Showing posts with label stress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stress. Show all posts
Tuesday 13 February 2024
Monday 22 January 2024
Sunday 16 April 2023
After the easy money: a giant stress test for the financial system
John Plender in The FT
Five weeks after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, there is no consensus on whether the ensuing financial stress in North America and Europe has run its course or is a foretaste of worse to come.
Equally pressing is the question of whether, against the backdrop of still high inflation, central banks in advanced economies will soon row back from monetary tightening and pivot towards easing.
These questions, which are of overwhelming importance for investors, savers and mortgage borrowers, are closely related. For if banks and other financial institutions face liquidity crises when inflation is substantially above the central banks’ target, usually of about 2 per cent, acute tension arises between their twin objectives of price stability and financial stability. In the case of the US Federal Reserve, the price stability objective also conflicts with the goal of maximum employment.
The choices made by central banks will have a far-reaching impact on our personal finances. If inflation stays higher for longer, there will be further pain for those who have invested in supposedly safe bonds for their retirement. If the central banks fail to engineer a soft landing for the economy, investors in risk assets such as equities will be on the rack. And for homeowners looking to refinance their loans over the coming months, any further tightening by the Bank of England will feed into mortgage costs.
The bubble bursts
SVB, the 16th largest bank in the US, perfectly illustrates how the central banks’ inflation and financial stability objectives are potentially in conflict. It had been deluged with mainly uninsured deposits — deposits above the official $250,000 insurance ceiling — that far exceeded lending opportunities in its tech industry stamping ground. So it invested the money in medium and long-dated Treasury and agency securities. It did so without hedging against interest rate risk in what was the greatest bond market bubble in history.
The very sharp rise in policy rates over the past year pricked the bubble, so depressing the value of long-dated bonds. This would not have been a problem if depositors retained confidence in the bank so that it could hold the securities to maturity. Yet, in practice, rich but nervous uninsured depositors worried that SVB was potentially insolvent if the securities were marked to market.
An inept speech by chief executive Greg Becker on March 9 quickly spread across the internet, causing a quarter of the bank’s deposit base to flee in less than a day and pushing SVB into forced sales of bonds at huge losses. The collapse of confidence soon extended to Signature Bank in New York, which was overextended in property and increasingly involved in crypto assets. Some 90 per cent of its deposits were uninsured, compared with 88 per cent at SVB.
Fear spread to Europe, where failures of risk management and a series of scandals at Credit Suisse caused deposits to ebb away. The Swiss authorities quickly brokered a takeover by arch rival UBS, while in the UK the Bank of England secured a takeover of SVB’s troubled UK subsidiary by HSBC for £1.
These banks do not appear to constitute a homogeneous group. Yet, in their different ways, they demonstrate how the long period of super-low interest rates since the great financial crisis of 2007-09 introduced fragilities into the financial system while creating asset bubbles. As Jon Danielsson and Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics point out, the longer monetary policy stayed lax, the more systemic risk increased, along with a growing dependence on money creation and low rates.
The ultimate consequence was to undermine financial stability. Putting that right would require an increase in the capital base of the banking system. Yet, as Danielsson and Goodhart indicate, increasing capital requirements when the economy is doing poorly, as it is now, is conducive to recession because it reduces banks’ lending capacity. So we are back to the policy tensions outlined earlier.
Part of the problem of such protracted lax policy was that it bred complacency. Many banks that are now struggling with rising interest rates had assumed, like SVB, that interest rates would remain low indefinitely and that central banks would always come to the rescue. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates that US banks’ unrealised losses on securities were $620bn at the end of 2022.
A more direct consequence, noted by academics Raghuram Rajan and Viral Acharya, respectively former governor and deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is that the central banks’ quantitative easing since the financial crisis, whereby they bought securities in bulk from the markets, drove an expansion of banks’ balance sheets and stuffed them with flighty uninsured deposits.
Rajan and Acharya add that supervisors in the US did not subject all banks to the same level of scrutiny and stress testing that they applied to the largest institutions. So these differential standards may have caused a migration of risky commercial real estate loans from larger, better-capitalised banks to weakly capitalised small and midsized banks. There are grounds for thinking that this may be less of an issue in the UK, as we shall see.
A further vulnerability in the system relates to the grotesque misallocation of capital arising not only from the bubble-creating propensity of lax monetary policy but from ultra-low interest rates keeping unprofitable “zombie” companies alive. The extra production capacity that this kept in place exerted downward pressure on prices.
Today’s tighter policy, the most draconian tightening in four decades in the advanced economies with the notable exception of Japan, will wipe out much of the zombie population, thereby restricting supply and adding to inflationary impetus. Note that the total number of company insolvencies registered in the UK in 2022 was the highest since 2009 and 57 per cent higher than 2021.
A system under strain
In effect, the shift from quantitative easing to quantitative tightening and sharply increased interest rates has imposed a gigantic stress test on both the financial system and the wider economy. What makes the test especially stressful is the huge increase in debt that was encouraged by years of easy money.
William White, former chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements and one of the few premier league economists to foresee the great financial crisis, says ultra easy money “encouraged people to take out debt to do dumb things”. The result is that the combined debt of households, companies and governments in relation to gross domestic product has risen to levels never before seen in peacetime.
All this suggests a huge increase in the scope for accidents in the financial system. And while the upsets of the past few weeks have raised serious questions about the effectiveness of bank regulation and supervision, there is one respect in which the regulatory response to the great financial crisis has been highly effective. It has caused much traditional banking activity to migrate to the non-bank financial sector, including hedge funds, money market funds, pensions funds and other institutions that are much less transparent than the regulated banking sector and thus capable of springing nasty systemic surprises.
An illustration of this came in the UK last September following the announcement by Liz Truss’s government of unfunded tax cuts in its “mini” Budget. It sparked a rapid and unprecedented increase in long-dated gilt yields and a consequent fall in prices. This exposed vulnerabilities in liability-driven investment funds in which many pension funds had invested in order to hedge interest rate risk and inflation risk.
Such LDI funds invested in assets, mainly gilts and derivatives, that generated cash flows that were timed to match the incidence of pension outgoings. Much of the activity was fuelled by borrowing.
UK defined-benefit pension funds, where pensions are related to final or career average pay, have a near-uniform commitment to liability matching. This led to overconcentration at the long end of both the fixed-interest and index-linked gilt market, thereby exacerbating the severe repricing in gilts after the announcement. There followed a savage spiral of collateral calls and forced gilt sales that destabilised a market at the core of the British financial system, posing a devastating risk to financial stability and the retirement savings of millions.
This was not entirely unforeseen by the regulators, who had run stress tests to see whether the LDI funds could secure enough liquidity from their pension fund clients to meet margin calls in difficult circumstances. But they did not allow for such an extreme swing in gilt yields.
Worried that this could lead to an unwarranted tightening of financing conditions and a reduction in the flow of credit to households and businesses, the BoE stepped in to the market with a temporary programme of gilt purchases. The purpose was to give LDI funds time to build their resilience and encourage stronger buffers to cope with future volatility in the gilts market.
The intervention was highly successful in terms of stabilising the market. Yet, by expanding its balance sheet when it was committed to balance sheet shrinkage in the interest of normalising interest rates and curbing inflation, the BoE planted seeds of doubt in the minds of some market participants. Would financial stability always trump the central bank’s commitment to deliver on price stability? And what further dramatic repricing incidents could prompt dangerous systemic shocks?
Inflation before all?
The most obvious scope for sharp repricing relates to market expectations about inflation. In the short term, inflation is set to fall as global price pressures fall back and supply chain disruption is easing, especially now China continues to reopen after Covid-19 lockdowns. The BoE Monetary Policy Committee’s central projection is for consumer price inflation to fall from 9.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2023 to just under 4 per cent in the fourth quarter.
The support offered by the Fed and other central banks to ailing financial institutions leaves room for a little more policy tightening and the strong possibility that this will pave the way for disinflation and recession. The point was underlined this week by the IMF, which warned that “the chances of a hard landing” for the global economy had risen sharply if high inflation persists.
Yet, in addition to the question mark over central banks’ readiness to prioritise fighting inflation over financial stability, there are longer-run concerns about negative supply shocks that could keep upward pressure on inflation beyond current market expectations, according to White. For a start, Covid-19 and geopolitical friction are forcing companies to restructure supply lines, increasing resilience but reducing efficiency. The supply of workers has been hit by deaths and long Covid.
White expects the production of fossil fuels and metals to suffer from recently low levels of investment, especially given the long lags in bringing new production on stream. He also argues that markets underestimate the inflationary impact of climate change and, most importantly, the global supply of workers is in sharp decline, pushing up wage costs everywhere.
Where does the UK stand in all this? The resilience of the banking sector has been greatly strengthened since the financial crisis of 2007-08, with the loan-to-deposit ratios of big UK banks falling from 120 per cent in 2008 to 75 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2022. Much more of the UK banks’ bond portfolios are marked to market for regulatory and accounting purposes than in the US.
The strength of sterling since the departure of the Truss government means the UK’s longstanding external balance sheet risk — its dependence on what former BoE governor Mark Carney called “the kindness of strangers” — has diminished somewhat. Yet huge uncertainties remain as interest rates look set to take one last upward step.
Risks for borrowers and investors
For mortgage borrowers, the picture is mixed. The BoE’s Financial Policy Committee estimates that half the UK’s 4mn owner-occupier mortgages will be exposed to rate rises in 2023. But, in its latest report in March, the BoE’s FPC says its worries about the affordability of mortgage payments have lessened because of falling energy prices and the better outlook for employment.
The continuing high level of inflation is reducing the real value of mortgage debt. And, if financial stability concerns cause the BoE to stretch out the period over which it brings inflation back to its 2 per cent target, the real burden of debt will be further eroded.
For investors, the possibility — I would say probability — that inflationary pressures are now greater than they have been for decades raises a red flag, at least over the medium and long term, for fixed-rate bonds. And, for private investors, index-linked bonds offer no protection unless held to maturity.
That is a huge assumption given the unknown timing of mortality and the possibility of bills for care in old age that may require investments to be liquidated. Note that the return on index-linked gilts in 2022 was minus 38 per cent, according to consultants LCP. When fixed-rate bond yields rise and prices fall, index-linked yields are pulled up by the same powerful tide.
Of course, in asset allocation there can be no absolute imperatives. It is worth recounting the experience in the 1970s of George Ross Goobey, founder of the so-called “cult of the equity” in the days when most pension funds invested exclusively in gilts.
While running the Imperial Tobacco pension fund after the war he famously sold all the fund’s fixed-interest securities and invested exclusively in equities — with outstanding results. Yet, in 1974, he put a huge bet on “War Loan” when it was yielding 17 per cent and made a killing. If the price is right, even fixed-interest IOUs can be a bargain in a period of rip-roaring inflation.
A final question raised by the banking stresses of recent weeks is whether it is ever worth investing in banks. In a recent FT Money article, Terry Smith, chief executive of Fundsmith and a former top-rated bank analyst, says not. He never invests in anything that requires leverage (or borrowing) to make an adequate return, as is true of banks. The returns in banking are poor, anyway. And, even when a bank is well run, it can be destroyed by a systemic panic.
Smith adds that technology is supplanting traditional banking. And, he asks rhetorically, have you noticed that your local bank branch has become a PizzaExpress, in which role, by the way, it makes more money?
A salutary envoi to the tale of the latest spate of bank failures.
Thursday 2 December 2021
Sunday 21 March 2021
DECODING DENIALISM
Nadeem F. Paracha in The Dawn
Illustration by Abro
On November 12, 2009, the New York Times (NYT) ran a video report on its website. In it, the NYT reporter Adam B. Ellick interviewed some Pakistani pop stars to gauge how lifestyle liberals were being affected by the spectre of so-called ‘Talibanisation’ in Pakistan. To his surprise, almost every single pop artiste that he managed to engage, refused to believe that there were men willing to blow themselves up in public in the name of faith.
It wasn’t an outright denial, as such, but the interviewed pop acts went to great lengths to ‘prove’ that the attacks were being carried out at the behest of the US, and that those who were being called ‘terrorists’ were simply fighting for their rights. Ellick’s surprise was understandable. Between 2007 and 2009, hundreds of people had already been killed in Pakistan by suicide bombers.
But it wasn’t just these ‘confused’ lifestyle liberals who chose to look elsewhere for answers when the answer was right in front of them. Unregulated talk shows on TV news channels were constantly providing space to men who would spin the most ludicrous narratives that presented the terrorists as ‘misunderstood brothers.’
From 2007 till 2014, terrorist attacks and assassinations were a daily occurrence. Security personnel, politicians, men, women and children were slaughtered. Within hours, the cacophony of inarticulate noises on the electronic media would drown out these tragedies. The bottom-line of almost every such ‘debate’ was always, ‘ye hum mein se nahin’ [these (terrorists) are not from among us]. In fact, there was also a song released with this as its title and ‘message.’
The perpetrators of the attacks were turned into intangible, invisible entities, like characters of urban myths that belong to a different realm. The fact was that they were very much among us, for all to see, even though most Pakistanis chose not to.
Just before the 2013 elections, the website of an English daily ran a poll on the foremost problems facing Pakistan. The poll mentioned unemployment, corruption, inflation and street crimes, but there was no mention of terrorism even though, by 2013, thousands had been killed in terrorist attacks.
So how does one explain this curious refusal to acknowledge a terrifying reality that was operating in plain sight? In an August 3, 2018 essay for The Guardian, Keith Kahn-Harris writes that individual self-deception becomes a problem when it turns into ‘public dogma.’ It then becomes what is called ‘denialism.’
The American science journalist and author Michael Specter, in his book Denialism, explains it to mean an entire segment of society, when struggling with trauma, turning away from reality in favour of a more comfortable lie. Psychologists have often explained denial as a coping mechanism that humans use in times of stress. But they also warn that if denial establishes itself as a constant disposition in an individual or society, it starts to inhibit the ability to resolve the source of the stress.
Denialism, as a social condition, is understood by sociologists as an undeclared ‘ism’, adhered to by certain segments of a society whose rhetoric and actions in this context can impact a country’s political, social and even economic fortunes.
In the January 2009 issue of European Journal of Public Health, Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee write that the denialism process employs five main characteristics. Even though Diethelm and McKee were more focused on the emergence of denialism in the face of evidence in scientific fields of research, I will paraphrase four out of the five stated characteristics to explore denialism in the context of extremist violence in Pakistan from 2007 till 2017.
The deniers have their own interpretation of the same evidence. In early 2013, when a study showed that 1,652 people had been killed in 2012 alone in Pakistan because of terrorism, an ‘analyst’ on a news channel falsely claimed that these figures included those killed during street crimes and ‘revenge murders.’ Another gentleman insisted that the figures were concocted by foreign-funded NGOs ‘to give Pakistan and Islam a bad name.’
This brings us to denialism’s second characteristic: The use of fake experts. These are individuals who purport to be experts in a particular area but whose views are entirely inconsistent with established knowledge. During the peak years of terrorist activity in the country, self-appointed ‘political experts’ and ‘religious scholars’ were a common sight on TV channels. Their ‘expert opinions’ were heavily tilted towards presenting the terrorists as either ‘misunderstood brothers’ or people fighting to impose a truly Islamic system in Pakistan. Many such experts suddenly vanished from TV screens after the intensification of the military operation against militants in 2015. Some were even booked for hate speech.
The third characteristic is about selectivity, drawing on isolated opinions or highlighting flaws in the weakest opinions to discredit entire facts. In October 2012, when extremists attempted to assassinate a teenaged school girl, Malala Yousafzai, a sympathiser of the extremists on TV justified the assassination attempt by mentioning ‘similar incidents’ that he discovered in some obscure books of religious traditions. Within months Malala became the villain, even among some of the most ‘educated’ Pakistanis. When the nuclear physicist and intellectual Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy exhibited his disgust over this, he was not only accused of being ‘anti-Islam’, but his credibility as a scientist too was questioned.
The fourth characteristic is about misrepresenting the opposing argument to make it easier to refute. For example, when terrorists were wreaking havoc in Pakistan, the arguments of those seeking to investigate the issue beyond conspiracy theories and unabashed apologias, were deliberately misconstrued as being criticisms of religious faith.
Today we are seeing all this returning. But this time, ‘experts’ are appearing on TV pointing out conspiracies and twisting facts about the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines. They are also offering their expert opinions on events such as the Aurat March and, in the process, whipping up a dangerous moral panic.
It seems, not much was learned by society’s collective disposition during the peak years of terrorism and how it delayed a timely response that might have saved hundreds of innocent lives.
On November 12, 2009, the New York Times (NYT) ran a video report on its website. In it, the NYT reporter Adam B. Ellick interviewed some Pakistani pop stars to gauge how lifestyle liberals were being affected by the spectre of so-called ‘Talibanisation’ in Pakistan. To his surprise, almost every single pop artiste that he managed to engage, refused to believe that there were men willing to blow themselves up in public in the name of faith.
It wasn’t an outright denial, as such, but the interviewed pop acts went to great lengths to ‘prove’ that the attacks were being carried out at the behest of the US, and that those who were being called ‘terrorists’ were simply fighting for their rights. Ellick’s surprise was understandable. Between 2007 and 2009, hundreds of people had already been killed in Pakistan by suicide bombers.
But it wasn’t just these ‘confused’ lifestyle liberals who chose to look elsewhere for answers when the answer was right in front of them. Unregulated talk shows on TV news channels were constantly providing space to men who would spin the most ludicrous narratives that presented the terrorists as ‘misunderstood brothers.’
From 2007 till 2014, terrorist attacks and assassinations were a daily occurrence. Security personnel, politicians, men, women and children were slaughtered. Within hours, the cacophony of inarticulate noises on the electronic media would drown out these tragedies. The bottom-line of almost every such ‘debate’ was always, ‘ye hum mein se nahin’ [these (terrorists) are not from among us]. In fact, there was also a song released with this as its title and ‘message.’
The perpetrators of the attacks were turned into intangible, invisible entities, like characters of urban myths that belong to a different realm. The fact was that they were very much among us, for all to see, even though most Pakistanis chose not to.
Just before the 2013 elections, the website of an English daily ran a poll on the foremost problems facing Pakistan. The poll mentioned unemployment, corruption, inflation and street crimes, but there was no mention of terrorism even though, by 2013, thousands had been killed in terrorist attacks.
So how does one explain this curious refusal to acknowledge a terrifying reality that was operating in plain sight? In an August 3, 2018 essay for The Guardian, Keith Kahn-Harris writes that individual self-deception becomes a problem when it turns into ‘public dogma.’ It then becomes what is called ‘denialism.’
The American science journalist and author Michael Specter, in his book Denialism, explains it to mean an entire segment of society, when struggling with trauma, turning away from reality in favour of a more comfortable lie. Psychologists have often explained denial as a coping mechanism that humans use in times of stress. But they also warn that if denial establishes itself as a constant disposition in an individual or society, it starts to inhibit the ability to resolve the source of the stress.
Denialism, as a social condition, is understood by sociologists as an undeclared ‘ism’, adhered to by certain segments of a society whose rhetoric and actions in this context can impact a country’s political, social and even economic fortunes.
In the January 2009 issue of European Journal of Public Health, Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee write that the denialism process employs five main characteristics. Even though Diethelm and McKee were more focused on the emergence of denialism in the face of evidence in scientific fields of research, I will paraphrase four out of the five stated characteristics to explore denialism in the context of extremist violence in Pakistan from 2007 till 2017.
The deniers have their own interpretation of the same evidence. In early 2013, when a study showed that 1,652 people had been killed in 2012 alone in Pakistan because of terrorism, an ‘analyst’ on a news channel falsely claimed that these figures included those killed during street crimes and ‘revenge murders.’ Another gentleman insisted that the figures were concocted by foreign-funded NGOs ‘to give Pakistan and Islam a bad name.’
This brings us to denialism’s second characteristic: The use of fake experts. These are individuals who purport to be experts in a particular area but whose views are entirely inconsistent with established knowledge. During the peak years of terrorist activity in the country, self-appointed ‘political experts’ and ‘religious scholars’ were a common sight on TV channels. Their ‘expert opinions’ were heavily tilted towards presenting the terrorists as either ‘misunderstood brothers’ or people fighting to impose a truly Islamic system in Pakistan. Many such experts suddenly vanished from TV screens after the intensification of the military operation against militants in 2015. Some were even booked for hate speech.
The third characteristic is about selectivity, drawing on isolated opinions or highlighting flaws in the weakest opinions to discredit entire facts. In October 2012, when extremists attempted to assassinate a teenaged school girl, Malala Yousafzai, a sympathiser of the extremists on TV justified the assassination attempt by mentioning ‘similar incidents’ that he discovered in some obscure books of religious traditions. Within months Malala became the villain, even among some of the most ‘educated’ Pakistanis. When the nuclear physicist and intellectual Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy exhibited his disgust over this, he was not only accused of being ‘anti-Islam’, but his credibility as a scientist too was questioned.
The fourth characteristic is about misrepresenting the opposing argument to make it easier to refute. For example, when terrorists were wreaking havoc in Pakistan, the arguments of those seeking to investigate the issue beyond conspiracy theories and unabashed apologias, were deliberately misconstrued as being criticisms of religious faith.
Today we are seeing all this returning. But this time, ‘experts’ are appearing on TV pointing out conspiracies and twisting facts about the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines. They are also offering their expert opinions on events such as the Aurat March and, in the process, whipping up a dangerous moral panic.
It seems, not much was learned by society’s collective disposition during the peak years of terrorism and how it delayed a timely response that might have saved hundreds of innocent lives.
Friday 10 April 2020
Information can make you sick
Trader turned neuroscientist John Coates in The FT on why economic crises are also medical ones.
As coronavirus infection rates peak in many countries, the markets rally. There is a nagging worry that a second wave of infections might occur once lockdowns are lifted or summer passes. But for anyone immersed in the financial markets there should be a further concern. Volatility created by the pandemic could itself cause a second wave of health problems. Volatility can make you sick, just as a virus can.
To get an inkling of what this other second wave might look like, it helps to recall what happened after the credit crisis. That event was both a financial and medical disaster. Various epidemiological studies suggest it may be responsible for 260,000 cancer deaths in OECD countries; a 17.8 per cent increase in the Greek mortality rate between 2010-16; and a spike in cardiovascular disease in London for the years 2008-09, with an additional 2,000 deaths due to heart attacks. The current economic crisis may be far worse than 2008-09, so the medical fallout could be as well.
Why do financial and medical crises go hand in hand? Many of the above studies focused on unemployment and reduced access to healthcare as causes of the adverse health outcomes. But research my colleagues and I have conducted on trading floors for the past 12 years suggest to me that uncertainty itself, regardless of outcome, can have independent and profound effects on physiology and health.
Our studies were designed initially to test a hunch I had while running a trading desk for Deutsche Bank, that the rollercoaster of physical sensations a person experiences while immersed in the markets alters their risk-taking. After retraining in neuroscience and physiology at Cambridge University, I set up shop on various hedge fund and asset manager trading floors, along with colleagues, mostly medical researchers. Using wearable tech and sampling biochemistry, we tracked the traders’ cardiovascular, endocrine and immune systems.
My goal was to demonstrate how these physiological changes altered trader performance. Increasingly, though, I came to see that a trading floor provides an elegant model for studying occupational health.
One remarkable thing we found was that traders’ bodies calibrated sensitively to market volatility. For humans, apparently, information is physical. You do not process information dispassionately, as a computer does; rather your brain quietly figures out what movement might ensue from the information, and prepares your body, altering heart rate, adrenaline levels, immune activation and so on.
Your brain did not evolve to support Platonic thought; it evolved to process movement. Our larger brain controls a more sophisticated set of muscles, giving us an ability to learn new movements unmatched by any other animal — or robot — on the planet. If you want to understand yourself, fellow humans, even the markets, put movement at the very core of what we are.
Essential to our exquisite motor control is an equally advanced system of fuel injection, one that has been misleadingly termed “the stress response”. Stress connotes something nasty but the stress response is nothing more sinister than a metabolic preparation for movement. Cortisol, the main stress molecule, inhibits bodily systems not needed during movement, such as digestion and reproduction, and marshals glucose and free fatty acids as fuel for our cells.
The stress response evolved to be short lived, acutely activated for only a few hours or days. Yet during a crisis such as the current one, you can activate the stress response for weeks and months at a time. Then an acute stress response morphs into a chronic one. Your digestive system is inhibited so you become susceptible to gastrointestinal disorders; blood pressure increases so you are prone to hypertension; fatty acids and glucose circulate in your blood but are not used, because you are stuck at home, so your risks increase for cardiovascular disease. Finally, by inhibiting parts of the immune system, stress impairs your ability to recover from diseases such as cancer, and Covid-19.
So why the connection with uncertainty? The stress response is largely predictive rather than reactive. Just as we try to predict the future location of a tennis ball, so too we predict our metabolic needs. When we encounter situations of novelty and uncertainty, we do not know what to expect, so we marshal a preparatory stress response. The stress response is comparable to revving your engine at a yellow light. Situations of novelty can be described, following Claude Shannon, inventor of information theory, as “information rich”. Conveniently, informational load in the financial markets can be measured by the level of volatility: the more Shannon information flowing into the markets, the higher the volatility.
In two of our studies we found that traders’ cortisol levels did in fact track bond volatility almost tick for tick. It did not even matter if the traders were making or losing money; just put a human in the presence of information and their metabolism calibrates to it. Take a moment to contemplate that curious result — there are molecules in your blood that track the amount of information you process.
Today, with historically elevated volatility, there is a good chance cortisol levels are trending higher. Immune systems could also be affected. When your body is attacked by a pathogen, your immune system coordinates a suite of changes known as “sickness behaviour”. You develop a fever, lose your appetite and withdraw socially. You also experience increased risk aversion.
Central to the immune response is inflammation, the process of eliminating pathogens and initiating tissue repair. However, inflammation can also occur in stressful situations, because cytokines, the molecules triggering inflammation, assist in the recruitment of metabolic reserves. If inflammation becomes systemic and chronic, it contributes to a wide range of health problems. We found that interleukin-1-beta, the first responder of inflammation, tracked volatility as closely as cortisol.
Recently we have focused on the cardiovascular system. Working with a large and sophisticated fund manager, we have used cutting-edge wearable tech that permits portfolio managers to track their cardiovascular data, physical activity and sleep. The cardiovascular system similarly tracks volatility and risk appetite.
In short, here we may have a mechanism connecting financial and health crises. On the one hand, fluctuating levels of stress and inflammation affect risk-taking. In a lab-based study, we found that chronically elevated cortisol caused a large decrease in risk appetite. Shifting risk presents tricky problems for risk management — and for central banks. Physiology-induced risk aversion can feed a bear market, morphing it into a crash so dangerous that the state has to step in with asset purchases. On the other hand, chronically elevated stress and inflammation are known to contribute to a wide range of health problems.
We are not accustomed to combining financial and medical data in this way. But corporate and state health programs should start.
The markets today are living through a period of volatility the likes of which I have never encountered. March was, to put it mildly, information rich. As a result, there is now the very real possibility of a second wave of disease. Viruses can make you sick, but so too can information.
As coronavirus infection rates peak in many countries, the markets rally. There is a nagging worry that a second wave of infections might occur once lockdowns are lifted or summer passes. But for anyone immersed in the financial markets there should be a further concern. Volatility created by the pandemic could itself cause a second wave of health problems. Volatility can make you sick, just as a virus can.
To get an inkling of what this other second wave might look like, it helps to recall what happened after the credit crisis. That event was both a financial and medical disaster. Various epidemiological studies suggest it may be responsible for 260,000 cancer deaths in OECD countries; a 17.8 per cent increase in the Greek mortality rate between 2010-16; and a spike in cardiovascular disease in London for the years 2008-09, with an additional 2,000 deaths due to heart attacks. The current economic crisis may be far worse than 2008-09, so the medical fallout could be as well.
Why do financial and medical crises go hand in hand? Many of the above studies focused on unemployment and reduced access to healthcare as causes of the adverse health outcomes. But research my colleagues and I have conducted on trading floors for the past 12 years suggest to me that uncertainty itself, regardless of outcome, can have independent and profound effects on physiology and health.
Our studies were designed initially to test a hunch I had while running a trading desk for Deutsche Bank, that the rollercoaster of physical sensations a person experiences while immersed in the markets alters their risk-taking. After retraining in neuroscience and physiology at Cambridge University, I set up shop on various hedge fund and asset manager trading floors, along with colleagues, mostly medical researchers. Using wearable tech and sampling biochemistry, we tracked the traders’ cardiovascular, endocrine and immune systems.
My goal was to demonstrate how these physiological changes altered trader performance. Increasingly, though, I came to see that a trading floor provides an elegant model for studying occupational health.
One remarkable thing we found was that traders’ bodies calibrated sensitively to market volatility. For humans, apparently, information is physical. You do not process information dispassionately, as a computer does; rather your brain quietly figures out what movement might ensue from the information, and prepares your body, altering heart rate, adrenaline levels, immune activation and so on.
Your brain did not evolve to support Platonic thought; it evolved to process movement. Our larger brain controls a more sophisticated set of muscles, giving us an ability to learn new movements unmatched by any other animal — or robot — on the planet. If you want to understand yourself, fellow humans, even the markets, put movement at the very core of what we are.
Essential to our exquisite motor control is an equally advanced system of fuel injection, one that has been misleadingly termed “the stress response”. Stress connotes something nasty but the stress response is nothing more sinister than a metabolic preparation for movement. Cortisol, the main stress molecule, inhibits bodily systems not needed during movement, such as digestion and reproduction, and marshals glucose and free fatty acids as fuel for our cells.
The stress response evolved to be short lived, acutely activated for only a few hours or days. Yet during a crisis such as the current one, you can activate the stress response for weeks and months at a time. Then an acute stress response morphs into a chronic one. Your digestive system is inhibited so you become susceptible to gastrointestinal disorders; blood pressure increases so you are prone to hypertension; fatty acids and glucose circulate in your blood but are not used, because you are stuck at home, so your risks increase for cardiovascular disease. Finally, by inhibiting parts of the immune system, stress impairs your ability to recover from diseases such as cancer, and Covid-19.
So why the connection with uncertainty? The stress response is largely predictive rather than reactive. Just as we try to predict the future location of a tennis ball, so too we predict our metabolic needs. When we encounter situations of novelty and uncertainty, we do not know what to expect, so we marshal a preparatory stress response. The stress response is comparable to revving your engine at a yellow light. Situations of novelty can be described, following Claude Shannon, inventor of information theory, as “information rich”. Conveniently, informational load in the financial markets can be measured by the level of volatility: the more Shannon information flowing into the markets, the higher the volatility.
In two of our studies we found that traders’ cortisol levels did in fact track bond volatility almost tick for tick. It did not even matter if the traders were making or losing money; just put a human in the presence of information and their metabolism calibrates to it. Take a moment to contemplate that curious result — there are molecules in your blood that track the amount of information you process.
Today, with historically elevated volatility, there is a good chance cortisol levels are trending higher. Immune systems could also be affected. When your body is attacked by a pathogen, your immune system coordinates a suite of changes known as “sickness behaviour”. You develop a fever, lose your appetite and withdraw socially. You also experience increased risk aversion.
Central to the immune response is inflammation, the process of eliminating pathogens and initiating tissue repair. However, inflammation can also occur in stressful situations, because cytokines, the molecules triggering inflammation, assist in the recruitment of metabolic reserves. If inflammation becomes systemic and chronic, it contributes to a wide range of health problems. We found that interleukin-1-beta, the first responder of inflammation, tracked volatility as closely as cortisol.
Recently we have focused on the cardiovascular system. Working with a large and sophisticated fund manager, we have used cutting-edge wearable tech that permits portfolio managers to track their cardiovascular data, physical activity and sleep. The cardiovascular system similarly tracks volatility and risk appetite.
In short, here we may have a mechanism connecting financial and health crises. On the one hand, fluctuating levels of stress and inflammation affect risk-taking. In a lab-based study, we found that chronically elevated cortisol caused a large decrease in risk appetite. Shifting risk presents tricky problems for risk management — and for central banks. Physiology-induced risk aversion can feed a bear market, morphing it into a crash so dangerous that the state has to step in with asset purchases. On the other hand, chronically elevated stress and inflammation are known to contribute to a wide range of health problems.
We are not accustomed to combining financial and medical data in this way. But corporate and state health programs should start.
The markets today are living through a period of volatility the likes of which I have never encountered. March was, to put it mildly, information rich. As a result, there is now the very real possibility of a second wave of disease. Viruses can make you sick, but so too can information.
Monday 16 March 2020
How fighting an employer or becoming a whistleblower can lead to retaliation and undermining tactics
Alicia Clegg in The FT
Caroline Barlow felt little emotion when she settled with the BBC last May and withdrew her employment tribunal claims over unequal pay and constructive dismissal. Just a crushing tiredness that left her shaky and sick and so disoriented that for a while she stopped driving.
She now views her reaction as a kind of grieving, for her job and faith in an institution that she had revered. She entered the BBC’s pay review process suspecting that she was paid less than male heads of product doing jobs similar to her own, and received a 25 per cent rise, though with little explanation of how the figure was arrived at. So she used data protection law to view internal documents that indicated that even after the increase she would still be paid less. The assessors argued, without providing evidence, that she had skills she still needed to develop and the men had bigger roles.
“Publicly the BBC was saying it had introduced a transparent process. Yet, it was made very clear to me that I’d only get salary information on my peers at a final tribunal hearing by court order,” she says.
Like the journalist Carrie Gracie, who also challenged unequal pay at the BBC, Ms Barlow talks of her sense of entering a no-man’s-land of stonewalling and doublespeak, where evidence that she presented was watered down or selectively reported. She says that a strategic project described as “transforming” in a business case, for which she obtained executive committee sign-off, was trivialised as “a hygiene project” after she questioned her pay. She felt blocked by the slow progress of her grievance — she only received the outcome on her final day of employment − undermined in numerous small ways and made to feel unimportant. She became ill and was diagnosed with depression.
Lawrence Davies, director of Equal Justice Solicitors, who acted for Ms Barlow, says such experiences are common. Most employers try to quash internal complaints to avoid exposing themselves legally, should the employee sue. Yet while employers uphold only 1 per cent of grievances, he says, 65-70 per cent of complainants who persevere to an employment tribunal ultimately win, though the strain can be immense.
Kathy Ahern, a retired mental health nurse and academic, studied the psychological toll of challenging an employer after discovering that nurses who reported misconduct had strong beliefs about what it means to be a nurse. When they faced reprisals for putting patients before other loyalties they suffered overwhelming mental distress, not just because of what was done, but because the institutional reality gave the lie to everything that nursing codes of conduct teach. Another study, published in the journal Psychological Reports in 2019, found levels of anxiety and depression among whistleblowers are similar to those of cancer patients.
Ms Ahern likens retaliatory employers to domestic abusers who psychologically manipulate or “gaslight” a partner to destroy their self-confidence and credibility. Tell-tale patterns, which she documents in a review paper published in the Journal of Perinatal & Neonatal Nursing in 2018, run the gamut from maliciously finding fault, to sustained campaigns of petty slights and obstructions, to seeding rumours that the victim is unhinged.
Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, believes that while employers sometimes label whistleblowers as “crazy” simply to tarnish them, this may actually be how they see them. To “more negotiable” colleagues who know when to bend with the wind, they may come across as “unreasonable sticklers”, and end up friendless and questioning their own sanity.
Margaret Oliver, a former detective with Greater Manchester Police, says that senior officers dismissed her as “unreasonable” and “too emotionally involved” when she voiced concerns about the conduct of two investigations into child sexual exploitation, Operation Augusta (2004-2005) and Operation Span (2010-2012).
After returning from sick-leave, brought on by stress, she spotted an article in the staff newspaper in which GMP’s then chief constable urged officers to challenge police policies that their gut told them was wrong. She “took the scary step” of contacting him directly. But instead of meeting her, as she had suggested, she says he replied with a “bland email” promising that her concerns would be reviewed and passing her back down the command chain.
Having got nowhere, she resigned in 2012 and went public with her allegations, prompting the Mayor of Greater Manchester to commission an independent review. In January this year phase one, covering the period to 2005, concluded that Operation Augusta, had, as she always alleged, been closed down prematurely and children at risk of sexual exploitation had been failed. Ms Oliver recently launched the Maggie Oliver Foundation to support abuse survivors, and also whistleblowers who, like her, have nowhere to turn. “I asked myself: ‘Is there something obvious to others that I’m not seeing? Or is what I’m seeing wrong and making me ill?’ I felt isolated,” she says.
Isolation dogged whistleblower Aaron Westrick throughout a 14-year US legal battle concerning alleged corruption in the body armour industry that concluded, in 2018, with all the defendants ultimately making settlement payments.
As research director at Second Chance Body Armor (since liquidated), Mr Westrick urged his employer to recall a line of defective bulletproof vests containing Zylon, a material manufactured by Japanese company Toyobo. Instead he says that he was frozen out, told by an HR officer accompanied by his employer’s attorney that he was “crazy,” sacked and maligned. “If there’s one word that describes being a whistleblower, it’s loneliness,” he says. “Even your friends don’t really get it.”
Georgina Halford-Hall, chief executive of WhistleblowersUK, says the stress of fighting a bad employer is all-consuming. But, however difficult, it is important to continue doing the everyday things you enjoy. Drawing on personal experience, she recommends finding an independent mental health professional to offload on. “Don’t make every conversation with your partner and friends about your concerns, because that only isolates you further, making it likelier that you’ll end up behaving irrationally.”
From a practical standpoint, the best way for society to support victims of retaliation is to pay their legal fees, says Peter van der Velden, senior researcher at CentERdata, a Dutch research institute, and lead investigator of the study published in Psychological Reports. “What we know from research is that financial problems are a main stressor, few people have money for a lawyer after losing their job.” Something organisations should consider doing, that might strengthen their culture, is to look for opportunities to hire former whistleblowers rather than giving them a wide berth, says Marianna Fotaki, professor of business ethics at the University of Warwick Business School.
Ms Barlow says she still has “bad days”, though increasingly less so. Finding people who have had similar experiences, she says, is helping her rebuild her shattered sense of self. “It keeps your feet grounded in reality, not the manipulated version of reality that your employer wants you to believe.”
The Choreography of Retaliation
When organisations retaliate against employees, they tend to do so through a gradual piling on of pressure that pushes the individual to the point where they mistrust their own judgment, says Kathy Ahern. They become anxious, hypersensitive to threats and easy to cast as “overreacting, or simply disgruntled”. Some warning signs of what she terms a “gaslighting” pattern of retaliation include:
▪Reassuring employees that their complaints are being investigated, while repeatedly stalling.
▪Using euphemisms that diminish the person’s experience, such as “grey area” or “personality clash” for victimisation.
▪Finding fault with a highly-regarded employee who makes a complaint. ▪Praising someone for reporting misconduct, while doing nothing to prevent reprisals.
▪ Encouraging an employee who has suffered retaliation to take sick leave or undergo a psychological evaluation, under the guise of offering support.
Caroline Barlow felt little emotion when she settled with the BBC last May and withdrew her employment tribunal claims over unequal pay and constructive dismissal. Just a crushing tiredness that left her shaky and sick and so disoriented that for a while she stopped driving.
She now views her reaction as a kind of grieving, for her job and faith in an institution that she had revered. She entered the BBC’s pay review process suspecting that she was paid less than male heads of product doing jobs similar to her own, and received a 25 per cent rise, though with little explanation of how the figure was arrived at. So she used data protection law to view internal documents that indicated that even after the increase she would still be paid less. The assessors argued, without providing evidence, that she had skills she still needed to develop and the men had bigger roles.
“Publicly the BBC was saying it had introduced a transparent process. Yet, it was made very clear to me that I’d only get salary information on my peers at a final tribunal hearing by court order,” she says.
Like the journalist Carrie Gracie, who also challenged unequal pay at the BBC, Ms Barlow talks of her sense of entering a no-man’s-land of stonewalling and doublespeak, where evidence that she presented was watered down or selectively reported. She says that a strategic project described as “transforming” in a business case, for which she obtained executive committee sign-off, was trivialised as “a hygiene project” after she questioned her pay. She felt blocked by the slow progress of her grievance — she only received the outcome on her final day of employment − undermined in numerous small ways and made to feel unimportant. She became ill and was diagnosed with depression.
Lawrence Davies, director of Equal Justice Solicitors, who acted for Ms Barlow, says such experiences are common. Most employers try to quash internal complaints to avoid exposing themselves legally, should the employee sue. Yet while employers uphold only 1 per cent of grievances, he says, 65-70 per cent of complainants who persevere to an employment tribunal ultimately win, though the strain can be immense.
Kathy Ahern, a retired mental health nurse and academic, studied the psychological toll of challenging an employer after discovering that nurses who reported misconduct had strong beliefs about what it means to be a nurse. When they faced reprisals for putting patients before other loyalties they suffered overwhelming mental distress, not just because of what was done, but because the institutional reality gave the lie to everything that nursing codes of conduct teach. Another study, published in the journal Psychological Reports in 2019, found levels of anxiety and depression among whistleblowers are similar to those of cancer patients.
Ms Ahern likens retaliatory employers to domestic abusers who psychologically manipulate or “gaslight” a partner to destroy their self-confidence and credibility. Tell-tale patterns, which she documents in a review paper published in the Journal of Perinatal & Neonatal Nursing in 2018, run the gamut from maliciously finding fault, to sustained campaigns of petty slights and obstructions, to seeding rumours that the victim is unhinged.
Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, believes that while employers sometimes label whistleblowers as “crazy” simply to tarnish them, this may actually be how they see them. To “more negotiable” colleagues who know when to bend with the wind, they may come across as “unreasonable sticklers”, and end up friendless and questioning their own sanity.
Margaret Oliver, a former detective with Greater Manchester Police, says that senior officers dismissed her as “unreasonable” and “too emotionally involved” when she voiced concerns about the conduct of two investigations into child sexual exploitation, Operation Augusta (2004-2005) and Operation Span (2010-2012).
After returning from sick-leave, brought on by stress, she spotted an article in the staff newspaper in which GMP’s then chief constable urged officers to challenge police policies that their gut told them was wrong. She “took the scary step” of contacting him directly. But instead of meeting her, as she had suggested, she says he replied with a “bland email” promising that her concerns would be reviewed and passing her back down the command chain.
Having got nowhere, she resigned in 2012 and went public with her allegations, prompting the Mayor of Greater Manchester to commission an independent review. In January this year phase one, covering the period to 2005, concluded that Operation Augusta, had, as she always alleged, been closed down prematurely and children at risk of sexual exploitation had been failed. Ms Oliver recently launched the Maggie Oliver Foundation to support abuse survivors, and also whistleblowers who, like her, have nowhere to turn. “I asked myself: ‘Is there something obvious to others that I’m not seeing? Or is what I’m seeing wrong and making me ill?’ I felt isolated,” she says.
Isolation dogged whistleblower Aaron Westrick throughout a 14-year US legal battle concerning alleged corruption in the body armour industry that concluded, in 2018, with all the defendants ultimately making settlement payments.
As research director at Second Chance Body Armor (since liquidated), Mr Westrick urged his employer to recall a line of defective bulletproof vests containing Zylon, a material manufactured by Japanese company Toyobo. Instead he says that he was frozen out, told by an HR officer accompanied by his employer’s attorney that he was “crazy,” sacked and maligned. “If there’s one word that describes being a whistleblower, it’s loneliness,” he says. “Even your friends don’t really get it.”
Georgina Halford-Hall, chief executive of WhistleblowersUK, says the stress of fighting a bad employer is all-consuming. But, however difficult, it is important to continue doing the everyday things you enjoy. Drawing on personal experience, she recommends finding an independent mental health professional to offload on. “Don’t make every conversation with your partner and friends about your concerns, because that only isolates you further, making it likelier that you’ll end up behaving irrationally.”
From a practical standpoint, the best way for society to support victims of retaliation is to pay their legal fees, says Peter van der Velden, senior researcher at CentERdata, a Dutch research institute, and lead investigator of the study published in Psychological Reports. “What we know from research is that financial problems are a main stressor, few people have money for a lawyer after losing their job.” Something organisations should consider doing, that might strengthen their culture, is to look for opportunities to hire former whistleblowers rather than giving them a wide berth, says Marianna Fotaki, professor of business ethics at the University of Warwick Business School.
Ms Barlow says she still has “bad days”, though increasingly less so. Finding people who have had similar experiences, she says, is helping her rebuild her shattered sense of self. “It keeps your feet grounded in reality, not the manipulated version of reality that your employer wants you to believe.”
The Choreography of Retaliation
When organisations retaliate against employees, they tend to do so through a gradual piling on of pressure that pushes the individual to the point where they mistrust their own judgment, says Kathy Ahern. They become anxious, hypersensitive to threats and easy to cast as “overreacting, or simply disgruntled”. Some warning signs of what she terms a “gaslighting” pattern of retaliation include:
▪Reassuring employees that their complaints are being investigated, while repeatedly stalling.
▪Using euphemisms that diminish the person’s experience, such as “grey area” or “personality clash” for victimisation.
▪Finding fault with a highly-regarded employee who makes a complaint. ▪Praising someone for reporting misconduct, while doing nothing to prevent reprisals.
▪ Encouraging an employee who has suffered retaliation to take sick leave or undergo a psychological evaluation, under the guise of offering support.
Wednesday 8 November 2017
Ex-cricketers are candidates for post traumatic stress disorder
Suresh Menon in The Hindu
It is that time again — when a long-serving, much-respected cricketer has questions thrown at him, which, in summary is: isn’t it time to retire, buddy?
Years ago, Anil Kumble’s young son wore a T-shirt with the legend: It’s time to call it a day. It probably referred to his bed time, but those who saw it couldn’t help thinking it was a gentle reminder for his father, who, however, was smart enough to pick his time of departure.
Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who has quit Tests, is now being questioned over his relevance to the white-ball format. He would like to play the 2019 World Cup — and has the support of national coach Ravi Shastri — but spirit and flesh aren’t always in consonance towards the end of a sporting career.
Sport is a wonderful servant when you are young and fit. It will joyfully carry you to the top, unmindful of your occasional mistakes, with the promise that whatever happens there is always tomorrow. But it’s a terrible master as you grow older, demanding, unforgiving of lapses, reminding you constantly that your tomorrows will never match your yesterdays.
Ageing cricketers make a pact with time: let me make one more century, bowl my country to one more win; it doesn’t matter if the century is unrecognisable from the one I made ten years ago or if my bowling lacks bite. Just once more, and in gratitude I promise to quit.
But few players keep their end of the deal. Kapil Dev was carried around in the end like a grandmother everybody had to be kind to because she was responsible for all the family wealth. His goal? Richard Hadlee’s then world record 431 Test wickets. When past admiration combines with present pity, it is not a pretty picture.
When Brian Lara retired, he asked his fans, “Did I entertain?” For the average fan, it is impossible to understand or even imagine the feelings of a national hero, who once played as if there was no tomorrow but suddenly realises that there might not be a today even. I think it was Hemingway who said retirement is the ugliest word in the language.
Can you go easily from playing the world’s fastest bowlers, guiding your country to victories, having a whole stadium, perhaps a whole nation chanting your name, and being, to quote John Lennon, “more popular than Jesus Christ”, to an ordinary life of buying groceries and and attending PTA meetings while watching someone else’s name being chanted nation-wide? If you think about it, ex-cricketers are prime candidates for post traumatic stress disorder.
This, despite the easy familiarity which cricketers develop with the big issues that are usually pushed into the back of the mind. Cricket — in fact, all sport — prepares us for loss, failure, even death. A batsman dies symbolically every time he loses his wicket. Yet, there is always another innings, another match, another year which converts apparent finality into something temporary, something one gets over in time.
Retirement is different. The finality is final. Only so many ex-players can coach, commentate, write or get into administration to maintain their connection with the game. Others are pulled out of obscurity on special occasions, like the World Cup. Till 2011, players who had won India the 1983 World Cup were featured in the media every four years. Now they will have to share the spotlight with the Class of 2011, if at all.
Retirement can be traumatic. Few teams invest in a system that makes the player’s transition smoother and more natural. For most players, cricket is the only thing they know, and when that is gone from their lives, the void can be difficult to fill. Some fill it with alcohol.
There is an organised system which prepares a gifted youngster to play for India. He is given technical, temperamental, tactical, strategic guidance as he graduates through the age-group tournaments. And then, in the early or mid-twenties, he plays for the country. It is the start of a wonderful ride.
If he is good enough, he plays on for a decade and a half, or more. But there is no similar organised system at the other end of his career. Unlike a couple of generations ago, today money is no longer a problem. But relevance is, self-esteem is, acceptance is. It is difficult to walk into a room and realise that you no longer turn heads. You might still sign autographs, but then might have to answer a young fan’s devastating question: “What’s your name?”
Some are happy to leave, to put the training and discipline behind them. Steve Redgrave, multiple gold winning British rower once finished with, said “I’ve had it. If anyone sees me near a boat they can shoot me.” But the more common feeling was expressed by the US jockey Eddie Arcaro: “When a jockey retires, he becomes just another little man.”
Dhoni is capable of walking away without looking back. He has other passions. But till he does, the question will follow him everywhere.
It is that time again — when a long-serving, much-respected cricketer has questions thrown at him, which, in summary is: isn’t it time to retire, buddy?
Years ago, Anil Kumble’s young son wore a T-shirt with the legend: It’s time to call it a day. It probably referred to his bed time, but those who saw it couldn’t help thinking it was a gentle reminder for his father, who, however, was smart enough to pick his time of departure.
Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who has quit Tests, is now being questioned over his relevance to the white-ball format. He would like to play the 2019 World Cup — and has the support of national coach Ravi Shastri — but spirit and flesh aren’t always in consonance towards the end of a sporting career.
Sport is a wonderful servant when you are young and fit. It will joyfully carry you to the top, unmindful of your occasional mistakes, with the promise that whatever happens there is always tomorrow. But it’s a terrible master as you grow older, demanding, unforgiving of lapses, reminding you constantly that your tomorrows will never match your yesterdays.
Ageing cricketers make a pact with time: let me make one more century, bowl my country to one more win; it doesn’t matter if the century is unrecognisable from the one I made ten years ago or if my bowling lacks bite. Just once more, and in gratitude I promise to quit.
But few players keep their end of the deal. Kapil Dev was carried around in the end like a grandmother everybody had to be kind to because she was responsible for all the family wealth. His goal? Richard Hadlee’s then world record 431 Test wickets. When past admiration combines with present pity, it is not a pretty picture.
When Brian Lara retired, he asked his fans, “Did I entertain?” For the average fan, it is impossible to understand or even imagine the feelings of a national hero, who once played as if there was no tomorrow but suddenly realises that there might not be a today even. I think it was Hemingway who said retirement is the ugliest word in the language.
Can you go easily from playing the world’s fastest bowlers, guiding your country to victories, having a whole stadium, perhaps a whole nation chanting your name, and being, to quote John Lennon, “more popular than Jesus Christ”, to an ordinary life of buying groceries and and attending PTA meetings while watching someone else’s name being chanted nation-wide? If you think about it, ex-cricketers are prime candidates for post traumatic stress disorder.
This, despite the easy familiarity which cricketers develop with the big issues that are usually pushed into the back of the mind. Cricket — in fact, all sport — prepares us for loss, failure, even death. A batsman dies symbolically every time he loses his wicket. Yet, there is always another innings, another match, another year which converts apparent finality into something temporary, something one gets over in time.
Retirement is different. The finality is final. Only so many ex-players can coach, commentate, write or get into administration to maintain their connection with the game. Others are pulled out of obscurity on special occasions, like the World Cup. Till 2011, players who had won India the 1983 World Cup were featured in the media every four years. Now they will have to share the spotlight with the Class of 2011, if at all.
Retirement can be traumatic. Few teams invest in a system that makes the player’s transition smoother and more natural. For most players, cricket is the only thing they know, and when that is gone from their lives, the void can be difficult to fill. Some fill it with alcohol.
There is an organised system which prepares a gifted youngster to play for India. He is given technical, temperamental, tactical, strategic guidance as he graduates through the age-group tournaments. And then, in the early or mid-twenties, he plays for the country. It is the start of a wonderful ride.
If he is good enough, he plays on for a decade and a half, or more. But there is no similar organised system at the other end of his career. Unlike a couple of generations ago, today money is no longer a problem. But relevance is, self-esteem is, acceptance is. It is difficult to walk into a room and realise that you no longer turn heads. You might still sign autographs, but then might have to answer a young fan’s devastating question: “What’s your name?”
Some are happy to leave, to put the training and discipline behind them. Steve Redgrave, multiple gold winning British rower once finished with, said “I’ve had it. If anyone sees me near a boat they can shoot me.” But the more common feeling was expressed by the US jockey Eddie Arcaro: “When a jockey retires, he becomes just another little man.”
Dhoni is capable of walking away without looking back. He has other passions. But till he does, the question will follow him everywhere.
Monday 7 March 2016
Emails can be a curse, but don’t blame them for the failings of company culture
Andre Spicer in The Guardian
If you ask anyone what the worst part of their job is, they are likely to respond with one word: email. Over the weekend, the inventor of this contemporary curse, Ray Tomlinson, died. Tomlinson came up with the idea while developing the Arpanet – the predecessor of today’s internet – in 1971. He and his colleagues were scratching their heads about what to do with their new invention, wherein one application eventually became email. “Don’t tell anyone!” he told a colleague. “This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.”
How did email grow from messages between academics to a global epidemic?
Today, email is part of the fabric of our lives. A recent survey of US employees found that they spent 3.2 hours a day dealing with work emails alone. Often the first thing we do in the morning is scan through our emails. Smartphones have made matters much worse. One study that tracked the introduction of BlackBerrys a decade ago found employees would compulsively monitor the device, often waking up in the middle of the night to check emails. When the researchers asked people why they did this, they said they wanted to appear professional and didn’t want to miss anything. A decade later, we check our smartphones on average 221 times a day.
Email is a huge source of distraction at work. One study found that when people check their email, it takes them an average of 64 seconds to switch their attention back to their original task. Workers in the study were distracted this way an average of 96 times a day. This means they spent more than 100 minutes every day being distracted by emails. Another study recorded even more disturbing results. After observing employees closely over a two-week period, it found that after checking their emails, people would do on average 2.3 other tasks before getting back to the activity they were originally working on.
This distractive quality of emails is worrying. Our ability to focus on a task not only determines whether we get things done at work, but also helps to influence whether we feel good about what we do. A recent study by researchers at Harvard Business School asked hundreds of people what they did at work, and whether they felt they had a good day. They found that the days people felt good about their work were those when they had an uninterrupted block of time to make progress on a task that they saw as important. Unsurprisingly, the constant stream of emails is often the biggest interruption to this goal.
Many of the problems we blame on email are not really down to the inbox
Some people have suggested that you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by email with the help of a few small changes. A typical piece of advice is to only check your emails a few times a day and turn off notifications. Unfortunately, some studies suggest email management techniques don’t decrease stress. If you get a lot of emails, then you are likely to be stressed out by the sight of a bulging inbox no matter how you manage it.
It might be easy to think if we got rid of emails, our workplaces would be much happier. Some firms stop you logging into your emails after hours. Others have started deleting emails that are sent while someone is on holiday. Although dreams of an email-free workplace might seem appealing, the reality would be unlikely to create miracles. Many of the problems we blame on email are not really down to the inbox. They are actually the result of the increasingly fragmented, highly pressured and insecure patterns of work.
A recent study by researchers at Stanford found that people who spend more time working on emails were in fact not always more overloaded and stressed. Instead, people confused emails with other work issues. They saw email as a source of stress, but they did not consider other more important issues in their working lives, such as long hours or a stressful company culture. This had a dangerous consequence. A few “productivity hacks” were seen as magic keys to reducing overload, but the reality is that only changing wider working practices would help.
If you ask anyone what the worst part of their job is, they are likely to respond with one word: email. Over the weekend, the inventor of this contemporary curse, Ray Tomlinson, died. Tomlinson came up with the idea while developing the Arpanet – the predecessor of today’s internet – in 1971. He and his colleagues were scratching their heads about what to do with their new invention, wherein one application eventually became email. “Don’t tell anyone!” he told a colleague. “This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.”
How did email grow from messages between academics to a global epidemic?
Today, email is part of the fabric of our lives. A recent survey of US employees found that they spent 3.2 hours a day dealing with work emails alone. Often the first thing we do in the morning is scan through our emails. Smartphones have made matters much worse. One study that tracked the introduction of BlackBerrys a decade ago found employees would compulsively monitor the device, often waking up in the middle of the night to check emails. When the researchers asked people why they did this, they said they wanted to appear professional and didn’t want to miss anything. A decade later, we check our smartphones on average 221 times a day.
Email is a huge source of distraction at work. One study found that when people check their email, it takes them an average of 64 seconds to switch their attention back to their original task. Workers in the study were distracted this way an average of 96 times a day. This means they spent more than 100 minutes every day being distracted by emails. Another study recorded even more disturbing results. After observing employees closely over a two-week period, it found that after checking their emails, people would do on average 2.3 other tasks before getting back to the activity they were originally working on.
This distractive quality of emails is worrying. Our ability to focus on a task not only determines whether we get things done at work, but also helps to influence whether we feel good about what we do. A recent study by researchers at Harvard Business School asked hundreds of people what they did at work, and whether they felt they had a good day. They found that the days people felt good about their work were those when they had an uninterrupted block of time to make progress on a task that they saw as important. Unsurprisingly, the constant stream of emails is often the biggest interruption to this goal.
Many of the problems we blame on email are not really down to the inbox
Some people have suggested that you can avoid feeling overwhelmed by email with the help of a few small changes. A typical piece of advice is to only check your emails a few times a day and turn off notifications. Unfortunately, some studies suggest email management techniques don’t decrease stress. If you get a lot of emails, then you are likely to be stressed out by the sight of a bulging inbox no matter how you manage it.
It might be easy to think if we got rid of emails, our workplaces would be much happier. Some firms stop you logging into your emails after hours. Others have started deleting emails that are sent while someone is on holiday. Although dreams of an email-free workplace might seem appealing, the reality would be unlikely to create miracles. Many of the problems we blame on email are not really down to the inbox. They are actually the result of the increasingly fragmented, highly pressured and insecure patterns of work.
A recent study by researchers at Stanford found that people who spend more time working on emails were in fact not always more overloaded and stressed. Instead, people confused emails with other work issues. They saw email as a source of stress, but they did not consider other more important issues in their working lives, such as long hours or a stressful company culture. This had a dangerous consequence. A few “productivity hacks” were seen as magic keys to reducing overload, but the reality is that only changing wider working practices would help.
Tuesday 12 August 2014
One in 10 do not have a close friend and even more feel unloved, survey finds
Study by relationship counsellor Relate finds a divided nation with many left without vital support of friends and family
Millions of people in the UK do not have a single friend and fewer still feel loved. Photograph: keith morris / Alamy/Alamy
Millions of people in the UK do not have a single friend and one in five feel unloved, according to a survey published on Tuesday by the relationship charity Relate.
One in 10 people questioned said they did not have a close friend, amounting to an estimated 4.7 million people in the UK may be leading a very lonely existence.
Ruth Sutherland, the chief executive of Relate, said the survey revealed a divided nation with many people left without the vital support of friends or partners.
While the survey found 85% of individuals questioned felt they had a good relationship with their partners, 19% had never or rarely felt loved in the two weeks before the survey.
"Whilst there is much to celebrate, the results around how close we feel to others are very concerning. There is a significant minority of people who claim to have no close friends, or who never or rarely feel loved – something which is unimaginable to many of us," said Sutherland.
"Relationships are the asset which can get us through good times and bad, and it is worrying to think that there are people who feel they have no one they can turn to during life's challenges. We know that strong relationships are vital for both individuals and society as a whole, so investing in them is crucial."
The study looked at 5,778 people aged 16 and over across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and asked about people's contentment with all aspects of their relationships, including their partners, friends, workmates and bosses. It found that people who said that they had good relationships had higher levels of wellbeing, while poor relationships were detrimental to health, wellbeing and self-confidence.
The study found that 81% of people who were married or cohabiting felt good about themselves, compared with 69% who were single.
The quality of relationship counts for a lot, according to the survey: 83% of those who described their relationship as good or very good reported feeling good about themselves while only 62% of those who described their relationship as average, bad or very bad reported the same level of personal wellbeing.
The survey, The Way We Are Now 2014, showed that while four out of five people said they had a good relationship with their partner, far fewer were happy with their sex lives. One in four people admitted to being dissatisfied with their sex life, and one in four also admitted to having an affair.
There was also evidence of the changing nature of family life – and increasing divorce rates – in the survey, which found that almost one in four of the people questioned had experienced the breakdown of their parents' relationship.
When it comes to the biggest strains put on relationships, a significant majority (62%) cited money troubles as the most stressful factor.
The survey also found that older people are more worried about money, with 69% of those aged 65 and over saying money worries were a major strain, compared with only 37% of 16 to 24-year-olds.
When it comes to employment, many of those questioned had a positive relationship with their bosses, but felt putting work before family was highly valued in the workplace.
Just under 60% of people said they had a good relationship with their boss, but more than one in three thought their bosses believed the most productive employees put work before family. It also appears that work can be quite a lonely place too: 42% of people said they had no friends at work.
Nine out of 10 people, however, said they had a least one close friend, with 81% of women describing their friendships as good or very good compared with 73% of men.
Monday 23 December 2013
There's a new jobs crisis – we need to focus on the quality of life at work
British workers face low wages, but are also being hurt by job insecurity, stress and the demand of long hours
David Cameron addresses workers at a factory in Britain. ‘The dominant free-market ideology has convinced Britons that consumption is the ultimate goal of life, and that their work is only a means to gaining the income to buy the goods and services to derive pleasure from.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AFP/Getty Images
With economic growth now picking up and unemployment inching its way downwards, things are beginning to look up for Britain's economy. Except that it does not seem that way to most people.
David Cameron may be in denial, but most people in Britain are experiencing a "cost of living crisis", as Labour puts it. Growth in nominal wages has failed to keep up with the rise in prices. With real wages predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility not to recover to the pre-crisis level until 2018, we are literally in for a "lost decade" for wage earners in Britain.
Worse, the crisis for British wage-earners is much more than the cost of living. It is a work crisis too. Take unemployment. For most people this results in a loss of dignity, from the feeling of no longer being a useful member of society. When combined with economic hardship, this loss makes the jobless more likely to suffer depression and even to take their own lives, as starkly shown by Sanjay Basu and David Stuckler in The Body Economic. There is even some evidence, published in the British Medical Journal, thatout of work people become more prone to heart diseases. Unemployment literally costs human lives.
On this account British workers have been doing badly since the financial crisis began. Though the unemployment rate has fallen, it still stands at 7.4%. Most people find this rate acceptable, if regrettable – but that is only because they've been taught to believe that full employment is impossible. We may not be able to go back to the mid-1960s and the mid-70s, when the jobless rate was between 1% and 2%, but a rate much lower than today's is possible, if we had different economic policies.
There is also the issue of job security. The feeling of insecurity is inimical to our sense of wellbeing, as it causes anxiety and stress, which harms our physical and mental health. It is no surprise then that, according to some surveys, workers across the world value job security more highly than wages.
On this account too, British workers have been doing very poorly. The rise in the number of zero-hours contracts is only the most extreme manifestation of increasing insecurity for the workforce. The 2010 European Social Survey revealed that a third of British workers feared losing their jobs – giving Britain, together with Ireland, the highest sense of job insecurity in Europe.
Then there's the issue of the quality of work. Even if you are getting the same real wage – which most British workers are not – wellbeing is reduced if your work becomes less palatable. It may have become more strenuous because, say, the company has just turned up the speed of the conveyor belt in the factory, as happened to Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Or the stress level may have increased because the company reduced your control over your work, as Amazon did when it decided to attach GPS machines to its warehouse staff.
Whatever form it takes, any deterioration in the quality of work can harm the worker's wellbeing. And this is what has been happening to many employees in Britain.
The European Social Survey also revealed that a quarter of British workers have had to do less interesting work. The 2012 Skills and Employment Survey revealed that British employees are now working with much greater intensity than before the crisis; the proportions of jobs requiring high pressure, high speed and hard work all rose significantly from 2006.
And then there is the issue of commuting. Britons spend more hours travelling to and from work than any other workforce in Europe. But to make thing worse, the quality of the commute has been deteriorating. The failure to invest in transport has meant more crowded and more frequently disrupted journeys in many regions of the country. Recent surveys have also revealed that more and more people are working while they commute, at least in part to cope with increased workload.
Once we take into account all these dimensions, it becomes evident that the "cost of living crisis" is only one – albeit important – part of a broader problem that is afflicting most people in Britain.
Despite the graveness of the situation, this wider crisis – perhaps we can call it the "general living crisis" – is not seriously discussed because over the last few decades we have come to neglect work as a serious issue.
During this period, most Britons have come to see themselves mainly – or even solely – as consumers, rather than workers. The dominant free-market ideology has convinced them that consumption is the ultimate goal of life, and that their work is only a means to gaining the income to buy the goods and services to derive pleasure from. At the same time, the decline of the trade union movement has made many people believe that being a "worker" is something of an anachronism.
As a result, policies are narrowly focused on generating higher income, while any suggestion that we spend money on making jobs more secure and work less stressful, if it is ever made, is dismissed as naive. Yet this neglect of work-related life is absurd when most adults of working age devote more than half their waking hours to their jobs – especially if we include the time spent in commuting and, increasingly, out-of-hours work. We simply cannot ignore this when judging how well we are doing.
If we are to deal with the "general living crisis" we need to radically change our perspectives on what is a good life. We need to accept that consumption is not the end goal of our life, and stop measuring our wellbeing simply on the basis of earnings. We need to explicitly take the quality of our work-related life into account in judging our wellbeing. Let's start taking work seriously.
Tuesday 12 February 2013
The injury that has no quick fix. Brearley on Depression
by Mike Brearley in Cricinfo
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Depression is a terrible thing. People struggle to describe it to those
who aren't subject to it: darkness, pointlessness, worthlessness; a
black dog, perhaps, or a nuclear winter of the soul. There are often
suicidal thoughts, which can dominate consciousness. Depressed people
can't concentrate, can't think, feel lethargic, guilty, worthless and
irritable. There may well be disturbance in sleep, and in eating and
digestion. Some turn to drugs or drink. Those in its grip often seem
addicted to suffering, helpless and hopeless. There is inadequate
understanding of what it is about, why it has taken such a hold.
And, of course, there's no reason why cricketers more than anyone else should be immune: the image of Marcus Trescothick
hunched up in a corner of an electronic-goods shop at Heathrow while
his Somerset team-mates prepared to board a flight to Abu Dhabi for a
pre-season tournament remains a haunting one even four years later.
For sportsmen and women - but in particular men - depression has often been a badge of shame, especially in a world that values confidence, courage and the supposedly manly virtues of strength and assertiveness. When Trescothick's return home from England's tour of India in early 2006 was first explained, it was put down to a virus, which later changed to a "stress-related illness", still the terminology often used when his condition is discussed today. By the time Mike Yardy left the World Cup in 2011, the ECB did feel able to cite depression as the reason. This was a step in the right direction, but the reluctance to be open in the first place about Trescothick's plight stems, I believe, from a long-held idea that we should be thick-skinned and resilient; that to admit fear or unhappiness would be to lay oneself open not only to ridicule but to being dropped from the side (the very word "dropped" hints at the link to early-life anxieties and the insecurities of the baby). We are not supposed to be vulnerable, certainly not to show vulnerability. We don't wear our hearts on our sleeves - particularly not we English.
The proliferation of coaches and backroom staff over recent years may,
paradoxically, risk making the situation harder. In the old days, it
would be one's closest team-mates to whom one might admit anxiety; they
are, after all, in the same boat, and may have a less judgmental or
executive response. But the willingness of players such as Trescothick,
Yardy, the outwardly chipper Matthew Hoggard,
the former Derbyshire captain Luke Sutton, and even that tremendous
competitor Andrew Flintoff to admit to their feelings may suggest change
at a societal level: depression is not quite the taboo it once was.
And, unlike Trescothick and Yardy - who both felt compelled to explain
their departures from tours - the others were under no obligation to
talk about their emotions.
There are two separable things here: the reluctance to admit to feeling
low; and the increasing willingness of players to overcome that
reluctance. On the one hand, in order to be a good sportsman one must be
tough, a quality which can be weakened by self-doubt and fear. Players
may therefore rightly be apprehensive about too much self-doubt. On top
of this, there may be a reinforcement of such apprehension from the
macho attitude of those who mock ordinary doubt. It is this that leads
to the shame. However, self-doubt can be a necessary resource leading to
work, improvement and, in the end, greater strength, both technically
and emotionally.
Keeping things bottled up can be disastrous. The New Zealand seamer Iain O'Brien, another sufferer who has felt able to go public
about his condition, alluded to this process when he admitted that the
potential consequences of saying nothing were far worse than the
supposed shame of opening up. "I don't want to be one of those
statistics," he said, referring to those cricketers - and there have
been too many - who have ended up killing themselves.
Several have now risked this feared ridicule and come out as depressed.
O'Brien himself was encouraged to do so after listening to a radio
programme on the subject, hosted by Michael Vaughan in 2011, in which
Hoggard said he felt like crying as he reached the end of his run-up
during his final Test appearance, in Hamilton.
The revelation was a poignant one: Vaughan was Hoggard's captain in
that game. Not long before my time as a player, bowlers were reluctant
to show emotion even when they took a wicket; Hoggard's openness was an
encouraging sign of the times. Equally refreshing has been the respect
accorded by the press to both Trescothick and Yardy. Despite inevitable
pressure from their editors to get the story, journalists have been
sensitive enough to allow the players to tell it in their own time. And
admitting the extent of the problem may be the first step towards
healing and repair.
So why the apparently growing need for healing and repair? Has
depression become more prevalent for cricketers? It may be that the
speeding up of life, the demand for quick fixes, the "taking the waiting
out of wanting" - as the 1980s credit-card advertisement so pithily put
it - make for more depression, not less. Such a culture seems to
require happiness, briskness, a capacity to succeed early, and in
overtly measurable ways. So cricket, with its waiting around, its lonely
trudge back to the pavilion, its longueurs, its rain-breaks, may offer a
testing task to the modern young man or woman.
But there must be more to it than that. For depression often arises in
relation to loss, especially loss that the person cannot, for whatever
reason, successfully mourn. It may be of a significant other; it may be
more a matter of long separations and loneliness; or it may be of
prestige, position or power, such as comes with loss of form, or decline
with age, or from a realisation that one is not the only pebble on the
beach. Cricket is no exception. Careers are short - few go on beyond
their late thirties, unless offered a juicy contract by a Twenty20
franchise. Since most professional cricketers are in it primarily
because they love the game, and since it has such intensities of effort,
elation and disappointment, the loss related to retirement is bound to
be painful. By the time you retire, your contemporaries in other fields
will have moved onwards and upwards, while you have to start afresh.
Most ex-professional cricketers will never again be so directly involved
in doing what they are passionate about. Even jobs which involve the
skills and knowledge of the sport - umpiring, coaching, commentating or
writing - may seem less intensely vocational than playing at a high
level, and few go into second careers which involve them as cricket did.
Shakespeare, naturally, had a phrase for this general truth about life:
"And every fair from fair sometime declines, by chance or nature's
changing course untrimmed." For the cricketer, nature's change of course
can be too early, too fast, and too damaging. Hoggard, remember, was
discarded by England's Test team virtually overnight during that tour of
New Zealand.
| Depression is an arrangement by which we keep from ourselves the degree of hostility we feel, turning it on ourselves, but in a way inflicting it on others indirectly | |||
Loss is harder to bear and more likely to turn into depression if one is
full of hatred. All losses evoke some anger: how dare you leave me! But
for some it is particularly strong; loss and separation may evoke
bitterness and anger such that in the imagination there are murderous
impulses to the person one misses. New Zealand's Lou Vincent, who was
dropped on more than one occasion, told the Independent: "I was
passionate about playing for New Zealand. But how many times can you be
let down by something that you love? It's like the love of your life,
she takes you back and she drops you. How many times can you have your
heart broken?" Since that person - or, in the case of Vincent, that
organisation - is often the very person one would turn to in a crisis,
the hostility towards them, and the ensuing guilt, leaves the subject
doubly alone. It is harder in such cases to mourn and move on.
Closely related to letting go of one's passionate activity is decline in
form. Failure is stark and public. Like a king deposed, the dismissed
batsman has to leave the arena; the bowler is merely taken off. The
batsman may have to wait days for another chance. One little error, one
good delivery, can result in total exclusion. And such outcomes are
reported instantly to the public. The starkness of a scorecard that
reads "Gatting b Warne 4"
tells the casual observer nothing about the drama of the moment. Luck
plays a big part. What's more, failures which may be a result of bad
luck eat away at one's confidence, making form not only mercurial and
uncontrollable, but self-fulfilling, the outcome of self-denigration.
There can so easily be a vicious circle.
One type of such destructiveness happens when the person is prone to
grievance: the glass is always half empty. Such a person is addicted to
suffering and to inflicting suffering; he focuses on what he doesn't
have, rather than what he does. He even prefers suffering - perhaps in
dramatic or histrionic ways - to making the best of a bad job, and
appreciating what he has. Depressed people feel passive, have no energy,
a damaged sense of self. They may trade on this, stoking up the role of
victim and, without realising, choose it over the ordinary struggle
involved in getting on with things. As Iain O'Brien perceptively put it:
"Wrapped up in it is how you value and see yourself."
Depression is more likely, too, for someone who at heart feels
fraudulent, which itself is related to the weight of expectation felt by
international sportsmen. Then - because that fraudulence may have been
repressed - the depression can be experienced as something alien to the
conscious self, a black dog, something that comes from outer space, or
from a blue sky. Reflecting on his swift demise, Hoggard told Vaughan:
"I was just thinking that the world was against me, that I'm rubbish,
that I can't do this anymore. It just got on top of me. The self-doubt
was huge."
People may be depressed at failure, but also at success. How often do we
see a tennis player lose his serve immediately after breaking his
opponent's? I think this is to do with guilt at triumph, at superiority.
We may, in hidden ways, gloat over our defeated opponent or upstaged
rival, and this may be so hard to bear that we contrive to fail rather
than risk it. We may also discover that success isn't the panacea we
have expected. No doubt post-natal depression has many causes, but one
might be: this is not a bed of roses!
This may be hard to see in sport, partly because, as spectators,
journalists and readers, our attention is so fixed on success; and those
who are consistently successful are better able to accept their
aggression and manage it well. But I am convinced, partly from my own
experience, that we often do draw back from success, reluctant to risk
gloating over a defeated rival who in the depths of our minds evokes a
father or a sibling. We may also identify with that part of the other
which wishes to knock the successful off their pedestals.
Depression, then, is an arrangement by which we keep from ourselves the
degree of hostility we feel, turning it on ourselves, but in a way
inflicting it on others indirectly. The depressed person is savaged by a
judgmental inner voice, whose punitiveness mirrors the often
unconscious wish to hurt the person felt to have let him down. He may
also displace his bitterness and anger from the lost person on to an
available target (an umpire, for example), like someone who comes home
from a humiliating day at work and kicks the cat.
So the cricketer has to tolerate loss of form - and with it, perhaps,
his place in the team, even his career - and the early ending of at
least one of the loves of his life. It can, as Lou Vincent implied, feel
like the end of a love affair, or like a sticky patch in a marriage;
loss of, or decline in, bodily skill can, like later mental decline, be
experienced as the surrender of the essential self. No wonder some find
it unbearable. As David Frith catalogued in Silence of the Heart,
published in 2001, no fewer than 150 professional cricketers had by
then committed suicide. And this must have been the tip of a much larger
iceberg of players who had been depressed but not gone to this
ultimate. During his career, the successful cricketer also spends a lot
of time travelling. Some find this separation from loved ones,
especially at great distances, troublesome. One reason why, on the
whole, teams do so much better at home lies here. The depression
suffered by both Trescothick and Yardy was exacerbated by being far away
from the people who knew them best and by the lack of a comparable
support network on tour.
Of course, it can be hard to know what is going on in people's minds.
But I was occasionally aware of a player being in difficulties, perhaps
depressed, especially on tour. And loneliness was often at the heart of
it. Some found big hotels in large cities anonymous and not conducive to
feeling safe and at home. By contrast, the communal experience of
staying in circuit houses or small hotels in India or Pakistan back in
the 1970s, usually outside the main cities, could create a feeling of
togetherness, humour and sociability that was much harder to find in the
five-star luxury of a modern big-city hotel; some would stay in their
rooms evening after evening, eating dinner on their own. Such patterns
could be hard to notice when there was no place of focus once we were
away from the dressing room, the manager's room, or the team bus, and
the habit could become more addictive if morale dropped lower. A vicious
circle of alienation and loneliness could ensue if no one became aware
of it.
Such scenarios also happen in England. There are county cricketers who
find it hard to be away even from their home town. One county captain I
knew made himself available for dinner with a team member who was prone
to depression during every away match. For some, loneliness is an
outcome of the sheer routine of socialising on a cricket tour. A certain
sameness can become limiting. Such people need other, perhaps more
culturally varied, stimuli. Sometimes, one needs to get away from the
close cricketing family.
During my playing days, tactful help and awareness of the problem
prevented it from getting a grip on a few individuals. Captains and
managers vary greatly in this important ability to be sensitive to
people when they become unhappy, or aggrieved, or bored. One of Doug
Insole's many assets as England manager was in this area. It would be
hard to write "sensitivity to potential depression" into the job
description of today's England coach. But ordinary human consideration,
concern for everyone in the party, and tact should be. And occasionally
that would extend to recognising that something more than ordinary
friendly management is required, that a player needs to get specialist
treatment, and may even have to leave the team for the time being.
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Despite all this, the sporting arena itself can provide an antidote,
since sport does permit aggression. Many people give the impression that
only on the field can they be thoroughly and spontaneously themselves,
though here again, this can make retirement, or absence through injury
or poor form, feel like a loss of the true self. But at least the
sportsman might be helped to avoid depression by the fact that sport has
aggression built in. What is not so readily permitted in its ethos is
envious rivalry with one's own team-mates. I think it's impossible not
to feel some envy at the successes of a colleague who is vying with you
for a place, and this can arouse guilt and shame. So aggression can be a
problem when one can't enlist it, and also when one can but with too
much or inappropriate venom or force.
Sporting teams are, as I've suggested, tough social groups, and the
effect can be amplified in cricket, where the participants spend so much
time with each other. Vulnerability may not be respected. Professional
cricketers can be quick and perceptive, often cruelly so. The dressing
room is not an easy place in which to hide. The rough and tumble, the
sarcasm and mockery, are mostly friendly, but can also become bullying,
the stuff of small boys in school playgrounds. In short, for some
cricketers, aggression causes problems rather than provides a safety
valve.
Perhaps what I have suggested in relation to both loss and aggression
could be summed up thus: what doesn't kill you - or make you depressed -
leaves you stronger. The tipping point can be hard to predict, perhaps
the outcome of chance and the presence or absence of the right person,
or the right piece of good luck, at the right time. Sport can indeed be
an antidote to depression. I remember a time when I was in turmoil in my
personal life; batting and playing, however difficult to do well,
provided an arena in which life's aims and objectives were for a while
simplified. It is not easy to hit a hard ball delivered with speed and
skill by a fellow professional, but facing it does, like imminent
execution, concentrate the mind.
And yet there is no escaping the profundity of depression - nor, as I
noted at the beginning, the difficulty among non-sufferers of grasping
it. As Trescothick said: "There's so much to it. People say: 'Pull
yourself together, move on.' I wish it was that simple. You try to
forget, but it takes over your whole life." Our understanding of this
crippling condition, especially in the sporting arena, may merely have
scratched the surface. And even when something is recognised and
acknowledged, it is still hard to know what's best for the sufferer.
Sportsmen want, above all, quick fixes, as with physical injury. The
trouble is, established patterns can take a long time to shift.
Mike Brearley played in 39 Tests for England between 1977 and
1981, captaining them in 31, of which 18 were won and only four lost. He
is a practising psychoanalyst
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