Sweet Distress: How our love affair with feelings has fuelled the current mental health crisis (and what we can do about it)

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This book is dedicated to independent thinkers everywhere.D

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Acknowledgements

My thanks to my editor Emma Tuck, who by using her cool classical thinking to temper my hot-hatch impulses brought it to its present beautifully balanced state.

And thanks to my wonderful, ever patient, supportive and loving family and friends. ii

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Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1:Self-pleasuring in every way

Addicted to self

Chapter 2:A fixation on fixing life?

Chapter 3:In which sugar and resilience come together …

What is a man?

Chapter 4:Hot stuff and cool reason

Chapter 5:A balancing (of emotions) act

Parents’ takeaway for balancing emotion

Educators’ takeaway for balancing emotion

Chapter 6:Language matters

Parents’ takeaway for boosting pro-mental health language skills

Educators’ takeaway for boosting pro-mental health language skills

Chapter 7:Up and down and round and round we go

Dopamine

Oxytocin

Other substances

Nicotine

Cannabis

Alcohol

Parents’ takeaway for protecting youngsters against substance-related problems

Educators’ takeaway for protecting youngsters against substance-related problemsiv

Chapter 8:The less sweet sweet spot

Universities

Happiness

Single interest communities

Beam me up, Scottie!

Parenting Goldilocks (or hitting the sweet spot)

Educating Goldilocks (or hitting the sweet spot)

Chapter 9:‘I’dentity

Am I really who I think I am?

Parenting to support a strong enough sense of identity

Educating to support a strong enough sense of identity

Chapter 10:Prehab beats rehab (or how to build resilience)

Sneaking feelings

Parenting for resilience

Educating for resilience

Chapter 11:A call to action

Exercise

Diet

Substances

External observations, aka criticism

Grand finale

Fitter, healthier brains (and less emotional flab)

References

Copyright

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Let us not talk ourselves into far greater mental distress, even as we believe ourselves to be talking our way out of it.vi

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Introduction

A Great Big Emotional Wankfest?

I do believe (even passionately, if it helps) that the answer to the above question is a great big YES. Yes, we’ve been living in a gross-out world of personal emotional self-indulgence and sentiment for decades now: decades which, for all the alluring (and, yes, passionate) rhetoric of celebrities, of pressure groups and of parts of the media, have seen the nation’s mental health worsening and not improving, as they seem to imply that it should be doing, given how much more emotionally articulate we’re supposedly becoming. It’s a terrible, and often tragic, irony.

We’re actually in a crisis of vast proportions. Youngsters are dying needlessly, everyone seems confused and overwhelmed by often contradictory information and, to me, it all seems as insane as it does unnatural. How can a species that is supposed to be as intelligent as ours be self-harming in this way? Quite frankly, it’s getting much too late for the niceties; far too many of us have been pussyfooting around personal and cultural sensitivities, even as the nation’s mental health has been racing downhill on a Teflon-coated sledge. It’s time for some tough talking. Every way we turn there is increasing evidence that families, schools, universities – the whole societal shebang, in fact – is being overwhelmed by an extraordinary epidemic of mental ill health. And that means real lives, real people who are suffering every day and desperately looking for the help that just can’t be made available to enough of us, in a short enough space of time, to make it possible for such lives to be lived as fully and robustly as they could and should be lived.

Notice that I say mental ill health, because we have become so ‘into’ the problem that people have started to use the phrase ‘mental health’ to mean ‘negative mental health’, and that surely is one of the most worrying developments of all. We no longer seem to have any real concept of positive mental health. 2

What a bizarre, unnatural mess we appear to have landed ourselves in.

I’ve already talked at much greater length about the problems we’re facing (as well as what we can do about them) in my book The Significance Delusion,¹ but that goes into a lot of background, a lot of detail and maybe a tad more science than is needed to get the basic message across – although it is essential reading if you really want to understand the hows and whys of our current crises of identity and wellbeing. This time, because we have no time to spare, I’m going to go straight for the functional jugular.

What I want, what you want, what we all want, is a solution to the crisis, and with as little reference to ‘deep science’ as we can get away with in order to explain cause and effect. I’m planning to provide that in as straightforward a way as possible.

First, I will be focusing primarily on the mental health of young people – of children and adolescents. By looking at what is going on for them I will, inevitably, be looking at the entire family tree, the whole evolution of mental health, which will include everyone else’s, too. I will also, inevitably, be looking at where and how we can all play our parts in making a difference and have a role in improving the lives of those around us. Because we all can and should – no, must – if we genuinely want things to change. And that is one of the most positive and empowering things that can come out of the current mental health mess.

And so, by a sort of benign contagion, with viral efficiency, I hope that we can sort out many of the problems fairly swiftly. Pressure groups are constantly demanding huge policy shifts that will effect massive social change. Such things take time and significant resources. Can we wait that long?

It is far easier to make smaller everyday changes that will impact directly on the people we care about, and so spread like a meme – the meme of mental good health.

Let’s make that our resolution: to focus on the things that we, that I, can do in small incremental shifts to foster good mental health in those we love and in anyone else who comes into our world. By taking on the challenge at a personal level – even when that goes against the grain if we think institutions should be dealing with it – I believe 3that we can end up feeling more in control of our lives. And that is especially important at a time when it can often feel as if we’re being overwhelmed and disempowered by external forces taking over so many of the roles we used to assume for ourselves.

Personal control over mental and physical health, in particular, is something which some of us feel has been pulled out from underneath us by politicians, institutions and even the media, which is endlessly assaulting us with lifestyle ‘advice’ and campaigns. Campaigns which often appear to set one shiny new inspirational lifestyle movement against another equally exciting, promising and intoxicating one: clean living; detoxifying your self, your environment, your shelves, your social media accounts, your apps; mindfulness; slow living, slow eating, slow TV and radio, living more like a sloth; green exercise, blue exercise, high-intensity interval training, yoga, aerobics, cold water exercise; playdates for the over sixties, sessions combating loneliness for teens … and on and on it goes. All these brilliant new ideas, initiatives and innovations! It can feel like there is a new one for every new dawn.

How can anyone ‘normal’ feel competent to decide what’s right, what’s best (for them) and what’s going to work in the long term, let alone feel as if they are entitled to decide for themselves? And if it’s hard to know which celebrity-endorsed approach is going to be most effective in getting any of us from couch potato to triathlete before life finally calls time, how much harder is it going to be to sort out the mental health wheat from the maybe just mental chaff? It’s all enough to do your head in!

I want to make it easier for all of us. With a personal back catalogue that includes teaching, lecturing, addiction therapy, brain damage therapy, psychotherapy, counselling, autism specialisation and executive coaching, and with time spent working in organisations ranging from schools and universities to prisons and elite private members’ clubs to banks and international businesses, I have been able to gather an extraordinary amount of diverse, occasionally strange but often surprisingly relevant material. This includes the common neurobiological features of addiction, autism and criminality, and the importance of storytelling in avoiding post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), all of which gives me a slightly different perspective on many behavioural problems. And I have worked with a wonderful and colourful selection of living breathing humans who have generously provided me with that material. What I have been able to discover is that people often have far more in common, in 4terms of their underlying make-up, their brains and their behaviour, than much academic research (with its inevitably narrower focus) is able to pick up on, which gives me quite a ‘head start’ when it comes to recognising and understanding the links between our behaviour (whether ‘average’ or rather less so), our ways of communicating and our brain health.

Drawing on my experience of prisoners, addicts, teenagers, mental health clients of every age, people on the autism spectrum and those with brain damage, as well as my wide knowledge base, I believe that I’m very well equipped to comment on the main presenting problems of the day, as well as in just about the best possible position to consider one of the most important weapons we have in our fight against them. That is resilience, the human quality that above all others keeps us strong when things get tough.

I have seen it all, and then quite a bit more, and that has given me an overview of what is working for those individuals who are able to keep it together, and what isn’t working for those who sadly can’t.

Resilience isn’t wellbeing, it isn’t self-esteem, it isn’t mindfulness, it isn’t happiness. It has been around a lot longer than any on-trend, single solution sound bite might suggest, and it’s both simpler and more complicated than any of them. Without going into a huge amount of detail at this point, I can say that it’s just about as close to being the opposite of self-gratification as you can get.

The Significance Delusion deals with resilience in detail; in this book I will stick mostly to aspects of it that are relevant to some very specific problems – the ones that give us such worrying headlines. Without suggesting any hierarchy of significance, I have put together a list of those problems which seem to be most frequently cited as being sources of mental distress:

Stress

Loneliness

Anxiety

Depression

Body image

Eating disorders

Social media

Suicidal thoughts

Substance and behavioural disorders5

Perfectionism

Academic pressures

Bullying

Fear of missing out (FOMO)

I might have added family structures or the concerns that social commentators and politicians will often point to as being the real underlying problems, such as poverty, or lack of adequate housing, or job insecurity, or, or, or … But actually I think my list stands (although you may want to add your own concerns to it), and that is because I don’t believe that societal issues are inevitable triggers of individual reactions. One person’s anxiety-provoking situation may be another person’s incentive to do something radical and creative in response to it. By keeping my list to those things that are less to do with hard, objectively measurable problems, and more to do with qualitative human experiences, I want to stay in the realm of the personal and stay out of the realm of the pressure group. That way lies true empowerment – of you, of me and of real people everywhere. We can make lives better. They are absolutely not the only ones with the power to do it.

I will be taking a look at how these matters have come to be the insurmountable emotional problems they are, and I will also be taking a few potshots at some of the things that I think have contributed to turning life events that may, at other times or in other places (perhaps more resilient ones?), have been little more than nuisances or inconveniences into sources of genuine psychic pain. Some of these may seem both surprising and counter-intuitive, but I hope my revelations will eventually make sense and, more importantly, point the way to solutions.

I’ve given the book, and especially this chapter, titles which I hope may both stimulate some fresh thinking and highlight one of its main themes – that of the self-gratification and self-indulgence of appetites. As it’s being written at a time when we’re already being asked to reflect on the relative healthfulness of our past lives, it also gels rather sweetly with my take on the relationship between physical and psychological appetites. We’re having to accept that sugar – the substance which has tempted and tickled our taste buds for so many years – has been one of the root causes in the downward spiral of our physical health. Now I want us to consider whether our mental health problems may also be 6down to sweet and attractive substances which have been just as positively marketed and promoted to us, and also involve quite a lot of self-gratification.

We have finally realised that we must change our lifestyles if we want to live longer and better physical lives, so perhaps we should also learn to accept alternative ways of thinking and living if we want to achieve the healthier and happier mental outcomes of which we’re so desperately in need. Even if that means giving up some tasty things we’ve come to love. I believe that it is completely doable. Although we may have lost touch with the concept of good mental health, underneath it all we are just a species of animal, and like other animals most of us still have a healthy survival instinct. We may be teetering on the entrance to the emergency department of life at the moment, but there is help on the way.

Think of this book as a crash-team approach to mental health – fast, hard and life-saving, but not necessarily comfortable or sensitive to feelings. However, it will focus on offering that help in a practical way, so at the end of Chapters 5–10, which deal with specific issues, there will be sections of particular value to parents, would-be parents, teachers and those in the business of young people’s mental health, such as counsellors and therapists. For simplicity I will use the headings ‘parents’ and ‘educators’, but I hope these ‘takeaway’ sections will be of use to everyone, because the bottom line is that we all have a part to play in the mental health of those around us, and we should all take the applause when we start to make a positive difference.

Likewise, towards the end of the book I have gathered together some selected material into ‘a call to action’ which will reiterate and reinforce some of the most practical and achievable lifestyle advice mentioned in the book. The idea is to make it all as memorable and accomplishable as possible. We can make that difference!

1 Gillian Bridge, The Significance Delusion: Unlocking Our Thinking for Our Children’s Future (Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing, 2016).

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Chapter 1

Self-pleasuring in every way

As I write, we are living out the consequences of our longstanding sugar habit, and it’s not a very nice place to be. It’s not just the physical reality that a moment on the lips has led to a lifetime on the hips – leaving many of us obese and at great risk of debilitating illness – but it’s also that the pursuit of instant and accessible sweetness has affected our thought processes and priorities. The bottom line, sadly, is that anything which encourages us to live in and for the short term, and do what gives us immediate pleasure, is bound to trip us up in the longer term. Other animals may get away with living like that, but they don’t have to run nuclear plants, manage traffic flow on motorways or take A levels. We have to look after our species’ long-term interests, too.

The trouble is that once you’re hooked on short-termism, it’s really hard to give it up and it becomes a tyranny. Just think about soap operas. Once upon a time a programme like Coronation Street could spend weeks on a spat between two middle-aged women who disapproved of one another’s dress sense. But now the producers seem to be terrified that if there isn’t a