Senior Support Officer 55+ Team Oxford City

I am thrilled OJ’s book has helped you with the your caring issues. I don’t know what I have to say to make it clear that I comepletely see how such a book and such a campaign may help people. I only said that the OJ approach was too simplistically triumphalist and universalist.

My experience of mental health issues is slight. A long time ago I read Bettelheim and Laing and Foucault. I saw “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Much more recently, I have looked quite carefully at the Seligman and positive psychology work – and find it fascinating and wanting. Like everyone, I have been close to people with depression. I have several man years’ experience of caring for and catering to very old people.

On OJ’s dementia work, it may be worth reminding you that my beef with his book was not based on huge experience: rather it was a matter of suggesting that his large conclusions did not flow well from the evidence he quoted. (One got the impression that lots of people have pioneered this territory whilst knowing that it is wise not to be overly proscriptive.) This is a matter of textual analysis as much as my experience. However, I did point out that the book seemed to conflate the business of dealing with ageing or failing mental faculties with the business of dealing with Alzheimer’s. I know something about the former and can say that very old people do indeed have difficulty with dealing with some sorts of questions; but they seem positively to respond well to some sorts of challenge. It seems tricky to base a strategy on never asking questions or posing challenges. It’s a matter of horses for courses.

My point was that one needs to go rather modestly into this territory and that doing so seems supported by the evidence in OJ’s book (and by the AS view of it), but not by OJ’s typically grandiose and sweeping generalisations.

So: never mind my experience of mental health. My long experience of book-reviewing may help you to unpick OJ’s book a bit. Or you may think OJ’s book easily survives what you think are my ill-considered (and what you may freely call uninformed) remarks.

On my experience of OJ’s other work Britain On the Couch sort of work, I think I understand the “happiness” and “well-being” data rather better than OJ (or, come to that, the authors of “The Spirit Level”). That again is a matter of looking at the data and talking clearly about what it says, as a matter of text and logic, more than mental health experience.

Regards,

Jonathan
Guidance Counsellor

My reply is very simple – it is not a bad world.I feel there is something in your way and it is not Oliver James – only you know the answer to that – let`s say you are passionate as opposed to angry – I am sure you can turn that into something positive.Being negative is rarely productive and it doesn`t feel good!

Heaps

Sylvie

Thanks for that.

To deal with the “angry” point first. I hope it isn’t true, but if I was sparky then that is because I have for many years been at loggerheads with much of Oliver James’s “Britain on the Couch” and “Affluenza” material. In particular, I haven’t liked his handling of evidence nor his egotistical tirumphalism (if I may be so sparky as to call it that).

Coming to the “Contented Dementia” material, I wanted to point out that many elements of his case are sound and have been known to be so for several or many years (as I know not least from his book). So I think the risk of the OJ writing is that it renders universally applicable what needs to be selectively considered and it suggests an embattled, visionary status for his campaign which would be better framed as a candidate for being useful rather than as a unique bastion of truth in a bad world.

Best Wishes

Sylvie Clayden