Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label depression. Show all posts
Saturday 18 March 2023
Friday 16 December 2022
What if Work is making us Sick?
Sarah O'Connor in The FT
Britain is sick. The number of people claiming disability benefits has doubled in a year. Working-age deaths (that did not involve Covid-19) are on the rise. As Andy Haldane, former chief economist of the Bank of England, put it in a speech recently: “For the first time, probably since the Industrial Revolution . . . health and wellbeing are in retreat”.
The consequences for the country’s economy have been well chewed over. A rising share of people are now too unwell to work, which makes it harder to tame inflation and boost growth. Understandably, then, “How can we get people back to work?” is the question policymakers keep asking. But what if work itself is part of the problem?
By many metrics, work is less dangerous to our health than it used to be, especially in a country like the UK where the manufacturing and mining sectors have shrunk so much. Musculoskeletal disorders, which used to be the biggest cause of work-related ill-health, have declined steadily over the past few decades.
But while work has become less physically dangerous, it seems to have become more psychologically dangerous. Work-related stress, depression and anxiety began to rise about a decade ago. This surged during the pandemic and now accounts for half of all work-related illness.
Why might that be? We know from government-sponsored survey data that there has been an intensification of work in recent decades across all types of jobs from delivery drivers to corporate lawyers. People are more likely now than in the 1990s to say they work fast and hard to tight deadlines.
There has also been a drop in the level of control people have over how they work, particularly among lower-paid workers. Between 1992 and 2017, the share of low-paid workers who report that they have a say in decisions which affect their work fell from 44 per cent to 27 per cent, with particularly steep drops among hospitality and retail workers.
Research shows the combination of high demands and low control at work — known in the academic literature as “job strain” — is bad for mental and physical health. One US study, which followed more than 52,000 working women over four years, found that job strain was associated with a greater increase in body mass index, for example.
Last week, I interviewed a woman who works in a casino. She works on her feet for 10 hours from 6pm to 4am, gets home, grabs a few hours sleep, then gets up to take her daughter to school. People at the casino often suffer from relationship breakdowns because of the hours, she says.
The work can be gruelling too. “It’s really mentally hard work sometimes, the hours are not helping us, sometimes [customers] come in drunk at 3am and you are so tired, and they are just swearing at you, so drunk you can’t handle them on the table but you have to do it because it’s your job.”
Her employer used to do things to make the job easier to cope with, but they have all been stripped away. The free warm dinner is gone, as is the break that was long enough to eat it. The taxi home at 4am is gone. The Christmas bonus is gone. The night premium has gone. “Lately it’s very often happening that people are leaving because they are depressed,” she told me.
Plenty of countries have experienced similar trends in the quality of work in certain sectors, so why might the UK be struggling more than most?
Perhaps because the countervailing mechanisms that could protect workers from these trends — the “protective shield”, as Jennifer Dixon of the Health Foundation puts it — are particularly weak in Britain. The country is bad at enforcing its own labour laws, as the P&O debacle showed this year when the company sacked hundreds of sailors without any consultation in what lawyers call an “efficient breach” of employment law. Trade union membership has declined sharply in the private sector. The Health and Safety Executive’s budget has been cut.
None of this is to say that work is entirely to blame for the nation’s worsening health. There are plenty of other possible causes, from processed foods to rising loneliness and social media, not to mention the pandemic itself and the strain on the NHS.
But I don’t think any discussion of the country’s health is complete without a clear-eyed look at the reality of life in the UK labour market for those who don’t have decent jobs. Good quality work is beneficial for health. But if we just try to patch people up and push them back into jobs that were making them sick, we won’t get anywhere at all.
Thursday 26 August 2021
Friday 26 March 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.
Friday 31 July 2020
Economics for Non Economists 3 – Explaining GDP and Economic Growth
By Girish
Menon
Introduction
You will have
recently read:
What does this mean?
Just like the
Forbes magazine compiles an annual list of the richest individuals on planet
earth, most countries participate in an annual ‘show of wealth’. The most
commonly used measure in this competition is called GDP. At the end of 2019 the
top six countries were:
Table 1
Country
|
GDP
($ trillions)
|
Economic growth over previous year (%)
|
Per Capita GDP ($)
|
Share of World GDP (%)
|
19.5
|
2.2
|
59, 939
|
24
|
|
12.2
|
6.9
|
8,612
|
15
|
|
4.9
|
1.7
|
38,214
|
6
|
|
3.7
|
2.2
|
44,680
|
4.5
|
|
2.7
|
6.7
|
1,980
|
3.28
|
|
2.6
|
1.8
|
39.532
|
3,26
|
What do these terms mean?
Simply
defined, GDP or Gross Domestic
Product is the money value of all goods and services (goods) produced within an
economy in a period of time. In Table 1 the GDP is estimated over the year of
2019. The data quoted in the introduction compares GDP changes over the first two quarters of 2020.
Economic growth is a measure of the
additional goods produced by an economy over the last period of time (say a year or a quarter).
Per Capita GDP means the value of goods
each resident would get if all goods produced in an economy is shared equally.
This is calculated by dividing the GDP with the residents of the country. Do you think per capita GDP is an accurate description of how goods are actually distributed in an economy?
Share of World GDP means the share of
global goods produced by an economy. This is calculated by dividing each
country’s GDP with the whole world’s total GDP.
Why is GDP and the rate of Economic growth
so important?
Materialism is the underlying
principle of using GDP and economic growth as the most important indicator
of economic performance. Materialism, according to the Cambridge English
Dictionary, is the belief that having money and possessions is the most
important thing in life. It follows that as one’s material goods increases
one’s standard of living (happiness) tends to increase.
GDP is a tool that
measures the volume of material goods produced by an economy. A high rate of
economic growth demonstrates the rate at which the material goods in an economy
is increasing and as a result the happiness of the residents as well. So, when
the rate of economic growth becomes negative, as in the data mentioned in the
introduction, it follows that your happiness will decrease.
Are GDP
and GNP the same?
They are similar but
not the same. GDP measures the volume of goods produced by people living within
the boundaries of an economy. The output of Nissan’s Sunderland plant will be
included in UK UK will be added to calculate UK
GNP stands for Gross
National Product. It is a measure of the volume of goods produced by British
nationals living in the UK
Is GDP an accurate measure of the volume of
goods produced within an economy?
The answer is
No. The calculation is arduous and with questionable assumptions which I will
not go into here. I will however mention some weaknesses here:
1. Even though there are some standardised procedures for
its computation governments are known to deliberately intervene in its
methodology and computation.
2. Not all goods are included. For example if you clean
your own house and look after your family – these services are not included.
However, if you employ a cleaner, a cook, a nanny and a driver then their
services are included.
3. In some countries where there is a large informal economy. The goods produced by such activities are not be included in GDP computations.
Does an increase in GDP necessarily improve
residents’ happiness?
In economics, happiness
is better known as welfare.
If there is an
earthquake in your country and many roads, buildings, bridges, stadia are
destroyed. Then rebuilding them will increase the national GDP but has it
improved the citizens’ welfare?
As a resultant
of economic growth the quality of air you breathe has gone down and the water
supply is polluted. Has this improved your standard of living?
Due to
increased standard of living everybody has a car and you are now required to spend one hour extra
in commuting time. Has this resulted in improved happiness?
What is the prognosis for GDP and economic
growth?
It appears
that due to Covid-19 the GDP of most nations will be lower than in 2019. These
economies will have negative economic growth which means that in 2020 they will
produce fewer goods than in 2019.
When the GDP
falls, the terms most used are recession and depression. The difference between
the two according to Harry Truman is ‘It's a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours’ .
As
you have seen in the news, firms are busy firing staff which means there will
be increased unemployment. Since more people are unemployed they will not have
money to buy goods in the future and so there will be even less demand for goods in
the future and those who have jobs today may lose their jobs next year in a downward spiral of negative economic growth begetting even more negative growth.
Will there be lower
emphasis on GDP and economic growth in the future? For such a change to happen
there needs a material change in organising the world economy. (If you wish to read further click here)
I hope it happens
in my lifetime.
* - annualised rate---Also watch
How the Economic Machine Works by Ray Dallio
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.
Thursday 16 July 2020
Wednesday 16 August 2017
The 10 best jokes from the Edinburgh fringe
Paul Fleckney in The Guardian
Robert Garnham: Insomnia is awful. But on the plus side – only three more sleeps till Christmas.
Dan Antopolski: Centaurs shop at Topman. And Bottomhorse.
Paul Savage: Oregon leads America in both marital infidelity and clinical depression. What a sad state of affairs.
Caroline Mabey: I’m very conflicted by eye tests. I want to get the answers right but I really want to win the glasses.
Athena Kugblenu: Relationships are like mobile phones. You’ll look at your iPhone 5 and think, it used to be a lot quicker to turn this thing on.
Evelyn Mok: My vagina is kind of like Wales. People only visit ironically.
Phil Wang: In the bedroom, my girlfriend really likes it when I wear a suit, because she’s got this kinky fantasy where I have a proper job.
Gráinne Maguire: The Edinburgh fringe is such a bubble. I asked a comedian what they thought about the North Korea nuclear missile crisis and they asked what venue it was on in.
John-Luke Roberts: How did the Village People meet? They obviously led such different lives.
Olaf Falafel: If you’re being chased by a pack of taxidermists, do not play dead.
Robert Garnham: Insomnia is awful. But on the plus side – only three more sleeps till Christmas.
Dan Antopolski: Centaurs shop at Topman. And Bottomhorse.
Paul Savage: Oregon leads America in both marital infidelity and clinical depression. What a sad state of affairs.
Caroline Mabey: I’m very conflicted by eye tests. I want to get the answers right but I really want to win the glasses.
Athena Kugblenu: Relationships are like mobile phones. You’ll look at your iPhone 5 and think, it used to be a lot quicker to turn this thing on.
Evelyn Mok: My vagina is kind of like Wales. People only visit ironically.
Phil Wang: In the bedroom, my girlfriend really likes it when I wear a suit, because she’s got this kinky fantasy where I have a proper job.
Gráinne Maguire: The Edinburgh fringe is such a bubble. I asked a comedian what they thought about the North Korea nuclear missile crisis and they asked what venue it was on in.
John-Luke Roberts: How did the Village People meet? They obviously led such different lives.
Olaf Falafel: If you’re being chased by a pack of taxidermists, do not play dead.
Monday 12 December 2016
Tuesday 6 October 2015
Tom Jones' long and messy marriage shows us what true love looks like
Grace Dent in The Independent
One of the binds of having an extraordinarily long marriage, like Tom and Linda Jones’s 58-year partnership, must be questions about how it has survived – and then disgruntlement over the answer. Because the answer we all want about marital longevity is a heart-fluttering, lightly existential comment on the benefits of zen-like tolerance, weekly date nights and unquellable, life-long lust. Not, as Tom Jones gave in an interview published this weekend, a response which instead mentions depression, infidelity and a point back in the 1970s where his wife punched him several times in the face over one of his dalliances.
“She’s lost her spark,” Tom said of Linda – although, importantly, the resounding themes about his “solid” partnership were of love, respect, dependency and gratitude for the life they’ve weathered together. “She is an unbelievable woman,” he said. “She’s the most important thing in my life. All the rest is just fun and games.”
I’m sure Tom will be criticised for being candid about Linda, 75, although mainly by single people who “haven’t time for a relationship” and smug marrieds who’ve been together seven minutes. But I very much enjoyed this wholly unvarnished look at the long slog of staying legally tied for nearly six decades to someone you first met when you were both 12.
The fact is that the vast majority of weddings which we maxed out credit cards to attend this summer will implode within the next five or 10 years, in a nappy-scented fug of mutual disappointment, shagged tennis instructors and costly solicitors letters. This rot sets in even if you did have a sublime Puglian villa-wedding with an Instagram hashtag. It happens despite your joint solemn adherence to visiting Bella Pasta every Tuesday night in order to discuss “non mummy and daddy things” and “keep the magic alive”.
I’ve long suspected that any couple’s love which survives over 30 years relies heavily on selective deafness and multiple televisions. The deafness is handy for avoiding hearing the other one tell a story that you’ve not only heard 66 times already, but which you also know isn’t completely true. Televisions in different rooms are vital when one of you loves Homes Under the Hammer and the other loves Columbo re-runs. Also handy is a dog which needs frequent walking – often via the pub – and the option of a spare bedroom for those nights when your beloved is snoring like an asthmatic warthog inhaling tapioca.
None of these things is remotely romantic, especially the most stringent requirement of a long marriage: mutual pig-headed stubbornness.
Tom and Linda Jones could have easily divorced at any point over the past six decades. By easily, I mean that with excruciating emotional pain and a lot of tedious paperwork they could have gone their separate ways upon earth. Tom could have swallowed an enormous divorce payment and had a lot of other weddings with skinny things with pert knockers who, inevitably, would become as familiar as Linda themselves and need upgrading. Linda could have banked the money and remarried a man who didn’t perform pelvis-grinding pop songs in Las Vegas to a sea of screaming knicker-throwers.
Being married to a showbiz god when you’re happier in the house reading paperbacks must be virtually impossible. Staying married to a civilian who doesn’t gasp when your starry self enters the room must take enormous willpower. But instead, Tom and Linda seem to accept – as many normal everyday couples do, too – that regardless of how imperfect home life is, it holds a damn sight more substance than the new or the unknown.
Many have chosen this path, like Tom and Linda, and are seeing it out to the end. Quibbles about her growing reclusiveness, smoking or the stuff he got up to in 1976 are nothing more than window-dressing. Regardless of it all, wherever Linda is, Tom classes it as home. That, I cannot help but think, is a definition of real love – and it’s one that’s rarely paid tribute to in Hallmark Cards.
There is no “Jesus Christ, We Really Are Stuck With Each Other” Day to rival the hollow sentiment of St Valentine’s. Suggested gifts for this new “special day” would be elasticated-waist lounge-pants, anti-dandruff shampoo and lint rollers to remove pet-hair. A tin of anti-freeze for cold grumpy school-run mornings and a Ped Egg so your loved one can grate those hard bits off their toes.
These are the nuts and bolts of real love. Older people don’t mention this much at weddings because the bride and groom would run a mile.
I liked the part of Tom Jones’s interview when he said he loved speaking to Linda on the phone, wherever he is in the world, as they still have the same old giggle they always did. The idea of a person lying about on a hotel bed in London, chatting and laughing with their spouse in Los Angeles, still solid after 56 years, is rather special.
“When you’re face-to-face with somebody, you realise that time has gone on, but when you’re on the phone, we’re both young again. We haven’t aged on the phone,” he explained. “You’re not looking at one another, I’m looking at an old picture I carry around with me and leave by the bed. She says, ‘I don’t look like that any more’. I say, ‘I know you don’t, it brings back wonderful memories’.”
Rival women have come and gone. I’m fairly sure many of them thought that, within time, boring old Linda with her fags and her social anxiety would be “let go”. It’s exciting being a mistress, for a couple of weeks, until it’s just boring and painful. Women like Linda always laugh last and laugh longest.
One of the binds of having an extraordinarily long marriage, like Tom and Linda Jones’s 58-year partnership, must be questions about how it has survived – and then disgruntlement over the answer. Because the answer we all want about marital longevity is a heart-fluttering, lightly existential comment on the benefits of zen-like tolerance, weekly date nights and unquellable, life-long lust. Not, as Tom Jones gave in an interview published this weekend, a response which instead mentions depression, infidelity and a point back in the 1970s where his wife punched him several times in the face over one of his dalliances.
“She’s lost her spark,” Tom said of Linda – although, importantly, the resounding themes about his “solid” partnership were of love, respect, dependency and gratitude for the life they’ve weathered together. “She is an unbelievable woman,” he said. “She’s the most important thing in my life. All the rest is just fun and games.”
I’m sure Tom will be criticised for being candid about Linda, 75, although mainly by single people who “haven’t time for a relationship” and smug marrieds who’ve been together seven minutes. But I very much enjoyed this wholly unvarnished look at the long slog of staying legally tied for nearly six decades to someone you first met when you were both 12.
The fact is that the vast majority of weddings which we maxed out credit cards to attend this summer will implode within the next five or 10 years, in a nappy-scented fug of mutual disappointment, shagged tennis instructors and costly solicitors letters. This rot sets in even if you did have a sublime Puglian villa-wedding with an Instagram hashtag. It happens despite your joint solemn adherence to visiting Bella Pasta every Tuesday night in order to discuss “non mummy and daddy things” and “keep the magic alive”.
I’ve long suspected that any couple’s love which survives over 30 years relies heavily on selective deafness and multiple televisions. The deafness is handy for avoiding hearing the other one tell a story that you’ve not only heard 66 times already, but which you also know isn’t completely true. Televisions in different rooms are vital when one of you loves Homes Under the Hammer and the other loves Columbo re-runs. Also handy is a dog which needs frequent walking – often via the pub – and the option of a spare bedroom for those nights when your beloved is snoring like an asthmatic warthog inhaling tapioca.
None of these things is remotely romantic, especially the most stringent requirement of a long marriage: mutual pig-headed stubbornness.
Tom and Linda Jones could have easily divorced at any point over the past six decades. By easily, I mean that with excruciating emotional pain and a lot of tedious paperwork they could have gone their separate ways upon earth. Tom could have swallowed an enormous divorce payment and had a lot of other weddings with skinny things with pert knockers who, inevitably, would become as familiar as Linda themselves and need upgrading. Linda could have banked the money and remarried a man who didn’t perform pelvis-grinding pop songs in Las Vegas to a sea of screaming knicker-throwers.
Being married to a showbiz god when you’re happier in the house reading paperbacks must be virtually impossible. Staying married to a civilian who doesn’t gasp when your starry self enters the room must take enormous willpower. But instead, Tom and Linda seem to accept – as many normal everyday couples do, too – that regardless of how imperfect home life is, it holds a damn sight more substance than the new or the unknown.
Many have chosen this path, like Tom and Linda, and are seeing it out to the end. Quibbles about her growing reclusiveness, smoking or the stuff he got up to in 1976 are nothing more than window-dressing. Regardless of it all, wherever Linda is, Tom classes it as home. That, I cannot help but think, is a definition of real love – and it’s one that’s rarely paid tribute to in Hallmark Cards.
There is no “Jesus Christ, We Really Are Stuck With Each Other” Day to rival the hollow sentiment of St Valentine’s. Suggested gifts for this new “special day” would be elasticated-waist lounge-pants, anti-dandruff shampoo and lint rollers to remove pet-hair. A tin of anti-freeze for cold grumpy school-run mornings and a Ped Egg so your loved one can grate those hard bits off their toes.
These are the nuts and bolts of real love. Older people don’t mention this much at weddings because the bride and groom would run a mile.
I liked the part of Tom Jones’s interview when he said he loved speaking to Linda on the phone, wherever he is in the world, as they still have the same old giggle they always did. The idea of a person lying about on a hotel bed in London, chatting and laughing with their spouse in Los Angeles, still solid after 56 years, is rather special.
“When you’re face-to-face with somebody, you realise that time has gone on, but when you’re on the phone, we’re both young again. We haven’t aged on the phone,” he explained. “You’re not looking at one another, I’m looking at an old picture I carry around with me and leave by the bed. She says, ‘I don’t look like that any more’. I say, ‘I know you don’t, it brings back wonderful memories’.”
Rival women have come and gone. I’m fairly sure many of them thought that, within time, boring old Linda with her fags and her social anxiety would be “let go”. It’s exciting being a mistress, for a couple of weeks, until it’s just boring and painful. Women like Linda always laugh last and laugh longest.
Tuesday 19 May 2015
Why I choose to have less choice
Shopping around is the mantra of the modern era. But who really benefits from our befuddlement?
Tim Lott in The Guardian
Tim Lott in The Guardian
Once, when I was suffering a fit of depression, I walked into a supermarket to buy a packet of washing powder. Confronted by a shelf full of different possibilities, I stood there for 15 minutes staring at them, then walked out without buying any washing powder at all.
I still feel echoes of that sensation of helplessness. If I just want to buy one item but discover that if I buy three of the items I will save myself half the item price, I find myself assailed by choice paralysis.
I hate making consumer choices at the best of times, because I have this uncomfortable suspicion that big companies are trying to gull me out of as much money as possible, using sophisticated techniques designed by people who are smarter than I am.
For instance, when I buy an insurance product, how can I decide whether I should just buy the cheapest, or the best? The best is the one most likely to pay out without penalty or fuss, but that information is much harder to find out than factors such as cost, extent of cover, etc. It’s complicated. So I often try not to make choices – by just putting my payments for insurance with my usual insurers on direct debit, for example, which means I don’t have to think about shopping around.
This issue of choice and complexity lies at the heart of the experience of being modern. It penetrates commerce, politics and our personal lives. It may even be connected to the fact that there are higher levels of depression in society than ever before.
This idea was suggested by Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. Choice oppresses us. Why? Because there are too many choices and they are often too complex for us to be confident that we are making the right one.
When you might have 200 potential choices to make of a particular style of camera, it is difficult to feel sure you have chosen the right one – even if you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make a rational decision. Or you may see the same model two weeks after you’ve bought it being sold more cheaply. When there was less choice and fewer types of camera, this kind of experience was rare. Our capacity for hindsight has become a means of punishing ourselves.
Complexity is not entirely accidental. Late capitalism solves the dilemma of competition (for the producer) through complexity. To try to choose a mortgage, or a pension, or a computer, requires a tremendous amount of application, so we become relatively easy to gull. Whether it is a power company or a loan company, we struggle to understand tariffs, terms and the small print. Exhausted, we just take a stab and hope for the best, or we succumb to inertia; choose what we have always chosen. Consumers are thrown back on simple cues that are advantageous to the producers, such as brand recognition.
Complexity also impacts on politics. Once it was pretty clear who to vote for – your class position, on the whole, made it a simple matter of self-interest for most voters. Now we have become closer to what is ironically the democratic ideal – ie choice-making actors – voting is more of a challenge than it once was. Do you really have a good enough grasp of economic theory to judge whether it is best to spend or save in a recession? Do you understand the complexities of private provision in the NHS enough to rule it out? Do you know enough about international affairs to support a reduction in defence spending, or a retreat from the EU? Most people don’t – so, again, they make snap judgments based on loyalty and sentiment.
This problem of choice and complexity is ubiquitous. It applies in medicine. If I am ill and asked to make a choice about treatment, I would often rather leave the choice to the doctor, if only because if the wrong choice is made, I am not going to feel nearly so bad about it. I had a prostate cancer scare recently, and I just wanted to be told what to do – not decide whether, say, I should choose an operation that would guarantee impotency in order to stave off a 5% chance of cancer. The burden of choice was too big.
In the field of education a similar dilemma applies. Once your child went to the local primary or secondary. Now you have to decide from a bewildering number of types of school. In the personal realm, once, you stayed married for life. Now, if you are in an unhappy marriage you have to decide whether to stay or not. These may be all positive developments, but they come at a cost – the potential for regret.
So how should one react to complexity? Schwartz suggests we should limit choice, not extend it. If you are shopping for food, go to supermarkets that are priced simply with a limited range, such as Aldi and Lidl. Recognise and accept complexity – which means accepting that you can never be sure that you’ve made the right choice.
Above all, don’t fall for the old trope of only wanting “the best”. Schwartz calls such people “maximisers” – people who are never happy, because they have expectations that can never be met, since in a world of complexity and unlimited choice there is always a better option. Be a “satisficer” instead – people who are happy to say “that’s good enough”, or “it’ll do”.
This may not work in politics – saying the Conservatives “will do” when you wanted the Green party is not very satisfactory – but as a consumer, and in life generally, it’s a pretty good formula. It’ll do, anyway.
Sunday 8 February 2015
Depression, suicide and the fragility of the strong, silent male
Yvonne Roberts in The Guardian
On Thursday, the bruised and tearful face of former footballer and chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Clarke Carlisle, 35, appeared on the front page of the Sun. He was released from psychiatric hospital two weeks ago. In a clip on the paper’s website, he appears so raw and vulnerable that to watch it provokes thoughts of a modern-day version of Bedlam with us as Hogarthian gawpers treating the mentally fragile as entertainment.
The paper’s headline read: “I leapt in front of a lorry hoping to die.” Carlisle, a father of three, has suffered from depression for 18 months. He explained that the end of his career, the curtailment of his contract as a TV sports pundit and a struggle with alcohol led to financial problems. He felt the lack of “a sense of worth and value in life”.
He said strangers would comment: “Didn’t you used to be Clarke Carlisle?”, as if, once off the television screen and football pitch, he had passed into no-man’s-land. Throwing himself in front of a lorry became the “perfect answer”. Carlisle survived, unlike 12 men who will kill themselves today, as 12 do every day, in England and Wales.
Just before his death, the psychiatrist Anthony Clare wrote a thoughtful book, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. He concluded with a plea to men to place “a greater value on love, family and personal relationships and less on power, possessions and achievement… to find meaning and fulfilment”.
Except that redefining what it means to be a man in contemporary society isn’t a job for men alone. It’s a dynamic process of cultural and social change that repeatedly judders to a halt. And it will continue to be impeded for a variety of reasons (better the stereotype you know) and as long as some women hold fast to a hierarchy of need.
This is the kind of thinking that says: if male fragility is addressed, women’s requirements are marginalised. Men can hog resources, but the two requirements are interlocked. Until male violence can be defused, for instance, the refugees will continue to overflow.
In the main, support for Carlisle’s honesty has been strong, as it has been for Nick Baber, 48, chief operating officer at KPMG, who last week said he would pretend he had flu during severe depression. He has called for more senior executives to speak out. But then what? As Dr Margaret McCartney explains in The Patient Paradox, the severely depressed are too ill to make plans to end their life. When a patient is beginning to recover, suicide becomes an option, particularly if they are male. Thoreau wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Talk to parents from Papyrus, the charity that campaigns to prevent young suicide, and again and again they say they had no idea that their sons were depressed, let alone suicidal. Their sons, they felt, had so much to live for.
According to the charity, Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm), men account for more than three-quarters of all suicides in England and Wales, 4,590 deaths – the single biggest cause of death among males under 50. Three out of four had no contact with mental health professionals. As the Men’s Health Forum constantly points out, men are reluctant to go their GP and fail to identify their own symptoms of depression. When Carlisle’s wife, Gemma, was diagnosed with postnatal depression, he advised her to “get a grip”; then he took Goldberg’s depression test and recognised his own symptoms. They include lack of energy, sadness, negativity and self-destructiveness. A survey by Calm revealed that 69% of men said they preferred to deal with problems themselves, 56% didn’t want to burden others. “The traditional strong silent response to adversity is increasingly failing to protect men from themselves,” said Jane Powell, Calm’s chief executive.
Last year, the charity issued a much-needed four-point charter to encourage change for the better. It includes a shift in thinking about the needs of males in schools, work and public services and a fuller range of expression of masculinity in the media and advertising. Too often, still, while depression in women is wrongly viewed as an inevitable part of being female, it’s precisely this alleged association with female fragility that underscores the notion that the male sufferer is less of a man; he has a weakness, not an illness best kept secret. So, as the suicide rate has risen, the taboos and social “norms” stay in place.
Change, however, is possible. Last month, a new policy on suicide prevention was launched, the Stop Suicide pledge. It is based on the work of Dr Ed Coffey in Detroit that enrols as many members of the public as possible with the aim of ending the stigma and the secrecy. In four years, the suicide rate dropped 75%.
The UK “zero suicide” pilots ask the whole community to look out for each other, recognise warning signs and offer help, not exclusion. The pledge, with a badge, is, “I’d ask”. (Although what you ask is trickier. “Is everything OK?” is bound to get a positive response in a well-trained man.)
The New Economics Foundation says the five foundation stones of wellbeing are: connect, be active, take notice, keep learning and give. The female sphere, even when it involves working 10 hours a day as well as mothering and acting as a carer, has all those aspects woven into it (and paradoxically at extremes can be the cause of female depression and breakdown). The male stereotypes of protector, provider, toughie and top dog shoves wellbeing well down the list.
Kurt Cobain, desperately in need of help for years, in his poignant suicide note to Boddah, his imaginary childhood friend, quoted a Neil Young song: “… better to burn out than fade away…” The tragedy for too many men is that society doesn’t yet allow them to let down their guard so they can value and enjoy the infinity of choices that lie between those two extremes.
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