Blame your parents -- it’s all their fault

YOU could be forgiven for thinking that Oliver James has got it in for parents, even though he is one himself. The clinical psychologist has in the past gone public about the shortcomings of his own mother and father, both psychoanalysts, in his bestseller They F*** You Up. And he extended that reference to Philip Larkin’s pessimistic poem in a follow-up on childcare, How Not to F*** Them Up.

Now comes his latest volume, Not in Your Genes. Its stark conclusion is that, whatever mental health issues youngsters may have, it’s mostly due to parental maltreatment, rather than any genetic inheritance. And this, he says, can be unconscious. As a parent, it is one of the most chilling books I have read.

James, 63, looks shocked when I tell him this. “That’s the last thing on earth I intended,” he says.

But there is an added sting in the tail of the book. The crucial period for damaging your children, it suggests, is up to the age of three.

James says he wrote the book because he became very aware of all the evidence about the Human Genome Project, which startled him. That evidence is that when it comes to conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, genes play little or no part.

Many of us know loving and long-suffering parents, I suggest, who devote themselves to the care of troubled offspring. Is he really saying such parents have caused those troubles? “Definitely,” he replies.

“[But] I have no time for blame. Insight is all. Blaming your parents gets you nowhere.” Any redemption, he suggests, will be addressing the symptoms — through therapy and drugs — rather than the causes.

“I am not ruling out physical causes for psychological traits. There’s a whole business about the long-term effects of what happens in pregnancy that will, perhaps, one day turn out to be hugely important.

“However, with psychosis — whether it be bipolar or schizophrenia — there is just a mass of evidence that something has gone horribly wrong in the family.

“Maltreatment can be everyday,” he says. “I went blundering into [parenting], just like everybody else. But, I have become gradually more conscious of how awful it can be for them to be my children.” — © The Daily Telegraph, London