be it hate, love, fear,…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND July/Aug 2001 RESCUE REMEDY Dorothy Rowe Two years ago my friend Anna went through a very bad time. Up till then she had been happy, and with good reason. She had an interesting, responsible, well-paid job, a light, airy modern loft, a glamorous social life and Nick, her handsome, loving partner. She and Nick were talking about marriage and a family. Then suddenly it all went wrong. Her firm was taken over by a large organisation, Anna was demoted, and her new boss issued orders and didn't listen. Then Nick left, saying that he wasn't ready for commitment. What he was ready for, as Anna found out accidentally, was a much younger woman. Anna's social life vanished because it was based on couples, and Anna couldn't bear being the odd one out. Anna withdrew into herself. Her mother phoned me and asked me whether I thought Anna was depressed. I said I didn't know. Anna insisted to me that she was fine, though her eyes told another story. Six months went by, then out of the blue Anna phoned to tell me that she had changed her job to something completely…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND July/August 2001 issue LOW ON SELF-ESTEEM?BUY NOW WHILE STOCKS LAST Dorothy Rowe How's your self-esteem? Getting a bit low? Why not pop along to the self-esteem shop and stock up for the summer? Well, why not. Self-esteem is always talked about as if it's some commodity. You've got it or you haven't, or you're brimming over with it, or you've let your supply run a bit low. Or is low self-esteem like low blood pressure, something that goes up and down like mercury in a barometer? People are always talking about self-esteem as if it's something you really must have, but how do you get it? What exactly is it? People talk as if they know what it is, and they say very worrying things, such as how parents can damage their child's self-esteem, but if you don't know what self-esteem is, how can you make sure that you've got enough of it or that you don't damage someone else's self-esteem? That's the trouble with jargon. It sounds good but it's empty of meaning. There's a word, self-esteem, but it doesn't refer to anything real. You don't have a lump of…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND May/June 2001 The Protestant & the Catholic Conscience Dorothy Rowe In an article in the Guardian the Irish playwright Conor McPherson wondered why, with a population of only 4 million, Ireland had produced so many great playwrights - Synge, O'Casey, Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, Friel, Tom Murphy, Billy Roche, Sebastian Barry and so on. His answer was in terms of the Catholic and Protestant conscience. He wrote, "Irish plays tend to explore the inner workings of the human being, how it feels to be alive, and the difficulty we have in communicating our feelings. British plays veer toward journalism: 'Look at the state of the NHS/British socialism/what Thatcher did/drugs among our youth/Aids/power struggles in the home/police/my flat/London ect.'" Not all Irish playwrights were Catholics but they grew up in a Catholic culture. Conor McPherson wrote, "When I started school at the age of four, I was educated to believe that I was a bad person. I was told I'd be lucky if God forgave me. Every week I was made to confess to a priest. Until I was nine, corporal punishment was legal. I grew up in a working class area…

OpenMind - Journal of the mental health association MIND March/April 2001 FORGIVENESS and DEPRESSION Dorothy Rowe When I was in Pietermartizburg, South Africa for New Year, 1999, a brother and sister, James aged twenty and Kate, eighteen, were murdered on their way home from a party. Shortly after their father, the Reverend Lawrie Wilmot, issued a statement saying that, as Christians, he and his wife had forgiven their children's killers. I thought, 'Who are you kidding?' If the Reverend Wilmot had not loved his children forgiving their killers would be easy, but if he loved them how could he forgive so quickly? Of course he was following what Jesus had taught. Jesus knew how futile the Old Testament teaching of an eye for an eye was, but in the Bible it seems that He did not take into account that forgiveness, if it comes, takes time. If we tell ourselves we have forgiven when we have not we soon find ourselves caught unaware by feelings of intense rage about which we can then feel very guilty. Perhaps what Jesus was actually saying was that we should not try to create the emotion of forgiveness but simply act in a forgiving…

The Curious Case of The Tablet Having learned of the imminent publication of What Should I Believe?, Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet, contacted Adrian Weston of Raft PR to arrange an appointment for an interview with me. Thus it was that Catherine came to my home on September 30, 2008, where we spent about two hours in quiet discussion. Like all good journalists, she had read my book carefully and prepared a list of questions. I answered straightforwardly and seriously. All her questions were crystal clear. None aimed to trick or attack me. It was not until the end of our discussion that she chided me for criticising the Catholic Church. She told me that to her the Church was family, and she was loyal to her family. We spent a few minutes discussing family loyalty, and how we can feel hurt if an outsider criticises it. She then packed her things and prepared to leave. I asked her when her article was likely to be published, and she said that possibly it would appear in the issue after next. Catherine left me copies of six issues of The Tablet which I read with considerable interest. However, I did…

The self-help delusion Spurred by the atrocities of 9/11, critics of religion first turned their fire on the fundamentalists - initially those of Islam, then those of Christianity. Now, doyenne of the make-it-alone gurus Dorothy Rowe has conventional Christians in her sights By Catherine Pepinster If you have attended literary festivals you will know which kind of author is guaranteed to be a big draw. There will be a good crowd for a novelist, a few hangers- on for a poet reciting his verse, but the sellout stars are the gurus - the ones that people feel explain the world and make sense of it. Once, that might have been the role of a priest, and certainly some of today's gurus reflect the characteristics of a holy man. There's the fire-and-brimstone, preaching-from-the-pulpit type - a Christopher Hitchens or a Richard Dawkins warning their followers of the dangers of religion. Or there are the emotional gurus, the ones attracting those wanting to confess their misery and their failings, looking for some kind of redemption from those who advocate psychological self-help. And among the self-help gurus, you don't come bigger than Dorothy Rowe. Rowe, to give her credit, is no self-made selfhelper. She has…

IS PSYCHOLOGY a science? This was the big theme in the fourth year of my undergraduate psychology degree at the University of Sydney, Australia, in the late 1940s. Our professor, Bill O'Neill, devoted many lectures to this question. The subject matter of research in psychology might not fit easily into experimental designs, he argued, but that should not prevent us from holding fast to scientific principles to define our terms and refine our hypotheses. The purpose of science, he said, was not to discover facts but to ask better questions. Today, psychologists - and the public - take it for granted that psychology is a science. I base my work on the developmental psychologists who study infants, and neuropsychologists who study how we make sense of our experiences. I know developmental and neuropsychologists follow O'Neill's principles. However, many psychologists prefer to try to show that the world is what they want it to be, while others fear venturing into any area where they might have to confront the questions of how our brain creates meaning, and how, out of this meaning, comes what the neuropsychologist Chris Frith calls the "illusion" of being a person. The subjects of research in the…

Not mad or bad, just scared (June 07) Suppose you're at home awaiting the arrival of the person on whom you feel your life depends. The person is very late and the minutes are flying by. You try to watch television but you can't concentrate. You move from chair to window and window to door. Acting on sudden impulses, you make phone calls, check diaries and traffic news. When a friend phones you for a chat you rudely order them to hang up. The line must be kept clear. You're exhibiting hyperactivity, impulsiveness, distractibility and emotional lability (short temper). You have been stricken with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Or it may be that you are afraid. The symptoms of ADHD are the symptoms of fear. ADHD is the mental disorder which millions of children in the developed world have succumbed to in recent years. At the same time the numbers of children diagnosed with bipolar disorder 'have risen astronomically' (NS 19/5/07). The symptoms of this disorder are hyperactivity, irritability (not getting your own way), psychosis (grandiosity/inflated self-esteem), elation (expansive mood), rapid speech, sleep (lack of).These symptoms are an exaggeration in a particular way of the symptoms of ADHD. The person…

5 February 2005:  Like a puppet on the couch Psychologists and psychiatrists persist in treating us as if we were helpless victims of our biochemistry. This is a disastrous mistake, says Dorothy Rowe. The Bible says you have free will and you can choose to do whatever you like, but if you make a choice God doesn't approve, He'll clobber you. Most scientists, on the other hand, argue that what you do is nothing but the end result of a long chain of causes over which you have no control worth talking about. Who is right? Are we agents capable of acting on the world anyway we choose or puppets dangling off biochemistry's strings? Actually neither really fits our daily experience. In my work as a psychologist one of the big questions I ask people is: "How do you operate as a person?" I also listen to people talking to each other about how they operate. The vast majority describe themselves as engaged in making sense of a situation, deciding what to do and acting on those decisions. A few insist that they are being controlled by extraterrestrial powers or voices emanating from their television. Not surprisingly, these people don't…