Connection?

Call it an obsession of mine but I have been interested in psychology and
mental health since being a nurse for the profoundly mentally
retarded in my youth.
Once I had children the interest compounded.
I found these two articles this weekend in two main papers.
Separately they were of interest to me, but together, I wondered
if they could be in some way connected with time and study.

I have cut and pasted the most interesting sections and given
due recognition to the authors.

I am posting it here as I want a record of it somewhere
for future reference.



Russell Meares, 71, is emeritus professor of psychiatry
at the University of Sydney and head of the mental health
sciences unit at Westmead Hospital in western Sydney.

He has developed a new way of recognising and helping those people
with Borderline Personality Disorders (BPD).

Before WW1 (It) was suggested that the feelings of warmth and intimacy
at the core of the sense of self flowed from the interplay between a baby
and its mother or carer.

These ideas were cast aside at the time of World War I, when there
was a shift to a behaviourist approach in psychology, Meares says.
The behaviourists distrusted what couldn't be measured as change.
Ideas about things as nebulous and unruly as feelings of warmth
and intimacy went right out the window and James
(the proponent of this idea) became a footnote in the history of psychology.

However, when Meares was investigating borderline personality
disorders, he went back to the idea that the sense of self was not
a given but a kind of consciousness of ourselves and our place
in the world that grows out of the proto-conversation between mother and baby.

His patients seemed to have been deprived of that interplay or
to have suffered a series of psychic shocks. These traumas, as
psychiatrists call them, are most obviously caused by physical
and sexual abuse, but may also result if children are subjected to
chronic disparagement.

Yet the reverberations of these painful experiences
will cause a disturbance of the sense of self.
"Instead of the warmth there's a painful feeling of
emptiness, which is not in the standard definition
of the borderline condition," he says.

"The condition can cause desolation for the individual,
wreckage for the family and huge consequences to the
community in terms of costs of mental health," he says.

("On the Frontier of Self" Elisabeth Wynhausen
January 19, 2008 in The Australian.)

Steve Biddulph is a psychologist and the author
of Raising Babies (Harper Thorsons).

In 2000 the province of Quebec, populous and progressive,
took the bold step of providing universal day care right down
to newborn babies, at a cost to parents of $5 a day.
It was a well-intentioned attempt to come to terms
with a large increase in the number of families where
both parents were working, which had almost doubled in 30 years.

Three economists, Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber and
Kevin Milligan, seized the chance to evaluate what happened
in real time. They had the rest of Canada as a control group,
and a large study in place tracking children across the
country to provide detailed data on their development.

What they found was astonishingly clear cut in a field usually
littered with carefully worded reservations and ideologically
filtered reporting. The scheme was a disaster.

But the human cost was the most significant.
There were marked declines in child wellbeing;
on measures of hyperactivity, inattention,
aggressiveness, motor skills, social skills and
child illness, children were significantly worse off
than their peers who remained at home.

The family suffered, too: parent-child relationships deteriorated
on all measured dimensions. There was a significant increase in
depression rates among mothers and a deterioration in couple
relationships among affected parents. None of these changes
was minor. The hyperactivity increases were in a range of
17 to 44 per cent; the skills decline was between 8 and 21 per cent;
childhood illnesses rose by 400 per cent. The study is littered
with adjectives researchers are usually careful to avoid: strong,
marked, negative, robust, striking. Yet it did echo,
though more strongly, similar findings in the United States, Britain and Europe.

The evidence points to only one possible solution: paid parental leave.

In the end, paid parental leave is the most equitable way
and the best value for money.

It is certainly the best for babies. Love, after all, can't be bought.
(Steve Biddulph
January 19, 2008 in the Sydney Morning Herald)