Dorothy Rowe
Psychologist and authority on depression who wrote several bestselling books on the subject
DOROTHY ROWE, the psychologist, who has died aged 88, was considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on depression; though her belief that the condition was not an illness to be treated with drugs sparked controversy, thousands subscribed to her model of self-help, advanced in several bestselling books.
Arriving in Britain from Australia just as the NHS was beginning to invest in psychological treatment, in 1972 Rowe began work establishing a new department of clinical psychology in Lincolnshire. At that time, the prevailing view was that depressed people would be better off treated with drugs or, in severe cases, electroconvulsive therapy.
The longer she spent in contact with her patients, however, the more convinced she became of the restorative power of conversation. “I realised that if you give somebody the opportunity to just sit and talk about themselves, and if you are interested in what they’re saying, then over time you gradually build up a picture of how that person sees themselves and their world,” she said. “I would be there to offer alternative interpretations.”
This experience led Dorothy Rowe to define depression in terms of “mental distress”, brought about by a serious life event. Strikingly, she rejected the idea of a genetic explanation for complex selfdamaging behaviour. In 1978 she published Choosing Not Losing: The Experience of Depression, the first of more than a dozen books detailing her work with patients and the strategies that had helped them regain control over their painful emotions.
Often addressing readers in the second person (“You have become an expert in guilt. Every action or omission of an action you can interpret as a cause for guilt”), she set out the patterns of thinking that lead to depression.
Sufferers, according her own theory, were reacting to some personal disaster in their lives, for which depression was their own mental punishment. While antidepressants might provide sufficient distance from emotional distress to enable someone to think critically about its origins, they could not offer a cure. Rather, recovery began once a sufferer understood how they had constructed their own damaging worldview, and had the resources available to challenge it.
However, Dorothy Rowe’s refutation of the biological model did not blind her to the very real pain experienced by those with depression. She recalled meeting patients too immobilised by fear to leave their bedrooms, who relied on pills or alcohol to cope. Her most famous book on the subject, Depression, which ran for several editions, was subtitled The Way Out of Your Prison, reflecting the cruelty of the experience that was all the worse for being, on some level, self-enforced.
“You are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer,” she wrote. “It is this peculiar isolation which distinguishes depression from common unhappiness.”
She knew whereof she spoke; for, though never a sufferer of depression herself, it had shaped her life from the very earliest days.
She was born Dorothy Conn in Newcastle, New South Wales, on December 17 1930, sharing a birthday with her sister, who was six years older. “She has never forgiven me,” Dorothy Rowe wrote in 2007, reflecting on a decidedly troubled childhood. While her sister resented the new arrival, her depressive mother, Ella, made it clear that Dorothy was a poor replacement for the boy that she had aborted three years previously. If Dorothy expressed opposition to a particular viewpoint she would be accused of lying. Any perceived or actual misdemeanour would entail long silences and physical withdrawal; if the two of them were alone, Ella would fly into rages and threaten to kill them both. Her father, John, who worked as a commercial traveller for a food firm, was seldom willing to intervene. At Newcastle Girls High School she was an unhappy but accomplished student, performing well enough in her exams to win a place at Sydney University, where she read Psychology. After graduation she went into teaching, became an educational psychologist and married a lawyer called Edward Rowe in 1956. Their son, also Edward, was born the following year. However, the marriage was soon under strain. A lung problem, present since Dorothy Rowe’s childhood and ignored by her parents, led to major surgery, and soon afterwards she learnt that her husband had fathered a love child; he suggested that Dorothy should become his mistress instead.
They divorced in 1964, and three years later she left for Britain, taking their son with her, and signed up to do a PHD at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis, which she completed in 1971, was on “Psychological aspects of regular mood change”.
Her subsequent time practising in Lincolnshire was one of personal and professional freedom. “Nobody supervised me,” she recalled. “It was really a matter of having the time to sit and listen to the person.” Following the publication of Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison, which won the 1984 Mind Book of the Year Award, she gave up seeing patients in order to write full-time.
She later moved to London, and had visiting professorships at Middlesex, London Metropolitan and Sunderland universities. In 2015 she returned to Australia, where she lived in Sydney.
In addition to more than 15 books, Dorothy Rowe contributed articles to a variety of mainstream and scientific publications, expressing – among other opinions – her opposition to cognitive behavioural therapy as a “quick fix” for the nation’s mental health, and her rejection of the idea of an “addictive personality”. Among her most personal works was My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend (2007), a study of sibling relationships that made frequent reference to her own stormy upbringing.
Why We Lie (2010), which analysed the psychology of untruths – whether they be everyday fibs or mass deceptions perpetrated by corrupt governments and power brokers – was both persuasive and grimly funny. In between sideswipes at public figures ranging from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Jeremy Clarkson, Dorothy Rowe wrote of the damage that parents can do to their children through declaring a monopoly on the truth.
“I would like to see my ability to understand why people do what they do as a mark of some kind of special intelligence or virtue,” Dorothy Rowe reflected, “but I have to admit that it arises from a need to be vigilant and know what the danger is.”
Her son survives her.