No, we don’t always need counselling
WHEN I was a weekly newspaper reporter I remember interviewing a prominent local figure whose back-story included being buried as a child under tons of rubble during the Blitz. After nearly three days he was eventually dug out, dehydrated, half-starved and hours from a wretched, lonely death.
When I asked him about the experience he became restless and uneasy. “Look,” he told me, “I’ve learned not to talk about it to anyone outside my family, OK? It doesn’t help. It just brings it all back. My parents died in the same raid, you know. I don’t need to go there.”
I remembered that man this week when I read the eminently sensible comments from the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Sir Simon Wessely, urging health services and charities not to automatically assume “something must be done” for people caught up in the recent terrorist atrocities in Manchester and London. [He was speaking before the Grenfell Tower disaster.]
“All the research we have done, going right back to the Blitz and all the way forward to today’s terrorist attacks – all the really big traumas we’ve had – shows that
impoRtant to leaRn fRom youR mistakes
most of the time the way people get better is by talking to their own social networks.
“When something bad happens EVERYONE is in a state. If I interviewed them the day after I would probably diagnose every single person as having a psychiatric disorder.”
Sir Simon thinks overenthusiastic early counselling can often make things much worse for people caught up in atrocities. Being forced to re-live their experiences might interfere with “natural psychological defence mechanisms”.
My farmer grandfather saw horrors in the trenches of the First World War that he spoke about to me only once, on a walk through his Shropshire wheat fields one autumn afternoon. I could tell the disclosure somehow made him feel better. We went home, he made us hotdogs, and we watched Morecambe And Wise on the telly.
Talking to family and friends is probably the best first option. Of course professional counselling is vital if the former doesn’t help – but Sir Simon thinks we should offer a period of three months of “watchful waiting” before stepping in. He specialises in post-traumatic stress disorder. I reckon he knows what he’s talking about. MODEL and aspiring Olympic showjumper Kirstie Covele is a lovely girl with aspirational hopes and dreams who has completely screwed up. This week she was sentenced to two years in a young offenders’ institution after admitting being the getaway driver for a gang of luxury-car thieves.
Described in court as being of “respectable upbringing” the 18-year-old said she thought she was merely being paid petrol money to ferry the young men around.
Kirstie, learn from your mistakes. You obviously fell in with the wrong crowd. When you get out, start again. You’re very young. All is not lost. Nil desperandum.