Who is responsible for the near-destruction of 1,400 horrifically abused children in Rotherham?

 The rapists themselves, of course.

We can blame brass-necked officials like Shaun Wright who missed the opportunity to be respected as an honourable man and is still refusing to resign. Or the upper echelons of South Yorkshire Police Service and Social Care, who defensively refuse to imagine their role in little girls being dowsed in petrol.

We can blame managers in Social Services who were much more concerned with avoiding litigation than protecting children. We know some managers disciplined and sidelined individuals who attempted to do their jobs properly, and suppressed reports drawing attention to the abuse. We can blame those workers who joked and laughed with the girls’ abusers, believing 24 year old men to be ‘boyfriends’ of 15-year-old girls.

We can blame a culture within the police force of treating vulnerable children with contempt, dismissing them as ‘undesirables’ and ‘not worthy of protection.’

We can blame the “PC Brigade” that army of unidentified hand wringers who apparently care more about placating non-white groups than abused 11 year olds.

We can blame the staff in Rotherham schools, churches, children’s homes, GP’s and A&E’s who knew when individual children had been tortured, beaten and violated and did nothing about it.

We can blame local authorities for distributing money to vanity projects rather than local services, and the government for cutbacks that hit poorer families hardest.

We can blame those parts of the media even now naming this a ‘sex scandal’ when it’s a child abuse, child exploitation, child trafficking and paedophile scandal.

Terrible, dreadful things have happened in Rotherham but be in no doubt that child rape and child trafficking is happening in your town. When you drive home through the night-time streets just outside of your town centre, you’ve seen those bloody feral children running wild. Dope-smoking little thugs and sluts. They’re costing the taxpayer an arm and a leg. Who’s going to have to pay for their council flats and their child benefit when they get pregnant at 14 and their dole when they refuse to work?

When Martin Narey, the previous chief executive of Barnardo's warned that if Baby P had not been killed the child would have become a ‘feral parasitic yob,’ he came under a storm of criticism. How could anyone talk about The Little Angel like that? How could Narey defile the memory of an Innocent Baby? We don’t want to engage with the complexity of real lives, we like to keep our sentimentality and our prejudices simple.

When you drive home tonight, report those children to the police and to social services. When you get that report, follow it up. You are not the only member of the public, police officer, social worker, teacher, doctor, play- or support worker, counsellor or nurse who feels that it’s hopeless to refer these children on, that nothing will be done to help them. If you don’t report, you can guarantee that nothing will. When we all take our responsibility for the care of vulnerable children seriously, the people with genuine power to effect change might take notice.

If you google 'Carnival' endless pictures of women catching a cold turn up. You won't see pictures like this one on the news, but for me this is one of the most fascinating parts of Carnival - Jouvert (a contraction of jour ouvert or 'daybreak') sees a small number of people walking Carnival route the wrong way round at dawn, throwing flour and paint at each other and along the route. I find this magical and inspiring, a real demonstration of the subversive and chaotic, a kind of secret ritual that allows and boundaries the following two days. 

Carnival is The World Turned Upside down, a time when some people pretend to be what they're not, things that are illegal at other times are now permitted, and feasting and revelry are indulged. Carnival is not, despite what it may seem, an advert for Top Shop or an opportunity for a politician to make a terrible arse of himself, it's a reminder that racism still exists and that magic remains possible. In the UK it's a farewell to Summer and a blowout before Autumn. Go out and have a ball.

Depression has been under the spotlight this week after Robin Williams’ suicide. It’s great that despair – lets call it what it is rather than a medicalised euphemism - and mental ill-health are finally coming out of the dingy little spare room closet for an airing and wonderful that people who are suffering depression are having their voices heard. Talking about how mental ill-health can feel shameful, that there is little parity of esteem (a nice, tight, catchphrase) between the care offered to people with physical illness and people with mental illness is temporarily refreshing. Politicians and policy makers are saying worthy things about how dreadful this and that are and how they’ll make things better.

They're being economical with the truth.

People with chronic illnesses, physical and emotional, are being driven to suicide by the same ministers now saying how awful depression is, something that was recognised by the DWP back in 2012. It's only going to get worse.

It’s not just people at the end of their financial tether that are killing themselves. Successful men, you are killing yourselves at a catastrophic rate.

“We have a series of assumptions about suicide that are explicit and implicit, and they make a toxic mix,” Powell says. “One is that suicide is undertaken by failures: people who have no friends, who spend all their time in their room, who have something wrong with them. Are you going to talk about people close to you who might have taken their own lives if that is what others are thinking? If you say your son has taken his own life, then that means saying he’s a failure too. But when you look at the people who do this it’s quite the reverse - it’s often true that they are admired, well-loved and talented - though they might push themselves extremely hard.”

Take a look at this article:

"The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, is not humanly interesting. . . . In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree." Lewis Mumford, 1951

Unhappy women generally medicate and endure, unhappy men kill themselves.

I’m no fan of the Good Old Days when we all lived in each others pockets and did our socialising at the communal launderette or men-only club, but when as a nation we took the decision to vote for personal prosperity people began getting more sad. Now we're reaping that whirlwind. People who bought their council houses find their adult children have nowhere to live. When we all demanded cheap washing machines it was inevitable that manufacturing was going to go abroad. When we decided to treat each other as economic units it can’t come as too much of a surprise when we are also treated not as individual people but as things that make other things function. Like a widget. 

Counselling falls into this trap too. Far too many counsellors join in the scroungers and strivers nonsense. Too many believe that success is a client returning to work, even in the face of a foundational belief that our job is to support the client in discovering their own meaning for their own life.

For a great many people depression is a sign that your life has lost any meaning. A lot of people believe that having a high status job title, two posh cars, a big house and garden owned by the bank, and some nice clothes will mean their life is complete, but if they ever attain all that life remains just as hollow and meaningless as ever.

Look to the US which is 5 or so years ahead of us. If you want that life then do nothing, it’s on its way. You may be interested to learn that the American Dream has been totally debunked: if it were true then immigrant women would be sipping champagne in a swimming pool on a Learjet.

If you’re depressed take yourself seriously. As well as going to the GP and doing all the stuff you already know helps depression, think about what you want to do with your life. It may be that you want to spend more or less time with your children. You might want to spend more time awake, relaxed and communicating with your partner or you might want to get far away from them. You might regret having got on your bike like you were told to at 18, to move far away from your family, who are getting old. You may have to sell your house and move somewhere smaller (If you move out of London this won't be a problem.) you may have to take a significant wage cut. But you really are more than your job title and bank balance.

You don’t need to come to counselling to discover this – though it can be helpful to get some support as you explore your fears, desires and options. But you do need to recognise that something is wrong, understand that you don’t have to do what’s expected of you – even if it’s just you who’s putting you under pressure – and then dare to think of what you genuinely want to do with the rest of your life.

Campaign Against Living Miserably is a charity specifically for men under pressure.

The media is buzzing with commentary and opinion on Robin Williams’ suicide some of it fairly shocking. “Williams was selfish,” “What a stupid thing to do,” “Didn’t he know how much people loved him?”

People who haven’t experienced clinical depression can have no idea what depression is like. When it’s bad it’s a life sentence in an underground cell with no door or window. When depression is just ticking over you know that life is a sea of endless pain and loss and sorrow and that whilst there are little shallow islands of not-misery you know that continuing to live means having to continue swimming through pain and loss and sorrow.

Williams suffered bipolar disorder and had a long relationship with addiction. Other people have suffered bereavements, traumas, illnesses and disappointments that they just can’t recover from. Some people go through the world with one less layer of protective psychological skin than other people, that’s just the way they’re made. Anti-depressants can definitely help some people and other people are not helped by them. The same can be said for therapy: drugs and therapy can work well to begin with and then their efficacy wears off.

Imagine having an illness that isn’t visible, that can’t be seen on an x-ray or CAT scan or be identified in a blood sample. You can understand feeling miserable if you’re made redundant or a relationship ends or someone close to you dies but when those feelings spiral downward into depression that’s less easy to understand. You’ve read about exercise and diet being really good for depression, so why can’t they come out for a run or even a walk for goodness sake? Why can’t they just eat better?

Being around someone who is depressed can be tough. It’s difficult to understand why a depressed person just can’t clear their head, take a deep breath and see that life isn’t so awful – there is sunlight and beauty, joy and pleasure in the world there for the taking. What makes it particularly difficult is that to a great extent this is true, it’s just that for someone who is depressed it’s not. People who don’t have depression can aim to leave this painful place they’ve found themselves in, people with depression can do all the exercise and healthy eating and find god and all the rest of it, and some of it may help but for a significant number it won’t make much of a difference.

You might be surprised to know how many people seem completely fine but think about death every day.

Therapists have a duty to break confidentiality when someone discloses that they are acutely suicidal. That means that if someone says, “Thanks Clare, it’s been great but this is our last session. I’ll be killing myself later today,” or “I’ve taken an overdose,” I am obliged to call the clients GP and possibly an ambulance. That seems sensible to me. And there are some people who have become exhausted from trying to keep their head above the sea of misery. They’ve taken the drugs, had all the therapy, made the lifestyle changes, love their family and friends, feel guilty about the trauma they know they’ll leave behind them and the sheer weight of having to bear life is greater than everything else.

That’s what happens to a lot of people who get cancer, MS, Motor Neurone Disease, osteo- or rheumatoid arthritis or any other chronic condition. Many of us can understand why some of those people make their way to Dignitas because we can see how their illness has reduced their enjoyment of life to nil. That’s what many people with chronic depression feel and not all the love, care or sense of duty can make a difference.



RIP Robin Williams



A link to helpful resources for people who are suicidal is on my homepage, including the Maytree Sanctuary for the Suicidal. If you want to commemorate Williams, consider donating to them.

A good part of my working week is spent in other people’s offices where I've noticed that there are little signs telling people how to use a microwave, what the fridge policy (a fridge policy!) is, reminders not to steal and that in the event of a fire they must leave the building to avoid being burned to death. In one office there were 14 full colour, laminated notices telling people to come to work on time, not to pour boiling water on toddlers, to avoid spreading infectious diseases, the sink policy – yes, really - that time in the kitchen was being monitored, and that staff attendance was under review.

This in an organisation that "doesn't have the money" for a box of tissues.

I'm a big fan of Health and Safety legislation, it really is necessary to tell people that hot water is hot, but Health and Safety is not the issue in an organisation that feels it necessary to watch how long individuals are spending in a kitchen.

The private sector doesn’t seem to have the same issues. People there somehow know how to use a fridge without needing a policy. It's not that people who work in the private sector are any brighter than people who serve the public, far from it. It’s more that initiative is more likely to be nurtured rather than treated with suspicion and organisational vision tends to be wider than what’s happening in a microwave.

Work in the public and voluntary sectors is too often reduced to a Kafkaesque model of not-work where flair and imagination are perceived as suspect and personally threatening. In the private sector innovation, ideas and positive critique are more likely to be welcomed.

I've worked in places where little children bellow and cry too much while stressed workers scream nursery rhymes at them. The staff have obviously gone through training and got appropriate qualifications. The staff ratios are legal and the toilet-cleaning rota is managed very well, everything is fine on paper and that's all that matters. Sickness rates and staff turnover are costing an arm and a leg but the funders are content with the reports sent to them. Funders tell organisations what they expect to hear and then organisations repeat it back to them including, incredibly, sending them ‘case studies’ instead of saying, “No, we will not send you a case study because that would be entirely inappropriate.” Instead, organisations make case studies up.

It's true that many people are put into positions of responsibility that they are not worthy of and they can have a profound effect on the people working under them. It's an irony that those people who don't feel anxious about being competent at their job, who believe they're indispensable to the organisation, are more likely to be so comfortable at work that they feel no need for personal development. Similar problems arise when a leader isn't confident enough to lead but just keeps doing what they're told rather than saying, "Why do we need to be told not to scald children? What's going on here?"

Writing a fridge policy is not a good use of anyone's time. Any organisation that needs a fridge policy has far, far greater problems than manky yoghurt.

What a week it’s been. Hellish stories and images coming out of Gaza day after day; the upsurge in anti-Semitism; endless body-parts being found (finally) in east Ukraine after disgusting politicking, hold-ups and looting; simmering hints about child abuse in high places; no let up in news stories of poverty on our doorstep which only seems to be getting worse; and now, Ebola.

In the face of so much terrible distress we quite rightly re-evaluate our own sorrows. Our annoyance with an internet provider or not having enough money to go away for the weekend becomes a bit #FirstWorldProblems

There’s something to be said for putting things in perspective. Being grateful is a genuine therapeutic tool and people who cultivate it are generally more happy, content and resilient than people who don’t. It’s a practice that we can all integrate into our lives just by writing down three positive things about the day before going to bed, or joining the 100 Happy Days meme on social media.

Mindfulness is also useful and reminds us that right here, right now, things are OK and we can take 10 long seconds to breath, be calm and bring a cool mind to our problems.

All that said, there is no hierarchy of pain. Your unhappiness is no less important that anyone else’s unhappiness. With or without war there will always be people more and less unhappy than you. Finding the balance between knowing that your problems may not be all that bad or being aware that something is beginning to affect your life and the lives of the people around you, can be difficult. It can be particularly difficult if your partner is chronically ill or has a very stressful job or is looking after an elderly parent: your stress just doesn’t compare to theirs.

Your stress is still very worthy of being heard and addressed. Paradoxically, if we address these feelings rather than believing they’re contemptible we become better able to manage them and to manage the way we are with the people who are living in ways we fear to contemplate. There’s a lot of relief in just saying a taboo sentence like, “I’m sick of never seeing my wife because she works in these high-risk areas,” or “Part of me is jealous of the attention my very ill mother in law gets from my husband.”

Yes, other people’s pain can indeed be more urgent and more important than your own, but there isn't a limited amount of care in the world, even though it can often feel as if there is. Your unhappiness is important for the very reasons we judge other peoples distress to be important. Just because you’re a human being.