Happy Christmas from your editors...

Happy Christmas from us, under the very white Black Hill.

Depression has been in the News this Week: The invisible illness of War Survivors

Unfortunately depression has been with us for years and it is very much the quiet disaster waiting to happen. Although many would associate this illness with the pressures of the modern world covering marriage, career and financial failure the current publicity identifies plain old fashioned poverty. However, just having remembered the fallen from two World Wars I will just put a word in for the survivors of the many conflicts in the world that have been mentally scarred. In our parish Church there is a memorial plaque to the two men from the parish that died in the First War as well as a commemorative plaque listing the twenty two men who survived. How did those men cope with their memories and how many were left with the effects of Shell Shock such as depression? While the image of war veterans is that of the blinded or physically crippled those left with mental illness seem to have fallen from public view. It is a commonplace to hear people like myself talk of their veteran fathers as having said nothing of their experiences for the remaining years of their lives, except for the very occasional short reference. My father always referred to courgettes as Corselets, which many years after he had died I discovered was my Dad’s joke for a village on the Somme. He was one of the lucky ones to have coped whilet others were less lucky. When I was a bus-conductor one of my drivers, a tall man well over 6 feet would keep reaching up to imaginary controls above his head as though flying an aircraft. I never raised it with him but others told me that he had been severely tortured after being singled out because his height when a prisoner of the Japanese. Another hidden cost of War.

All of these horrible memories never become expectations by those who take us into wars and when there seems to be an unseemly rush to arms as now seems the case with the Iraq War, a selective memory makes it possible for politicians to sex up the documentation as well as indulge in a bit of ‘creative writing’ at the same time. Such was the rush nothing was planned for the reconstruction of a country which was about to suffer ‘Shock and Awe’. No doubt this would have been the tag line for Hiroshima and Nagasaki if the shallow thinking of the Bush regime had been available. Once the horrors of such events have been remembered together with the devastation of 9/11 then war against modern cities can be seen as genocidal madness. Multiply the Twin Tower images by a large number of city targets and you will soon get the picture. One can understand why those who prepare the next bombing campaign, or invasion or contemplate the use of nuclear weapons, prefer not to deal with consequences.

Prompted by the earlier post on Remembrance Joe, a correspondent with this site, has sent me a copy of a comment he left for Alistair Campbell after it became known the he was campaigning for more help for those suffering from depression. As I was reading it I could not help remembering that we are now approaching the first anniversary of the bombardment of Gaza and wondering what consequences in mental health terms we are yet to see there.

Dear Alastair,

I applaud your campaign to highlight mental illness and depression in society. As a child brought up by a depressed father I know first hand how mental illness devastates a family.

My father served in the Merchant Navy from 1939 to 1942 but was invalided out with “shell shock” when he was 21. Consequently he suffered from depression and insomnia all his life. As well as undergoing electric shock treatment he was prescribed barbiturates for 40 years to which he became addicted. When he died aged 61 in 1983 I found among his books one entitled Towards Diagnosis: A family Doctor’s Approach and I noted the well thumbed pages on the chapter entitled “Mental Disorders”. According to the book depression can be either endogenous or it can be psychoneurotic, ‘which follows from adverse circumstances’; my father’s psychoneurotic depression being the result of the horrors of the Atlantic and Pacific theatres of war.

In March 2003, exactly twenty years after my father’s death, B-52 bombers took off from Fairford in Gloucestershire to unleash “shock and awe” on Iraq, a policy defined by the Pentagon as “a simultaneous effect…to shatter Iraq, emotionally, physically and psychologically”. As the cruise missiles smashed into Iraq I remembered my father’s words: “Watch out when a generation who’ve never experienced war come to power”.


Given your obvious concern about depression, I wonder if you would be so kind as to read the following thoughts by mental health care professionals in Iraq today. Dr Majid al-Yassiri, at the Centre for Psychosocial Services in Iraq, writes: "Depression is at a higher rate than one would expect in a population this size - three times as high”, while Kholoud Nasser Muhssin, a researcher on family and children’s affairs at the University of Baghdad writes:“60-70 percent of Iraqi children are suffering from psychological problems and their future is not bright”; and Dr. Nadal al-Shamri, a paediatrician in Baghdad says: "I look into the eyes of children whose parents have been killed. The psychological trauma is so deeply ingrained that they may never lead a normal life."

Iraqi psychiatrists are seeing what they call a disturbing spike in mental health disorders, a problem compounded by Iraq's lack of mental health workers, facilities and services. Mental health care professionals suggest the number of untreated or under-treated people nationwide reaches into the millions and some like Bilal Youssif Hamid, a Baghdad-based child psychiatrist, write of an “"an immense and unnoticed psychological toll, with long-term consequences"; while Hadoon Waleed, a psychology professor at Baghdad University believes that since the war, “eventually, the entire population of Iraq will require some type of psychological healing”.

Milan Kundera wrote: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, and although you continue to enjoy a high profile and extraordinary career espousing high ideals about democracy and depression, there are many of us ordinary Britons who cannot forget the part you played in inflicting mental illness and psychoneurotic depression on a whole society.

Prejudice derived from Labels

Prejudice to my mind arises out of the persistent habit of people, even so called well educated and enlightened people, attaching labels to others they may not have even met. A modern tendency seems to be that only one side of the label will be read, if at all, and even that may be confined to the large print. Even where an individual attempts to give an indication of what sort of person they are by using recognisable terms, the utterance is quickly reduced to a text which neatly fits onto a small label. Any other subtleties or major distinctions let alone a civilised discussion as to what the individual might actually believe are cast aside. For example, should a person describe themselves as a Christian Anarchist, for the majority of people this will probably be seen as a joke.Declaring oneself a pre-Marxist English Socialist, or a Leveller, or come to that matter, a Marxist would induce puzzlement rather than mirth. To begin to understand any of this self styling the recipient will have to ask a series of questions and do a bit or reading. Much easier therefore to reach a conclusion along the lines that the person is either a nutter or a Commi and to move on to the next person in the canapé line. Much easier than putting your prejudices to one side to find out what it’s all about. Better to judge them and establish another new prejudice of your own.

Over the years I have had so many labels stuck on me it’s a wonder I can still get into off the peg clothes. I have in my time been called many things, my favourite being a ‘faceless anarchist’ which appeared in an edition of the old Daily Herald circa 1963. Whilst this no doubt appealed to a sub-editor the fact that it had more to do with abuse rather than any facts, and showed that it had great potential as a label which to most people would be very sinister. I wonder if the editor had bothered to read anything on the subject and new anything about the different schools. If he had done some reading he would have seen that there are probably as many schools as there were anarchists.

Some labels can be a good starting point for a discussion or a title for an essay about an individual, but they are nothing more. I confess that mislabelling often occurs from a failure to fully explain oneself, but more commonly from a misplaced belief that the listener will want further and better particulars. This ignores the natural laziness of people, ‘No thanks, I only need the label with the brand name, the fact that it is produced by slave labour is too complicated a burden to take on’. And so it is that all Christians, Moslems and Jews will be afflicted by the ignorance of those who should no know better and be lumped in with the worst and most easily targeted adherents of a particular faith. The will go for anarchism, communism, liberalism and socialism and conservatism. Try to combine ideas from both the religious and the political worlds and for some you might as well be trying to convince Dawkins that there is such a thing as a Religious Scientist!

The danger is of course that many people will jump to a whole bundle of conclusions which doesn’t matter if the person doing it is the average ‘Saloon bar Johnnie’. (I always rather like that label).Unfortunately he could also be the local Special Branch Officer or one of his ‘Blairite’ reincarnations who acts on the label and the erroneous conclusions thus drawn. Until recently this was not a major threat but with the increasing powers and power of the police jumping to conclusions can have serious consequences for the person so labelled. Being shot on a tube train for example.

Consider this true story. A friend of mine had always been interested in amateur radio and pop music and with the advent of the Pirate Radio stations he got to wondering what would be involved. He had a brief chat with a work mate as to what would have to be done. Firstly a boat would be needed to get beyond the three mile limit, a generator source would be needed for the valve based generator and a rather large aerial would also be needed. He also mused that such a station would be very useful to his mates who were all ‘Ban the Bombers’. A few weeks later he was called in to the local police station to be asked questions about a stolen police radio transmitter. Needless to say my friend had stopped his musings as soon as he thought about bobbing up and down in a small boat in the English Channel but enough had been said to ‘bring him to notice’ as the police euphemism goes. In some totalitarian systems today he would have executed by firing squad the next day without all the fuss of an interview.

It could of course not happen here? Of course it could because of peoples preparedness to add labels of convenience when their political ambitions so require it. That is why when someone starts to draw all kinds of conclusions from one piece of information about me, without even knowing me beyond the glancing canapé factor; I feel that I have learnt more about the labeller already, than he will ever be prepared to learn about me.