Spirituality & Mental Health

The title of this post is also the title of a lecture I had today. I wasn’t really sure what it was going to be like and anticipated feeling mildly/deeply uncomfortable depending on how overtly religious the lecturer was.

The closest psychology really gets to offering some kind of spiritual support during times of mental ill-health is in the area of transpersonal psychology, which integrates psychological concepts with spiritual disciplines. For me personally, this comes rather too close to the murky Freudian world of psychoanalysis, however our lecturer did point out that many people who are deeply spiritual and/or religious might well feel something is missing from the mainstream psychological models of mental illness. These models tend to avoid any mention of the spiritual dimension in terms of health – this is partly due to the fact that there is no clear consensus on what the term “spirituality” actually refers to, but also because we tend to view religion and spirituality as something both intensely personal and private, but also to a certain degree unmeasurable.

How do you quantify spirituality or religiosity? By the number of times someone prays/meditates/goes to church? Is it possible to measure the strength of people’s faith or belief in something? Before I go on, just in case you are, as I was, unclear about what spirituality really means, or at least, what it can mean (I had an image of a serenely smiling individual calmly meditating in lotus position before a nice blue soothing background). Here is Wikipedia’s definition (I know, I know, but it’s so easy):

“Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the ‘deepest values and meanings by which people live.’”

This definition still somehow seems a bit vague and wishy-washy to me, but anyway.

In addition to this problem, unless you are a truly evangelical believer, most people are extremely cautious about discussing religious and spiritual beliefs, either through fear of offending someone, or because they are afraid of being ridiculed, or simply because they view it as being rather unseemly to declare your religious affiliation in public. This is perhaps more the case here in the UK rather than in the US, where according to our lecturer church attendance can be as high as 80%. I was reminded of this recently whilst watching some programme, I think it was American Idol, with my housemate. Several of the contestants openly acknowledged God as being key to their success – on stage, in front of an audience, who actually applauded – something which I feel would almost certainly be met with a slightly awkward embarrassed silence were that to happen on, for example, the X-Factor. Perhaps I’m wrong, maybe that does happen on talent shows over here, but I’ve never seen it myself.

This unwillingness on the part of mental health professionals to engage with “service users” (not my favourite term, I have to say) on the subject of spirituality is apparently now being viewed with concern. There is a growing sense (in some areas) that the mental health profession has got too caught up in the biological/genetic/medical model of mental illness and needs to start taking a more holistic view of a person’s overall health and wellbeing.

There is also an interesting overlap between religion and psychiatry when considering psychosis. How, for example, would you differentiate between someone hearing the voice of God and speaking in tongues and someone experiencing a psychotic delusion? A substantial minority of people who go to church (particularly the more evangelical “Testify!” kind of groups) are likely to report having spoken in tongues or seen someone else do so. But these people are not seen as being mentally ill – not in the medical sense anyway – deluded maybe, but not actually certifiable. So what is the difference between that person in church and a psychotic patient experiencing religious delusions in a psychiatric hospital?

It is uncomfortable for us to realise that the main difference is in fact how that person is perceived by others around them. The context of a person’s delusions and hallucinations is a strong factor in deciding whether or not that person is mentally ill. In some developing countries the kind of behaviour that we perceive as psychotic (and therefore requiring medical treatment) is much less likely to be seen as  symptoms of an illness.

The third episode of BBC4 documentary Inside the Medieval Mind, which was shown on Monday evening, mentioned a man in the Middle Ages who became possessed by demons, tore off his clothes and ran down into the nearest village, presumably then proceeding to disturb the peace to no little extent. On being caught and bound with rope so he couldn’t escape, he was taken to the local church and left tied up in front of the shrine in the charge of the monks. After three days the demons left him and he was released. Nowadays we would class this as a psychotic episode. Although the villagers’ treatment of him might seem somewhat barbaric, I don’t honestly think it is much different to the way psychiatric patients are treated today. Admittedly we don’t tie people up, but we still restrict their freedom by keeping them in hospitals and even if they are discharged back into the community, they may be on a Community Treatment Order which obliges them to comply with their medication or face being taken back into hospital.

The possessed man in the Middle Ages was presumably tied up both for his own safety and for the protection of others. That is the same justification used for sectioning patients today. The difference is that once the demons had left the man, he was seen as being back to normal again. Admittedly he may well have suffered other episodes later on, but the fact that his behaviour could be attributed to supernatural forces beyond his control probably meant that he would not have suffered the stigma of being labelled a “crazy person”, but seen more as a victim in the eternal struggle between the forces of light and dark.

This is not to say, however, that modern psychiatry is not an improvement on the rather primitive methods of “treatment” used in the Middle Ages. It should also be remembered that whilst bizarre behaviour is more likely to be tolerated in the communities of less well-developed countries today, there is likely to be more stigma resulting from the perceived cause of the behaviour (e.g. a punishment from God), which may cause considerable distress to the sufferer. This is the negative side to religion that I cannot bear.

Bill Bryson writes in his book Neither Here Nor There of his visit to a town in a Scandinavian country (I can’t remember which one at the moment) where the patients at the asylum used to come and mingle with the locals: going into the newsagents to pick up a paper etc. and any behavioural oddities they exhibited were just accepted by the townsfolk and no one batted an eyelid. How on earth they managed to get the locals to agree to this intermingling in the first place I have no idea – I can just imagine the uproar if anyone suggested doing something similar with a local psychiatric hospital in this country. Of course, we don’t know whether this freedom was granted to all of the patients, perhaps they had to be relatively well-functioning anyway. But I still feel that this level of acceptance is a fine example and should perhaps be promoted more. Much of our aversive reaction to odd behaviour – the homeless man shouting in the subway, or the old woman talking animatedly to a lamppost – is caused by embarrassment and our own negative reactions, which only adds to any stigma that people may experience.

Anyway, this blog was supposed to be about spirituality and I have almost completely wandered from the point. I can just about see it, like a little light winking away in the darkness far far away, but I have already written a forest of words and it’s too late for me to fight my way back through them, so you’ll just have to manage with this for now.

I hope you found the ramble at least mildly interesting. Once again, any thoughts or comments, please feel free to leave them below.

Thank you for reading x

Cecil Sharp & The Folk Songs of Somerset

On a visit to Taunton Museum a couple of months ago I noticed a small exhibit tucked away in a corner which described Cecil Sharp’s visit to Somerset in 1903 and the song-collecting trip that followed. His story fascinated me and although my own interest in it had more than a little to do with the fact that I am from Somerset myself and am thus drawn to its local history, I hope that you will also find the story interesting.

 Cecil Sharp was born in Camberwell, London on 22 November 1859 and was educated at Uppingham and Cambridge before emigrating to Australia after graduating in 1882 and taking a job as a bank clerk. After a few years he decided to give up this work and devote his life to music. He was an assistant organist for a time, as well as a conductor and lecturer. He returned to England in 1892 and took up a job teaching music, later becoming Principal at the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music in 1896.

 During his time in Australia, he had met a man named Charles Marson and they later became friends. In 1903, after both men had returned to England, Sharp visited Marson, who was vicar at the village of Hambridge in Somerset. Whilst they were sat out in the garden, they heard the gardener, whose name was John England, singing The Seeds of Love while he mowed the lawn. Sharp was immediately struck by the song and recognised its value. He wanted to hear more of these “folk songs” and on making his desire known, someone suggested that he apply to two sisters, Louie Hooper and Lucy White, and also a dairyman named Tom Sprackler, all three of whom knew many songs.

 Within ten days he had collected over 40 songs from these three and a couple of others. Another week gave him another 45 songs, these just from Hambridge alone. Unfortunately after this Sharp had to return to the Hampstead Conservatoire for the start of term but he returned to Somerset soon after this as it was clear that the supply of songs was, as Charles Marson said, “nothing like exhausted”.

Marson himself confessed he had been entirely ignorant of the “wealth of art” in the village. This is not surprising when you remember the class divide that existed even between the vicar and his parishioners. This division was something that Sharp had to contend with when he started his five-year song-collecting trip in Somerset with the help of Marson. He visited all sorts of different people of varying professions, although almost all of them were over 60 and some were very much older. Folk songs at this time seemed to be dying out with the spread of railways and other modern contrivances and Sharp and other fellow song-collectors considered themselves almost as conservationists, trying to capture and record a type of musical expression that was rapidly nearing extinction.

 In order to find singers, he asked friends and acquaintances for help identifying people who might be of use to him. He also said that “it is difficult to exaggerate the value to the folksong collector of an introduction to the parson or squire”, as this meant less time was “wasted with preliminaries and disarming suspicion”. Sometimes he would find singers in more unusual circumstances – once he collected a song from a man running a coconut shy at Cheddar Cliffs when business was slack and on another occasion he met a man called William Ashton who was cracking stones on Polesden Hill. Sharp said of this encounter: “I sat down and thoroughly enjoyed the performance, joining in at the chorus”.

 One of the best bits of singing Sharp heard was from a gypsy woman called Betsy Holland. He described the experience as follows:

“We attacked her about the songs she had learnt from her grandmother. A little persuasion and she sat down on a stone, gave her baby the breast and then began a murder song that was just fascinating. Talk of folk singing! It was the finest and most characteristic bit of singing I had ever heard.”

The song was known as the Execution Song. Later, Sharp actually managed to meet her grandmother, Rebecca Holland.

Despite the difficulty of overcoming the class barrier, Sharp seems to have been met with enthusiasm and good humour from most of the people who sang for him, who all seemed very willing to share their songs with him. Having said this, he may simply have neglected to mention any issues he might have encountered during his song-collecting. Many of the people he met, however, must have thought him at least mildly eccentric, and there is one account noted down by Sharp in which his odd passion is met with almost exactly that kind of reaction:

“One singer in Langport could only sing when she was ironing, while another woman in the court sang best on washing day. I was once in her wash-house on wash-day sitting on an inverted tub, notebook in hand, while my host officiated at the copper, singing the while. In one of the intervals between songs, a woman remarked: “You’ll be going to make a deal of money out of this sir?” My embarrassment was relieved by the woman at washtub who said “Oh it’s only his hobby”. “Ah well”, replied the first. “We do all have our failings.”

 Sharp’ s approach probably seems incredibly direct and straight-forward compared to the endless rounds of form-filling and permission-seeking that today’s collectors and researchers have to engage in before setting off on their trips. He quite literally just went up to strangers’ houses, knocked on the door and asked people to sing for him. I can’t even imagine the reaction he would have got if he tried that today. The idea of being sat at home quietly working on emails or whatever, hearing a knock and opening the door to some bloke who then asks you to sing a song for him sounds like something you’d see in a comedy sketch. But in those days going out and meeting people was by far the best method of collecting the material that Sharp wanted. One particularly memorable incident occurred in Langport.

As he approached the public house, Sharp saw a group of women standing outside and chatting. “Is Mrs Overd here?” he asked. “That’s my name,” an elderly woman replied. “And what do you want of me?” Sharp explained that he was hunting for songs and hoped she would sing him some. She promptly flung her arms around his waist and danced him round and round, shouting “Lor girls, here’s my beau come at last!”

 Far from finding him intrusive and irritating, most of his singers seemed to like him and he in turn spoke of them with respect and affection. It is known that he gave some of them gifts in gratitude for their services: a few of the men received tobacco and he also presented Louie Hooper with a concertina, as she was particularly fond of instrumental music.

When he had collected a considerable number of songs – around 500 in total from Somerset and North Devon – he and Marson put some of them into a book entitled Folk Songs from Somerset. This was distributed to schools across the country for the children to sing in music classes, thus ensuring that these traditional songs were both heard and learnt by a new generation across the whole of England.

 Unfortunately, after their initial collaboration, Marson and Sharp quarrelled and never spoke to each other again, although Sharp attended Marson’s funeral in 1914.

Sharp was not the only person collecting folksongs at this time, nor was he the first to do so. Other collectors included Percy Grainger and Harry E. Piggott – and even some now-famous composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth, who both also arranged many traditional tunes.

 Sharp chose to note down the songs he heard with pencil and paper and this was thought by traditional song-collectors to be much the best way of doing it. However, some, such as Percy Grainger preferred to use a phonograph to record the songs they collected. This had the advantage of capturing the tone of the song and the way it was sung, but was unfortunately not a very portable device, although, as Sharp notes in his letter to Grainger in 1908 it was possible to transport it on a bicycle.

“My dear Grainger. I have been tremendously interested in the transcriptions of your phonograms. You have won the thanks of all good folksongers. I recognise and this volume proves it, that the phonograph is a collecting device of very great value, although I am unable to endorse all that you say in its praise. For example, in my own somewhat limited experience, I have found singers, although willing to sing into the phongraph, yet quite incapable of singing into it in their usual unselfconscious manner. Again, some of the songs I have collected were sung by singers far too frail to sing into a phongraph. Also songs collected at chance times, in harvest fields or by the wayside, when it would have been quite impossible to use the phonograph. Of course you can carry a instrument with you on the bicycle, but it is a great encumbrance. Yours sincerely, Cecil J. Sharp.”

Grainger clearly had different views, as shown by his entry in the Journal of the Folk Song Society for that same year:

“When I first started collecting songs with phonograph in 1906 in North Lincolnshire, I was surprised to find how readily the old singers took to singing into the machine. They were all agog to have their own singing recorded. An old singer listening to a long song of his the phonograph had just recorded, said: “Ee’s learnt that quicker n’or I!” Another commented: “It do follow up we wonderful”. One Lincolnshire singer, Mr Joseph Taylor, said “It’s like singing with a muzzle on” but he sang his best all the same. Even having their heads guided nearer to or farther from the recording trumpet never seems to break the old folks’ memory or freedom of delivery.”

Around the same time that Sharp started collecting folksongs, he also developed an interest in morris-dancing. He and other collectors travelled round collecting and noting down the dances, which sparked a revival of English folkdancing alongside that of folksongs.

 During the First World War Sharp was struggling to make money from his lecturing and writing so he decided to try his luck in America. Whilst travelling through the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky & Tennessee, he came into contact with Appalachian folksongs and began to put them together into another collection, this time with a woman called Maud Karpeles. Sharp was popular in America and people flocked to hear his lectures on folk music. He was greatly impressed with the “dignity, courtesy and natural grace” of the people he met in the mountains and spoke highly of them in his writings.

 Sharp died on 23 June 1924, at almost exactly the same time as the last performance of a group of visiting morris dancers who were touring the villages where the dances had originally been collected by Sharp and others. This rather neatly illustrates how Sharp’s own influence helped to re-ignite the traditions of English folksong and folkdance, which had hitherto been sadly neglected. When the new headquarters of the English Folkdance and Song Society (founded by Sharp some years earlier) opened in 1930, they named the building Cecil Sharp House in his honour.

In 1931 Sharp’s biographer placed adverts in the newspapers asking to hear from anyone who had known him. He received this letter from Louie Hooper of Hambridge, one of the first singers Sharp ever collected from:

 “Sir, I was looking down the paper when I seen Cecil Sharp’s name. You wanted to know if anyone knew him. Now I must say I, Louie Hooper and my sister Lucy White, both of this place, knew him quite well and spent many a happy hour singing to him at the vicarage Hambridge, with Father Marson, his friend. He took our photos and put them in his first book of Somerset Folk Songs. He gave me a nice concertina – he used to like to hear me play it. And Mrs Sharp gave me and my sister a new blouse each. The last time I seen him was when Father Marson was buried. That was in March the same year war broke out. I am 72 years of age. He came to my house one Christmas time and took a photo of my dinner Christmas Day. When I went to Langport, to a lantern lecture that he gave, I seen my Christmas dinner come through on the slide! He gave me a book of songs after he had mine and he said exchange was no robbery and he wrote it in the book. I liked him very much. He was a very kind gentleman. He also gave the old men tobacco that used to sing for him. I often think of the days. It was a happy time. Now I hope you will be able to understand this letter that I have sent. From yours faithfully, Louisa Hooper.”

Right from the start I was fascinated by the story of this man who went round the countryside asking people to sing for him. Even though the people he met hadn’t actually written the songs they sang, he was still asking them to share a part of themselves, of their memories and childhoods. The fact that they were willing to do this, even though he was a complete stranger to them, shows that they had a natural pride in their folksongs and also that they were warm-hearted and open-minded enough to want to share them.

 I personally feel proud to come from an area which contributed so much to England’s musical heritage and was even more delighted to find out that where I now live in London is very close to where Cecil Sharp was born!

I had planned to visit Cecil Sharp House in London, but I didn’t quite get round to it and then I bought a CD on amazon which not only had recordings of some of the songs that Sharp and others collected (not original recordings sadly!) but also extracts from the Journal of the Folk Song Society, written by various people including Sharp, Butterworth and Grainger. Most of the direct quotes in this post come from that CD. I felt that, having amassed material from that, plus my visit to Taunton Museum, I probably didn’t need to visit the Folk Song Society.

However, last weekend I did go and visit the village of Hambridge, which is about half an hour away from Taunton. To my delight I discovered that, although the vicarage where Sharp and Marson first heard John England singing The Seeds of Love is now a nursing home, there is a plaque on the wall outside marking the event. I also saw Marson’s gravestone in the churchyard further down the street. Pictures of the plaque and the gravestone can be seen below, along with photos of some of the singers that Sharp collected from, including Louie Hooper, Lucy White, John England and Emma Overd.

Before visiting Hambridge, I put the songs from the CD on my phone, so when I visited the vicarage I was able to sit outside and play The Seeds of Love and imagine what it must have been like for Sharp to hear it for the first time, right there in that garden.

I thought perhaps you might also like to hear what the songs sounded like, so I have uploaded two of the songs to youtube. The first is The Seeds of Love and the second is Lord Randel, which was first sung to Sharp by Louie Hooper. I think Lord Randel might be my favourite, the tune is so haunting and melancholy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSQoazXUT6w&context=C4aca596ADvjVQa1PpcFPaFHCiHEfvQdDSyv11EVNC3LW85CzDASo=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lumKaqXfW1Y&feature=context&context=C4aca596ADvjVQa1PpcFPaFHCiHEfvQdDSyv11EVNC3LW85CzDASo=

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References

 Somerset Folk Map picked up at the Cecil Sharp exhibit in Taunton Museum, Somerset

The Seeds of Love – Opus Anglicanum (CD)

Wikipedia entry for Cecil Sharp

The photos of Somerset folk singers and the sign in America are courtesy of Google Images, all other pictures are my own

Schizophrenia – the Z makes it sound scary.

There’s an episode of Futurama in which Fry accuses Bender of blackmail and Bender replies:
“I prefer the word ‘extortion’. The X makes it sound cool.”
This made me laugh, but also made me think a bit about how the ‘shape’ of words can sometimes affect how we view the subject they are describing. Hence the title of this post.

Schizophrenia is a much-misunderstood mental illness. I myself knew very little about it until I started the Mental Health Studies course I’m on now. Because of this, I thought it might be interesting to write a blogpost about schizophrenia, which would serve the dual purpose of informing others about it whilst acting as a kind of revision aid for me.

There have been many celebrities – and indeed, many ordinary people – who have spoken out about their own mental health problems. Some of these issues include: depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, drug addiction, alcoholism, self-harm etc. But schizophrenia is rarely, if ever, talked about. This is particularly unfortunate as it has suffered from inaccurate – and in some cases frankly insensitive – portrayals in the media.

I believe the main problem with this illness is the fact that the predominant symptom is usually some form of psychosis. The idea of someone suffering from delusions and hallucinations is one that is both upsetting and very difficult to understand. It is so far outside the realms of most people’s experience that it is hard to empathise with those who suffer from it. So-called “neurotic” (as opposed to psychotic) disorders such as depression and anxiety are much easier for people to identify with, because even if we have never suffered from a full-blown major depressive episode, we all know what it is to feel overwhelming sadness, guilt, fear and low self-esteem on occasion. Relatively few people, on the other hand, have suffered from terrifying delusions or bizarre hallucinations, although some may have experienced these effects after using illicit substances.

Before I go into a deeper explanation of what psychosis actually is, I will first mention some of the basic facts about schizophrenia. I should also point out that having psychotic symptoms is not the same as being schizophrenic (and vice versa), but psychosis is definitely a big part of schizophrenia. The two words are not interchangeable, but they are very closely linked.

Schizophrenia affects around 1% of the population and people are usually diagnosed with it around their early twenties. The relatively young age of onset is reflected in Emil Kraepelin’s original term for the illness, which was “dementia praecox”, meaning “precocious madness”. Eugen Bleuler later coined the term ‘schizophrenia’, or ‘split mind’ to describe “the loosening of associations between different functions of the mind” associated with the course of the illness.

The causes of schizophrenia are still not clear. It was once put down to poor parenting – the “schizophrenogenic mother” was one of the phrases used by psychiatrists to describe this. Thankfully for both the sufferers and their families, this immensely harmful viewpoint has since been abandoned by professionals. There is now something of a divide between those who believe schizophrenia is mainly caused by genetic abnormalities and those who think that the illness has a more social cause. Those who argue for genetics will point out that twin studies have shown if one twin has schizophrenia, there is a 10% likelihood that the other twin will also have it. This probability increases to 50% with identical twins, who of course share the same DNA. A recent meta-analysis has shown that genes are the largest risk factor for schizophrenia. Having said this, environmental factors will also determine whether someone develops the illness. The argument for a social cause has strengthened recently following research which has shown that the rate of schizophrenia is higher in immigrant populations (this is found in almost every country) and also in urban areas. Smoking cannabis during adolescence may also increase the risk of developing the illness later on.

Having mentioned some of the possible causes, I will now move on to mention some of the symptoms of the illness. In the early twentieth century a psychiatrist called Karl Schneider made a list of what he considered to be the first-rank symptoms of schizophrenia. These included: hearing thoughts spoken aloud, auditory hallucinations, thought withdrawal or insertion, thought broadcasting and delusional perception. These symptoms are not in fact necessary for a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but they are common enough to be termed “first-rank” and they are the most obvious and flamboyant signs of the illness.

Why do people experience delusions and hallucinations? They may be more common than you think – quite apart from hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations (which occur just when you are either waking up or falling asleep), studies have shown that the experience of such phenomena seems to be on a spectrum. Some people never have any, others may occasionally hear voices which they can’t explain without it affecting their lives in any adverse way and still others may develop full-blown schizophrenia. Hallucinations can be auditory (the most common), visual, olfactory or tactile.

Delusions are usually either grandiose (when the person believes they are someone special or important i.e. God or Elvis Presley) or paranoid – thinking that MI5 have secret cameras hidden in your house or that people from the government are trying to kill you etc. They are thought to be caused by increased levels of dopamine in the brain – dopamine is a neurotransmitter which regulates how much attention we pay to external stimuli. If there is too much of it, then we begin to pay attention to details which we would usually consider to be relatively insignificant – the colour of that person’s jumper, the way someone looks at you, three red cars in a row going past etc. It is hypothesised that because the brain is noticing so many of these tiny details, it needs to provide some sort of explanation, thus giving rise to the paranoid or grandiose delusions mentioned above.

Whilst this type of psychosis is usually associated with schizophrenia, it can also occur during episodes of mania in people with bipolar disorder and sometimes even in people suffering from depression. Psychotic depression is relatively rare and can be difficult to treat – Alan Bennett describes with heart-breaking honesty how his mother suffered from it for many years in his book “A Life Like Other People’s”.

Other symptoms of schizophrenia include social withdrawal, reduced volition (lack of drive/initiative), emotional apathy and thought disorder. These are usually known as negative symptoms and are more commonly associated with the chronic type of schizophrenia. This is often a progression from the acute type, which is more likely to feature delusions and hallucinations. These are called positive symptoms because something has been added to the person’s usual experiences – in contrast to negative symptoms which involve something being removed from the person’s experiences – hence words such as withdrawal, reduction, lack, apathy.

So what is it actually like to suffer from schizophrenia? There have not been anywhere near as many books written by sufferers of schizophrenia as there have been by people suffering from depression, bipolar disorder etc. In part, this is because the illness has such a devastating effect on a person’s ability to function. As I mentioned before, the portrayal of this type of mental illness in films and TV programmes has also been somewhat lacking in authenticity and sensitivity, usually resulting in people with schizophrenia being portrayed either as dangerous psychopaths or having rare intellectual gifts – as in “A Beautiful Mind”, which is about the brilliant mathematician John Nash, who experienced auditory hallucinations caused by schizophrenia. Whilst these storylines have undeniable dramatic potential, they do not truly represent the lives of most people who have the illness. Such misrepresentation can also be found in films about people with autism – “Rain Man” is a good example. Having said this, at least “A Beautiful Mind” demonstrated that mental illness does not necessarily prevent people from having a successful career, even if that illness involves symptoms of psychosis.

Below are some historical accounts written by people who had suffered from schizophrenia.

The first is from a Reverend George Trosse, who wrote these words around the year 1690. He appeared to have suffered this episode in his early twenties, but recovered and later became a respected member of his local community in Exeter.

“I was haunted with a great many terrifying and disquieting Visions and Voices; which tho’ (I believe) they had no Reality in themselves, yet they seem’d to be such to me, and had the same Effect upon me, as if they had been really what they appear’d to be.

I heard a Voice, as I fancy’d, as it were just behind me, saying, Yet more humble; Yet more humble; with some continuance…In Compliance with it I proceeded to pluck down my Stockings, and then my Hose, and my Doublet; and as I was thus uncloathing my self, I had a strong internal Impression, that all was well done, and a full Compliance with the design of the Voice.

At length, standing up before the Window, I either heard a Voice, which bid me, or had a strong Impulse, which excited me, to cut off my Hair; to which I reply’d, I have no Scissors. It was then hinted, that a Knife would do it; but I answer’d, I have none. Had I had one, I verily believe, this Voice would have gone from my Hair to my Throat, and commanded me to cut it.”

The second account is from a man called John Perceval and was written in 1838. He first experienced such symptoms at the age of 27 and was kept in asylums for three years before he finally recovered.

“Only a short time before I was confined to my bed I began to hear voices, at first only close to my ear, afterwards in my head, or as if one was whispering in my ear, – or in various parts of the room. These voices I obeyed, or endeavoured to obey, and believed almost implicitly…Those voices commanded me to do, and made me believe a number of false and terrible things.

…

I recollect that even at the height of my delusions I refused to obey these voices on several occasions, when by obeying them I was afraid of taking away the life of my attendants – for instance I was often desired to push a man named Hobbs backwards into an empty bath, but I was afraid to do it, lest I should injure him.”

The last account was written by an 18 year old boy and quoted by Sir Aubrey Lewis (an eminent psychiatrist) in 1967. It describes the terrifying cognitive deterioration associated with the chronic type of schizophrenia.

“I am more and more losing contact with my environment and with myself. Instead of taking an interest in what goes on and caring about what happens with my illness, I am all the time losing my emotional contact with everything including myself. What remains is only an abstract knowledge of what goes on around me and of the internal happenings in myself…Even this illness which pierces to the centre of my whole life I can regard only objectively. But, on rare occasions, I am overwhelmed with the sudden realisation of the ghastly destruction that is caused by this creeping uncanny disease that I have fallen victim to…My despair sometimes floods over me. But after each outburst I become more indifferent, I lose myself more in the disease, I sink into an almost oblivious existence. My fate when I reflect on it is the most horrible one can conceive of. I cannot picture anything more frightful than for a well-endowed cultivated human being to live through his own gradual deterioration fully aware of it the whole time. But that is what is happening to me.”

I feel I should point out that although these accounts all come from men, schizophrenia also affects women. The more chronic and debilitating form of the illness is more often seen in men, however, and there is also a later stage of onset in some female cases (around the fifties).

Medication is the usual method of treatment, usually in the form of antipsychotics. Some forms of psychological therapy are also starting to be used, as studies have shown that they can be effective and they provide a valuable alternative to medication, which can have unwanted side effects. The acute form of the condition has a sudden onset, but a better chance of recovery. The chronic form, as the name suggests, is much harder to treat successfully and may eventually result in the gradual deterioration described by the last account quoted above. Having said this, community psychiatry now offers patients the chance to receive treatment for their illness whilst remaining at home, thus maintaining vital social links with friends, family and colleagues. This also means, however, that they are more likely to be exposed to stigma and discrimination from other members of their local community. In order to target this, there have been a couple of media campaigns, most notably one by Time to Change, which was based around a short film called Schizo. The link for it is here, should you wish to watch it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kh2SpZP4Cg

It has been suggested that such campaigns may give the public the wrong idea about people with schizophrenia and perhaps make them feel that those who suffer from it aren’t really that ill at all, however I personally feel that anything which helps to reduce stigma and promote understanding and sympathy for people who have mental illness should be encouraged. I hope that this post has gone some way to encouraging a positive and accepting attitude towards mental illness – any questions or comments which you may have will be greatly appreciated, as always.

References

Frith, C. & Johnstone, E. (2003). “Schizophrenia: A Very Short Introduction”.

Gelder, M., Harrison, P. & Cowen, P. (2006). “Shorter Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry”.

Champion, L. & Power, M. (2000). “Adult Psychological Problems: An Introduction”.

Wonders of the Universe

This post is by way of being a thank you letter to someone. I first met this person just over three years ago and have only seen her once more since then, but she was responsible for introducing me to something which has been a source of joy and fascination to me ever since. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will probably know that I love star-gazing. Despite the depressing level of light pollution in most areas, it is still possible to see some of the best-known constellations on clear nights and being able to recognise and identify them is immensely satisfying. But even more than this, the fact that we are able to see these celestial objects here on Earth, with the naked eye, despite them being millions and millions of light years away, fills me with a sense of awe and wonder – something which I am very keen to share with other people.

In November 2008 I went on a two-week trek in India with a charity called ActionAid. One evening we were sat around the campfire, quite high up in the foothills, where there was practically zero light pollution, and Liz began pointing out some of the constellations that she could see. I didn’t know any of the constellations at all, not even the most well-known ones like the Plough, so I was absolutely fascinated. Because the skies were so clear, there was an enormous number of stars visible – so many that it was actually difficult for us to find some of the major constellations. We couldn’t see Orion at all, until someone found that it was on the other side of the hut we were staying in, having been blocked from view by the building. Considering how bad I am at recognising people’s faces, even those of people I know well, I was astonished at how easy it was to spot the constellations for myself when I returned home. I got a book from the library called Philips’ Guide to the Night Sky by Sir Patrick Moore and later bought a copy because I found it so useful. Once I had an iPhone, however, everything suddenly became almost absurdly simple. No longer do I have to take a torch and the book out with me and keep switching my attention from the book to the sky whilst trying to adjust my eyes to the differing lights levels of bright torchlight and near-darkness. With the Star Walk app, I can simply open the app, point the phone at the constellation I wish to identify or know more about and it will tell me what I’m looking at, the names of the individual stars, how far away they are, how old, what type of star etc etc.

I have also now got a telescope, although I haven’t used it properly as yet because the instruction manual is not as helpful as I would have liked. One of my New Year’s resolutions for this year is to work out how to use it properly.

But you don’t need to buy expensive pieces of astronomical equipment, or even possess a smartphone to enjoy star-gazing People have been fascinated and inspired by the stars for almost as long as humankind has existed – and that is something else which adds to the delight of it: the fact that you are looking at the same stars that the ancients used for navigation, tracking the seasons and predicting the future.

I was particularly pleased about the Star-gazing Live extravaganza that Professor Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain presented over three nights recently, because I love the idea of introducing as many people as possible to the wonders of the universe. Apart from anything else, the programmes were a reminder that astronomy is something that anyone can enjoy, because you don’t need to be a scientist (or even be able to read!) in order to stand next to someone outside one night and learn to spot the different patterns of stars in the sky.

I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone could fail to be interested in learning more about our universe in such a fun and undemanding way, but sadly there are those who don’t seem to particularly bothered, which seems a great shame to me. I remember one particularly disappointing moment last year when someone I was working with asked me which apps I had on my phone. I immediately started singing the praises of StarWalk, saying that it could tell you the names of the constellations and where they were in the sky etc…and she said:

“Does it tell you what’s going to happen though?” I stared at her blankly.

“You know, like what’s going to happen next week, in your love-life and stuff?”

She meant astrology. She wanted to read some inane nonsense about whether next Tuesday was going to be a good day for financial transactions, or whatever bullshit it is they make up in astrology columns.

How can that possibly be more interesting than learning about the stars and planets in our night sky? How?? I have no idea.

Thankfully, the Star-gazing Live programme showed that there are in fact many other people who are curious about the universe and want to know more, so all is not lost.

The point I wanted to make, really, is that if it hadn’t been for Liz taking the time to show me all the constellations that she could recognise when we were in India three years ago, I would not be writing this right now. One of the most precious gifts we can give someone (after love and time) is knowledge and one of my favourite ever lines is from a film called The History Boys. It is simply “pass it on”.

Thank you Liz for passing your knowledge of astronomy on to me. I will now try to pass it on to as many people as possible.

National Geographic Magazine

Anyone who has been following me for a while on Twitter may have noticed that about once a month I post a tweet saying I’m currently reading the latest issue of National Geographic magazine and probably also banging on about how brilliant it is. I asked my mum to get me an annual subscription to it a couple of years ago for Christmas because I had read a couple of odd issues here and there and found them practically stuffed to bursting point with information on history, culture, science and the environment, all accompanied by stunning pictures and also, in some cases, detailed maps and explanatory diagrams. I also like the fact that part of your annual subscription goes to fund research projects and trips organised by the National Geographic Society – and if any article in the magazine has been written about one of these projects you have helped to fund, they inform you of this so you can see where some of your money is going.

The National Geographic Society was founded in 1888 and it originally began as a club for academics who were interested in travel and also patrons who were keen to sponsor expeditions. The National Geographic magazine was started nine months later and was intended to act as the Society’s official journal, as well as being a tax-exempt benefit for Society members. The second president of the NGS was Alexander Graham Bell, who succeeded from Gardiner Greene Hubbard following his death in 1897. The Society’s mission is to “increase and diffuse geographic knowledge whilst promoting conservation of the world’s cultural, historical and natural resources”. The current president of the Society (since 1998) John M. Fahey Jr, has also stated that it’s purpose is to inspire people to care about the planet. To this end, the Society has both funded and reported on some of the greatest scientific expeditions and research projects of our time, including: Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s underwater exploration, Diane Fossey’s work with mountain gorillas, Jane Goodall’s research with chimpanzees and the Leakeys’ excavations in Olduvai Gorge, uncovering the remains of ancient hominids.

Having purchased a much older edition of NatGeo magazine from 1962 for research for a previous blogpost (“Mountains of the Moon”), I can tell you that the articles used to be interminably long – they’re still very interesting but the depth and detail is almost overwhelming because there is just so much information to take in, and of course there were less photographs/diagrams etc. Nowadays the magazine is much more ‘readable’ in that the articles are considerably shorter, but still somehow manage to concentrate all the information  into a much more concise form that is nevertheless still satisfying in terms of detail.

The range of subjects they cover is extraordinary – one of the main benefits of this is that it makes you realise how incredibly varied and beautiful our planet is, both in terms of the natural environment and also human society and culture. Having said that, they don’t shy away from addressing some of the serious issues which we are now facing: climate change, water shortages, war, poverty etc. This year the global population reached 7 billion and to mark this, NatGeo have run a series of articles throughout the year on the challenges we will face due to problems caused or exacerbated by (over)population.

To give you an general idea of the kind of articles you might see in your average NatGeo issue, I have included below a list of some of the main articles that have appeared in the magazine over the past year. I should also point out (and I promise you they are not paying me to say this!) that the annual subscription to this monthly instalment of informative goodness will cost you the ludicrously small sum of £15. Considering that each issue costs well over £3 to buy on the high street, this is, in my opinion, seriously good value for money – and that’s before you even consider the educational value, which is naturally rather more difficult to calculate, but it would certainly be well over 15 of your measly pounds. I believe the price in dollars is about the same…and you can also get the NatGeo magazine app for your iPad, should you be lucky enough to own one of those. They seem to post the magazine pretty much anywhere too, the list of countries on their website is a pretty long one.

Anyway, here is a list of some articles which have appeared in NatGeo this year. If you or anyone you know has any kind of curiosity or interest in the world around them, I strongly urge you to take out a subscription. Apart from anything else, it’s like giving them twelve presents in one year – and it makes such a nice change to get something in the post that isn’t bills or spam!

January - Population 7 Billion, Bleached Reefs Bounce Back, Conquering Vietnam’s Megacave

February – The Curious History of Feathers, Can Afghanistan Win the War Against Opium?, Why Fish Flock to Sunken Ships

March – Designing the Perfect Pet, Kung Fu Kingdom: Shaolin’s Battle

April – The Genius of the Inca, Crimea: A Jewel in Two Crowns, Indomitable Snow Frogs

May – Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Magic Photos of Camera Obscura

June – The Birth of Religion, The Secret World of Child Brides, Crazy Creatures in Tide Pools

July – Searching for the Real Cleopatra, Not Too Late for Polar Bears, The Middle East: Young, Angry, Wired

August – Making Robots Human, Land of the Spirit Bear, Behind Burma’s Shadows

September – Can We Fly?, Girl Power in Brazil, The Race to the South Pole

October – The New Science of the Teenage Brain, Lost in Australia’s Slot Canyons, Genghis Khan’s Urban Clan

November – Who Buried the Warrior’s Gold? – England’s Medieval Mystery, Iceman Unfrozen: New Clues to his Death, America’s Wild Rivers

December – The King James Bible: Making a Masterpiece, Nuclear Zone: Japan’s Abandoned Towns, Space Clouds: Bound for the Milky Way?

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BBC Proms

This is a short blogpost about the BBC Proms – I meant to finish it back in September when the Proms was actually still on, but for various reasons* it got delayed, so it is unfortunately a bit out-of-date, but I hope you will still find it at least mildly interesting.

Despite a fair amount of exposure to it over the past year, I still know a shockingly small number of classical pieces, so most of the music I listen to at the Proms is new to me. This puts me in a slightly different category to the vast majority of Prommers, who seem to know all the pieces and the orchestras AND the conductors in virtually every performance!

However, as you will see, the Proms is – and always has been – a classical music festival that anyone and everyone can enjoy. I am certain this is one of the main reasons that it is still so well-loved and popular today.

So what is the Proms all about? Well, every year from about the middle of June through to September the world’s greatest classical music festival takes place in London. Thousands of people rush to buy tickets for their favourite pieces and performers as soon as booking opens. Many – probably most, in fact – of these people are dedicated devotees to classical music in all its various forms: they may have the scores to the pieces with them so they can follow the music by sight as well as ear, they could have been Promming for decades and will almost certainly know a tremendous amount about the music and the performers. For people like me who know relatively little about classical music, going to the Proms is both enjoyable and educational – before even hearing the music you can listen to people chatting about different conductors, composers etc for hours beforehand in the queue. The organisers even put on pre-concert talks so that you can hear a discussion of the composer and/or piece before listening to the performance.

Before going any further, I will explain a little bit about the origins of the festival, the formal title of which is “The Henry Wood Promenade Concerts presented by the BBC”! Despite its official title, the festival was actually the brainchild of a man named Robert Newman, who, in 1895, decided that he wanted to set up an event to bring classical music to a wider audience:

“I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.”

Apart from finding the notion of ‘training’ the public rather amusing, I think this was (and still is) a wonderful idea. He reinforced the inclusive nature of the festival by allowing eating, drinking & smoking in the venue, which was originally the Queen’s Hall. The building was unfortunately destroyed during an air raid in 1941 and after that the concerts were held at the Royal Albert Hall. Henry Wood was appointed official conductor and he assembled the Queen’s Hall orchestra to perform the concerts. After Newman died in 1926, Wood was the name most closely associated with the Proms. There is always a bust of Wood placed in front of the RAH Organ at all the Proms concerts, but it seems a shame that Newman is less well known, particularly as he was the one who had the original idea for the festival.

The word “prom” comes from the term ‘promenade concert’, which refers to the outdoor concerts in London’s pleasure gardens, where people were free to stroll around as the music played. Nowadays, “promming” refers to those who buy tickets for the standing areas – either up in the gallery or down in the arena. Standing tickets are, not surprisingly, much cheaper than seats, usually costing £5. They are purchased on the day of the concert, so if you want a good view (and if the performance promises to be something special) you need to arrive a few hours before the concerts start – and for some particularly momentous concerts, you may even need to start queueing the night before.

Having mentioned how cheap the standing tickets are, I feel I should perhaps issue a word of warning here. Standing up for two hours or so to listen to a symphony or two is just about do-able, although you will (unless you have the leg muscles of a super-athlete or bionic legs or something) still suffer from “Prommer’s Legs” afterwards. But I cannot understand for the life of me how prommers managed to stand for the whole five hours of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg last year. The mind boggles. Perhaps they underwent a special training regime….or maybe they’re all tenth-level yogis?

This brings us on to another point of interest – the prommers themselves. Many of these are well-known faces because they appear at almost every concert, and some of them are so intriguingly eccentric that they end up being given nicknames based on their individual quirks. Hence we have Cycling-Shorts Man, Score Lady and someone I like to think of as Tuxedo Man…he turned up at a prom last year wearing full evening dress down to the waist…and then shorts and sandals. This was presumably because he wished to look decently formal for the event but realised in a hot crowd no one was likely to see his legs, so he could get away with something cooler. Possibly.

It may seem odd that people are prepared to stand in queues for hours on end just to see something that will almost certainly be televised or at least on the radio, but watching it at home simply does not come close to the experience you get when you actually see and hear the orchestra performing live right in front of you, particularly when you are in a building as impressive as the Royal Albert Hall. And queuing is not necessarily the interminable tedium you might imagine – people bring books, chairs, picnics etc and there is a good deal of camaraderie which makes the time pass surprisingly quickly – although it is perhaps worth knowing some of the finer points of Prom Queue Etiquette. Strictly speaking you are not supposed to leave the queue, but there is an unwritten rule that says you can leave for up to half an hour to go and buy lunch/ice cream/use facilities etc, but longer than that will probably not be tolerated and you may find self-appointed Principals of the Line** casting stern looks in your direction on your return!

At about lunchtime the Prom stewards will come round with raffle tickets so you have a number and henceforth Know Your Place in the queue. Later, at around 4-5pm, the stewards will venture forth again, this time to sell the actual tickets. The pre-concert talks are usually just after this and then the performance usually starts at around 7.30pm – although timings will obviously differ for morning and afternoon Proms.

Below I have a few photos of some lovely Prommers in the queue for the arena, which usually forms down the steps leading up to the Albert Hall – the gallery queue (which I’ve never been in) is round the side of the building. I should point out that the left-hand side of the steps is for common-or-garden Prommers, but the right-hand side is reserved for those devotees who have purchased a Season Ticket. That queue is usually shorter and has perhaps a slightly higher level of eccentricity per capita.

If you have never been to the Proms before, I would definitely recommend it. You don’t have to dress up – jeans and trainers are perfectly acceptable. You get to hear fabulous music played by world-class performers in a wonderful setting at a very reasonable price and all you need is a couple of friends (or a good book) to help pass the time in the queue. Not a bad way to spend a summer’s day

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*an obscene amount of procrastination

**Simpsons ref: Skinner “I’m not Principal of the line Mother!” Skinner’s Mother: “Then you never will be”

The Apple Of My Eye

I know that there will be many tribute blogs, tweets, videos, comments etc for Steve Jobs and that this post may therefore seem somewhat redundant, but I did want to write something similar to this a while ago and never properly got round to it. Now would seem an appropriate time to celebrate the life of this extraordinary man, but seeing as all I really know about him comes from my experience of using his company’s products, I will simply talk about that and leave the full obituaries and eulogies to those who knew him best. I own an iPhone4 and a Macbook Pro and although I do love my laptop, the iPhone is far and away the best thing that I have ever spent money on, for reasons which I hope to make a little clearer below.

A couple of years ago my brother asked for an iPhone 3G for his birthday. On receiving it, he naturally didn’t want the bother of having to set the thing up, so my mother and I got it out of the box and started peering at the instruction manual and trying to work out which bits did what. 

On opening the box containing my brother’s iPhone 3G, I remember very clearly being stunned by how beautiful it looked. Everything about it was an utter delight – for example, the fact that the charger cable could also be used as a USB cable  - WHY hadn’t anyone thought of doing that before? It made everything so much simpler. Also the fact that the plug was so small – all my previous phone chargers had great clunking plugs that weighed a ton and looked ugly and unwieldy. And the volume control on the headphones – how did that even work? This was all before we’d actually turned the phone on – and then I was, if possible, even more impressed. All the icons on the screen were laid out in simple squares and everything was where you would expect it to be. I had found with my last few phones that if you wanted to change, for example, the ringtone volume, you had to search for what seemed like hours just to work out what section it was under. 

The whole device seemed to be designed for people who just wanted to be able to USE the device, not fiddle about for hours with techno-wizardry, but just use it and be able to get the most out of it without having to refer to the manual every time they wished to change a setting. I was so pleased that someone seemed to have finally made a phone that simplified things rather than complicated them. I even remember saying that it felt as though someone (or a group of people) had sat down and thought “Now what do most people really want from a mobile phone and how can we give them that in the simplest way possible?” Rather than feeling excluded because of my techno-ignorance, I felt included because it felt as though someone had tailored it to my needs. I know that Apple have had some stick for pandering to the lowest common denominator, as it were, but I suspect that the people who say that are also those who are slightly sneering and snobbish about their own technological elitism. And I bet they don’t have as much fun with technology either.

Even after falling in love with the iPhone, I did read reviews of all the other latest phone releases before deciding a few months later when my contract finished that I definitely still wanted one. Some of the other phones were quite impressive – Blackberry was apparently a very popular choice. But I feel that Blackberrys were designed for businessmen, for people who go to conferences every week and drink champagne at corporate events in their Armani suits – and even the thought of having to wear a suit to work every day makes me shudder. The iPhone is so attractive because it seems to be designed for fun, for people who like playing games and downloading the most pointless apps imaginable just because their utter absurdity amuses you. 

Ah yes, the apps. The add-on applications that mean each phone is customisable to the individual preferences of the owner. Some people have dozens of games, others have all the news apps so they can keep track of current affairs, some have lots of photography and arty apps…the possibilities are endless. Only two weeks ago I was getting ridiculously emotional over the StarWalk app which I was using for the first time. I am still in awe of the fact that modern technology allows me to point my phone at a constellation in the night sky and have it tell me not only what the constellation is, but also then give me all the information about that star cluster that I could ever wish to know. This reminds me of something Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science-fiction writer, once said, which perfectly describes how I feel about much of today’s technology:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I know that there are many perfectly valid criticisms of Apple products – the fact that they aren’t – or don’t use – open source (I think that’s the right term), the frustratingly short lifespan of their headphones (and to some extent the charger cables too), the fact that you can’t use Flash when almost every other non-Apple device can….but I am prepared to forgive them all of that because their products are beautiful. They have style, they are so effortlessly cool. They look shiny and pretty and they can be used for almost anything – music, emails, games, study etc, thus fitting the two main requirements of the interior designer William Morris:

“Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Steve Jobs also said this about design, which I think explains a lot about why Apple’s products look so good:

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Thank you Steve – and indeed everyone at Apple -for making the wonders of technology more accessible to everyone – and for making it more beautiful too.

“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick ‘em.”

UNF.