Steve_Bamlett_blog

What daily habit do you do that improves your quality of life?

If I cannot read, and that happens sometimes, I cannot easily reintegrate imbalances in my mental health. Modern versions of cognitive-behaviouralism stress a kind of mindfulness, which is, in my view, more truly named mindlessness, and praise being in the moment and possibly aligning oneself to one action or sensation. The action might be a walking motion or the sensation, one of biting into a raisin ( I feel a thousand eyebrows in the ‘mad’ movement rise as I say that). I think this dumbing down of the voice of cognition however barely bearable. It literally makes me ill. When I can read however I must think, feel, sense and sometimes minimally act in order to do so, and those actions have to find a relationship with each other.

Now though it is common too these days to describe the ideal relationship of these functions as balance, this too is not an ideal prescriptive element of health. For mental health is about the ability to select the relationship appropriate to any one circumstance between feeling, thinking about, sensing or acting on it. Reading teaches implicitly the ways in which these functions vary in relation to each other, integratively or side by side.

And because to read we must progress, those relationships change. The most harmful element in low level medically purposed mindfulness, though not of Buddhist disciplines which are so differently situated in circumstances, is the antagonism encouraged to reduce control of time to ‘the moment’, possible in modern societies, as Ruby Wax’s latest book shows only with extremely high material resources (to wit wealth). Paradoxically, Ruby also shows that her ability to pay for mindful experience necessitates her falling ill again in pursuing the lucre in commodity advertising.

For mental distress is too often about the lack of trained responses to the passage of time and it’s necessitation of retrospect and prospect in the defining of the moment. The thoughts of past and future are necessary frameworks not only of the moment but our ability to feel, sense and know it for all of these activities are formed through histories: personal, communal, and ideological and through the processes of interpretation.

When I read, thought, feeling, sensation and action all aid the formation of necessary memories and expectations that ensure progression in reading. These in turn help educate the story making capacity we all need in order to improve our capacity for good mental health. In our best moments of mental health, life is an integrated set of stories which show the level of control necessary in any circumstance.

For mental health is not all about control unless we interpret that as about knowing when being in control is possible or desirable and when it is not. Sometimes, mental health is about respecting the need for confronting the dark discomfort of negative circumstances, feelings and thoughts and not shifting them out of the way as if they were not too necessary experiences. And reading allows these integrations and shifts of dominance between the contents of our thoughts, sensations, feeling and action.

When I cannot read, of course, it is difficult. Then I try writing or storytelling. But these too are sometimes impossible. Then things are very difficult and then help is necessary from those wise enough not just to think all you need is the routine and habitual, although they may (at those times only and briefly) then be a dominant need. The frightening thing is that you too often find professionals are incompetent except in the prescription of routines. When I taught social work, my aim was to address this educational need first and foremost.

In a recent health crisis, I was lucky to talk to a professional who just facilitated me being the main agent in drawing up my own health and safety to plan against the effects of suicidal thoughts and intentions, all in this case reactive to circumstances and therefore more easily addressed than those entirely (or apparently so) endogenous episodes which are thankfully rarer. In the past I have not been so lucky. Moreover, I have known people I worked with and friends, and some of which (of both kinds) I loved, left to the poor practice of other professionals which led to their completed suicide.

I write this having I think emerged from the worst of a current crisis, though I will attend psychodynamic counselling if it ever comes to fruition. Not for ‘closure’ but for rehabilitation and recovery. And the rest, of course, the act of reading will give to me: reading every day.

All my love

Steve