George Mikes was a Hungarian-born journalist and humorist. Most well-known for his 1946 book “How to be an alien”. This is a comic commentary on the English and their relationship with foreigners. Sometime in the 1980s, I remember a piece he wrote for a Sunday newspaper in which he said (I paraphrase) “I had a happy childhood, my sister had an unhappy childhood and yet we had the same childhood.”
Now that I have more free time, I find I am writing letters to the council, to government departments via my MP and reviewing commercial services online to share my (superior) opinions as to how things should be done or could be improved. I have already said to friends I should change the font on my devices to Comic Sans and green in order to signal to the recipients what they are dealing with.
How subjective is research?
I am also taking part in more bipolar-related research to contribute to further understanding. Of course my experience is just that – my experience, and because bipolar centres around the brain/mind, my impressions and views are by their very nature, subjective.
Yesterday I completed a questionnaire as part of one of these research projects. It is the same survey that I’ve completed several times this year for other projects and asks about my life including:
- The education level of my parents
- The age of my parents when I was born
- Have you ever cohabited?
- Do you have children?
Nature, nurture?
All of these are indisputable. It then goes on to ask questions which are much harder to answer, even on a Lickert scale. There is so much more to say than ticking a box.
- I felt loved
- People in my family hit me so hard that it left me with bruises or marks
- People in my family called me things like “stupid” ”lazy” or “ugly”
- I didn’t have enough to eat
- I had to wear dirty clothes
And the answer to all these questions could be yes and no. And there is a context to that. There may have been moments when the answer was one or the other.
Mark Twain wrote something of this: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
It takes a village to raise a child
When I was growing up in the 1960s slapping children round the legs, whether as a warning or punishment was not so uncommon. “Stop crying before I give you something to cry for”. That does not mean that on one or more occasions it left a mark that was more than physical. We had a set of Children’s Britannica, with some accompanying parent guides. I remember reading one that said hitting children once they became teenagers was ill-advised. That was then.
These days on occasion when I am out and about, I find myself drawn to distracting a crying child with a dad joke or similar – it takes a village to raise a child – parents need a helping hand sometimes…
My family consciously or unconsciously had a culture that included bawdy Edwardian parlour games at gatherings, and an acknowledgement that “Boys are best” – tough luck if you ain’t one – along with an ambivalence to cleverness. So it was as a young teenager I was told by someone, not a relative, but someone close to my family, that I was “not like them”. This kind of othering was very harmful for me – a single, passing comment, but I have a long memory.
Does mental illness run in families?
Also in this survey, or perhaps a different one, it asks about the family incidence of mental illness and again I have never been told by a clinician that I have Bipolar I (I was diagnosed before this classification was used). Similarly members of my family have not had a formal diagnosis of mental illness as far as I am aware, but I’m pretty certain that my Grandad had depression, if not bipolar, and there are other examples of mental illness dotted about the family tree, although not formally diagnosed. If the prevalence is that 1 in 4 people experience a mental health problem in any given year, it’s true of most families I’d guess.