Showing posts with label anxiety. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anxiety. Show all posts
Thursday 26 August 2021
Wednesday 30 September 2020
While India revels in the IPL, do we care about the mental health of cricketers?
Varun Shetty in Cricinfo
For 15 minutes, in the frigid press-conference room of the Holkar Stadium in Indore last November, Virat Kohli fielded questions mostly about the pink-ball Test in Kolkata nine days later. That was until he got one about Glenn Maxwell's decision to take a break from cricket to tend to his mental health.
"I'm absolutely for it," Kohli said. "I've gone through a phase in my career where I felt like it was the end of the world. In England 2014, I didn't know what to do, what to say to anyone, and how to speak and how to communicate. And to be honest, I couldn't have said I'm not feeling great mentally and I need to get away from the game. Because you never know how that's taken."
Kohli was 25 in 2014, an international player for six years, and long past the stage of just being an exciting prospect; he was a generational talent being groomed for leadership, and whose brandification had already transitioned him into the elite tier of Indian cricket. With no one to talk to, ten innings without a fifty felt like the end of the world.
The press conference wasn't a setting in which Kohli could have elaborated further on his thoughts about that tour. But whether his malaise was existential, performance-related, or even a symptom of mental illness, it provides a sombre insight into the contrast between cricket's profile in India and the negligible support system for its players.
Playing cricket in India is different to elsewhere in the world, not least because of a population approaching 1.4 billion. The margins for error are small, and nowhere else are the rewards of making it so lucrative, all of which thrusts the player into an unhealthy relationship with a demanding public. And though the phenomenon of stoning players' houses may have disappeared, it might be only because coordinated bullying on social media is easier to sustain.
Not that it should take such a reality to build a support system, as other cricketing nations have shown. Dr Samir Parikh, a psychiatrist and director of Fortis' National Mental Health Program, said one in four people suffer from mental health issues.
"If you have a hundred players that play for, let's say, a year, it is not possible that at least one or two will not have depression," he told the Cricket Monthly. "It's just statistically not possible. So how do you identify and take care of it? Because you might misread the lows, misread the reaction, as a part of the career, not as a medical problem."
Robin Uthappa has spoken recently about being clinically depressed around the late 2000s Jasjeet Plaha / © Hindustan Times/Getty Images
It stands to reason that self-reporting is the most reliable way to start tackling any such problems.
"If you think that a player is important enough, for the team or for Indian cricket to go forward, I think they should be looked after," Kohli said as part of his response to the Maxwell question. "When you get to the international stage, every player needs that communication, that ability to just speak out."
But if Kohli couldn't, then who can?
Amonth after Kohli's press conference, Madhya Pradesh batsman Aryaman Birla, 22 at the time, announced an indefinite break from the game as he had been coping with "severe anxiety related to the sport for a while now".
It was a rare public statement of the kind by a cricketer in India, perhaps the first. More cricketers have spoken of their experiences since. Recently, in separate interviews, Robin Uthappa said he had been clinically depressed and suicidal between 2009 and 2011 - not long after becoming a T20 World Cup winner. It had been especially difficult to manage when there was no cricket.
"Cricket kept my mind off of these thoughts but it became really difficult on non-match days and during the off season," Uthappa said on a wellness webinar hosted by the Royals. "On days I would just be sitting there and would think to myself on the count of three, I'm going to run and jump off of the balcony. But something kind of just held me back."
Uthappa's situation gives us a glimpse into how franchise cricket has added a new dimension to cricketers' lives. As a tournament that seems, paradoxically, both accessible and difficult to break into - 971 players registered for the last auction - the IPL has a certain amount of influence over players' destinies.
Psychiatrist Samir Parikh: "If I was working with a young sportsperson who is doing well, I would put all my might into grounding them into focusing on performance, shutting the noise of adulation, not looking at your bank balance, and focusing on the next ball" Ryan Pierse / © Getty Images
A few weeks ago, Chennai Super Kings owner N Srinivasan was quoted as saying that Suresh Raina, second only to MS Dhoni in the CSK pantheon, would "certainly realise what he is missing and certainly all the money he is going to lose" by opting out of the IPL. There's an immediate parallel in football, where Lionel Messi, synonymous with Barcelona FC, had to consider suing the club he has been at since he was 13 when he wanted to leave, and was all but coerced into staying on for another year. The commodification of players is a modern challenge - and may affect those who are biochemically predisposed to mental conditions.
For Uthappa, a last-minute trade to his home-town franchise, the Royal Challengers Bangalore, was unsettling enough to exacerbate an underlying illness.
"In 2008 I played for Mumbai Indians and I was just transferred to the RCB," Uthappa told the Quint. "I was very conflicted because the trade happened very close to the tournament. I think three-four weeks before. Suddenly, you're preparing the whole year to play for one team and you're thrown into a trade situation when you have to go to another team. Even though I was coming home [Bengaluru], I was very conflicted. And I think that was the hay that broke the camel's back, so to speak, for me. I realised something was not right. I was constantly depressed, I was not okay."
Uthappa reached out to a counsellor and was diagnosed. He then had to stick to a counselling routine, and was on medication as he navigated his illness, with his family as support system.
In a 2013 thesis on suicides in cricket at the University of Chester, Shaun McNee scraped international cricketers' autobiographies for quotes on the emotional toll of the cricketing life. In it are excerpts from players like Herschelle Gibbs, Marcus Trescothick and Andrew Flintoff on the strains of touring, of developing "four-wall fever" in hotel rooms, of returning home and not being recognised by their children. Professional cricket gets lonely.
Sheldon Jackson, Saurashtra's senior pro, was homesick at the start of the last Ranji Trophy season, as his team's first two fixtures were away. It had been a difficult year for the 33-year-old, one where he'd needed to be in "three-four places at the same time", apart from dealing with his frustration at not being called up to the India A squad. His mother had battled tuberculosis, and he was aching to be home with his wife, who was pregnant with their first child.
Sheldon Jackson didn't seek professional help for his mental-health troubles but managed to play through the phase Prashant Bhoot / © Sportzpics
"I was not sleeping well," Jackson told TCM. "Whatever was going on on the field, I was not enjoying it a bit. It was always like, jaldi khatam ho jaye, mujhe ghar jaana hai [I hope this ends early, I want to be home]. I tried to speak to certain people but instead of trying to understand from where you're coming, people always try to be the stronger person. Ki nahin yaar, aisa nahi hai [It's not a big deal], be strong, we are this, we are that. But actually at the end of the day we are just humans. We may be cricketers but we are humans first."
Jackson played through his discomfort, coping by keeping himself occupied and in the gym, while those at home reassured him that things were under control. He had another stellar season, breaching the 800-run mark once again as Saurashtra won the Ranji Trophy. During this time he only spoke to one of his team-mates, Chirag Jani, whom he has known a long time, and didn't seek professional help because, as he put it, "I hadn't gone into mental trauma or something".
Former India batsman Aakash Chopra, now a broadcaster, says things were much the same when he was an active cricketer: there was "no way" you could tell a captain or coach if you were feeling down, because you would be benched. "By the time you reach the top level, you're already hardwired to not acknowledge or admit if you're having certain issues," Chopra told TCM.
He makes an important distinction between the challenge of having to hold on to a spot in the team, and having to battle mental-health issues. The former is part of the game, wherever it is played, and something players train to manage as they step up through the ranks. The average cricketer already knows that the odds of success are stacked against them. A bad day at a trial or a bad decision from an umpire can end careers, and there are no second chances. Chopra was hearing he was going to be dropped even as he prepared to make his debut for Delhi.
Chopra says he first began to feel lonely and disconnected from the game after he was dropped from the Indian team. As he looked to navigate that period, he was too conscious to be open about it; and that included self-judgement about whether being a recent Indian player had changed how he behaves. He contemplated leaving cricket, before trying counselling and an Art of Living course to ground himself.
"For those who start doing well, the sheer expectation also has a huge impact," says Parikh. "Anything which happens in the public domain brings a lot more expectation, which exaggerates everything about the failure. So that makes it even more difficult, especially when you are younger. And the same stress comes back when you're not young anymore. The moment you're established and become slightly more senior, you know there is someone knocking on the door."
Hotel rooms are mostly lonely places, and living out of a suitcase can take a mental toll Ryan Pierse / © Getty Images
"The nature of cricket is such that it tears at the nerves," cricket writer David Frith said to the Guardian in a 2001 article about suicides in English cricket. "Half-hearted cricketers are extremely rare. This game gets a grip on people such as only religious fanatics might recognise."
For an aspirational generation of Indian cricketers, growing up on broadcasts flavoured by machismo and one-upmanship, the pressure of expectation is bound to rise.
In the present circumstances there are fresh challenges. In the ongoing IPL, even as cricket-starved audiences tune in to watch on television, the players perform in empty stadiums and live in biosecure bubbles. "There are a number of other players who are very much in the same boat as Suresh Raina, and I just hope that the teams are aware of that and are catering for that," mental-conditioning coach Paddy Upton told ESPNcricinfo a fortnight before the tournament began. "There are coaches who are gonna be struggling, there are support staff who are gonna be struggling in that three-month bio-bubble."
The work before the team management, according to Upton, is "to understand who are the extroverts, the confidence players, the externally motivated players, those who are risk-averse, those who are fear-based, the pessimists. Those are the players we really need to nurture to bring them up to a place where they can be comfortable in their own lives, comfortable by themselves in their hotel rooms without that external validation and stimulation…"
IPL games and international matches are the most high-profile of India's cricket, but they are only a small proportion of it. In the 2019-20 season, India held 2036 domestic matches across men's and women's cricket and age groups. For that volume of cricket, and cricketers, the support system that currently exists barely qualifies as an afterthought.
In thinking about why the BCCI hasn't matched up with Australia and England on mental-well-being measures, one must consider the spectrum of opinions that Indian society holds on the topic. From a legal lens, attempting suicide was punishable under criminal law in India until 2017, when that provision of the penal code was restricted (but not removed altogether). A 2018 document floated in the Indian parliament said there are only 3827 psychiatrists in the country, against a requirement of 13,500.
A future archive of prime-time TV news since June 2020 will be filled with popular anchors trying to talk down any mention of mental illness in the case of Sushant Singh Rajput - the actor who played Dhoni in a biopic - who died by suicide. Some segments have gone as far as analysing his smiles in old footage to "prove" that he could not have been depressed; adding to that narrative, some celebrities with big followings have dismissed mental illnesses as a conspiracy or a hoax.
In the early '90s, when former India wicketkeeper Sadanand Viswanath was dealing with the death of his parents within a year of each other, the end of his Indian career, and a subsequent battle with alcoholism and depression - all in a short period of time - he considered seeing a psychiatrist. His friend, a doctor, intervened.
"I did seriously consider that option," Viswanath told TCM. "Until one fine day a friend of mine who is a doctor said, 'Vishy, even if there's nothing wrong with you, once you finish those sessions of counselling with a psychiatrist, you'll be bonkers. Better not see any psychiatrist.'"
Viswanath said he considers it one of the best pieces of advice he was given at the time.
"Ultimately your mental strength and your bouncing-back ability and your resilience, your perseverance, that gumption, that gut feel - it all depends on your self-respect, your belief system and not wanting to cut a sorry figure in society. Because you have played for the Indian team. That's the maryaad [conduct] one must have. When I walk up, people should say, 'Wow, here's a former Indian cricketer.' If you see me in a sorry state of affairs, what's that going to reflect on Indian cricket? Indian cricket becomes the loser. I don't want that to happen."
The likelihood of, say, depressive symptoms being categorised as "negative thinking" are strong even today. In the age of motivational coaches, genuine medical issues may inadvertently get overlooked.
"The mental-health component, which is the more biological component, by and large is very neglected, and that's why some of the recent [player] breaks have happened," Parikh reckons. "Those breaks could well have been a pure mental-health issue and not merely a burnout. We don't know from a distance."
The IPL, with its big-money auctions, has had a significant impact on players' prospects, and that has brought pressure in its wake Kalpak Pathak / © Hindustan Times/Getty Images
The Indian men's team has, from time to time, employed mental-conditioning coaches. The women's team, on the other hand, has been publicly - and unsuccessfully - asking for a sports psychologist since the end of the 2016 T20 World Cup. The absence of one has meant that the burden of dealing with issues as varied as anxiety, depression and eating disorders have fallen on the players themselves, alongside support staff hired for other roles.
As far as TCM could determine, the only formal initiative taken at board level has been the creation of a general player's handbook in 2017, based on the recommendation of the Mudgal committee, which was set up to look into various aspects of Indian cricket. The handbook - adapted for cricket by GoSports Foundation, who originally created it for athlete awareness around things like sponsorships and the media - contains a section on mental well-being in a 101 format; it informs players about the symptoms of mental illness and recommends steps on dealing with them, including advice to seek professional help. It is understood that copies of this handbook were published in English and Hindi, but several players - domestic and international - told TCM they had never heard of it.
In summary, the pattern that emerges is that players at various levels are either not being heard, or are wary of speaking about their troubles. In contrast, players and boards in England and Australia have been openly supportive of those who need breaks, even multiple breaks or permanent ones. In both countries, cricketers have reached out through the respective players' associations, which represent the welfare of past and current cricketers, and which have created enabling systems, such as anonymous helplines. In India, the players' association is exclusively for retired cricketers who have played a minimum of one international match or ten men's first-class matches or five women's first-class matches. And even then the association is too limited in its power for real help. It certainly didn't feature in the account of Praveen Kumar, who came close to shooting himself in 2019 as the silence of retirement closed in on him.
"I told myself, 'Kya hai yeh sab? Bas khatam karte hain,'" [What's all this? Let me just end it] Kumar told the Indian Express. He only stopped himself when his eyes fell upon a picture of his children, and was soon in therapy. The Express story tells of Kumar's agony after being dropped from the Indian team and missing out on the IPL - a life cooped up in his room, watching his own highlights reel.
A tendency to downplay and dismiss the prevalence of mental illness in India has been a byproduct of the media feeding frenzy in the wake of the suicide of the actor Sushant Singh Rajput Indranil Mukherjee / © AFP/Getty Images
It's not unheard of for former players to crave the highs of their fleeting time at the top. The dynamics of trying to become a top athlete involve such an obsessive relationship with the sport in the formative years that your identity is tied to it. With the advent of social media and multi-crore IPL contracts for teenagers, the risks are even higher, fears Parikh.
"If I was working with a young sportsperson who is suddenly doing well, I would put all my might into grounding this person into focusing on performance, shutting the noise of friends, shutting the noise of adulation, virtually not looking at your bank balance, and focusing on the next ball," he said. "If I'm not able to succeed in doing that, your failure rate would be higher. Look at those people who've had a great IPL, and who did not follow it up.
"Imagine a scenario where you know that endorsements will make a difference, where you know that social-media followership and your individual identity will also make a difference. How do you ensure that this component of your life is like an occupational need but not the core? You may get endorsements today, and one bad season and they're all done with."
There is work in progress on this front at the National Cricket Academy, where Rahul Dravid and his team have tried to roll out mental-health seminars for even those young players who aren't contracted or part of NCA camps, alongside those who represent India in age-group and developmental cricket.
Between that and Kohli's call for more openness, there is a start.
But for now, as the world's richest board ignores even the simplest of requests - a psychologist for its women's team, which has played two World Cup finals in three years - the creation of a comprehensive support system seems a distant dream.
For 15 minutes, in the frigid press-conference room of the Holkar Stadium in Indore last November, Virat Kohli fielded questions mostly about the pink-ball Test in Kolkata nine days later. That was until he got one about Glenn Maxwell's decision to take a break from cricket to tend to his mental health.
"I'm absolutely for it," Kohli said. "I've gone through a phase in my career where I felt like it was the end of the world. In England 2014, I didn't know what to do, what to say to anyone, and how to speak and how to communicate. And to be honest, I couldn't have said I'm not feeling great mentally and I need to get away from the game. Because you never know how that's taken."
Kohli was 25 in 2014, an international player for six years, and long past the stage of just being an exciting prospect; he was a generational talent being groomed for leadership, and whose brandification had already transitioned him into the elite tier of Indian cricket. With no one to talk to, ten innings without a fifty felt like the end of the world.
The press conference wasn't a setting in which Kohli could have elaborated further on his thoughts about that tour. But whether his malaise was existential, performance-related, or even a symptom of mental illness, it provides a sombre insight into the contrast between cricket's profile in India and the negligible support system for its players.
Playing cricket in India is different to elsewhere in the world, not least because of a population approaching 1.4 billion. The margins for error are small, and nowhere else are the rewards of making it so lucrative, all of which thrusts the player into an unhealthy relationship with a demanding public. And though the phenomenon of stoning players' houses may have disappeared, it might be only because coordinated bullying on social media is easier to sustain.
Not that it should take such a reality to build a support system, as other cricketing nations have shown. Dr Samir Parikh, a psychiatrist and director of Fortis' National Mental Health Program, said one in four people suffer from mental health issues.
"If you have a hundred players that play for, let's say, a year, it is not possible that at least one or two will not have depression," he told the Cricket Monthly. "It's just statistically not possible. So how do you identify and take care of it? Because you might misread the lows, misread the reaction, as a part of the career, not as a medical problem."
Robin Uthappa has spoken recently about being clinically depressed around the late 2000s Jasjeet Plaha / © Hindustan Times/Getty Images
It stands to reason that self-reporting is the most reliable way to start tackling any such problems.
"If you think that a player is important enough, for the team or for Indian cricket to go forward, I think they should be looked after," Kohli said as part of his response to the Maxwell question. "When you get to the international stage, every player needs that communication, that ability to just speak out."
But if Kohli couldn't, then who can?
Amonth after Kohli's press conference, Madhya Pradesh batsman Aryaman Birla, 22 at the time, announced an indefinite break from the game as he had been coping with "severe anxiety related to the sport for a while now".
It was a rare public statement of the kind by a cricketer in India, perhaps the first. More cricketers have spoken of their experiences since. Recently, in separate interviews, Robin Uthappa said he had been clinically depressed and suicidal between 2009 and 2011 - not long after becoming a T20 World Cup winner. It had been especially difficult to manage when there was no cricket.
"Cricket kept my mind off of these thoughts but it became really difficult on non-match days and during the off season," Uthappa said on a wellness webinar hosted by the Royals. "On days I would just be sitting there and would think to myself on the count of three, I'm going to run and jump off of the balcony. But something kind of just held me back."
Uthappa's situation gives us a glimpse into how franchise cricket has added a new dimension to cricketers' lives. As a tournament that seems, paradoxically, both accessible and difficult to break into - 971 players registered for the last auction - the IPL has a certain amount of influence over players' destinies.
Psychiatrist Samir Parikh: "If I was working with a young sportsperson who is doing well, I would put all my might into grounding them into focusing on performance, shutting the noise of adulation, not looking at your bank balance, and focusing on the next ball" Ryan Pierse / © Getty Images
A few weeks ago, Chennai Super Kings owner N Srinivasan was quoted as saying that Suresh Raina, second only to MS Dhoni in the CSK pantheon, would "certainly realise what he is missing and certainly all the money he is going to lose" by opting out of the IPL. There's an immediate parallel in football, where Lionel Messi, synonymous with Barcelona FC, had to consider suing the club he has been at since he was 13 when he wanted to leave, and was all but coerced into staying on for another year. The commodification of players is a modern challenge - and may affect those who are biochemically predisposed to mental conditions.
For Uthappa, a last-minute trade to his home-town franchise, the Royal Challengers Bangalore, was unsettling enough to exacerbate an underlying illness.
"In 2008 I played for Mumbai Indians and I was just transferred to the RCB," Uthappa told the Quint. "I was very conflicted because the trade happened very close to the tournament. I think three-four weeks before. Suddenly, you're preparing the whole year to play for one team and you're thrown into a trade situation when you have to go to another team. Even though I was coming home [Bengaluru], I was very conflicted. And I think that was the hay that broke the camel's back, so to speak, for me. I realised something was not right. I was constantly depressed, I was not okay."
Uthappa reached out to a counsellor and was diagnosed. He then had to stick to a counselling routine, and was on medication as he navigated his illness, with his family as support system.
In a 2013 thesis on suicides in cricket at the University of Chester, Shaun McNee scraped international cricketers' autobiographies for quotes on the emotional toll of the cricketing life. In it are excerpts from players like Herschelle Gibbs, Marcus Trescothick and Andrew Flintoff on the strains of touring, of developing "four-wall fever" in hotel rooms, of returning home and not being recognised by their children. Professional cricket gets lonely.
Sheldon Jackson, Saurashtra's senior pro, was homesick at the start of the last Ranji Trophy season, as his team's first two fixtures were away. It had been a difficult year for the 33-year-old, one where he'd needed to be in "three-four places at the same time", apart from dealing with his frustration at not being called up to the India A squad. His mother had battled tuberculosis, and he was aching to be home with his wife, who was pregnant with their first child.
Sheldon Jackson didn't seek professional help for his mental-health troubles but managed to play through the phase Prashant Bhoot / © Sportzpics
"I was not sleeping well," Jackson told TCM. "Whatever was going on on the field, I was not enjoying it a bit. It was always like, jaldi khatam ho jaye, mujhe ghar jaana hai [I hope this ends early, I want to be home]. I tried to speak to certain people but instead of trying to understand from where you're coming, people always try to be the stronger person. Ki nahin yaar, aisa nahi hai [It's not a big deal], be strong, we are this, we are that. But actually at the end of the day we are just humans. We may be cricketers but we are humans first."
Jackson played through his discomfort, coping by keeping himself occupied and in the gym, while those at home reassured him that things were under control. He had another stellar season, breaching the 800-run mark once again as Saurashtra won the Ranji Trophy. During this time he only spoke to one of his team-mates, Chirag Jani, whom he has known a long time, and didn't seek professional help because, as he put it, "I hadn't gone into mental trauma or something".
Former India batsman Aakash Chopra, now a broadcaster, says things were much the same when he was an active cricketer: there was "no way" you could tell a captain or coach if you were feeling down, because you would be benched. "By the time you reach the top level, you're already hardwired to not acknowledge or admit if you're having certain issues," Chopra told TCM.
He makes an important distinction between the challenge of having to hold on to a spot in the team, and having to battle mental-health issues. The former is part of the game, wherever it is played, and something players train to manage as they step up through the ranks. The average cricketer already knows that the odds of success are stacked against them. A bad day at a trial or a bad decision from an umpire can end careers, and there are no second chances. Chopra was hearing he was going to be dropped even as he prepared to make his debut for Delhi.
Chopra says he first began to feel lonely and disconnected from the game after he was dropped from the Indian team. As he looked to navigate that period, he was too conscious to be open about it; and that included self-judgement about whether being a recent Indian player had changed how he behaves. He contemplated leaving cricket, before trying counselling and an Art of Living course to ground himself.
"For those who start doing well, the sheer expectation also has a huge impact," says Parikh. "Anything which happens in the public domain brings a lot more expectation, which exaggerates everything about the failure. So that makes it even more difficult, especially when you are younger. And the same stress comes back when you're not young anymore. The moment you're established and become slightly more senior, you know there is someone knocking on the door."
Hotel rooms are mostly lonely places, and living out of a suitcase can take a mental toll Ryan Pierse / © Getty Images
"The nature of cricket is such that it tears at the nerves," cricket writer David Frith said to the Guardian in a 2001 article about suicides in English cricket. "Half-hearted cricketers are extremely rare. This game gets a grip on people such as only religious fanatics might recognise."
For an aspirational generation of Indian cricketers, growing up on broadcasts flavoured by machismo and one-upmanship, the pressure of expectation is bound to rise.
In the present circumstances there are fresh challenges. In the ongoing IPL, even as cricket-starved audiences tune in to watch on television, the players perform in empty stadiums and live in biosecure bubbles. "There are a number of other players who are very much in the same boat as Suresh Raina, and I just hope that the teams are aware of that and are catering for that," mental-conditioning coach Paddy Upton told ESPNcricinfo a fortnight before the tournament began. "There are coaches who are gonna be struggling, there are support staff who are gonna be struggling in that three-month bio-bubble."
The work before the team management, according to Upton, is "to understand who are the extroverts, the confidence players, the externally motivated players, those who are risk-averse, those who are fear-based, the pessimists. Those are the players we really need to nurture to bring them up to a place where they can be comfortable in their own lives, comfortable by themselves in their hotel rooms without that external validation and stimulation…"
IPL games and international matches are the most high-profile of India's cricket, but they are only a small proportion of it. In the 2019-20 season, India held 2036 domestic matches across men's and women's cricket and age groups. For that volume of cricket, and cricketers, the support system that currently exists barely qualifies as an afterthought.
In thinking about why the BCCI hasn't matched up with Australia and England on mental-well-being measures, one must consider the spectrum of opinions that Indian society holds on the topic. From a legal lens, attempting suicide was punishable under criminal law in India until 2017, when that provision of the penal code was restricted (but not removed altogether). A 2018 document floated in the Indian parliament said there are only 3827 psychiatrists in the country, against a requirement of 13,500.
A future archive of prime-time TV news since June 2020 will be filled with popular anchors trying to talk down any mention of mental illness in the case of Sushant Singh Rajput - the actor who played Dhoni in a biopic - who died by suicide. Some segments have gone as far as analysing his smiles in old footage to "prove" that he could not have been depressed; adding to that narrative, some celebrities with big followings have dismissed mental illnesses as a conspiracy or a hoax.
In the early '90s, when former India wicketkeeper Sadanand Viswanath was dealing with the death of his parents within a year of each other, the end of his Indian career, and a subsequent battle with alcoholism and depression - all in a short period of time - he considered seeing a psychiatrist. His friend, a doctor, intervened.
"I did seriously consider that option," Viswanath told TCM. "Until one fine day a friend of mine who is a doctor said, 'Vishy, even if there's nothing wrong with you, once you finish those sessions of counselling with a psychiatrist, you'll be bonkers. Better not see any psychiatrist.'"
Viswanath said he considers it one of the best pieces of advice he was given at the time.
"Ultimately your mental strength and your bouncing-back ability and your resilience, your perseverance, that gumption, that gut feel - it all depends on your self-respect, your belief system and not wanting to cut a sorry figure in society. Because you have played for the Indian team. That's the maryaad [conduct] one must have. When I walk up, people should say, 'Wow, here's a former Indian cricketer.' If you see me in a sorry state of affairs, what's that going to reflect on Indian cricket? Indian cricket becomes the loser. I don't want that to happen."
The likelihood of, say, depressive symptoms being categorised as "negative thinking" are strong even today. In the age of motivational coaches, genuine medical issues may inadvertently get overlooked.
"The mental-health component, which is the more biological component, by and large is very neglected, and that's why some of the recent [player] breaks have happened," Parikh reckons. "Those breaks could well have been a pure mental-health issue and not merely a burnout. We don't know from a distance."
The IPL, with its big-money auctions, has had a significant impact on players' prospects, and that has brought pressure in its wake Kalpak Pathak / © Hindustan Times/Getty Images
The Indian men's team has, from time to time, employed mental-conditioning coaches. The women's team, on the other hand, has been publicly - and unsuccessfully - asking for a sports psychologist since the end of the 2016 T20 World Cup. The absence of one has meant that the burden of dealing with issues as varied as anxiety, depression and eating disorders have fallen on the players themselves, alongside support staff hired for other roles.
As far as TCM could determine, the only formal initiative taken at board level has been the creation of a general player's handbook in 2017, based on the recommendation of the Mudgal committee, which was set up to look into various aspects of Indian cricket. The handbook - adapted for cricket by GoSports Foundation, who originally created it for athlete awareness around things like sponsorships and the media - contains a section on mental well-being in a 101 format; it informs players about the symptoms of mental illness and recommends steps on dealing with them, including advice to seek professional help. It is understood that copies of this handbook were published in English and Hindi, but several players - domestic and international - told TCM they had never heard of it.
In summary, the pattern that emerges is that players at various levels are either not being heard, or are wary of speaking about their troubles. In contrast, players and boards in England and Australia have been openly supportive of those who need breaks, even multiple breaks or permanent ones. In both countries, cricketers have reached out through the respective players' associations, which represent the welfare of past and current cricketers, and which have created enabling systems, such as anonymous helplines. In India, the players' association is exclusively for retired cricketers who have played a minimum of one international match or ten men's first-class matches or five women's first-class matches. And even then the association is too limited in its power for real help. It certainly didn't feature in the account of Praveen Kumar, who came close to shooting himself in 2019 as the silence of retirement closed in on him.
"I told myself, 'Kya hai yeh sab? Bas khatam karte hain,'" [What's all this? Let me just end it] Kumar told the Indian Express. He only stopped himself when his eyes fell upon a picture of his children, and was soon in therapy. The Express story tells of Kumar's agony after being dropped from the Indian team and missing out on the IPL - a life cooped up in his room, watching his own highlights reel.
A tendency to downplay and dismiss the prevalence of mental illness in India has been a byproduct of the media feeding frenzy in the wake of the suicide of the actor Sushant Singh Rajput Indranil Mukherjee / © AFP/Getty Images
It's not unheard of for former players to crave the highs of their fleeting time at the top. The dynamics of trying to become a top athlete involve such an obsessive relationship with the sport in the formative years that your identity is tied to it. With the advent of social media and multi-crore IPL contracts for teenagers, the risks are even higher, fears Parikh.
"If I was working with a young sportsperson who is suddenly doing well, I would put all my might into grounding this person into focusing on performance, shutting the noise of friends, shutting the noise of adulation, virtually not looking at your bank balance, and focusing on the next ball," he said. "If I'm not able to succeed in doing that, your failure rate would be higher. Look at those people who've had a great IPL, and who did not follow it up.
"Imagine a scenario where you know that endorsements will make a difference, where you know that social-media followership and your individual identity will also make a difference. How do you ensure that this component of your life is like an occupational need but not the core? You may get endorsements today, and one bad season and they're all done with."
There is work in progress on this front at the National Cricket Academy, where Rahul Dravid and his team have tried to roll out mental-health seminars for even those young players who aren't contracted or part of NCA camps, alongside those who represent India in age-group and developmental cricket.
Between that and Kohli's call for more openness, there is a start.
But for now, as the world's richest board ignores even the simplest of requests - a psychologist for its women's team, which has played two World Cup finals in three years - the creation of a comprehensive support system seems a distant dream.
Monday 27 July 2020
Lay-offs are the worst of the bleak options facing recession-hit companies
Some groups are becoming more creative, offering short-time working rather than redundancies observes Andrew Hill in the FT
From the videotapes to the workplace hugs, much of Broadcast News, the 1987 satire on media, looks old-fashioned. But when I watched the film again recently, as an escape from pandemic-provoked gloom, the scene where the network announces a round of redundancies seemed raw and relevant.
“If there’s anything I can do,” says the network director, relieved at how a veteran newsman has accepted the news of his forced early retirement. “Well, I certainly hope you die soon,” responds the departing colleague.
Similar scenes are playing out at companies around the world. Marks and Spencer, the retailer, Melrose, which owns venerable manufacturer GKN, New York-based Macy’s department store, and European aircraft-maker Airbus have all announced potential cuts in recent weeks. Manufacturing trade group Make UK has warned of a “jobs bloodbath”. Newsrooms have been particularly hard hit.
One added twist is that some of today’s lay-off conversations with unlucky staff will take place by video link rather than in person — easier for nervous managers, but crueller for the people they are laying off.
Another, more positive, development is that companies are becoming more creative as they brace for recession, turning to short-time working rather than lay-offs. As governments remove subsidies, what was a simple decision to hold staff in reserve, rather than fire them, will become more complicated. But avoiding permanent cuts makes sense, according to David Cote, former chief executive of Honeywell. The sheer cost of severance — in time, money and administrative hassle — mounts up. Often you have to hire the staff back to meet demand as the economy recovers.
“If someone told you that it would take you six months to build a factory, six months to recover your investment, you’ll get a return for six months, and then you’ll shut it down, you’d never go for it because it would be ridiculous,” he writes in his new book Winning Now, Winning Later. “Yet somehow leaders think it makes sense to do the same with people.”
Honeywell’s reliance on furlough — combined with its commitment to customers, sustained long-term investment, and attention to supplier relations — helped it bounce back.
Research also backs up the hunch on which Mr Cote acted 12 years ago. A 2011 OECD review of 19 countries’ experience of short-time working confirmed such schemes preserved permanent workers’ jobs beyond recession. In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta applaud US companies such as Tesla and Marriott for using furlough to soften the blow of this crisis. Such schemes let companies “maintain connections with their employees, cut costs while still providing employee benefits, and create a path to a seamless recovery”.
Yet defending the decision in 2008 was one of the toughest points of Mr Cote’s tenure as Honeywell’s boss.
Management, employees and investors were not “trained” to accept short-time working as a solution, he told me. Laws differed from country to country, and even state to state. In regions where furlough was put to a vote, support varied in line with the enthusiasm of managers for the measure. Elsewhere, while workers backed short-time working publicly, as Honeywell pushed through successive rounds of furlough, Mr Cote received private notes from staff urging him to “lay off 10 per cent of our people and have done with it”. As one FT reader commented when we asked recently about individuals’ experience of furlough: “Loneliness, anxiety, depression and guilt are hourly occurrences.”
“All recessions are different,” Mr Cote says, “but they all feel miserable.” He remains convinced, though, that irreversible job cuts would have undermined Honeywell’s ability to respond to an economic upturn, ultimately harming staff, investors and customers.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has declared that “this is not a normal recession”. Mr Cote suggests, rather, that 80 per cent of the actions companies take to respond to recession are common across downturns, whether triggered by oil crises, inflation, terror attacks or mortgage mis-selling. To managers, he offers this advice: don’t panic; think independently; keep investing for the long term; communicate; and “whatever you do, let people know you’re sacrificing too”.
Some things, though, don’t change. “This is a brutal lay-off,” remarks Jack Nicholson’s smug anchorman, visiting the newsroom in Broadcast News, supposedly in solidarity with his colleagues. “You can make it a little less brutal by knocking a million dollars or so off your salary,” says his boss, before rapidly backtracking in the face of the trademark Nicholson glare.
From the videotapes to the workplace hugs, much of Broadcast News, the 1987 satire on media, looks old-fashioned. But when I watched the film again recently, as an escape from pandemic-provoked gloom, the scene where the network announces a round of redundancies seemed raw and relevant.
“If there’s anything I can do,” says the network director, relieved at how a veteran newsman has accepted the news of his forced early retirement. “Well, I certainly hope you die soon,” responds the departing colleague.
Similar scenes are playing out at companies around the world. Marks and Spencer, the retailer, Melrose, which owns venerable manufacturer GKN, New York-based Macy’s department store, and European aircraft-maker Airbus have all announced potential cuts in recent weeks. Manufacturing trade group Make UK has warned of a “jobs bloodbath”. Newsrooms have been particularly hard hit.
One added twist is that some of today’s lay-off conversations with unlucky staff will take place by video link rather than in person — easier for nervous managers, but crueller for the people they are laying off.
Another, more positive, development is that companies are becoming more creative as they brace for recession, turning to short-time working rather than lay-offs. As governments remove subsidies, what was a simple decision to hold staff in reserve, rather than fire them, will become more complicated. But avoiding permanent cuts makes sense, according to David Cote, former chief executive of Honeywell. The sheer cost of severance — in time, money and administrative hassle — mounts up. Often you have to hire the staff back to meet demand as the economy recovers.
“If someone told you that it would take you six months to build a factory, six months to recover your investment, you’ll get a return for six months, and then you’ll shut it down, you’d never go for it because it would be ridiculous,” he writes in his new book Winning Now, Winning Later. “Yet somehow leaders think it makes sense to do the same with people.”
Honeywell’s reliance on furlough — combined with its commitment to customers, sustained long-term investment, and attention to supplier relations — helped it bounce back.
Research also backs up the hunch on which Mr Cote acted 12 years ago. A 2011 OECD review of 19 countries’ experience of short-time working confirmed such schemes preserved permanent workers’ jobs beyond recession. In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta applaud US companies such as Tesla and Marriott for using furlough to soften the blow of this crisis. Such schemes let companies “maintain connections with their employees, cut costs while still providing employee benefits, and create a path to a seamless recovery”.
Yet defending the decision in 2008 was one of the toughest points of Mr Cote’s tenure as Honeywell’s boss.
Management, employees and investors were not “trained” to accept short-time working as a solution, he told me. Laws differed from country to country, and even state to state. In regions where furlough was put to a vote, support varied in line with the enthusiasm of managers for the measure. Elsewhere, while workers backed short-time working publicly, as Honeywell pushed through successive rounds of furlough, Mr Cote received private notes from staff urging him to “lay off 10 per cent of our people and have done with it”. As one FT reader commented when we asked recently about individuals’ experience of furlough: “Loneliness, anxiety, depression and guilt are hourly occurrences.”
“All recessions are different,” Mr Cote says, “but they all feel miserable.” He remains convinced, though, that irreversible job cuts would have undermined Honeywell’s ability to respond to an economic upturn, ultimately harming staff, investors and customers.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has declared that “this is not a normal recession”. Mr Cote suggests, rather, that 80 per cent of the actions companies take to respond to recession are common across downturns, whether triggered by oil crises, inflation, terror attacks or mortgage mis-selling. To managers, he offers this advice: don’t panic; think independently; keep investing for the long term; communicate; and “whatever you do, let people know you’re sacrificing too”.
Some things, though, don’t change. “This is a brutal lay-off,” remarks Jack Nicholson’s smug anchorman, visiting the newsroom in Broadcast News, supposedly in solidarity with his colleagues. “You can make it a little less brutal by knocking a million dollars or so off your salary,” says his boss, before rapidly backtracking in the face of the trademark Nicholson glare.
Wednesday 23 November 2016
White fragility, white fear: the crisis of racial identity
Marcus Woolombi Waters in The Guardian
With the US election now decided it’s interesting watching the fallout asking how this could have happened. I read an article last week that provided some insight. “Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity” was written by Amanda Taub and published in the New York Times. It highlighted the rise of white supremacists across the globe under the veil of conservative nationalism.
Taub claims white anxiety has fueled 2016’s political turmoil in the west referencing Britain’s exit from the European Union, Donald Trump’s Republican presidential ascension and the rise of rightwing nationalism in Norway, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Greece.
Michael Ignatieff, a former Liberal party leader in Canada, said that in the west, “what defined the political community” for many years “was the unstated premise that it was white.”
The rejection of racial discrimination has, by extension, created a new, broader international community. The United States has had their first black president, London a Muslim mayor and Melbourne a Chinese lord mayor. But rather than advancement many whites feel a painful loss and it is here we are seeing the rise of Trump.
Meanwhile across the west we see hate against Muslims, refugees and ethnic minorities with the racist catch cries, “I want my country back,” “we are full,” “Australia for Australians,” and, of course, “let’s make America great again.” Lecturer and author Robin DiAngelo, calls this movement “white fragility,” the stress white people feel in trying to understand they are not special and are just another race like any other.
White fragility leads to feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, even threat. It creates a backlash against those perceived as the “other.” One example is terrorism seen as an act of people of colour, but never perpetrated by white people.
Remember the mass murder in the US city of Charleston, where a white man killed nine black people in a church, seen to be motivated by depression, alienation and mental illness – not terrorism.
In Brisbane, Australia, again depression was cited as the cause when an Indian bus driver, Manmeet Alisher, 29, was burned alive by a white man. Queensland police and media were quick to suggest, one, the attack was not terrorism and two, not racially motivated. Could you imagine if it was a man of colour killing a white man on public transport?
India’s prime minister Narendra Modi even called Malcolm Turnbull to express concern felt in India over Alisher’s death, in light of the racially-motivated attacks on Indian students recently in Australia. But again these attacks were also denied as being racially motivated.
Consider the task force established in Kalgoorlie following the tragic death of Aboriginal teenager Elijah Doughty, who was run down by a 55-year-old white man. The task force is focusing on 30 “at risk families” rather than attempting to close down websites that Debbie Carmody from the Tjuma Pulka Media Aboriginal Corporation says, “incite violence, and murder towards Wongatha youth, and literally tell people to go out and kill”.
Colin Barnett, premier of Western Australia, said that a new safe house would likely offer young children somewhere to go to late at night “if their parents aren’t around or they’re not capable at the time”. The undercurrent of racism within the comment takes away from the circumstances of Doughty’s death suggests problems associated towards Aboriginal families instead.
Kalgoorlie’s mayor John Bowler went as far to say “social problems” in his town “begin with Aboriginal parents”, while claiming that each generation of Aboriginal people is “worse than the one before”.
Kalgoorlie is home of the biggest open pit mine in Australia where its website proudly claims it donates $460m to the local community each year. So why are our people not benefiting from such support? I will tell you who is benefiting – the local Golf Club that just had a $10m renovation approved by the local council.
As stated by Mick Gooda, co-chair of the royal commission into the detention of children in the NT, such mining towns do nothing to lift the quality of life of our people, instead establishing Aboriginal fringe communities out of town “like we’ve got in places like Kalgoorlie, Darwin and Alice Springs”.
It’s the same in Port Hedland, Australia’s largest distribution centre for iron ore where in March 2016 a record of 39.6m tons was exported. Port Hedland boasts $1m bungalows and apartment blocks, but in South Hedland, where Ms Dhu infamously died in custody our people continue to live in squalor and poverty.
As a young Kamilaroi I witnessed the same apartheid (let’s start calling it for what it is) practised when I visited the Aboriginal community of Toomelah just down the road from Goondiwindi. Rather than identify the problem, columnists like Andrew Bolt refuse to engage with the disadvantages faced by Aboriginal communities.
Only recently in his blog for the Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt published “How activists use Aborigines to censor debate” where the blog stated the Human Rights Commission was “disgraceful” and the Racial Discrimination Act as “sinister”, when writing about the Bill Leak cartoon. The blog went on to add, “so many journalists are on the side of the censors, attacking the free speech they should be defending to the death”.
The anger against “censorship” by the white privileged is explained by Amanda Taub who writes in her article: “For many western whites, opportunities for reaching the top of the hill seem unattainable. So their identity, their whiteness feels under threat and more important than ever.”
In other words, if you were supported for the majority of your life in a world that reinforced whiteness, settlement and colonisation of great white pioneers via invasion and genocide, whites as superior and blacks as inferior and in need of civilisation, rather than embrace a deconstruction of the truth, you become fearful.
'Racist' cartoon stokes debate over treatment of Indigenous Australians
And because the foundations of white identity were based on denial and non-truths rather than acceptance, you fear this “truth” will destroy or diminish an identity you cherish, and because you have no understanding of a world beyond whiteness, you have no culturally acceptable way to articulate what you perceive as a crisis.
In watching the destruction of Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and other third world nations of colour around the world at the hands of white developed countries, the days of thinking of domestic terrorism as the work of a few Klansmen or belligerent skinheads are over.
As Morris Dee and J. Richard Cohen wrote in the New York Times in their 2015 article “White Supremacists Without Borders”: “We know Islamic terrorists are thinking globally, and we confront that threat. We’ve been too slow to realise that white supremacists are doing the same.”
They are just better organised, resourced and firmly embedded into our institutions and structures.
With the US election now decided it’s interesting watching the fallout asking how this could have happened. I read an article last week that provided some insight. “Behind 2016’s Turmoil, a Crisis of White Identity” was written by Amanda Taub and published in the New York Times. It highlighted the rise of white supremacists across the globe under the veil of conservative nationalism.
Taub claims white anxiety has fueled 2016’s political turmoil in the west referencing Britain’s exit from the European Union, Donald Trump’s Republican presidential ascension and the rise of rightwing nationalism in Norway, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Greece.
Michael Ignatieff, a former Liberal party leader in Canada, said that in the west, “what defined the political community” for many years “was the unstated premise that it was white.”
The rejection of racial discrimination has, by extension, created a new, broader international community. The United States has had their first black president, London a Muslim mayor and Melbourne a Chinese lord mayor. But rather than advancement many whites feel a painful loss and it is here we are seeing the rise of Trump.
Meanwhile across the west we see hate against Muslims, refugees and ethnic minorities with the racist catch cries, “I want my country back,” “we are full,” “Australia for Australians,” and, of course, “let’s make America great again.” Lecturer and author Robin DiAngelo, calls this movement “white fragility,” the stress white people feel in trying to understand they are not special and are just another race like any other.
White fragility leads to feelings of insecurity, defensiveness, even threat. It creates a backlash against those perceived as the “other.” One example is terrorism seen as an act of people of colour, but never perpetrated by white people.
Remember the mass murder in the US city of Charleston, where a white man killed nine black people in a church, seen to be motivated by depression, alienation and mental illness – not terrorism.
In Brisbane, Australia, again depression was cited as the cause when an Indian bus driver, Manmeet Alisher, 29, was burned alive by a white man. Queensland police and media were quick to suggest, one, the attack was not terrorism and two, not racially motivated. Could you imagine if it was a man of colour killing a white man on public transport?
India’s prime minister Narendra Modi even called Malcolm Turnbull to express concern felt in India over Alisher’s death, in light of the racially-motivated attacks on Indian students recently in Australia. But again these attacks were also denied as being racially motivated.
Consider the task force established in Kalgoorlie following the tragic death of Aboriginal teenager Elijah Doughty, who was run down by a 55-year-old white man. The task force is focusing on 30 “at risk families” rather than attempting to close down websites that Debbie Carmody from the Tjuma Pulka Media Aboriginal Corporation says, “incite violence, and murder towards Wongatha youth, and literally tell people to go out and kill”.
Colin Barnett, premier of Western Australia, said that a new safe house would likely offer young children somewhere to go to late at night “if their parents aren’t around or they’re not capable at the time”. The undercurrent of racism within the comment takes away from the circumstances of Doughty’s death suggests problems associated towards Aboriginal families instead.
Kalgoorlie’s mayor John Bowler went as far to say “social problems” in his town “begin with Aboriginal parents”, while claiming that each generation of Aboriginal people is “worse than the one before”.
Kalgoorlie is home of the biggest open pit mine in Australia where its website proudly claims it donates $460m to the local community each year. So why are our people not benefiting from such support? I will tell you who is benefiting – the local Golf Club that just had a $10m renovation approved by the local council.
As stated by Mick Gooda, co-chair of the royal commission into the detention of children in the NT, such mining towns do nothing to lift the quality of life of our people, instead establishing Aboriginal fringe communities out of town “like we’ve got in places like Kalgoorlie, Darwin and Alice Springs”.
It’s the same in Port Hedland, Australia’s largest distribution centre for iron ore where in March 2016 a record of 39.6m tons was exported. Port Hedland boasts $1m bungalows and apartment blocks, but in South Hedland, where Ms Dhu infamously died in custody our people continue to live in squalor and poverty.
As a young Kamilaroi I witnessed the same apartheid (let’s start calling it for what it is) practised when I visited the Aboriginal community of Toomelah just down the road from Goondiwindi. Rather than identify the problem, columnists like Andrew Bolt refuse to engage with the disadvantages faced by Aboriginal communities.
Only recently in his blog for the Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt published “How activists use Aborigines to censor debate” where the blog stated the Human Rights Commission was “disgraceful” and the Racial Discrimination Act as “sinister”, when writing about the Bill Leak cartoon. The blog went on to add, “so many journalists are on the side of the censors, attacking the free speech they should be defending to the death”.
The anger against “censorship” by the white privileged is explained by Amanda Taub who writes in her article: “For many western whites, opportunities for reaching the top of the hill seem unattainable. So their identity, their whiteness feels under threat and more important than ever.”
In other words, if you were supported for the majority of your life in a world that reinforced whiteness, settlement and colonisation of great white pioneers via invasion and genocide, whites as superior and blacks as inferior and in need of civilisation, rather than embrace a deconstruction of the truth, you become fearful.
'Racist' cartoon stokes debate over treatment of Indigenous Australians
And because the foundations of white identity were based on denial and non-truths rather than acceptance, you fear this “truth” will destroy or diminish an identity you cherish, and because you have no understanding of a world beyond whiteness, you have no culturally acceptable way to articulate what you perceive as a crisis.
In watching the destruction of Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and other third world nations of colour around the world at the hands of white developed countries, the days of thinking of domestic terrorism as the work of a few Klansmen or belligerent skinheads are over.
As Morris Dee and J. Richard Cohen wrote in the New York Times in their 2015 article “White Supremacists Without Borders”: “We know Islamic terrorists are thinking globally, and we confront that threat. We’ve been too slow to realise that white supremacists are doing the same.”
They are just better organised, resourced and firmly embedded into our institutions and structures.
Wednesday 6 August 2014
Sick of this market-driven world? You should be
The self-serving con of neoliberalism is that it has eroded the human values the market was supposed to emancipate
To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life. It calls on you not to be ashamed.
I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe. What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why.
We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identities are shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don’t.
Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut, and business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35 years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power. It is rapidly colonising the rest of the world.
Verhaeghe points out that neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a state of nature it calls the market) and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently selfish and acquisitive. Rather than seeking to suppress these characteristics, neoliberalism celebrates them: it claims that unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest, leads to innovation and economic growth, enhancing the welfare of all.
At the heart of this story is the notion of merit. Untrammelled competition rewards people who have talent, work hard, and innovate. It breaks down hierarchies and creates a world of opportunity and mobility.
The reality is rather different. Even at the beginning of the process, when markets are first deregulated, we do not start with equal opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before the starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren’t, on the whole, the most talented, hardworking or innovative people, but those with the fewest scruples, the most thugs, and the best contacts – often in the KGB.
Even when outcomes are based on talent and hard work, they don’t stay that way for long. Once the first generation of liberated entrepreneurs has made its money, the initial meritocracy is replaced by a new elite, which insulates its children from competition by inheritance and the best education money can buy. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied – in countries like the US and UK – social mobility has greatly declined.
If neoliberalism was anything other than a self-serving con, whose gurus and thinktanks were financed from the beginning by some of the world’s richest people (the US multimillionaires Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair advantage of inherited wealth or economically determined education. But they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result, quickly gave way to rent.
All this is ignored, and success or failure in the market economy are ascribed solely to the efforts of the individual. The rich are the new righteous; the poor are the new deviants, who have failed both economically and morally and are now classified as social parasites.
The market was meant to emancipate us, offering autonomy and freedom. Instead it has delivered atomisation and loneliness.
The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers. It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty, and breeds frustration, envy and fear. Through a magnificent paradox, it has led to the revival of a grand old Soviet tradition known in Russian as tufta. It means falsification of statistics to meet the diktats of unaccountable power.
The same forces afflict those who can’t find work. They must now contend, alongside the other humiliations of unemployment, with a whole new level of snooping and monitoring. All this, Verhaeghe points out, is fundamental to the neoliberal model, which everywhere insists on comparison, evaluation and quantification. We find ourselves technically free but powerless. Whether in work or out of work, we must live by the same rules or perish. All the major political parties promote them, so we have no political power either. In the name of autonomy and freedom we have ended up controlled by a grinding, faceless bureaucracy.
These shifts have been accompanied, Verhaeghe writes, by a spectacular rise in certain psychiatric conditions: self-harm, eating disorders, depression and personality disorders.
Of the personality disorders, the most common are performance anxiety and social phobia: both of which reflect a fear of other people, who are perceived as both evaluators and competitors – the only roles for society that market fundamentalism admits. Depression and loneliness plague us.
The infantilising diktats of the workplace destroy our self-respect. Those who end up at the bottom of the pile are assailed by guilt and shame. The self-attribution fallacy cuts both ways: just as we congratulate ourselves for our success, we blame ourselves for our failure, even if we have little to do with it.
So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed – it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.
Tuesday 10 December 2013
Materialism: a system that eats us from the inside out
Owning more doesn't bring happiness: 'the material pursuit of self-esteem reduces self-esteem.' Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
That they are crass, brash and trashy goes without saying. But there is something in the pictures posted on Rich Kids of Instagram (and highlighted by the Guardian last week) that inspires more than the usual revulsion towards crude displays of opulence. There is a shadow in these photos – photos of a young man wearing all four of his Rolex watches, a youth posing in front of his helicopter, endless pictures of cars, yachts, shoes, mansions, swimming pools and spoilt white boys throwing gangster poses in private jets – of something worse: something that, after you have seen a few dozen, becomes disorienting, even distressing.
The pictures are, of course, intended to incite envy. They reek instead of desperation. The young men and women seem lost in their designer clothes, dwarfed and dehumanised by their possessions, as if ownership has gone into reverse. A girl's head barely emerges from the haul of Chanel, Dior and Hermes shopping bags she has piled on her vast bed. It's captioned "shoppy shoppy" and "#goldrush", but a photograph whose purpose is to illustrate plenty seems instead to depict a void. She's alone with her bags and her image in the mirror, in a scene that seems saturated with despair.
Perhaps I'm projecting my prejudices. But an impressive body of psychological research seems to support these feelings. It suggests that materialism, a trait that can afflict both rich and poor, and which the researchers define as "a value system that is preoccupied with possessions and the social image they project", is both socially destructive and self-destructive. It smashes the happiness and peace of mind of those who succumb to it. It's associated with anxiety, depression and broken relationships.
There has long been a correlation observed between materialism, a lack of empathy and engagement with others, and unhappiness. But research conducted over the past few years seems to show causation. For example, a series of studies published in the journal Motivation and Emotion in July showed that as people become more materialistic, their wellbeing (good relationships, autonomy, sense of purpose and the rest) diminishes. As they become less materialistic, it rises.
In one study, the researchers tested a group of 18-year-olds, then re-tested them 12 years later. They were asked to rank the importance of different goals – jobs, money and status on one side, and self-acceptance, fellow feeling and belonging on the other. They were then given a standard diagnostic test to identify mental health problems. At the ages of both 18 and 30, materialistic people were more susceptible to disorders. But if in that period they became less materialistic, they became happier.
In another study, the psychologists followed Icelanders weathering their country's economic collapse. Some people became more focused on materialism, in the hope of regaining lost ground. Others responded by becoming less interested in money and turning their attention to family and community life. The first group reported lower levels of wellbeing, the second group higher levels.
These studies, while suggestive, demonstrate only correlation. But the researchers then put a group of adolescents through a church programme designed to steer children away from spending and towards sharing and saving. The self-esteem of materialistic children on the programme rose significantly, while that of materialistic children in the control group fell. Those who had little interest in materialism before the programme experienced no change in self-esteem.
Another paper, published in Psychological Science, found that people in a controlled experiment who were repeatedly exposed to images of luxury goods, to messages that cast them as consumers rather than citizens and to words associated with materialism (such as buy, status, asset and expensive), experienced immediate but temporary increases in material aspirations, anxiety and depression. They also became more competitive and more selfish, had a reduced sense of social responsibility and were less inclined to join in demanding social activities. The researchers point out that, as we are repeatedly bombarded with such images through advertisements, and constantly described by the media as consumers, these temporary effects could be triggered more or less continuously.
A third paper, published (paradoxically) in the Journal of Consumer Research, studied 2,500 people for six years. It found a two-way relationship between materialism and loneliness: materialism fosters social isolation; isolation fosters materialism. People who are cut off from others attach themselves to possessions. This attachment in turn crowds out social relationships.
The two varieties of materialism that have this effect – using possessions as a yardstick of success and seeking happiness through acquisition – are the varieties that seem to be on display on Rich Kids of Instagram. It was only after reading this paper that I understood why those photos distressed me: they look like a kind of social self-mutilation.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons an economic model based on perpetual growth continues on its own terms to succeed, though it may leave a trail of unpayable debts, mental illness and smashed relationships. Social atomisation may be the best sales strategy ever devised, and continuous marketing looks like an unbeatable programme for atomisation.
Materialism forces us into comparison with the possessions of others, a race both cruelly illustrated and crudely propelled by that toxic website. There is no end to it. If you have four Rolexes while another has five, you are a Rolex short of contentment. The material pursuit of self-esteem reduces your self-esteem.
I should emphasise that this is not about differences between rich and poor: the poor can be as susceptible to materialism as the rich. It is a general social affliction, visited upon us by government policy, corporate strategy, the collapse of communities and civic life, and our acquiescence in a system that is eating us from the inside out.
This is the dreadful mistake we are making: allowing ourselves to believe that having more money and more stuff enhances our wellbeing, a belief possessed not only by those poor deluded people in the pictures, but by almost every member of almost every government. Worldly ambition, material aspiration, perpetual growth: these are a formula for mass unhappiness.
Wednesday 11 September 2013
The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship
No one said building a company was easy. But it's time to be honest about how brutal it really is--and the price so many founders secretly pay.
By all counts and measures, Bradley Smith is an unequivocal business success. He's CEO of Rescue One Financial, an Irvine, California-based financial services company that had sales of nearly $32 million last year. Smith's company has grown some 1,400 percent in the last three years, landing it at No. 310 on this year's Inc. 500. So you might never guess that just five years ago, Smith was on the brink of financial ruin--and mental collapse.
Back in 2008, Smith was working long hours counseling nervous clients about getting out of debt. But his calm demeanor masked a secret: He shared their fears. Like them, Smith was sinking deeper and deeper into debt. He had driven himself far into the red starting--of all things--a debt-settlement company. "I was hearing how depressed and strung out my clients were, but in the back of my mind I was thinking to myself, I've got twice as much debt as you do," Smith recalls.
He had cashed in his 401(k) and maxed out a $60,000 line of credit. He had sold the Rolex he bought with his first-ever paycheck during an earlier career as a stockbroker. And he had humbled himself before his father--the man who raised him on maxims such as "money doesn't grow on trees" and "never do business with family"--by asking for $10,000, which he received at 5 percent interest after signing a promissory note.
Smith projected optimism to his co-founders and 10 employees, but his nerves were shot. "My wife and I would share a bottle of $5 wine for dinner and just kind of look at each other," Smith says. "We knew we were close to the edge." Then the pressure got worse: The couple learned they were expecting their first child. "There were sleepless nights, staring at the ceiling," Smith recalls. "I'd wake up at 4 in the morning with my mind racing, thinking about this and that, not being able to shut it off, wondering, When is this thing going to turn?" After eight months of constant anxiety, Smith's company finally began making money.
Successful entrepreneurs achieve hero status in our culture. We idolize the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Elon Musks. And we celebrate the blazingly fast growth of the Inc. 500 companies. But many of those entrepreneurs, like Smith, harbor secret demons: Before they made it big, they struggled through moments of near-debilitating anxiety and despair--times when it seemed everything might crumble.
"It's like a man riding a lion. People think, 'This guy's brave.' And he's thinking, 'How the hell did I get on a lion, and how do I keep from getting eaten?"
Until recently, admitting such sentiments was taboo. Rather than showing vulnerability, business leaders have practiced what social psychiatrists call impression management--also known as "fake it till you make it." Toby Thomas, CEO of EnSite Solutions (No. 188 on the Inc. 500), explains the phenomenon with his favorite analogy: a man riding a lion. "People look at him and think, This guy's really got it together! He's brave!" says Thomas. "And the man riding the lion is thinking, How the hell did I get on a lion, and how do I keep from getting eaten?"
Not everyone who walks through darkness makes it out. In January, well-known founder Jody Sherman, 47, of the e-commerce site Ecomom took his own life. His death shook the start-up community. It also reignited a discussion about entrepreneurship and mental health that began two years earlier after the suicide of Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the 22-year-old co-founder of Diaspora, a social networking site.
Lately, more entrepreneurs have begun speaking out about their internal struggles in an attempt to combat the stigma on depression and anxiety that makes it hard for sufferers to seek help. In a deeply personal post called "When Death Feels Like a Good Option," Ben Huh, the CEO of the Cheezburger Network humor websites, wrote about his suicidal thoughts following a failed start-up in 2001. Sean Percival, a former MySpace vice president and co-founder of the children's clothing start-up Wittlebee, penned a piece called "When It's Not All Good, Ask for Help" on his website. "I was to the edge and back a few times this past year with my business and own depression," he wrote. "If you're about to lose it, please contact me."
Brad Feld, a managing director of the Foundry Group, started blogging in October about his latest episode of depression. The problem wasn't new--the prominent venture capitalist had struggled with mood disorders throughout his adult life--and he didn't expect much of a response. But then came the emails. Hundreds of them. Many were from entrepreneurs who had also wrestled with anxiety and despair. (For more of Feld's thoughts on depression, see his column, "Surviving the Dark Nights of the Soul," in Inc.'s July/August issue.)"If you saw the list of names, it would surprise you a great deal," says Feld. "They are very successful people, very visible, very charismatic-;yet they've struggled with this silently. There's a sense that they can't talk about it, that it's a weakness or a shame or something. They feel like they're hiding, which makes the whole thing worse."
If you run a business, that probably all sounds familiar. It's a stressful job that can create emotional turbulence. For starters, there's the high risk of failure. Three out of four venture-backed start-ups fail, according to research by Shikhar Ghosh, a Harvard Business School lecturer. Ghosh also found that more than 95 percent of start-ups fall short of their initial projections.
Entrepreneurs often juggle many roles and face countless setbacks--lost customers, disputes with partners, increased competition, staffing problems--all while struggling to make payroll. "There are traumatic events all the way along the line," says psychiatrist and former entrepreneur Michael A. Freeman, who is researching mental health and entrepreneurship.
Complicating matters, new entrepreneurs often make themselves less resilient by neglecting their health. They eat too much or too little. They don't get enough sleep. They fail to exercise. "You can get into a start-up mode, where you push yourself and abuse your body," Freeman says. "That can trigger mood vulnerability."
So it should come as little surprise that entrepreneurs experience more anxiety than employees. In the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, 34 percent of entrepreneurs--4 percentage points more than other workers--reported they were worried. And 45 percent of entrepreneurs said they were stressed, 3 percentage points more than other workers.
But it may be more than a stressful job that pushes some founders over the edge. According to researchers, many entrepreneurs share innate character traits that make them more vulnerable to mood swings. "People who are on the energetic, motivated, and creative side are both more likely to be entrepreneurial and more likely to have strong emotional states," says Freeman. Those states may include depression, despair, hopelessness, worthlessness, loss of motivation, and suicidal thinking.
Call it the downside of being up. The same passionate dispositions that drive founders heedlessly toward success can sometimes consume them. Business owners are "vulnerable to the dark side of obsession," suggest researchers from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. They conducted interviews with founders for a study about entrepreneurial passion. The researchers found that many subjects displayed signs of clinical obsession, including strong feelings of distress and anxiety, which have "the potential to lead to impaired functioning," they wrote in a paper published in the Entrepreneurship Research Journal in April.
Reinforcing that message is John Gartner, a practicing psychologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. In his book The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America, Gartner argues that an often-overlooked temperament--hypomania--may be responsible for some entrepreneurs' strengths as well as their flaws.
A milder version of mania, hypomania often occurs in the relatives of manic-depressives and affects an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent of Americans. "If you're manic, you think you're Jesus," says Gartner. "If you're hypomanic, you think you're God's gift to technology investing. We're talking about different levels of grandiosity but the same symptoms."
Gartner theorizes that there are so many hypomanics--and so many entrepreneurs--in the U.S. because our country's national character rose on waves of immigration. "We're a self-selected population," he says. "Immigrants have unusual ambition, energy, drive, and risk tolerance, which lets them take a chance on moving for a better opportunity. These are biologically based temperament traits. If you seed an entire continent with them, you're going to get a nation of entrepreneurs."
Though driven and innovative, hypomanics are at much higher risk for depression than the general population, notes Gartner. Failure can spark these depressive episodes, of course, but so can anything that slows a hypomanic's momentum. "They're like border collies--they have to run," says Gartner. "If you keep them inside, they chew up the furniture. They go crazy; they just pace around. That's what hypomanics do. They need to be busy, active, overworking."
"Entrepreneurs have struggled silently. There's a sense that they can't talk about it, that it's a weakness."
No matter what your psychological makeup, big setbacks in your business can knock you flat. Even experienced entrepreneurs have had the rug pulled out from under them. Mark Woeppel launched Pinnacle Strategies, a management consulting firm, in 1992. In 2009, his phone stopped ringing.
Caught in the global financial crisis, his customers were suddenly more concerned with survival than with boosting their output. Sales plummeted 75 percent. Woeppel laid off his half-dozen employees. Before long, he had exhausted his assets: cars, jewelry, anything that could go. His supply of confidence was dwindling, too. "As CEO, you have this self-image--you're the master of the universe," he says. "Then all of a sudden, you are not."
Woeppel stopped leaving his house. Anxious and low on self-esteem, he started eating too much--and put on 50 pounds. Sometimes he sought temporary relief in an old addiction: playing the guitar. Locked in a room, he practiced solos by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Chet Atkins. "It was something I could do just for the love of doing it," he recalls. "Then there was nothing but me, the guitar, and the peace."
Through it all, he kept working to develop new services. He just hoped his company would hang on long enough to sell them. In 2010, customers started to return. Pinnacle scored its biggest-ever contract, with an aerospace manufacturer, on the basis of a white paper Woeppel had written during the downturn. Last year, Pinnacle's revenue hit $7 million. Sales are up more than 5,000 percent since 2009, earning the company a spot at No. 57 on this year's Inc. 500.
Woeppel says he's more resilient now, tempered by tough times. "I used to be like, 'My work is me,' " he says. "Then you fail. And you find out that your kids still love you. Your wife still loves you. Your dog still loves you."
But for many entrepreneurs, the battle wounds never fully heal. That was the case for John Pope, CEO of WellDog, a Laramie, Wyoming-based energy technology firm. On Dec. 11, 2002, Pope had exactly $8.42 in the bank. He was 90 days late on his car payment. He was 75 days behind on the mortgage. The IRS had filed a lien against him. His home phone, cell phone, and cable TV had all been turned off. In less than a week, the natural-gas company was scheduled to suspend service to the house he shared with his wife and daughters. Then there would be no heat. His company was expecting a wire transfer from the oil company Shell, a strategic investor, after months of negotiations had ended with a signed 380-page contract. So Pope waited.
The wire arrived the next day. Pope--along with his company--was saved. Afterward, he made a list of all the ways in which he had financially overreached. "I'm going to remember this," he recalls thinking. "It's the farthest I'm willing to go."
Since then, WellDog has taken off: In the past three years, sales grew more than 3,700 percent, to $8 million, making the company No. 89 on the Inc. 500. But emotional residue from the years of tumult still lingers. "There's always that feeling of being overextended, of never being able to relax," says Pope. "You end up with a serious confidence problem. You feel like every time you build up security, something happens to take it away."
Pope sometimes catches himself emotionally overreacting to small things. It's a behavior pattern that reminds him of posttraumatic stress disorder. "Something happens, and you freak out about it," he says. "But the scale of the problem is a lot less than the scale of your emotional reaction. That just comes with the scar tissue of going through these things."
"If you're manic, you think you're Jesus. If you're hypomanic, you think you're God's gift to technology investing."John Gartner
Though launching a company will always be a wild ride, full of ups and downs, there are things entrepreneurs can do to help keep their lives from spiraling out of control, say experts. Most important, make time for your loved ones, suggests Freeman. "Don't let your business squeeze out your connections with human beings," he says. When it comes to fighting off depression, relationships with friends and family can be powerful weapons. And don't be afraid to ask for help--see a mental health professional if you are experiencing symptoms of significant anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, or depression.
Freeman also advises that entrepreneurs limit their financial exposure. When it comes to assessing risk, entrepreneurs' blind spots are often big enough to drive a Mack truck through, he says. The consequences can rock not only your bank account but also your stress levels. So set a limit for how much of your own money you're prepared to invest. And don't let friends and family kick in more than they can afford to lose.
Cardiovascular exercise, a healthful diet, and adequate sleep all help, too. So does cultivating an identity apart from your company. "Build a life centered on the belief that self-worth is not the same as net worth," says Freeman. "Other dimensions of your life should be part of your identity." Whether you're raising a family, sitting on the board of a local charity, building model rockets in the backyard, or going swing dancing on weekends, it's important to feel successful in areas unrelated to work.
The ability to reframe failure and loss can also help leaders maintain good mental health. "Instead of telling yourself, 'I failed, the business failed, I'm a loser,' " says Freeman, "look at the data from a different perspective: Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Life is a constant process of trial and error. Don't exaggerate the experience."
Last, be open about your feelings--don't mask your emotions, even at the office, suggests Brad Feld. When you are willing to be emotionally honest, he says, you can connect more deeply with the people around you. "When you deny yourself and you deny what you're about, people can see through that," says Feld. "Willingness to be vulnerable is very powerful for a leader."
Thursday 22 November 2012
How to let your kids fail
by Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer in The Times
Don't confuse your success with your children's. Separate yourself from your children. Neither their failures nor their successes are yours. Ask yourself why either matter so much to you.
Don't set unrealistic standards. Allow your children to set their own achievable goals and move on to the next one when they are ready.
Don't punich failure and see it as shameful; this can lead to lying, cheating, defiance, self-doubt and anxiety.
Don't generalise from any setback or mistake. It is not helpful to say, "You'll never be successful in life if you carry on skimping ...."
Don't reject them if they disappoint you or adore them if they succeed. Love them for who they are, not for what they can do.
Don't demand perpetual progress so that no success ever seems good enough. This could lead to anxious perfectionism and burnout.
Don't confuse your success with your children's. Separate yourself from your children. Neither their failures nor their successes are yours. Ask yourself why either matter so much to you.
Don't set unrealistic standards. Allow your children to set their own achievable goals and move on to the next one when they are ready.
Don't punich failure and see it as shameful; this can lead to lying, cheating, defiance, self-doubt and anxiety.
Don't generalise from any setback or mistake. It is not helpful to say, "You'll never be successful in life if you carry on skimping ...."
Don't reject them if they disappoint you or adore them if they succeed. Love them for who they are, not for what they can do.
Don't demand perpetual progress so that no success ever seems good enough. This could lead to anxious perfectionism and burnout.
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