Please listen to this interview about post natal depression in response to the terrible case of a woman who killed her children and is now in a psychiatric hospital under indefinite care.

“An awful lot of women get fobbed off, patted on the head, ‘It’s just the baby blues, Mummy.’ ”

In many ways therapy exists because day to day interaction permits very limited conversations. Upbeat enthusiasm is rewarded and anything else very quickly becomes annoying, the supremely normal complexity of individual life takes too much time and thought to engage with until all we’re capable of is soundbites. Mothers experience this very directly being expected to enjoy our children totally and unconditionally – we’re permitted some mild opinions about being tired but chocolate and wine have become the remedy for all tired women.

Part of my day today will be spent checking the handouts and Powerpoint for a presentation on stress that I’ll be giving on Friday at the Guildhall Business Library. I offer mentoring there too where people can explore their experience of stress in a very straightforward, businesslike manner, and the promotional material includes the word ‘Stress.’ Yet the majority of people who come to discuss their stress find it strikingly difficult to say why they’ve visited.

 We’ve become so profoundly conditioned to describe everything challenging as an ‘opportunity’ or ‘exciting’ that many of us literally can’t find the words to describe genuine feelings unless it’s in response to something everyone recognizes as difficult, like a death or divorce. The trouble is, when those feelings remain unaddressed they will demand attention by making us ill.

Stress has become such an issue in the UK that legislation has been created to deal with it and it costs £26 BILLION in absence, presenteeism and staff turnover every year.  

In purely economic terms we are in dire need of finding the right words to discuss our experiences. 

During the 1990’s I co-created a temporary community that met four times throughout a year. The camps began as a way of us getting together cheaply but we very quickly discovered that living in close relationship to the natural world with no access to electricity, gas or anything other than a standpipe for running water inevitably led us to behave in different ways with each other and with the land, and that we valued these new ways of relating.

We had to share living and sleeping space to keep warm. Even in August the nights get cold and damp so it was an easy choice between freezing in the equivalent of a kite or snuggling down on carpets in a yurt heated by a woodburner. We cooked and ate together, pooling money, sharing tasks as diverse as chopping vegetables to keeping a fire going and we learned that we had to get on with it if we were to eat before dark – something particularly important for children and our more elderly members.

Living in nature is far from romantic. Nature can be cold and wet, can seriously sunburn your children, gets dark at 6pm, rains interminably, can be incredibly painful if you walk barefoot on frost, grab the blackthorn, rose or hawthorn without care and can poke you in the eye in the dark. Learning to live comfortably with these realities leveled the field in ways that were a revelation: people who were affluent couldn’t buy someone else to do it for them academically able people couldn’t just talk or teach about how much they knew about walking on a field at night. Small people, most often women, were often better at it than people who are bigger, often men. Children who didn’t get on at school suddenly discovered they were superb at chopping wood or keeping a fire going or putting up structures, skills that had a direct impact on the wellbeing of the whole community. There was kudos and respect for people of any age who kept the site ticking along and these were almost always people who did not usually experience kudos or respect in the rest of their lives.

Children and adults learned to work as a team, to take risks, to expand every sense, to go for a walk rather than have an argument, to seek knowledge from the natural world – particularly the wisdom of knowing that we will die evidenced by bird and mammal bones – to get cold and not get a cold, to be contentedly alone in a group, to live together, to seek solitude and to slow down. All without any risk of being knocked over by a car. There were certainly dramas and we learned to factor in very structured meetings where everyone could say how they were doing and be heard by everyone else. Some of the rules that evolved from experience were to not offer advice during these meetings, and to take responsibility for ones own physical and emotional wellbeing: getting enough sleep, eating and drinking enough. From time to time people became very upset indeed and, not being told what to do, not being given advice, not being shut up and not being allowed to dominate a camp, people also moved through their own feelings to a new place of understanding for themselves.

In research terms, we know that obesity is rising as people seldom leave some kind of chair, that the behaviours of many children are becoming disturbing, that attention disorders, anxiety and depression are rapidly increasing. Anecdotally, people are becoming less creative, less positively imaginative, more risk averse and terminally bored. We have lost contact with the earth, the elements and communal life. It’s superb to have ones own front door, washing machine, cooker and fridge, but we’ve also lost neighbourliness and places where our grandparents might meet to share physical work. This is why I’m so pleased about the New Economics Foundation report suggesting that if we work a 4-day week and promote gardening this will "provide the answer to every headline problem at the moment." From low unemployment to significantly reduced mental and physical health problems, spending less time obsessing about being seen to be a Hard Working Tax Payer and focusing more on creating, nurturing and simply living as part of the natural world can only be positive.

A report has come out this morning suggesting that a shorter working week and space for growing plants and food could "provide the answer to every headline problem at the moment."

At a time when every political statement seems to be about Hard Working Tax Payers – and discounts every activity that isn’t work – this seems like Utopian nonsense. But the figures don’t bear that out.

Japan has suffered 20 years of economic decline but has kept unemployment low by having a 4-day week. They’re more interested in social cohesion than getting votes. The 4-day week in normal in Norway. Across the US, both public and private employers continue to experiment with the 4 day week finding that there are savings to be made on agency staff and utilities, that absenteeism plummets, productivity increases, morale improves. Families save money on childcare and spend more time with the kids. Parents are less exhausted and, not having to fit all the housework, social life, and shopping (never mind relaxing) into a few hours, actually enjoy that time with their children. So their kids are happier and more relaxed.

For everyone to move over to a four day week would take a huge cultural shift, but it’s been done before: football matches traditionally begin at 3pm because a five and a half day week was normal in the UK. A two-day weekend only became normal in the 1960's. The summer school holidays are so long because children had to help with the harvest. And of course, a seven-day week, for men, women and children was once brutally normal.

While the economists struggle with the figures, we can think about the ways we work and why.

If it’s about status, if you think you’re better than a person who’s unemployed or works part time, beware. Redundancy, illness and failed businesses happen all the time and the more you look down on people who are not like you the more savage your experience when you join them. If it’s about money then decide what your priorities are: if you or your children really need all that stuff could it be that the stuff is making up for less-than-good relationships? If it’s about identity then make sure you don’t get old or ill. You are so much more than your job title.

Rounded, productive, content people spend time enriching their lives, are interested in a whole range of things from breadmaking and calligraphy to philosophy and singing. Vitally, they work on developing good friendships. You need time to build relationships and while your manager may value you while you keep producing good friends will support you when your manager hands you your P45.

I’ll talk about the psychological benefits of gardening in the next blog: getting your hands dirty really can keep your head clear!

I was listening to a radio talk show this morning that discussed the man who yesterday stabbed his two small children to death and then killed himself. The question was ‘Why do some men do this and why is there an increase in this kind of behaviour?” People called in to say that the man was obviously suffering from a mental illness, or that it was obvious that men love their children so much that they ‘black out and do something they regret,’ or that, because men are now much more involved in the care of their children, when access to those children is under threat they 'panic and act out of character.'

The next hour was spent talking about April Jones, the little girl who’s been abducted, and how to protect children.

I was struck by the lack of complexity, almost the lack of irony involved in both these discussions: When a child is abducted we all scream for the perpetrator to be lynched. When a father stabs his two children to death – imagine that for a moment, imagine the fathers actions –we call that “A tragedy.”

We know that ‘stranger danger’ is a myth, that most abuse occurs within the home and is perpetrated by people the child knows, very often the child’s own parents, another family member or friends of the family. Ben aged 7 and Freya aged 6 were killed by their father, and yet when this happens it’s is never called child abuse. The media seldom call by its technical name, which is Family Annihilation, a phenomenon that’s rapidly on the increase.

If you Google ‘Father kills children then himself” you will find page upon page of reports of family annihilation which are always linked to domestic violence.

At this point, many people will rush to say that women kill their kids too. This is true but the father kills 95% of children murdered by a parent. The reasons for killing are very different too: most mothers who kill do so because they’re afraid of what the father will do to the children or are genuinely psychotic. Fathers kill as the ultimate punishment to any mother when the mother makes a break from her abusive husband. (This is, by the way, one good reason why women don’t leave abusive relationships – if they and the kids are going to be killed, it’s most likely to happen when they leave.)

We treat women who kill children as “abominable, despicable, vile and horrible” as one judge called a woman who killed her children rather than hand them over to their convicted paedophile father. When a father kills we search hard for reasons to excuse him.

The massive majority of fathers who are separated from their children by relationship breakdown do not go on to kill their children or themselves. They’re also sad, angry, upset, miss their children and the family home, are shocked, anxious, depressed and sometimes even panicky about suddenly being alone in the world. But they don’t kill their kids. This is overwhelmingly an issue of angry men who treat people as things they own. They’re allowed to do that because as a society we make excuses for them.

Domestic violence isn’t a woman’s issue; it’s an issue that affects everyone who cares about children’s wellbeing. If all of those people now feeling very sad that two young children have been stabbed to death by their ‘tragic dad’ cared as much about domestic violence, perhaps Ben and Freya might still be alive.