They lay down in awe and fear,
Of what their love was bringing near.
They gazed into each others eyes
And so did tantalise.
They lay down to gaze into
the eyes and soul of one who’s true.
They gazed until ,when overcome,
They were united into one.
Their souls and bodies were conjoined,
And thus their hearts were well entwined;
As honeysuckle on the walls,
In joy’s sweet arbours does grow tall,
Their loving lips and eyes and hands
Gave pause to time’s soft flowing sands.
and as they touched and gazed and longed,
The birds sa
ng out in glorious songs.
Which is me and which is you?
Are we one or are we two?
I give you all myself today,
So this shall be our way
As Mary stood by the fridge at bedtime, a can of fly killer brought by dear Annie fell off the top and struck her red,orange and brown framed spectacles on the top.The heavy can hurt her nose I hope nobody thinks a man has done this. she said to Emile Well,I didn’t do it ,he mioawed cheerfully It must be an Act of God, she mused.I hope there is no bruise Ah,well.Are you sleeping on my bed,she asked Emile No,I think I might go out roaming Looking for frogs,she teased him I may return, depending on the weather Suddenly Annie knocked on the door Are you all right, she asked anxiously? Why, what is wrong,dear? Your nose is blue It’s that fly stuff, it fell onto me! I’m terribly sorry.We must put it somewhere else. Choose between me and the flies,Mary joked. You are my best friend.I will not bring this stuff again I am off to bed,Mary cried.Let me lock the door behind you Annie ran out, and stole The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk.She wanted to discover why Mary liked Wittgenstein.And it covers a dangerous and terrible era in human history from the end of several Empires to the Second World War and beyond I wonder what the children of Dr Mengele and the other dreadful criminals who committed torture and atrocties would feel like when they learned the truth abou their fathers So Annie is embarking on some serious study while Mary is reading Woman and Home magazine.What is causing this strange change? In bed ,Mary gazed at an article on ” How to dress well when you are over 80″ Alas all the clothes were expensive.Very Does it matter what I wear, she pondered? I suppose people do judge by appearances, she concluded.But which people? Maybe I shall dress in one colour from now on.But not black. Blue is a good colour.From now on if I buy new clothese, they must be blue Maybe just a blue silk scarf is enough to make a vivid impression Mean while Annie is crying over “The Duty of Genius” because at least two of Wittgenstein’s brothers took their own live and his sisters were almost captured by the Nazis who had to be bought off by the family wealth unlike Freud’s sisters So what are we complaining about in the UK, she asked herself before saying some almost forgotten prayers. And wished her husband were there to hold her in his arms.At least one of her husbands would have been most welcome
But there is another way to see this crisis – one that doesn’t place it firmly in the realm of the medical system. Doesn’t it make sense that so many of us are suffering? Of course it does: we are living in a traumatising and uncertain world. The climate is breaking down, we’re trying to stay on top of rising living costs, still weighted with grief, contagion and isolation, while revelations about the police murdering women and strip-searching children shatter our faith in those who are supposed to protect us.
As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife.
If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.
In efforts to destigmatise mental distress, “mental illness” is framed as an “illness like any other” – rooted in supposedly flawed brain chemistry. In reality, recent research concluded that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of the brain. Ironically, suggesting we have a broken brain for life increases stigma and disempowerment. What’s most devastating about this myth is that the problem and the solution are positioned in the person, distracting us from the environments that cause our distress.‘I’m glowing’: scientists are unlocking secrets of why forests make us happy
Individual therapy is brilliant for lots of people, and antidepressants can help some people cope. But I worry that a purely medicalised, individualised understanding of mental health puts plasters over big gaping wounds, without addressing the source of violence. They encourage us to adapt to systems, thereby protecting the status quo. It is here that we fail marginalised people the most: Black people’s understandable expressions of hurt at living in a structurally racist society are too often medicalised, labelled dangerous and met with violence under the guise of “care”. Black people are more likely to be Tasered, sectioned, restrained and over-medicated than anyone else in our mental health services today.
The UK could learn a lot from liberation psychology. Founded in the 1980s by the Salvadorian activist and psychologist Ignacio Martín Baró, it argues that we cannot isolate “mental health problems” from our broader societal structures. Suffering emerges within people’s experiences and histories of oppression. Liberation psychology sees people not as patients, but potential social actors in the project of freedom, valuing their own lineages, creativity and experience, rather than being forced into a white, eurocentric and individualistic idea of therapy. It directly challenges the social, cultural and political causes of distress through collective social action.
This framework makes complete sense when we hear that the pandemic in the UK has affected poor people’s mental health most. Does it mean wealthy, privileged white men don’t experience suffering? Of course they do. We’re still learning about the complicated ways these structural issues affect our everyday lives. For example, how the pressures of individualism and capitalism may lead to isolation and substance abuse, or how colonial violence towards immigrant families plays out within homes and on bodies.
Let me be clear, I’m not saying people in distress should be out there on the picket line. Pain can be debilitating. But those of us who are supporting people in distress, such as mental health workers, have a key role in social transformation. Social action is the medicine that relieves people’s personal and collective distress.
Instead of trying to change “mindsets” in therapy, we need to change race- and class-based hierarchies, the housing and economic system. Universal basic income has psychological benefits, and recent studies show how it improves the “crises of anxiety and depression”. As a clinical psychologist, some of my most powerful work has been not in the therapy room but in successfully advocating for secure housing for, or working in the community with, queer, black and brown facilitators in organisations such as Beyond Equality, to prevent gender-based violence. The network Psychologists for Social Change shows us a practical imagining of this work. We also need social change that is preventive, such as investing in young people and community-led services such as healing justice london and 4front. They work to shift trauma in marginalised communities through building social connectedness, social action and creativity, towards futures free of violence.
None of this is to dismiss the value of one-on-one therapy (that’s part of my job, after all). But therapy must be a place where oppression is examined, where the focus isn’t to simply reduce distress, but to see it as a survival response to an oppressive world. And ultimately, I’d like to see a world where we need fewer therapists. A culture that reclaims and embraces each other’s madness. Where we take the courageous (and sometimes skin-crawling) risk of turning to each other in our understandable, messy pain.
Meaningful structural transformation won’t happen overnight, though the pandemic taught us that big changes can happen pretty quickly. But change won’t happen without us: our distress might even be a sign of health – a telling indicator of where we can collectively resist the structures that are hurting so many of us.
Dr Sanah Ahsan is a clinical psychologist, poet, writer, presenter and educator
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
… as you’re joining us today from the UK, we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.
Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence. Reporting like this is vital for democracy, for fairness and to demand better from the powerful.
And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it.
Every contribution, however big or small, powers our journalism and sustains our future.Support the Guardian from as little as £1 – it only takes a minute. SingleMonthlyAnnual£6 per month£12 per monthOther
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But there is another way to see this crisis – one that doesn’t place it firmly in the realm of the medical system. Doesn’t it make sense that so many of us are suffering? Of course it does: we are living in a traumatising and uncertain world. The climate is breaking down, we’re trying to stay on top of rising living costs, still weighted with grief, contagion and isolation, while revelations about the police murdering women and strip-searching children shatter our faith in those who are supposed to protect us.
As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife.
If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.
In efforts to destigmatise mental distress, “mental illness” is framed as an “illness like any other” – rooted in supposedly flawed brain chemistry. In reality, recent research concluded that depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance of the brain. Ironically, suggesting we have a broken brain for life increases stigma and disempowerment. What’s most devastating about this myth is that the problem and the solution are positioned in the person, distracting us from the environments that cause our distress.‘I’m glowing’: scientists are unlocking secrets of why forests make us happy
Individual therapy is brilliant for lots of people, and antidepressants can help some people cope. But I worry that a purely medicalised, individualised understanding of mental health puts plasters over big gaping wounds, without addressing the source of violence. They encourage us to adapt to systems, thereby protecting the status quo. It is here that we fail marginalised people the most: Black people’s understandable expressions of hurt at living in a structurally racist society are too often medicalised, labelled dangerous and met with violence under the guise of “care”. Black people are more likely to be Tasered, sectioned, restrained and over-medicated than anyone else in our mental health services today.
The UK could learn a lot from liberation psychology. Founded in the 1980s by the Salvadorian activist and psychologist Ignacio Martín Baró, it argues that we cannot isolate “mental health problems” from our broader societal structures. Suffering emerges within people’s experiences and histories of oppression. Liberation psychology sees people not as patients, but potential social actors in the project of freedom, valuing their own lineages, creativity and experience, rather than being forced into a white, eurocentric and individualistic idea of therapy. It directly challenges the social, cultural and political causes of distress through collective social action.
This framework makes complete sense when we hear that the pandemic in the UK has affected poor people’s mental health most. Does it mean wealthy, privileged white men don’t experience suffering? Of course they do. We’re still learning about the complicated ways these structural issues affect our everyday lives. For example, how the pressures of individualism and capitalism may lead to isolation and substance abuse, or how colonial violence towards immigrant families plays out within homes and on bodies.
Let me be clear, I’m not saying people in distress should be out there on the picket line. Pain can be debilitating. But those of us who are supporting people in distress, such as mental health workers, have a key role in social transformation. Social action is the medicine that relieves people’s personal and collective distress.
Instead of trying to change “mindsets” in therapy, we need to change race- and class-based hierarchies, the housing and economic system. Universal basic income has psychological benefits, and recent studies show how it improves the “crises of anxiety and depression”. As a clinical psychologist, some of my most powerful work has been not in the therapy room but in successfully advocating for secure housing for, or working in the community with, queer, black and brown facilitators in organisations such as Beyond Equality, to prevent gender-based violence. The network Psychologists for Social Change shows us a practical imagining of this work. We also need social change that is preventive, such as investing in young people and community-led services such as healing justice london and 4front. They work to shift trauma in marginalised communities through building social connectedness, social action and creativity, towards futures free of violence.
None of this is to dismiss the value of one-on-one therapy (that’s part of my job, after all). But therapy must be a place where oppression is examined, where the focus isn’t to simply reduce distress, but to see it as a survival response to an oppressive world. And ultimately, I’d like to see a world where we need fewer therapists. A culture that reclaims and embraces each other’s madness. Where we take the courageous (and sometimes skin-crawling) risk of turning to each other in our understandable, messy pain.
Meaningful structural transformation won’t happen overnight, though the pandemic taught us that big changes can happen pretty quickly. But change won’t happen without us: our distress might even be a sign of health – a telling indicator of where we can collectively resist the structures that are hurting so many of us.
To return to the plant analogy – we must look at our conditions. The water might be a universal basic income, the sun safe, affordable housing and easy access to nature and creativity. Food could be loving relationships, community or social support services. The most effective therapy would be transforming the oppressive aspects of society causing our pain. We all need to take whatever support is available to help us survive another day. Life is hard. But if we could transform the soil, access sunlight, nurture our interconnected roots and have room for our leaves to unfurl, wouldn’t life be a little more livable?
Dr Sanah Ahsan is a clinical psychologist, poet, writer, presenter and educator
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
… as you’re joining us today from the UK, we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent.
Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence. Reporting like this is vital for democracy, for fairness and to demand better from the powerful.
And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it.
Every contribution, however big or small, powers our journalism and sustains our future.Support the Guardian from as little as £1 – it only takes a minute. SingleMonthlyAnnual£6 per month£12 per monthOther
ContinueRemind me in Novemberhttps://6bd2070874e8cb4fdc70397ff773cf80.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html?n=0
Professor Rosa Benchez was in the staff-room at Middle-Jeans-Rise University collecting her mail and having coffee at 9.30 am on Monday morning after running 10 miles on her rowing machine.It rowed and she ran How are you? enquired Danny her friend and colleague in the School of Learning. I’m feeling very insignificant today,she replied. quietly.I am giving a lecture on Semiotics and it’s those French people who use such idiotically complicated language.We all know that an object like a bird has to have a name before we can talk about it. Well.,said Danny, I thought you’d just say,”In the pink” as usual to my greeting, so you must feel bad.Does each bird have to have its own name,he continued wonderingly? Well,it depends on the context, she informed him coolly and enigmatically. First,if we are looking at birds as a class or set, they just need a name like “bird”.It could have been anything but somehow it was” bird” that occurred like x is used in algebra.We may just study one bird then we give it a number to identify it.That is its name Danny gazed at her beautiful bosom under her semi-transparent pink blouse.Did she dress like that on purpose to provoke men or did she feel so deep;y insignificant that she didn’t realise anyone at all could see her purple lace bra and her green silk and wool thermal vest with matching briefs, though fortunately, the latter were invisible from outside sp Danny,I’m talking to you, she called sympathetically.Why are you quiet? I dunno, the world famous biologist replied.Maybe I am not quite here today. You too,she murmured quietly ,like the stream in Little Walsingham by the ruined Abbey. Are you anxious about your lectures,she enquired softly and caringly? No, not really ,he said tearing his eyes away from her revealing clothing. Is there a biological reason why a scholar like Rosa would wear this unusually exciting outfit. The truth was more mundane.Rosa bought her clothes in Sales and was indifferent pr unaware to the way men might feel seeing her like this.After all,did she notice if they wore deep purple underpants that showed above their low rise jeans or gold coins on a chain with matching long earrings? She only looked at their faces while they naturally were drawn to see what outfit she was wearing that day. and what her new lingerie looked like. What did her partner feel?Had he left her for a woman who dressed in thick beige blouses and stockings with grey skirts? To dress well takes time and Rosa did not give it enough although so far she had not lectured in a string bikini nor an evening dress she had found in a jumble sale. These French people have made a fortune by re-labelling well know things like birds as “signified” and the word “bird” as signifiers! It reminded her of a sociologist who got a large grant to see if women were more scared walking under a railway bridge at night if there were no streetlight there The conclusion seems obvious.And that was what they proved “scientifically” Statistics,numbers, that’s what journals want. She went to her lecture room and turned on the lights.Eighty students gazed at her happily.She was almost the best and funniest lecturer in the place. I put 30 handouts in Dr Bevan-Finnish’s drawer for the seminar but someone has stolen them, she said menacingly.I write these handouts myself and if they do not appear by noon ,nobody will get another one for the entire semester With that, she turned to the blackboard and defined ” the signifier” Well,it’s better than taking the insides out of chickens on a conveyor belt she thought silently as she moaned on while the students took copious notes or wrote limericks on kleenex tissues with their own blood After lunch Rosa was in the staff room talking to some women colleagues when Dr Bevan -Finnish came over,blushing dark red as he approached.He said the handouts were back in his tray Why is he so shy, Rosa asked herself,not realising it was her outfit that provoked his blushes.And that is a very important thing to remember… whoever we are with affects us so a bold man like Bevan-Finnish seemed shy when with Rosa whereas with another more sensibly dressed woman he was quite at ease. There may be a few men who are not affected this way but not many otherwise the human race would die out and then where would we be?Nowhere! What a pity nobody tells a lady like Rosa the facts of life so she goes about causing sinful longings in her colleagues quite oblivious.Even some of the women were getting affected but nobody dared to tell her.At least it drew students to her lectures and who knows, they might have learned some Linguistics as well.And it kept them off the streets.Which streets nobody knows.Yet!
How my heart sings 