Britain On The Couch

Oliver James is a celebrity psychiatrist with a private practice amongst the upper echelons of London's professional classes. I've no doubt his work in prisons, hospitals or wherever brings him into contact with people we would rather see dead than want to make better. He's well-read and knows his pop culture. I've no doubt he's a good man and convivial company. This much is obvious from his book Britain on the Couch.

His thesis is that between the 1950's and to the present, Britain has become a more uncertain, anxious, depressed and rancourous place. His reason is that we have weaker roles, especially around the family and marriage, and we make and are forced to make by television and magazines, far more comparisons with other people - which usually doesn't make us feel good about ourselves. Britain is a low-seratonin society, serotonin being a chemical that makes the body work better and is generated by being in higher-status roles, the lack of which makes you depressed and injections of which do wonders for previously glum vervet monkeys. Being low-income doesn't help much either, and he notes that especially since the 1980's the low-income got less and the better-off got more. Low income depresses, and depression lowers serotonin.

I'm not disputing the figures and I'll assume the anecdotes are real. What I'm disputing is the significance of those figures and anecdotes, and the idea that it was better in the 1950's. Or 1850's. Or classical Athens. Many of the anecdotes turn out to be about people who are suffering from alcoholism, drugs or psychiatric problems - either their own or someone else's. Once booze, drugs or mental illness creeps into the gene pool, you have to assume those are the primary causes of any odd behaviour, rather than anything more literary or cultural. Many of the studies are based on observation and self-reporting via questionnaires. The reliability of these can be judged by the fact that they invariably show - when used to ask - that men have more sexual partners than women. Everyone buys this one, along with the one about one in three marriages ending in divorce (because there are about 100,000 divorces a year, and 300,000 marriages). Anyone who buys either of these for more than five minutes - as James does - should stay out of the policy analysis business. The increase in divorce since the 1970's does not argue that people are more picky about marriage. It argues that they always were bad judges of good partners, married too young and changed too quickly and, of course, just plain got tired of each others' acts - only after the Divorce Reform Act 1969, they could escape their bad judgement and misery more easily.

James cites a number of studies suggesting that people who have suffered a serious misfortune make themselves feel better by comparisons with people even worse off: they amy have AIDS, but at least they don't live in Chad. But that's not why people say these things. When two people with the same misfortune meet and talk, how they talk, what they say, the emotions they can share, are totally different from what they can say - and want to say - to the ignorant who haven't been there and don't know. The "at least I'm not in Chad" comment is a stock response - like saying you're happy when that nice man with the clipboard asks you. It's also a brush-off, a way for the knowing to avoid having to deal with the ignorance of the unknowing, and for the unknowing to signal that they aren't handing out any sympathy. More speech than you think is to close off unwanted conversations, and more conversations than you might think are unwanted. There is no point talking to people who haven't been there and don't get it - you may as well be talking Uzbek in Marseille.

Citing pop culture is always tricky, because more and more, pop culture is about itself. There is a lot of gender rancour in pop culture - especially women being rude about men - but that doesn't mean women are actually being ruder about men, it means editors like it and comedians can make money from it. Throughout history a greater number of women than we think have disliked men and held them in contempt - it's just that now they can get a newspaper column out of it. What's changed isn't the reality, it's the Daily Mail.

There's something about the Fifties, if you were born in them, which both James and I were. The decade is preserved in black-and-white photographs, a time when working men wore suits on a Saturday, trains were drawn by steam engines, the roads were often empty, the lorries were small, the shops local and women in long coats went walking with toddlers in duffel coats. There's an innocence in those photographs - not a moral, social, sexual or personal innocence, but an economic one. Most people worked for the big nationalised industries or long-established family firms. Outside inexcusable practices around the docks and farms, most jobs for the lower-middle classes and above were going to last as long as they wanted. And if they got fed up with the boss, they could get another one. And of course the money was good and there was less to spend it on. That's the innocence of the 1950's. If it was so wonderful, the Sixties would not have happened. But it wasn't, and they did.

If you're in the psychiatry business, it must be tempting to want to know why people fall apart and why so many of the people you see are so miserable and confused. A decent person would want to help them and a psychiatrist dealing with ordinary cases of neurotic unhappiness must believe that they can help. But it isn't quite like that. Everyone has cracks in their soul, either from birth or being brought up in Britain by British parents. You do. If you are lucky, nothing will happen to you that makes those cracks turn into a break. If it does, you will find yourself as a client of Oliver James - if you're lucky. If it doesn't happen to you, it will happen to someone else. James is always going to have clients. The number of unhappy, crazy and downright evil people (these are technical terms of folk psychology) may change, but it never becomes zero. Most people lead lives that vary between ordinary unhappiness and moderate joy, never quite reaching the heights or plumbing the depths. They never meet Oliver James and so they don't figure in his world-view.