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On Sir Bobby Robson

It is interesting to see that the passing of Sir Bobby Robson - a man born into a poverty only a couple miles away from where I live - has made it onto the front page of The New York Times website:

LONDON — No matter where in the world you mention the name Bobby Robson, the response is the same: a man of soccer. A man who lived his 50 adult years for the game and through the game. A man, above all else, whose passion never tired and was never defeated by culture, language or ultimately by the insidious impact of money on the sport.

Sir Bobby Robson died in the early hours of Friday in his native Durham, in northern England. He was 76, he fought five different cancers from 1991, and even last weekend, even in a wheelchair, he was on a soccer pitch in Newcastle.

Some of the great players, his players, formed a guard of honor as he was wheeled on. They thrilled him by reenacting the 1990 World Cup semifinal, which the England side he managed lost on penalty kicks to the West German team of Franz Beckenbauer.

Each of the players still able to kick a ball played last Saturday for as long as they were able. The match was to raise yet more money for Robson’s last great venture, his foundation for a cancer research center to trial new drugs on patients in his home city.

To that end, his life’s full circle had turned from playing the game as a coal miner’s son to managing world renowned players in England, the Netherlands, Portugal, Canada, Spain.

He was raised in a terraced coal miner’s cottage and left school at 15. Until soccer intervened, he was destined to follow his father down the local pit, as an electrician. “My father Philip,” he would say on introducing his parent to anybody he met. “A wonderful man, he only ever missed one shift in 51 years down the pit.” And Philip would settle into the background as people either fawned upon his son, or in his time as England team manager from 1982 to 1990, would seek to tear down his authority.

It was ever thus. From Fulham, the London club where Bobby Robson started as a professional player in 1950, to Ipswich, then Eindhoven, Lisbon, Porto, Barcelona and finally to take over Newcastle, the team his father loved, Robson was single minded, combative, dedicated.

“I saw Frank Sinatra sing when he was nearly 80,” Robson once said. “And I thought it was the best thing I witnessed in my life. It depends who you are and where you are.” His treatment of players is legion. He took the Brazilians Romario and Ronaldo when they were in their teens and far from their culture, in Eindhoven and Barcelona. He dealt with boys and men, with turbulent personalities and meek players.

Often he could barely pronounce, or remember, their names. He often mispronounced Josep Guardiola, now a successor of his as coach to Barcelona, as Gladioli.

But the guiding ethics of his life were hard work and love of the game.

I still have the original text he wrote for a speech at a coaches’ conference in 1977. He was then the team manager at Ipswich Town, a small club he raised to a bigger one in England.

His subject was “The period of Apprenticeship and selection of Professional Material.”

“What do I look for in a young player?” he wrote. “The same things that I look for in a player who might set me back more than one hundred thousand pounds in the transfer market.

“He must have pace, control, understanding and dash. He must be enthusiastic, brave, courageous and dedicated. He must have a certain amount of technique, although that can be added as he matures. If these raw materials are evident, you have something to work from and you have a good chance of producing a professional player.” The script then cautioned: “The qualities are developed during the apprenticeship years by sheer hard graft.” He was to spend the rest of his days nurturing boys from varying walks of life, and from different nationalities, though homesickness and alienation into developing the most precious thing they possess: talent.

I recall a day in Poland where his father had gone along to see an England game, and Bobby asked his guest to take the old man out of the hall, buy him a beer, make sure he does not see the bear baiting of the England manager by the English press.

I recall another day, when Robson was coach to a World XI chosen to play for a Unicef match against the then world champion Germany in Munich. Players arrived by the hour from the far corners of the world. He couldn’t pronounce or remember their names, but he knew their faces, and their talents.

Within one training session he had somehow gelled those disparate players into a team that played a coherent 4-4-2 formation. Each of them called him “Mister,” all played a charity match as if it were the World Cup final. And each of them to this day can remember that training session, that communication, that fun day.

Underlying it was the cause, and underlying Robson’s last cause, his cancer charity was what brought the German and English players of 1990 back to Robson’s boyhood stamping ground, Newcastle United. He had worked through his recurrent bouts of cancer — in the mouth, the lungs, the brain — with humor and fortitude and, his single most evident trait, sheer determination.

The million pounds raised by his charity in its first few months astounded him. It should not have.

People responded to the man he was, the enthusiasm he imparted. “Its difficult to compare achievements, and this is different to football,” he said of the cancer trust in February. “We are talking about saving lives, not winning matches.

“But this is up there with anything I have achieved in the game. Football makes a huge difference to people, but what the people here at this research center are doing is more important.

“Soccer is about beating your opponent, this is about beating death. I have met unforgettable people, and this has been a great year.”

It is one time where I feel the superlatives used are not an over-reaction to his death. He was regarded as a local hero, not just for his football success but also for being the archetype for the honest, working-class North-Easterner (sadly a dying breed).

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Well, the last few days have been really good for me. I've spent them socialising with people who I feel are accepting of me. Apart from moments when I've felt too quiet or a little awkward, I've generally felt okay with myself. Maybe I can manage to get on with people. It has left me with a spring in my step.

I've made the decision to devote all of August to sorting out my weight. I know that I will not attend the Access course I intend to do in September if I do not at least get my weight down to a level that I feel comfortable with. So walking and keeping my food consumption down are to be my primary activities.

Today's GP appoint to collect my anti-depressants resulted in an extra weapon in my arsenal. After I mentioned the discomfort caused by my weight gain and how I was finding it difficult to go outside, she asked me to step onto the scales. I didn't look at the reading but it was high enough to be immediately offered a prescription Orlistat. I hope they help, although being obese enough to warrant medical intervention does not help one's confidence. Orlistat is twice the strength of the non-prescription medication Alli, a drug which I've heard some horror stories about. From now on, trying to avoid fatty foods will not be just about weight loss, but also about trying to avoid some very uncomfortable effects. I just hope it works.

On a lighter note, I've spent in excess of £60 on books in the last couple of days. This includes Ian Kershaw's huge biography of Hitler (it also doubles as a suitable object to clobber BNP supporters with). I will also devote August to reading as much as possible.

On The Rosenhan Experiment

Research into how a person's behaviour is perceived on a psychiatric ward was brought up in conversation last night. It was quite coincidental that today's Times carried an article on it:

If you found yourself locked up against your will in a psychiatric ward, you would probably do your best to get out. But in 1969 a group of people did just the opposite — they tried to get in. A young American psychologist called David Rosenhan persuaded seven friends (two psychologists, a psychiatrist, a doctor, a housewife, a painter and a student) to see whether they could convince doctors that they were mentally ill simply by claiming to hear voices. Now previously unpublished notes from Rosenhan’s private archive reveal what the experience was really like.

Between 1969 and 1972 the team of “pseudo-patients” presented themselves at 12 different US hospitals in five states on the East and West coasts. What would a sane person have to do to convince a doctor they were insane? Not a lot, it seems.

Having claimed to hear words from “thud” and “empty” to “hollow”, words selected because they had never been recorded in psychiatric literature, every pseudo-patient was admitted to hospital for varying lengths of time, from 7 to 52 days. They were given diagnoses of schizophrenia and prescribed a total of 2,100 pills (only two of which were swallowed; in preparation for the study the pseudo-patients had learnt to “cheek” any medication).

Other than giving false names and inventing voices, the patients were to answer all other questions honestly. If they were admitted to hospital they were to say that they felt better and that the voices had disappeared. Not one member of staff suspected them of faking it.

Not only could the doctors be fooled, but once Rosenhan had been given a diagnosis the hospital staff began to read into his actions. His study required him to keep detailed observations, so the staff often saw him writing notes. This was described as “writing behaviour”. When one of the other pseudo-patients, a professional painter, sat down one day and began to paint, this was deemed “painting behaviour”.

Now aged 79 and barely able to speak after a stroke, Rosenhan, who lives in a nursing home in Palo Alto, California, allows me to look through the boxes containing his archive of papers. His unpublished notes describe his own repeated trips to psychiatric hospitals using the pseudonym David Lurie. He found the experience shocking, not because he was able to trick the doctors into admitting him, but because of the way he was treated the moment he had been labelled mentally ill. “I can still recall my own impulse to go up to the nurses and say, ‘You think I’m David Lurie, well I’m not, I’m David Rosenhan, professor of psychology. It was only my anticipation of their likely response — ‘Do you often think you’re a professor of psychology?’ — that stopped me doing it.”

Looking through Rosenhan’s notes, it’s clear that the whole experience has had a lasting effect on him. “Months spent as a pseudo-patient have evoked in me passions that I hardly believed I knew existed,” he says. He found himself in a Catch-22 situation: even when he told the doctors that he felt better, he still wasn’t allowed to leave. “The only way out was to point out that they were correct. They said I had been insane, I was insane, but I was getting better. It was an affirmation of their views.”

Even the pseudo-patients whose work meant that they were familiar with psychiatric hospitals found their experiences as a patient unsettling. Some carried out the experiment many times, becoming more nervous with each new hospital they visited. They also found the staff reluctant to leave the nurses’ station known as the “cage”, and estimated that the time spent talking to patients to be a mere six and a half minutes a day.

The publication of Rosenhan’s paper On Being Sane in Insane Places in the eminent journal Science in 1973 assured his place in the history of psychology. The timing of the study could not have been better, following criticisms of the practice of psychiatry by the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and influential books on the subject by Thomas Szasz and Erving Goffman.

The profession reacted furiously, complaining that the fact that they could be tricked did not undermine their methods of diagnosis. It was not their job, they said, to look for hoaxers. Patients could present with fake symptoms in any field of medicine and be prescribed unnecessary treatment. Doctors rely on patients to tell the truth and do not expect them to invent symptoms. After all, a person who goes to his doctor complaining of severe stomach pains would be taken at his word and possibly even admitted to hospital.

But Rosenhan argued that however much psychiatry might want to be viewed like any other branch of medicine, the difference was the lack of further tests to confirm a diagnosis. None of the decisions to diagnose schizophrenia in the pseudopatients was reversed, even for the patient who had been observed for 52 days. Rosenhan wondered how a doctor who could not even tell which patients had mental health problems could ever expect to distinguish between different types of mental illness.

Rosenhan’s friend and colleague, the Stanford University psychologist Lee Ross, believes that he relished the controversy: “I don’t think he minded being attacked. There would be no point in doing the study if he didn’t think he’d get the result he got.” After the study one hospital challenged Rosenhan to send more pseudo-patients, insisting that doctors would be able to spot the fakers if only they knew to look for them. For the next three months they monitored their admissions and uncovered 41 hoaxers. Mischievous as ever, Rosenhan had sent none.

The study demonstrates something much broader about human nature, something that psychological research has confirmed many times: once we have a view about a person, we look for anything that backs up our ideas and we explain away any evidence to the contrary. Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, says that within the health sphere this can have far-reaching consequences, “When a patient walks in to see a therapist that person is seen through a patient lens. Very ordinary behaviours are now going to seem extraordinary or pathological.”

Many believe that this is still the case today. Rufus May is a British clinical psychologist who bridges the divide between service user and health professional, having spent some time in a psychiatric hospital after a diagnosis of schizophrenia at the age of 18. “Staff do see patients in a compassionate way, but they also view them with fear because they see them as diagnoses,” he says. “That’s still very clearly the case. There are lots of good people working in the system, but the role often confines people.”

So would psychiatrists still be fooled if the pseudo-patient study was repeated today? Ethics committees would be unlikely to allow academic psychologists to repeat the study, but there have been attempts by journalists to do something similar. As most mental healthcare now takes place in the community, it would be hard to get admitted to hospital just for claiming that you can hear voices.

Methods of diagnosis have improved — indeed, there is now a movement against labelling people with a diagnosis at all. Some clinicians today prefer to describe and treat symptoms in place of giving a formal diagnosis. While the psychiatric profession did take notice of the pseudo-patient study, it is sad that it required healthy people to live through the experience before anyone listened.

I hate to say this, but all too often my own experiences have suggested that not much has changed. Those with 'neurotic' mental health problems generally have the awareness to differentiate between 'normal' behaviour and behaviour which is symptomatic of their problems. During my experiences on such wards, I know that observations are made by the staff on my behaviour but when these notes are recounted to justify any doctor's opinions, it becomes clear that any behaviour is seen as a manifestation of a mental illness rather than having another cause. Faced with the options of watching daytime TV or uncomfortable conversations with drying out elderly alcoholics (not the greatest conservationists at the best of times), to stay in one's room and lie in bed seems a natural reaction. Yet such withdrawal is seen as indicative of a depressed mood. Trying to justify such behaviour to the doctors is met with evasive responses as if to imply by omission that they are interpreting your reasoning as a defensive response.

I feel that all too often psychiatric wards often are not about their remit of treating a person or proving a stable environment but centre around staff - patient power conflicts - of which the patient is often stuck in a lose-lose situation. Given the difficulty in understanding mental illness and treating it effectively, such psychiatric wards are never going to be perfect places. However, I do feel they could be made much better places if doctors were willing to step back from their paternalistic and almost arrogant attitude ("doctor knows best").

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Now on to therapy...... in which, while it was the worst session I've had, I will not go off on a polemical rant again.

One thought that came into my mind as I walked home was that we had just re-enacted the first therapy scene from Good Will Hunting where patient Matt Damon and therapist Robin Williams sit in silence for the length of the session until Williams mutters the words "time's up". She greeted me with a smile but did not say anything. I tried to talk but words just blundered and spluttered out of my mouth. Then we sat in silence for ages. I remember concentrating on the rhythmic ticking on the clock and the dull vibration of traffic in the background as I slowly drifted off to sleep. Yes, the British tax payer paid a highly qualified and quite expensive individual to sit with me while I had a snooze. I was woken by the sound of my name and being told that the session was over. When I had staggered outside, I looked at my watch and realised the session had gone 10 minutes over the allotted time. Erm.....

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In other news, I had my first social outing for ages. With two people who I really like and appreciate. The problem is that I feel uncomfortable in my own body. I would like them and others to see me as a healthy person rather than someone who is not at ease with himself and has to fight against his instincts just to speak up and interact. Still I will be seeing them again over the next couple of days and I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm off for a strong drink....

On The Shame of Weight Gain

It is an ugly confession to make, but for reasons that I don't understand, my weight has ballooned by 30 lbs in two months. I'm been trying to deny in to myself, trying to say that is was just caused by the stress of my exams, trying to make any excuse to pretend it is not happening.

It has torn away the last remnants of self-confidence I had. I wanted to see Katyn at the cinema today, but after six hours of trying, I've given up trying to find the courage to leave the house. In fact, I haven't ventured out my door since my therapy session on Monday. I can't bear to let people see me like this, I know they will react with disguist (and who can blame them?). I feel I must keep away from everyone until I can present myself as somewhat more acceptable.

On Apathy

I want to write about how my efforts to transform my room have really paid off and how the room feels like a positive environment now. Or I want to write about what a fantastic film 35 Shots of Rum was (see it if you get the chance).

But I can't. It is one of the days when I'm overcome with a sense of apathy or mental lethargy which just stops me from functioning at all. Fuck I hate days like this.

On Tanya Gold

Claimed by some to be the new Charile Brooker, Tanya Gold has a habit of writing hilarious and sarcastic articles lampooning aspects of society. Here is today's effort from The Guardian:

Two remarkable examples of evil have drifted past my eyeballs this week, and made them bleed, and so, dear reader, they must be shared with you.

First – fling your flat caps into the air and whoop – is the Tatler "most invited" list, a collection of the people the employees at the "society bible" (it's an oxymoron) have fantasised are "popular", while lying on the carpet after another too-long night at Boujis. It's very random, which makes me think it is all made up, like the Vanity Fair best-dressed list, which always includes some of the magazine's employees and, sometimes, its furnishings. As in "Vanity Fair spoon. Doesn't talk much. Once sat in Barack Obama's mouth, while wearing ice-cream."

I don't trust the methodology of the Tatler most invited list. If I were compiling the Tatler most invited list, I would take Elton John and David Furnish hostage, and make them show me their invitations at the point of a diamante-clad shotgun. Then I would weigh them, leave, take Elle Macpherson hostage, slap her, and repeat.

But this isn't Tatler's way. Each "most invited" person gets a name, a number and a little precis of why they have been included. And so, Sarah Brown (No 2 on the list) is "chillaxing with Paris Hilton in LA". I bet she isn't; anyone who considers Gordon Brown good company is not going to enjoy Paris Hilton, and vice versa.

It is also weirdly informative. Lady Antonia Fraser (No 7) mustn't be asked "to anything in early October". Why not? "It's when she mourns the anniversary of the execution of Marie Antoinette". Then there is the Tatler most invited list as aid for aspiring bulimics. You should, apparently, invite David Cameron (he's No 8), to get "right on with the Right On". That is a phrase so repulsive I actually just vomited on my computer. And, if you invite Princess Beatrice (No 18) "don't forget to make space for the security team too". The computer is now buried under vomit.

I think I love the Tatler most invited list because its existence presupposes the existence of a Tatler least invited list, written in the same cloying, gnashing style, like a very big tongue licking its way up a chocolate eclair. As in – "At No 4, Dennis Nilsen. Shy north London boy. Boils heads. Often to be found on Twitter typing, 'I did the bad thing again.' At No 5, Pazuzu. Demon spirit made famous by Exorcist movies. Immortal, so ask him for his skincare tips."

On and on, typing gamely through the vomit, I can also tell you that Trinny Woodall (No 36) appears for the very bizarre reason that people want to see "how big her lips are". And, finally, there is someone called "Dangerous" Dave Hanbury (No 86, NEW ENTRY) who is currently "recovering from being bitten by a tramp".

And so on to Evil Event Part Two – a belated report from the Paris couture shows by me, a woman who dresses like a breeze block and describes her own personal style as "half Bolshevik, half handbag". Couture week is where very young, thin women model £50,000 outfits for women who are less young, and less thin. The customers cannot buy the bodies – not legal – and so they buy the clothes, sewn by seamstresses for a pittance.

Paris couture week is also the only place on earth where people actually clap dresses. I think you have to be a moron to clap dresses, or at least so rich you can be classified as mentally ill. And the clothes are very odd, as if normal clothes – clothes that actually look like clothes – cannot justify the price. "For £50,000 we want something really special," the customers must say. "Make me an outfit that a potato masher would wear to the opera after a divorce."

And they try – how they try – to make clothes that are not clothes. Jean Paul Gaultier features a model with a net on her head. The net has a hole in it, so it looks as if she is peering out of a window at a view from which all the poor people have been removed. Then he does a silver basque with a feathered skirt, so the poor scrawny woman looks like a chicken being slowly removed from a tin can, as a precis to being stir-fried. Givenchy has a similar idea. He has a woman in black with a leathery skirt. The general impression is of a snake glued to a paint pot.

The Chanel collection is the work of the German designer Karl Lagerfeld. I find Lagerfeld fascinating, because he has had so much plastic surgery he looks like a Transformer – "Robots in Disguise!" He has put his women in little Darth Vader hats. His next model, I am absolutely certain, is wearing a B&Q bracket. Another woman seemed to be completely covered in eyeballs.

For 2009, Christian Lacroix has done bats. Every model is dressed as a bat. A very expensive bat. Valentino has also done bats. One of the bats seems to be wearing a tyre. Other bats are obese. They look terrifying. Even the brides look terrifying.

At Lacroix (which has reportedly filed for voluntary bankruptcy), fashionseems to have finally reached its murderous zenith. The models actually look dead, and, one day, I predict, there will be corpses on the catwalk. It is a philosophical certainty – because couture is all about making the "clothes" look good. Dead people can wear anything.

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Even after reading that, I found my therapy session difficult. The psychologist (who from now on will be known as Sionna) had picked up on the difficulties I had at school so she pressed me to recall some of my experiences. At times I felt like I was close to tears as recalled the details and with them came the concomitant sensations of shame and self-disgust. It was stressful and I did not really want to have to talk about such events. I keep on telling myself this is what therapy is like although a part of me wants to not return next week.

On Destroying The Past

It feels like a lot of my behaviour of late has certain similarities to that of burning a former lover's photos and possessions after a particularly acrimonious split. I've delibrately sought to eliminate many physical elements that remind me of my past. I've thrown away the few photos I have of myself along with most of the photos of past friends, holidays, nights out etc. I've destroyed all letters, cards etc. which I've been given at one point or another. This may seem somewhat melodramatic and overly emotional, but I feel that my drive to do this has been entirely rational.

I have this yearning to reconstruct my sense of identity from the ground up. It seems common within psychology to percieve mental illness as an entity which exists within its own independent bubble; the metaphor of a cancer or disease is often used, or it is desribed in a language which acts to personaify it. I feel this can be inadvertently disingenuios. To me, my problems are inextricably linked to my personality and memories. My problems are a series of atavistic thoughts and behaviours which act to undermine me. Trying to understand and alter my identity plays a keyrole in recovery. I can't escape myself. I know that I will always be a produce of my past. However, I feel that by trying to destroy physical manifestations of my past can remove the stimuli that trigger these memories and habitual thoughts.

There are certainly postivies to this. I am looking towards the future, rather than merely embarking on some nihislitic destruction. With my Mum on holiday for a few days, I've taken the opporuntiy to paint to room. With the help of my sister, we are transforming it from a moody blue to a much lighter colour. We should be finished by tomorrow and the results look good so far (at least by amateur standards).

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I still have not taken any action on filling my days. I'm still prone to walking around the house in a maudlin frame of mind. I hope that in the next couple of weeks I can find the motivation towards taking practical steps forward.

On A New Beginning

Hi.

I'm J. A 27 year old male living in the UK. Of all the facets which define me, the most fundamental yet most oblique is that I have a long history of mental illness.

I feel that I'm really in a position to begin the long process of recovery. I think that writing an anonymous blog detailing my experiences of recovery and various other thoughts would help the process. I feel that the worst is behind me. No more periods of feeling that I'm losing my sanity, no more turning my back on 'normal' life and no more psychiatric wards. To simply recover in the sense that one is functional and no longer requires external support is not what I would define as recovery. It needs to be more than this, I need to carve out a niche in which life becomes valuable and worth living so as to remove any temptation to relapse.

Two events from last Monday will potentially have a big impact on the near future. The first is that I started seeing a new clinical psychologist. She turned out to be a very amicable Irish women with a soft face and probably only a few years on me. I felt immediately at ease, yet that did not make the session any less stressful. I struggled to find words to express myself and long silences ensued (remaining silent is a classic psychologist's trick to encourage someone to talk). Towards the end of the session, I felt like fleeing the room in panic. I had the second session yesterday which went surprising well. I felt more comfortable and this allowed me to talk freely and talk freely I did, to the extent that the session overran by twenty minutes. These first few sessions only serve to help her get to know me. Once the real psychotheraphy starts, I hope that it will be effective although past experiences leave me with some doubts.

The second event was that I acquired a new bed. This may seem frivolous except that I've had a chaotic sleep pattern including long bouts of insomnia for years. Since I was twenty, I've been sleeping on a single mattress on the floor. My new double bed has made such a difference. I'm able to get to sleep in under an hour and I sleep well for six hours or so. After a week of this, I'm finally starting to feel like my perpetual state of exhaustion is lifting and my cognitive abilities are becoming sharper. Long may this continue.

So, with my new psychologist and new bed, it is time to get on with my life.