I have no dad and nobody cares about me

Just over a month after the last blog about Derrick Bird, here is another on the same theme of men's pain and isolation in Raoul Moat's final lament before he shot himself at the weekend.  He wasn't psychotic or even inarticulate - he wrote a 49 page letter. He was just deeply deeply troubled and unhappy without a good enough foundation in life. It is probably the usual story of insufficient quality mothering and lack of a father and then a life with inadequate internal resources, where too much had gone wrong. He was, like Derrick Bird, faced with a lack of real intimacy and no apparent means of getting any.

When will people realise that good therapy can help? The usual cliché that women see therapists and men see probation officers and alcohol counsellors probably applies. More support for parents, widely available support for couples, good skilled psychotherapy and above all building a culture in which men can be real and intimate and feel valued as men would stop most of the killing and much of the pain.  By good skilled psychotherapy I don't mean a few sessions of counselling with volunteers or a session with the prison chaplain but the sort of individual and group therapy which can get to the roots of psychological pain and make a fundamental difference.  Therapy has been around for well over a hundred years but in Britain it is still marginalised, misunderstood and laughed at.  I have spent some of each week for the last 20 years training therapists and counsellors.  With the new cuts in public expenditure you can be pretty sure that the military, and the pharmaceutical industry will suffer less than the tiny amount of real therapy in the NHS. As for going privately, many men spend more on drink  in a week than the weekly cost of  therapy.

Desperation and Destruction

The horrific rampage of Derrick Bird in Cumbria is thankfully very rare. It does tell us something about life, intimacy and men.  He was not mentally ill, or schizophrenic or hearing voices commanding him to do this. Something which had been inhibiting him snapped and he put in to motion a sort of plan he had been developing over a long time; to kill himself.  This was a suicide, but on the way he wanted to get his revenge and show his anger and desperation. The largest groups for actual suicide (not suicide attempts) is men in their 50's. Although he was not described as a loner, ( like many of the others who have done similar outrages), it is obvious from the newspaper reports that his relationships had gone wrong; with women, the mother of his second child had left 15 years ago, problems in Thailand in attempts at intimacy and connection with women, possible problems resulting in his leaving work at Sellafield and finally, what was probably the last straw, falling out with some of  his fellow cab-drivers. The issue here is friendships, intimacy and a satisfying sexual and emotional life. This supports men who do not have self-esteem from work achievement. He was described as friendly but I doubt if that is a sign of real closeness. Although this is important for everyone; when men reach their 50's and don't have this for whatever reason, then they often decline into low-level depression or into alcoholism. Several times in China in the last few years men have gone beserk with knives in similar attacks and I expect the general picture was the same.  They often have a feeling of being left out or left behind by life and by progress and with no real intimacy. This is why I work professionally and personally at intimacy and the barriers we create against it.