Good stuff from Libby Purves:
The blame culture is debasing real distress
December 5 2016, 12:01am, The Times
Libby Purves
University dons counselled for Brexit stress and graduate suing Oxford over failing to get a first need a dose of Kipling
Where’s Kipling when you need him? It’s only 20 years since Britain voted If its favourite poem, to the horror of delicate souls who wanted something — well, less manly and more Manley Hopkins. Clearly the pre-Blair Britain of 1995 was still taken with the idea of keeping your head in triumph and disaster, watching a life’s work broken and building it up again with worn-out tools, while never breathing a word about your loss. Come to think of it, John Major was prime minister then: the man who after a humiliating landslide delivered my favourite election-night dawn moment. Arriving at party HQ he grinned like a boy and said: “Oh, all right, so we lost!”. Very Kipling, very cricket.
Few voting for the poem If in 1995 or since would have expected to live up to its granite determination, but admired it as an aim, accepting its message that we are stronger than we think: willpower can force “heart and nerve and sinew” to hold on through despair. Today we should rewrite it: “If you can shed your tears and speak your grievance / And tell yourself it’s surely not your fault; / If you can blame, and faint, and hire a lawyer / And spin your sadness into victimhood . . . ” .
At which point I give up on the iambics because no inspirational doggerel can gracefully end with “. . . then you’ll be a self-caring, emotionally intelligent, 21st-century citizen, well done, pet!”.
This gloom is brought on by two news items yesterday, though heaven knows never a day passes without new evidence of our enfeebled attitudes. The first is from Leeds and Nottingham universities, where dons (not students this time) are offered counselling and “wellbeing workshops” to deal with stress and anxiety. Not just the ordinary stress of work, money, family and personal sadness, which is fair enough: we all need a private hug and a rest sometimes, even when outwardly we carry on Kipling. This newly offered remedy is for psychological harm caused by the Brexit vote, and the dreadful fact that nobody is entirely sure what is going to happen (as if we ever could be).
The Leeds academics are told to expect the stages of grief: shock, denial, depression, bargaining, anger. They are warned about the perils of news bulletins: “If you receive a lot of news shocks, your body is likely to experience fear.”
Cue extreme irritation from anyone who has experienced actual grief. If you have sat by a deathbed or wept at a funeral recently you may, like me, have an unkind desire to take the pious leaflet writers of Leeds by the throat and shake them as a dog shakes a rat while barking: “Brexit is not personal, it is not necessarily catastrophic, it is not total war.” Wobbly people should not be soupily encouraged to act as if it was. Brexit is a nuisance, a fresh source of uncertainty in a world always uncertain, a turbulent bend in the fast-flowing river of history. But if you encourage people to claim “grief” at a political vote in a safe country — especially before the damn thing’s actually taken effect — you belittle the word. This is both terrible and tactless, given that all across the world there are thousands daily being given good reason to feel grief, sorrow, devastation, helplessness, hunger and terror. A lot of them are taking it with remarkable dignity. Moreover, if the authors of these university leaflets are fully qualified mental health professionals — I rather hope not, because I thoroughly respect real ones who treat real mental illness — they are degrading the whole profession’s credibility.
People claiming ‘grief’ at a political vote belittle the word
Still, at least any dons who take up the embarrassing offer will only be wasting half-days on full pay “enhancing their skills for resilience in response to the Brexit decision” or having mindfulness lessons (what kind of professional scholar needs lessons in concentration from some half-baked hipster guru?).
But an even less Kiplingesque modern habit is the determination to find somebody to blame, and sue them because your life is not fabulous. So flip a few news pages and meet Faiz Siddiqui, who graduated from Brasenose College, Oxford, many summers ago and didn’t get a first.
He says that poorish teaching pulled his grade down (which may be partly true, as there was a shortage in his subject).
Now, however — despite having qualified as a solicitor since — Mr Siddiqui extrapolates from Oxford’s possible deficiency. He has failed to become a top international commercial lawyer, so the chancellor and college must be sued for £1 million-plus for loss of earnings, because this self-pitying chap thinks that if he had got a first he would have automatically flourished, and not be suffering from “depression and insomnia” 16 years later.
Life is full of shocks and disappointments. Parents, teachers, spouses, friends and fellow voters will let you down from time to time, or just disgracefully fail to see things your way, the bastards! We all suffer sometimes from idiots, foes, and a woeful lack of appreciation.
But as Kipling says, the only way is to be better: “. . . being lied about, don’t deal in lies, / Or being hated, don’t give way to hating”. Have some dignity, have a sense of humour, thank God that you’re not in Aleppo or Mosul or a terminal ward. Not least because those who really are often behave pretty stoically. Psychiatry is for real sickness; lawyers are for real injustices. You don’t reach for either just because life’s a bitch.
