The injury that has no quick fix. Brearley on Depression

by Mike Brearley in Cricinfo

	"Snapping out" of depression isn't an option © Getty Images

 

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.

	Iain O'Brien felt bottling up what he felt inside would have had far worse consequences than opening up about his condition would © Getty Images Enlarge

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

Jacintha Saldanha: Duchess hospital nurse suicide note 'criticised hospital'

A suicide note left by the nurse found dead after the hoax call to the hospital treating the Duchess of Cambridge criticised fellow staff, it emerged tonight. 

By Gordon Rayner, and Andrew Hough in The Telegraph

11:45PM GMT 13 Dec 2012

The letter was one of three Jacintha Saldanha, 46, wrote before she was found hanging in her room at a nurses’ accommodation block at the King Edward VII Hospital in London last Friday.

Injuries to her wrists were also found, a coroner heard today. Attempts were made to revive the nurse but they were "to no avail".

Mrs Saldanha, from Bristol, had left three suicide notes for her family and had also written emails and made telephone calls that police believe might help shed light on what happened, the court was told.

Tonight, reports claimed that one note specifically addresses her employers and criticism of hospital staff despite officials previously maintaining they were fully supportive of the nurse. 

The Guardian reported that one note also specifically referred to the hoax call made by the two Australian radio presenters while a third detailed wishes for her funeral.

Two notes were found at the scene in central London and the third recovered in the nurse’s belongings.

The mother of two’s family has been given typed copies of the three handwritten notes by the police and has read the contents, the Guardian claimed.

It has been reported that the family did not know about the hoax call until after Mrs Saldanha’s death.
Today, during a five-minute hearing at Westminster Coroner’s Court, Det Chief Insp James Harman said Mrs Saldanha, a night sister, was found by a colleague and a security guard who called the emergency services.

DCI Harman told the court: “At this time there are no suspicious circumstances apparent to me in relation to this death.”

Detectives are talking to witnesses, friends, colleagues and Mrs Saldanha’s telephone contacts, DCI Harman said, in order to establish the circumstances that may have led to, and contributed, to her death.

Referring to the two 2 Day FM presenters who made the prank call, he added: “You will be aware of the wider circumstances in this case and I can expect in the very near future we will be in contact with colleagues in New South Wales to establish the best means of putting the evidence before you.”
Coroner’s officer Lynda Martindill said Mrs Saldanha’s accountant husband Ben Barboza, 49, had identified her body. The coroner opened and adjourned the inquest, with a full hearing listed for March 26 next year.

None of Mrs Saldanha’s family attended the hearing, but one of her colleagues was there. The coroner said: “Can I express my sympathy to you and to the family.”

Mrs Saldanha was a nurse at King Edward VII hospital, West London, where the Duchess of Cambridge was being treated for severe pregnancy sickness.

During the hoax call, the nurse transferred the DJs, believing they were the Queen and Prince of Wales, to a colleague who described in detail the condition of the Duchess of Cambridge during her hospital treatment for severe pregnancy sickness.

The Australian DJs, Mel Greig and Michael Christian, have both issued emotional apologies for her death and have since been moved into “safe houses” and given 24-hour bodyguards after receiving death threats.

It emerged last night that the broadcasters responsible for airing the call are to be officially investigated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which regulates radio broadcasting, in line with the Commercial Radio Codes of Practice.

Her family are set to receive more than £320,000 from Southern Cross Austereo, the parent company for whom the presenters work for.

The hearing comes on the day that Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) is to resume advertising on 2 Day FM. All profits from the adverts until the end of the year will be donated to a memorial fund established in aid of her family.

Keith Vaz, the Labour MP who is helping Mr Barboza, daughter Lisha, 14, and son Junal, 16, said a memorial service would be held in Bristol tomorrow, followed by one in Westminster Cathedral on Saturday. The hospital has offered bereavement counselling for the family in Bristol, which they have decided to take up, he added.

He did not attend the hearing but said of the family: “They are grieving in their homes, they are comforting each other and the community is comforting them, that is why they have not come.” Her body was released to her family in order to arrange her funeral in India.

A hospital spokeswoman tonight said no one in senior management knew what the contents of the notes left were but she said officials “were very clear that there were no disciplinary issues in this matter”.

Both the nurses involved had been offered “full support” and “it was made clear they were victims of a cruel journalistic trick,” she added.

 

A degree in life, not just cricket

The MCC university cricket system provides a chance to prepare for life after the game while pursuing a county contract

George Dobell

June 22, 2012

If the last few days have taught us anything, it is that there is far more to life than cricket. So while the outcome of the final of the British Universities and Colleges Cricket (BUCS) competition might not, in itself, seem particularly important in the grand scheme of things, such encounters actually carry much deeper significance. Indeed, you could make a strong case to suggest that the introduction of MCC University cricket (MCCU) is, alongside Chance to Shine, central contracts, four-day cricket and the adoption of promotion and relegation, one of the most positive developments in domestic cricket in the last 20 years.

Professional sport is a seductive beast. It sucks you in with whispered promises of glory and glamour and spits you out with broken dreams and an aching body. For every cricketing career that ends in a raised bat and warm ovation, there are a thousand that end on a physio's treatment table or in an uncomfortable meeting in a director of cricket's office. Many, many more stall well before that level.

And that's where the trouble starts. Young men trained for little other than sport can suddenly find themselves in a world for which they have little training and little preparation. Without status, salary or support, the world can seem an inhospitable place. It is relevant, surely, that the suicide rate of former cricketers is three times the national average.

The Professional Cricketers' Association does sterling work trying to help former players who have fallen on hard times, but prevention must be better than the cure, and a huge step on the road of progress has been taken in the form of the MCCU.

It has had different names along the way but the MCCU scheme was set up in the mid-1990s by former England opening batsman Graeme Fowler. Confronted with a choice between university and full-time cricket when he was 18, Fowler opted for university. It was a decision that provided the foundations for financial stability that extended far beyond his playing days. As Fowler puts it while watching the Durham MCCU team he coaches play Cambridge MCCU in the BUCS final: "Even a cricketer as successful as Alec Stewart had more of his working life to come after he finished playing. And not everyone can be a coach or a commentator."

The fundamental aim of the MCCUs is to allow talented young cricketers to continue their education while also pursuing their dream of playing professional cricket. It is to prevent a situation where they have to choose between the two. It should mean that young players gain the qualifications and skills for a life beyond cricket while still giving themselves every opportunity to progress in the game. Graduates will have enjoyed good-quality facilities and coaching while also maturing as people. It should be no surprise that several counties actively encourage their young players into the scheme as they know they will return, three years later and still in their early 20s, far better prepared for the rigours of professional sport and life beyond it.

It works, too. Just under 25% of England-qualified cricketers currently playing in the county game graduated through the system. Durham MCCU alone has helped develop more than 50 county players, six county captains, three England players and, most obviously, England's Test captain, Andrew Strauss, who credits the initiative as vital to his success. "It was at Durham University that I went through the transition of being a recreational cricketer to one who had the ambition to play the game for a living," he has said. The MCCUs have a mightily impressive record.

And, these days, it costs the ECB nothing. Not a penny. Instead the six MCCUs (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Cardiff, Leeds/Bradford and Loughborough) have, since 2005, been funded by the MCC. Each institution receives £80,000 a year and hopes to cobble together enough extra funding from sponsorship and other smaller grants to meet their annual running costs of around £130,000. You might well ask why the ECB - despite its annual income of around £110 million and rising - cannot find some more money for such an admirable scheme.

Indeed, it is interesting to reflect on the roots of the MCCUs. In the mid-1990s, the ECB (or the TCCB as it was known at the time) lost its Lottery funding as the Lottery Commission was concerned that the sport did not possess a complete development programme that incorporated higher education. The board, in panic, embraced Fowler's plans and appointed a couple of dozen regional development officers. Had the Lottery Commission not intervened, it is debatable whether the ECB would have had the foresight to act at all.

	Fowler never actually wanted the games to carry first-class status but worries that if such status is stripped the funding may disappear too. He also worries that the matches against the counties - key factors in the development of his young players - might go

There are detractors. When, in April, Durham MCCU were bowled out for 18 by a Durham attack that contained Graham Onions, among others, it provided fresh ammunition for those who say that such games should not hold first-class status.

It is a fair point. Fowler never actually wanted the games to carry first-class status but worries that if such status is stripped, the funding may disappear too. He also worries that the matches against the counties - key factors in the development of his young players - might go. Without those two facets, the system loses its attraction and the safety net disappears. The odd aberration in the first-class record might well prove to be a price worth paying for the benefits of MCCUs.

As it was, Cambridge MCCU, boosted by an innings of 129 by Ben Ackland, defeated Durham MCCU by 24 runs in the BUCS final in the scenic surrounds of Wormsley. Perhaps only four or five of the players on show have realistic hopes of enjoying a career in cricket - Surrey's Zafar Ansari is currently with Cambridge MCCU, though he missed the BUCS game, while Paul Best (Cambridge MCCU and Warwickshire), Chris Jones (Durham MCCU and Somerset) and Freddie van den Bergh (Durham MCCU and Surrey) are among those already affiliated with counties - but it was noticeable that at least one first-class county sent a scout to the match.

"I spent my whole professional playing career on a one- or two-year contract," Chris Scott, the Cambridge MCCU coach, says. "It probably made me a more insecure, selfish cricketer than I should have been. The MCCU scheme provides a safety net for players and helps them grow up and improve as players as people. It helps prepare them for life, whether that is in cricket or not."

"And it's not just about playing," Fowler adds. "Some of our graduates have gone to be coaches or analysts at counties. Some might have become solicitors, but set up junior coaching schemes at their local clubs. There is a cascade effect that people sometimes don't appreciate."

The quality of the head coaches is a vital factor. Scott, for example, is a philosophical fellow well suited to preparing his charges for the inevitable slings and arrows. He has needed to be. As Durham wicketkeeper he was, after all, responsible for the most expensive dropped catch in first-class history. Playing at Edgbaston in 1994, he put down Brian Lara on 18 and moaned to the slip cordon, "I bet he goes on and gets a hundred now." Lara went on to score an unbeaten 501.

Cambridge are the standout side among current MCCUs, and Scott's record in aiding the development of the likes of Chris Wright and Tony Palladino should not be underestimated.

The graduates of Durham MCCU are also lucky to have Fowler. Not just for his playing experience - anyone who scored a Test double-century in India and a Test century against the West Indies of 1984 knows a thing or two about batting - but also his life experience. For his easygoing good humour and mellow wisdom. He enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a player, but the formation of the MCCUs is surely his biggest contribution to the game.

George Dobell is a senior correspondent at ESPNcricinfo

An Ultimate Example of Cost Benefit Analysis

Brilliant pupil's 'logical' suicide




By Louise Jury



Thursday, 3 December 1998

A BRILLIANT schoolboy shot himself in the head after carefully calculating the benefits of life and deciding it was not worth living, an inquest was told yesterday.

Dario Iacoponi, 15, a pupil at the London Oratory in Fulham, west London, which is attended by Tony Blair's two sons, Euan, 14, and Nicky, 12, kept a diary of his philosophical thoughts on life in the two months leading up to his death. The Oratory is one of the top Roman Catholic schools in the country.



After weighing up the pros and cons, he decided to commit suicide and planned it meticulously. He taught himself to use his father's shotgun and worked out how to fire it with a wooden spoon. He then waited until neither of his parents was at home before carrying out the plan last month.



Dr John Burton, the West London Coroner, said it was clearly a considered process and Dario "came down on the side of suicide".



The inquest was told that the teenager was a brilliant pupil who had already passed six GCSEs at A* or A grades a year early. He played the violin and piano and was hoping to study law at Yale or Harvard.



But a darker side to his character emerged in diaries found by police. They spoke of his difficulties in coping with life, although there was little, or no mention, of any specific problem such as bullying.



Dario, an only child, was found by a 20-year-old lodger at the family's home in Ealing, west London. He had a shotgun by his side.



His father, Pietro, a translator, was in Switzerland on business, and his mother, Saleni, a teacher, was at an amateur dramatics class.



Inspector Colin Nursey, who found five diaries covering the last year of Dario's life, said there was a reference in them contemplating suicide. "He would not leave a note, he was very specific about that," he said.



Neither parent was in court, but Nadia Taylor, a family friend for the past 15 years, told the inquest that Dario was "always a very sociable and very friendly person". She added: "We are all very shocked. It all came as a surprise to us that he felt this way."



But Dr Burton said he could see no other conclusion than that Dario had taken his own life. "He has made it clear that he did so. That is the only verdict that I can return.



"He was quite stoical about it. He did not fear death. He decided on balance that life is not good and points out that the mathematics he has used are indisputable."



Dario's headmaster, John McIntosh, has said he was baffled and the school shocked. "He was an extremely able boy and he got on well with other pupils and his teachers and was extremely happy at school."

The callous cruelty of the EU is destroying Greece

Peter Oborne in The Telegraph

For all of my adult life, support for the European Union has been seen as the mark of a civilised, reasonable and above all compassionate politician. It has guaranteed him or her access to leader columns, TV studios, lavish expense accounts and overseas trips.

The reason for this special treatment is that the British establishment has tended to view the EU as perhaps a little incompetent and corrupt, but certainly benign and generally a force for good in a troubled world. This attitude is becoming harder and harder to sustain, as this partnership of nations is suddenly starting to look very nasty indeed: a brutal oppressor that is scornful of democracy, national identity and the livelihoods of ordinary people.

The turning point may have come this week with the latest intervention by Brussels: bureaucrats are threatening to bankrupt an entire country unless opposition parties promise to support the EU-backed austerity plan.

Let’s put the Greek problem in its proper perspective. Britain’s Great Depression in the Thirties has become part of our national myth. It was the era of soup kitchens, mass unemployment and the Jarrow March, immortalised in George Orwell’s wonderful novels and still remembered in Labour Party rhetoric.

Yet the fall in national output during the Depression – from peak to trough – was never more than 10 per cent. In Greece, gross domestic product is already down about 13 per cent since 2008, and according to experts is likely to fall a further 7 per cent by the end of this year. In other words, by this Christmas, Greece’s depression will have been twice as deep as the infamous economic catastrophe that struck Britain 80 years ago.

Yet all the evidence suggests that the European elite could not give a damn. Earlier this week Olli Rehn, the EU’s top economist, warned of “devastating consequences” if Greece defaults. The context of his comments suggests, however, that he was thinking just as much of the devastating consequences that would flow for the rest of Europe, rather than for the Greeks themselves.

Another official was quoted in the Financial Times as saying that Germany, Finland and the Netherlands are “losing patience” with Greece, with apparently not even a passing thought for the real victims of this increasingly horrific saga. Though the euro-elite seems not to care, life in Greece, the home of European civilisation, has become unbearable.

Perhaps 100,000 businesses have folded, and many more are collapsing. Suicides are sharply up, homicides have reportedly doubled, with tens of thousands being made homeless. Life in the rural areas, which are returning to barter, is bearable. In the towns it is harsh and for minorities – above all the Albanians, who have no rights and have long taken the jobs Greeks did not want – it is terrifying.

This is only the start, however. Matters will get much worse over the coming months, and this social and moral disaster has already started to spread to other southern European countries such as Italy, Portugal and Spain. It is not just families that are suffering – Greek institutions are being torn to shreds. Unlike Britain amid the economic devastation of the Thirties, Greece cannot look back towards centuries of more or less stable parliamentary democracy. It is scarcely a generation since the country emerged from a military dictatorship and, with parts of the country now lawless, sinister forces are once again on the rise. Only last autumn, extremist parties accounted for about 30 per cent of the popular vote. Now the hard Left and hard Right stand at about 50 per cent and surging. It must be said that this disenchantment with democracy has been fanned by the EU’s own meddling, and in particular its imposition of Lucas Papademos as a puppet prime minister.

Late last year I was sharply criticised, and indeed removed from a Newsnight studio by a very chilly producer, after I called Amadeu Altafaj-Tardio, a European Union spokesman, “that idiot from Brussels”. Well-intentioned intermediaries have since gone out of their way to assure me that Mr Altafaj-Tardio is an intelligent and also a charming man. I have no powerful reason to doubt this, and it should furthermore be borne in mind that he is simply the mouthpiece and paid hireling for Mr Rehn, the Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner I mentioned earlier.

But looking back at that Newsnight appearance, it is clear that my remarks were far too generous, and I would like to explain myself more fully, and with greater force. Idiocy is, of course, an important part of the problem in Brussels, explaining many of the errors of judgment and basic competence over the past few years. But what is more striking by far is the sheer callousness and inhumanity of EU commissioners such as Mr Rehn, as they preside over a Brussels regime that is in the course of destroying what used to be a proud, famous and reasonably well-functioning country.

In these terrible circumstances, how can the British liberal Left, which claims to place such value on compassion and decency, continue to support the EU? I am old enough to recall their rhetoric when Margaret Thatcher was driving through her monetarist policies as a response to the recession of the early Eighties. Many of the attacks were incredibly personal and vicious. The British prime minister (who, of course, was later to warn so presciently against monetary union) was accused of lacking any kind of compassion or humanity. Yet the loss of economic output during the 1979-82 recession was scarcely 6 per cent, less than a third of the scale of the depression now being suffered by the unfortunate Greeks. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 per cent, just over half of where Greece is now.

The reality is that Margaret Thatcher was an infinitely more compassionate and pragmatic figure than Amadeu Altafaj-Tardio’s boss Olli Rehn and his appalling associates. She would never have destroyed an entire nation on the back of an economic dogma.

One of the basic truths of politics is that the Left is far more oblivious to human suffering than the Right. The Left always speaks the language of compassion, but rarely means it. It favours ends over means. The crushing of Greece, and the bankruptcy of her citizens, is of little consequence if it serves the greater good of monetary union.

Nevertheless, for more than a generation, politicians such as Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Nick Clegg and David Miliband have used their sympathy for the aims and aspirations of the European Union as a badge of decency. Now it ties them to a bankruptcy machine that is wiping out jobs, wealth and – potentially – democracy itself.

The presence of the Lib Dems, fervent euro supporters, as part of the Coalition, has become a problem. It can no longer be morally right for Britain to support the European single currency, a catastrophic experiment that is inflicting human devastation on such a scale. Britain has historically stood up for the underdog, but shamefully, George Osborne has steadily lent his support to the eurozone.

Thus far only one British political leader, Ukip’s Nigel Farrage, has had the clarity of purpose to state the obvious – that Greece must be allowed to default and devalue. Leaving all other considerations to one side, humanity alone should press David Cameron into splitting with Brussels and belatedly coming to the rescue of Greece.

India named world's most depressed nation

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor in The Independent
Tuesday, 26 July 2011

One of the oddities of the human race is that people living in wealthier nations are less happy and more depressed than those in poorer ones. In France, the Netherlands and America, more than 30 per cent of people have suffered a major depressive episode, compared with 12 per cent in China, according to research from the World Health Organisation.

Overall, one in seven people (15 per cent) in high-income countries is likely to get depression over their lifetime, compared with one in nine (11 per cent) in middle- and low-income countries.

But there are exceptions to the rule. India recorded the highest rate of major depression in the world, at 36 per cent. It is going through unprecedented social and economic change, which often brings depression in its wake. The global study, based on interviews with 89,000 people, shows that women are twice as likely to suffer depression as men.

People in wealthier countries were also more likely to be disabled by depression than those in poorer ones. The findings are published in BMC Medicine. Depression affects over 120 million people worldwide. It can interfere with a person's ability to work, make relationships difficult, and destroy quality of life. In severe cases it leads to suicide, causing 850,000 deaths a year.

Why are we afraid of male sexuality?

We may have gone a long way towards liberating women, but male desire is increasingly seen as a problem

• 
• • Ally Fogg
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 July 2011 12.30 BST
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While older women are now widely eroticised, male equivalents such as John Major are attacked as 'old lechers'. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
Is there anything good to be said about male sexuality? That might seem a daft question. Apparently it brings a lot of pleasure and excitement to the lives of men and women alike, it's inspired some of the greatest art, music and literature through the ages and has played a fairly substantial role in sustaining our species and populating the planet. Nonetheless you'll need to search very, very hard to find any positive appraisal of male heterosexuality. Since the era of the permissive society and the mainstreaming of modern feminism, western society has gone a long way towards liberating women's sexuality. Younger women have, to an unprecedented extent, been encouraged to believe they can be as sexual as they like and to experience and express their desires as they wish. Even the age-old proscriptions on female promiscuity have been largely broken down, exemplified by the glorious flowering of the SlutWalk movement. Simultaneously, and perhaps not coincidentally, male sexuality has been increasingly seen as a problem. You can hear it in the gentle, dismissive mockery that says men are simple creatures who "only want one thing" or, at the extreme, outright vilification. The male gaze threatens, male desire is aggressive. Our primal instincts are pathologised with the jargon of gender studies. Righteous and necessary efforts to reduce sexual crimes have had the unwelcome effect of teaching generations of men that our sexuality can be dangerous and frightening. Don't believe me? Look back at the Bailey review into the early sexualisation of children, and the surrounding media hoo-ha. Leaving aside any concerns about the veracity and accuracy of the report itself (and I have plenty myself) it is striking that acres of print were devoted to the impacts of these social trends on girls, their self-esteem and body image; their developing sexuality; their safety and security. Barely a word was spoken about boys, beyond fears that they are being turned into beasts. Again and again the message came out: girls have problems. Boys are problems. And yet does anyone doubt that there should be concerns about how easy access to porn impacts upon boys' sexual development, their self-esteem, their body image or performance anxieties? It's not as if young men bask in perfect mental health and happiness – young men commit suicide at nearly four times the rate of young women, and sex and relationships rank high on their list of concerns. At the other end of the age range, sexually active older women are now widely eroticised (albeit often with a rather misogynistic undertone) as "cougars" or (forgive me) "Milfs" while their male equivalents are disparaged as dirty old men. Observer columnist Viv Groskop recently went further, opining about any older man who has sex outside marriage, even the mild-mannered old janitor John Major, saying "Unfortunately it's not against the law to be an old lecher. Maybe it should be. Or at the very least you shouldn't be rewarded with the highest office in the land." Perhaps the greatest concern for men and women alike should be the way male sexuality and sexual expressiveness balances on a narrow tightrope of acceptability. One step off the wire and you tumble into the realm of perversion. As feminist blogger Clarisse Thorn noted last year, any man who hits on a woman and gets it wrong risks being branded a "creep" – sometimes deservedly so, of course, but often for no greater sin than being insufficiently attractive or socially skilled, or having misread a perceived signal of invitation. I've never heard of a woman being stigmatised or disparaged for expressing an attraction to big men, rough men, geeky men or whatever. A man who expresses similar desires for women who don't conform to standard norms of beauty is a perv, a fetishist, a weirdo. All of these prejudices are rehearsed and reiterated by men and women alike, they reside in the intangible web of social norms, conventions and culture, but they can and must be challenged and changed. If we can begin to openly and joyously celebrate the positives to male sexuality, it might become easier for men to be happy and confident sexual partners, and in turn become better lovers, and sometimes better people. Male sexuality is no less diverse, complex and wonderful than women's or, for that matter, no more base, coarse and animalistic. Sure, most men might be slightly more likely to let our gaze linger on eye-catching curves, and slightly less likely to giggle about our lovers' proclivities with our friends, but in the grand picture women and men are surprisingly similar, in this respect as in so many others. Women have been entirely justified in asking that we blokes respect their rights, autonomy and wishes, that we respect them as sexual beings. It shouldn't be too much to ask for a little of the same in return.

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