Facebook, Twitter, Apple et al - Helping us Make a Better Connection? Really?

It’s a world of instant gratification, where we’ve all been massively conditioned by a constant barrage of advertising and new, better, bigger – well, actually smaller – products every few months. A world where we’re all racing to save time and make more money to pay for all these new necessities. Or working way too hard for not enough money so the person or company we’re working for can buy whatever they want. If we’re in that scenario we’re imprisoned by our own prejudices against ourselves – that we don’t deserve anything better – and by a pretty generally accepted idea that’s it our fault we’re not more empowered.

Time is money but there isn’t enough of the former, ergo never enough of the latter. We’ve been taught with Machiavellian cleverness and in ways that we’re not even aware of that social media keeps us connected but in fact it keeps us distracted, uses up that precious time and leaves us starved for something real. Because the connections we make are long distance but immediate, often with shorter and shorter sentences composed of horribly distorted and truncated words.

Our minds are deluged with information that’s outrageously seductive and feels fulfilling but only for a few seconds. Then we need more. It’s not the real stuff of connection and fulfilment, it’s a drug and dangerously addictive.

We are the slaves of Apple, Facebook, Twitter et al. Devices get smaller and smaller and we use less and less of our physical capacity. Hunched over a tiny screen, using tiny movements of thumbs. Body tense. Eyes straining to see the print.There’s nothing pleasurable about it and nothing intrinsically good about lousy grammar and small, but we don’t question, we just buy, buy, buy and use, use, use. Or feel left out, left behind if we can’t afford to keep up.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that all this information, all these new and better products, this fast-paced life, is giving us more and more, making our world bigger and bigger.

It isn’t, though. It’s imploding in the places it matters the most. Our capacity to express creatively and originally. To really think for ourselves. To realize that the worthwhile things in life take time and space to develop, and that it’s the journey which brings fulfilment not the immediate achievement or gratification.

And what about our capacity to connect in a meaningful way face to face? Either we don’t have time, or we’re hooked on social media, which has made cowards of us all. We throw words and images out into cyberspace hoping somebody will like them and leave some kind of cryptic comment. But if they don’t, hey, we’ve moved on to something else anyway so we don’t care. There’s no risk-taking and very little reward, so it leaves us overstimulated and understroked; dessicated at a deeper level. With an overactive brain and an aching heart.

It's not hard to imagine where this could end up. A world where, even face to face, everybody’s desperate to be heard by a living, touchable human being – to have that real experience without which none of us can survive in those places it matters the most. So desperate that everybody talks but nobody listens.

Good, Bad and Ugly News: Iran's Elections, G20 Spying Scandal and Nigella Lawson Abuse

Last night CNN brought the good, the bad and the ugly right into my home. The good was the result of Iran’s elections. 

After too many years of Ahmadinejad’s narcissistic extremism that ostracised Iran from the rest of the world and destroyed the economy, the Iranians have finally been allowed to have enough of a voice to elect a moderate. 

And that’s what they did. There was a lot scepticism prior to the Ayatollah’s Khomeni’s selection that there would even be a moderate to vote for but that scepticism proved ill-founded.

Hassan Rouhani looks and speaks like a reasonable man. Granted it’s two months before he takes office, and it remains to be seen whether he’s allowed to do what he wants, but he has said that the days of extremism are over. That he wants to forge a relationship with the US and the west. The west, of course, is going to have to come to the party as well. 

His requirements are that the US will not interfere in domestic policy and that Iran will have its nuclear program. The US will probably require total transparency regarding that. Personally, I warmed to Rouhani. I’m tired of western media’s portrayal of Iran as the embodiment of all that’s evil. It’s not. It’s a country with ordinary human beings who clearly aren’t extremists and who deserve the right to forge their own destiny. I think it’s kind of ironic that they have voted a moderate in while in the US conservatives still control Congress and hinder true progress for that country.

Moving on, CNN’s bad was also kind of funny. Turns out the British government spied on the G20 in 2009. Or the Guardian alleges they did. Bit embarrassing for the British hosts this time round.

The ugly was a picture of Nigella Lawson and her husband in a restaurant, he with his hand around her throat, his thumb pressing into her neck. Another shot was shown of her outside the restaurant on her own, in huge distress. As if that wasn’t enough, the bastard put out a press release saying he wasn’t being violent; he just had his hand round her neck while they argued about the children. As if it’s normal to partially choke somebody while you argue. He added that she wasn’t upset afterwards because he’d hurt her, but just because they hate it when they argue.

Well I bet she hates it. I wonder what’s been going on up until this point. Nobody gets to that level of abuse in one leap. Why didn’t she kick him in the shins, call out for help, scream? That she didn’t, says more about him than anything. 

He’s a pig and deserves whatever is coming to him. The whole situation is horrendous and shocking. Not just because of his actions in the restaurant but because we’ve believed a lie. Here we have another beautiful woman who’s seemed like such a great role model. She’s consciously created a universally appealing image from which she’s garnered fame and fortune. It hasn’t all been about food. Part of it has been that she’s an independent and spirited woman who has made a life for herself. But it’s been underpinned by being married to an abuser. That part leaves me feeling betrayed. 

Who knows when the abuse started. If she’d been able to be truthful from the start, would she still be so famous? It’s hard to say. Can you imagine her speaking passionately about being trapped in a marriage of abuse, crying, angrily slamming things down, but still creating marvellous dishes? Getting help, walking away with her children. Now that’s real role modelling. What immense courage that would have taken, though.

A Horse-Whispering Kind of Romance

I had a religious experience today.  It’s been two years since I decided to finally do something I’ve dreamed about for ages. Learning to ride a horse. I’d had a couple of Wild West experiences with spirited horses getting the bit between their teeth and running for their lives and for the hell of it, I’m sure, to see if they could dislodge this ridiculously inept and green creature on their backs.

One of them succeeded, god bless her stalwart soul. With the others I fought back. Or rather I clung on, resolving in the heat of the moment never to get on again. But somehow I couldn’t stick to my resolve, and over the years I’ve had a few riding lessons. I’ve never stuck at it, but still, I could never dislodge this dream I had of one day.

You know, having a relationship with a horse. So there I was, two years ago, suddenly saying just do it. So I did. I enrolled at a riding school for a term of lessons, and paid upfront. Lesson one was out of this world, more amazing than anything I’d dreamed of. Sometimes reality does that.

All I did was walk around a muddy patch, and then break into a rising trot. But the thing is, I got it. I got that you don’t ask the horse nicely please will you just do what I ask you to. It’s not about being nice. It’s not about being a control freak or megalomaniac either. It’s just about clear communication. My teacher had said to me that riding isn’t liking driving a car, where you put your foot down and the car just keeps going. With horses, she said, you’re telling them something every single second with your body movements, and they’re getting the message loud and clear. So get clear, she said. Be aware of what you’re doing.

It was quite difficult at first. What am I saying? It was ridiculously impossible. Hard enough to not fall off, let along keep my back straight, my hands relaxed and not too far forward, the reigns not to far anything, thighs tight, feet in the right position. And remember, you’re not just standing, you’re moving.

Oh, and one other thing. Relax. Riiight. As it happens, I had some glorious moments when I got enough of it right for the horse to be able to understand and we had a thing together that horse and I, for a minute or two. Wow. That’s when I understood why I’d lusted after the experience all my life. Must have sensed what it would be like somehow. It’s everything you imagine when you see it in the movies. I only had it for a few seconds at a time and it blew me away.

Fast forward to the next week. I was nervous for no reason I could understand. The last lesson had gone well, my teacher had told me I had a natural feel, the world was my oyster. Alas, my sense of be careful, something bad’s gonna happen was in good working order. My inexperienced teacher hoisted me onto the horse, and when adjusting my stirrups yanked my leg out at an unnatural angle. Ow! The stirrup wasn’t quite right and before I could stop her she did it again.

Tore something up inside. And that was the end of my riding lessons. Fast forward again, shall we, let’s leave out the grisly details. Two years later and I’m almost completely mended. The odd twinge if I sit at my laptop for too long for too many days in a row without doing any exercise.

Over the two years I’ve quite often gone down to a kind of common field in a horsey village where everybody who doesn’t have a big paddock lets their horses hang out. I was pretty scared of them at first, and they didn’t care much for me. Then one day I was feeling so unhappy and I went to hang out with them. Which is code for watch them and wish they’d come and talk to me. One of them came up to the fence and stuck around while I bawled my eyes out. We had a good heart to heart talk. He even nuzzled me now and then.

Since then I haven’t seen him again and none of the other horses ever came up to the fence to say hi or even bother me for food. Until today. I went down again. I’d watched Dream Horse the other night, and it had awoken all my passion. I was actually just going to go to the bank, but that field beckoned me and once I was out the house there was no stopping me.

When I got there, there were a dozen horses, most of them hanging out at the fence! The thing is, I don’t know what to do, really, around horses. Not yet, anyway. The best I could do was greet them and wish I was a horse whisperer. I wondered if they liked being sung to, so I tried that. They didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t get a standing ovation. After a while I stopped trying to draw them to me and just sang to myself and enjoyed their company. At some point one of them came up to the fence. He was quite forward and for some reason it didn’t scare me. He was nudging me all over the place, trying to eat my camera even.

I loved it. But the best, the best, was that after a while I put my forehead against his and stroked him and whispered to him. He stood so still and so did my heart. Every now and then he would move to flick off a fly, but he stayed with me. I stroked him and talked to him. Sometimes he would lift his head and look down his nose at me, then he’d stand still and put his head against mine. And I felt it again. That something between me and a horse.

Eventually somebody came to take him home. His name is Parabola.

ADHD Drugs and Mis-diagnosis Cause 24 Year Old to Hang Himself

I’ve always wondered about ADHD, and how easily doctors prescribe medication for it. I’ve never believed it’s a viable solution, any more than I believe anti-depressants work to solve the problem of depression. They don’t, they simply anaesthetize emotions – which people often believe is the core problem because they’re uncomfortable.  

They’re not, though, they’re only symptoms that something needs to be attended to. If a person is depressed, it’s got a whole lot to do with how they’re living, their relationship with themselves and those around them, their inability to know their own value and rights, their social skills, their inability to trust and receive love and walk away from people who aren’t treating them with love and respect. 

The depression has also got a whole lot to do with suppressing emotions – but it’s only because doing so means they can’t get to the cause of the problem. By the by, one of the results of repressed emotions and unmet needs is inability to concentrate. There are four choices: do nothing; seek therapeutic or counseling help so you can learn that you do have value and how to take a stand against people who don’t respect you and all the messages in your head that tell you you’re worthless; take anti-depressants; or commit suicide.

In life it seems to me that five things are guaranteed. We’re born, we die, we can’t alter the law of cause and effect, symptoms have a purpose and if they’re ignored the problem doesn’t get solved, and nothing stays the same so if it isn’t getting better it’s getting worse.  

Logic tells me that if the things I believe about myself, my self esteem and entitlement and my environment and the way I respond to it are the essential cause of my depression, unless I change them, nothing can get better. Taking anti-depressants makes it easy for me to stay where I am, because I can’t feel those uncomfortable emotions. So I continue being disempowered. And that means things can only get worse.

Of course I don’t see it because I’m drugged out of my mind, but it takes its toll nonetheless and one day even the drug can’t hide that toll. By then I’m addicted, either physically or psychologically and my body is damaged often irreparably. Getting back to ADHD, I think it’s most likely to be a symptom directly related to the quality of nurturing and understanding a child receives and the emotional health of its family environment.

It kills me when parents let doctors prescribe drugs for their children. Imagine the soul of a child frantic for some kind of nurturing input that it isn’t getting and desperately needs – but can’t articulate. Instead of getting what it needs it gets drugged down. Now there’s a real solution for you. 

One of the problems is that adults don’t realize how sensitive children really are and how easily they’re traumatized. How easily they’re conditioned to not speak out, to not articulate when something is wrong. Plus, we’re a society that’s been so conditioned by a prescription drug industry remorseless about exploiting how hard it is to really grapple with the things that bother us in life, and how scary emotions are if you don’t know what to do with them.   

On Feb. 03 2013 nytimes.com ran an article about Richard Fee, a 24-year old from Virginia Beach. His doctor, from Dominian Psychiatric Associates, diagnosed ADHD, despite that Richard had never had it in childhood. He prescribed Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication. Richard’s mother pleaded with her son to stop the medication when she was sure he was becoming addicted. She was also sure he didn’t have ADHD.  

Richard wasn’t able to hear her, and became violently delusional. He was put in a psychiatric hospital. As if that isn’t horrific enough, his doctor prescribed another 90 days of Adderall. Richard hanged himself two weeks after the prescription ended. We see stories like this in the movies and think it doesn’t really happen in real life. Yes it does.

ADHD – and depression – could be caused by underlying stress in the home that isn’t being acknowledged by parents who don’t know how to deal with it, or by all the things a child or an adult doesn’t know how to do, or all the misbegotten beliefs that control their actions and the way they relate to people and themselves, or the way they deal - or don’t - with emotions. Humans are complex and our needs are myriad. We’re so unconscious of most of them, which is why we have uncomfortable emotions; they wake us up. 

The thing is; whatever we don’t know can be learned at any age, and whatever we lack can be corrected. It doesn’t matter whether we’re a child or an adult. When that happens, the depression is resolved and the triumph is phenomenal. When people are disturbed about something they can’t concentrate. If it’s so in adults, why would it be any different in children? So instead of prescribing medication for the child, maybe the parents need to seek counseling.

Drugs don’t fix depression and I don’t believe they do anything for ADHD. They either procrastinate on the inevitable crisis that’s caused by living in a disempowered way, or they lead to addiction and getting trapped in a nightmare of psychiatric misdiagnoses. Are depression and ADHD purely a chemical imbalance? Or is the chemical imbalance caused by something that’s treatable and accessible and has nothing to do with science and pills but everything to do with the complexity of what human beings – adults and children - need to be able to live balanced, healthy lives? 

One thing I know; giving a person nurturing which includes unconditional love and really good, sane, guidance, for as long as they need it, never led to them being violently delusional and hanging themselves. Rest in peace, Richard Fee. My heart goes out to his family.

Living with Schizophrenia

Elyn Saks was told in her early adult years that her life held no prospect and that to hold down a cashier’s job would be an accomplishment. But she defied the criticisms. Today she is a chaired professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, has an adjunct appointment in the psychiatry department of psychiatry at University of California’s San Diego medical school. She’s also on the faculty of the New Center for Psychoanalysis. 

In 2007 she wrote about her battle with schizophrenia, "The Centre Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness". The MacArthur Foundation gave her a genius grant for it. I read the sample ten odd pages of her memoire. It’s beautifully written, and her story - and what she's achieved despite mammoth obstacles - has inspired me, but something about it gave me chills up and down my spine. In her introduction she writes of her family as a normal, upper middle class Jewish family.

The word ‘normal’ is mine, not hers, but the intimation is hers, as far as I can gather. She paints a picture of parents in love with each other who made time for enjoying each other’s company – Saturdays were for them, Sundays for the kids. She mentions in passing that actually they probably preferred each other’s company more than that of their children. But her comment about it is a throwaway one.

Her family life sounds pretty sane. There was enough money, there was enough love. Normal. She writes of a little bit of sibling rivalry – she was the oldest and very driven – which she mentions as a plus because it helped her survive the damning diagnosis and the reality of her schizophrenia – but nothing massively destructive. 

So why were my alarm bells ringing? Three or four pages in she writes of the early warnings that she had schizophrenia – hallucinations of intruders. Night terrors. And suddenly the ‘normal, loving parents’ image kind of melts away. They criticized and even mocked her. Her mother’s response was “Oh don’t be silly darling”. Her father was more cruel and dismissive.

Later, she put on weight and pinned all her low self esteem onto it, refusing to eat properly. She got thin, looked ill and had no energy. Her parents’ response? Anger. I have to get the book to read more, so I’m not sure if Elyn Saks made any observations about the absence of empathy in her parents and what it did to her, how it may have contributed to her later diagnosis of rank schizophrenia.

The world still largely believes that a faulty brain structure is the cause of schizophrenia and its symptoms. But the whole diagnosis is predicated on two things: an assumption of what’s normal, and an absence of sensitivity to how potently childhood experiences influence and damage us – and what that might do to the structure and functionality of the brain.

Mostly as adults we don’t see the potent emotions that run beneath the surface of our ‘normal’ exterior. We behave as if the surface is all there is. But there’s nothing anybody on earth can do to stop those underlying emotions from impacting incredibly powerfully on children. As adults we just don’t notice it. Children are force-fed the idea that what they’re experiencing is ‘normal’.

Many adults can’t get beyond that force-fed idea. Even when they can’t get their lives together and have blistered self esteem and entitlement, they cling to “I had a happy childhood”. So many parents can’t let themselves acknowledge that their children suffer from the consequences of whatever they, the parents, bury beneath the surface. 

This idea we have of what’s ‘normal’ is more about keep things nice on the surface, but destroying each other in reality. And when a person can’t their life together in the way they feel sure they should be able to, if you go back to their childhood you’ll find the key – violent emotions in the parental environment being spewed out in every neurotic direction but cloaked by “I’m not angry, I’m normal”.

This isn’t about the blame game. Everybody does their best; denial is an unconscious thing, that’s what makes it so lethal. But we need a greater understanding of how sensitive children are to those underlying emotions that parents have learned to suppress and how much it damages them. 

And what impact does that unrecognized emotional deprivation have on brain development and subsequent schizophrenia? Is the brain structure that is cited as being the cause of this terrible affliction actually itself the symptom of a cause that is much more subtle and difficult to diagnose? Unrecognized wounds don't heal.

Elyn Saks has shown immense resourcefulness and courage and, at a time of huge vulnerability, pushed through the damning barriers to entry of a fulfilled life as schizophrenic.  She hasn’t stopped at medication, she’s stayed in therapy and reached out for the emotional support she needs. She’s searched for ideas that would help her hold her course. What a courageous woman. But I wonder if we’ll ever see the book “What My Childhood Really Did To Me”.