The Psychologist June 2012 by The Psychologist

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psychologist vol 25 no 6

june 2012

Toilet psychology Nick Haslam on why psychologists should open the door

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments ÂŁ5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

conference 418 careers 462 new voices 472 looking back 476

tall poppies and schadenfreude 434 defining learning disability 440 opinion: the brave psychologist 446 psychology in the Arab world 448

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Associate Editors Articles Harriet Gross, Marc Jones, Rebecca Knibb, Charlie Lewis, Wendy Morgan, Paul Redford, Miles Thomas, Monica Whitty, Jill Wilkinson, Barry Winter Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Nathalie Chernoff Interviews Vacant Viewpoints Catherine Loveday International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus

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letters 398 advertising unpaid positions; replication; social norms; well-being; and more

THE ISSUE

news, digest and media 408 neuroscience in the news, and more; plus the latest research, press coverage of the Society’s Annual Conference, and commenting on Anders Breivik

When writing the editorial to introduce an article on toilet psychology, some might succumb to the temptation to fill it with loads of childish lavatorial puns, appealing to the Great British love of toilet humour. I like to think we’ve got a little more class here at The Psychologist. At our earliest convenience, we should aim to make a splash and bowl on: sweet temptation must be thrown aside if we are to be flushed with success, so to speak. In his article, Nick Haslam argues that excretion is a universal part of the human experience. Psychologists have tackled other taboos, such as sex and death, but they have largely ignored elimination. Turn to p.430 to lift the lid on a rich assortment of intense emotions, mental disorders, personality traits, social attitudes and linguistic practices that can be linked to our time in the toilet. In another packed issue, I must particularly direct your attention to our Annual Conference reports (p.418). We have top psychologists reporting on a very successful conference, which welcomed around 800 delegates in London this April. Dr Jon Sutton

annual conference reports highlights from London’s April event, from a stellar cast of reporters

Toilet psychology Nick Haslam argues that psychologists should stop averting their eyes from the bathroom

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Eureka! Psychology in the bath Photo by Jon Kipps, of an art project by psychology teacher Debora D’Auria. E-mail ‘Big picture’ ideas to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk. with education and perhaps even their own psychology.’ Eureka! is free to host. If you are interested, then contact ddauria@shsg.org. See www.deboradauria.co.uk for more.

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Fiona sits in a bath at the British Psychological Society’s student lectures in Watford. The ‘think tank’, a lecturing bath tub coated in figures from Psychology textbooks, is the brainchild of Debora D’Auria, artist and Head of Psychology at Southend High School for Girls. Mini psychology lectures play through the mixer shower head, so people can be truly immersed in psychology. D’Auria tells us: ‘We’re echoing the archetypal couch in order to challenge contemporary misconceptions about psychology. We’re playing on the idea of ideas; Archimedes is said to have exclaimed ’Eureka!’ in the bathtub. This is a bath full of ideas and theories. I want people to stop and pause for just a moment, to think about what they understand about psychology, their relationship

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Tall poppies, deservingness and schadenfreude Norman Feather outlines his research journey

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Defining learning disability Jenny Webb and Simon Whitaker question whether the right people are being labelled and supported

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Opinion: The brave psychologist Paul Furey argues that psychologists should keep it simple

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Interview: Psychology in the Arab world Arij Baidas interviews Linda Sakr, a therapist working in Dubai

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book reviews 450 early memory; the new statistics; the optimism bias; the social cure; and the psychologically literate citizen society President’s column; Going for Gold; Scottish Branch Undergraduate Conference; Psychology’s ‘Origins’; Spearman Medal; and more

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462 careers and psychologist appointments we meet Geoff Lindsay (University of Warwick), and Graham Paley recommends reflective practice groups. Plus the featured job along with the latest vacancies new voices the curious case of Sherlock Holmes and perceptual load: David James Robertson in the latest of our series for budding authors

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looking back

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what was life like within Leicestershire’s first lunatic asylum? Diane Lockley turns to the historical records one on one …with Richard Hallam

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DIGEST

Strong reassurances about vaccines can backfire

Unwarranted public anxiety about vaccinations can have deadly consequences. Unfortunately, the challenge of communicating health risks is full of psychological complexity. A new German study brings this home, showing how messages that deny vaccination health risks in unequivocal terms can backfire, actually increasing concern among parents. Cornelia Betsch (University of Erfurt) and Katharina Sachse (Technical University Berlin) recruited 115 participants online (mean age 34; 34 per cent were male; 43 per cent had one or more children). The participants were asked to imagine they were a parent of an eight-month-old and to read an account of a fictitious illness phyxolitis pulmonis. They were further told that their paediatrician had advised vaccinating their child against this condition. Next, the participants were presented with anti-vaccine statements that they’d ostensibly found on the internet (e.g. ‘Multiple vaccines overwhelm the infant’s immune system’). Finally, they read statements of reassurance about the vaccine, which claimed any risks were low – half the participants read weak versions (e.g. ‘There is only sporadic evidence that repeated vaccinations overwhelm the immune system’) and half read strong versions of these statements (e.g. ‘There is no evidence that repeated vaccinations overwhelm the immune system’). The key finding here was that participants who read the strong statements of reassurance actually reported greater perceptions of risk afterwards, and lower intentions to vaccinate their child. This effect was heightened among participants who had a preference for complementary medicine. Results didn’t vary according to In the March issue of Health Psychology whether participants were a parent in real life or not. A second study with a further 119 participants was similar, but this time the source of the reassuring statements was varied, either being from a pharmaceutical company (untrusted) or from a government health department (a trusted source). Again, strong statements of reassurance backfired, increasing risk perception and reducing vaccination intentions, but only if those statements came from an untrusted source. Again, this paradoxical effect was stronger among participants who favoured complementary medicine. This study can’t reveal why the paradoxical effect occurs. However, one possibility proposed by Betsch and Sachse is that an extreme statement of no risk is more attention-grabbing, which only serves to highlight the possibility that risk is an issue. Another potential explanation is that people look for ways to combat claims they disagree with, and if those claims are stated more strongly then that encourages people to marshal even stronger counter-claims of their own. The results have obvious implications for real-life risk communication. ‘Especially when organisations lack complete knowledge about how much trust the public puts in them, optimal risk negation is likely to profit from moderate rather than extreme formulations,’ the researchers said.

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Creating non-believed memories in the lab In PLoSONE Most of the time our autobiographical memories and beliefs match up – we remember last week’s journey to a conference and believe that journey really took place. Other times, we believe an event happened – we know we travelled to that conference – but our memory for the event eludes us. Recently, psychologists have begun to examine the rarer reverse scenario, in which we have what feels like a memory for an event, but we know (or believe) that the event never happened. A recent survey of over 1500 undergrads found that nearly a quarter reported having a non-believed memory of this kind. Now Andrew Clark and his colleagues have gone further – for the first time actually provoking non-believed memories in the lab. Participants were invited to a psychology lab for what they thought was a study into mimicry. Each was filmed as they watched and then mimicked 26 different actions of a researcher, including clapping their hands, rubbing the table, and clicking their fingers. The clever bit came two days later when the participants were shown clips taken from the earlier footage. These clips showed them sitting passively, watching the researcher perform 12 different actions. In each case, the participant now had to say whether they remembered performing each action, and how strong their belief was that they’d performed each action. Crucially, two of the

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clips had been doctored – footage of the watching participant had been superimposed over a separate video of the researcher performing two actions that were never part of the original mimicry sessions. Because the participants had earlier mimicked all the actions that they’d witnessed, the doctored footage gave the strong impression that they must have mimicked those two new actions even though they hadn’t. This set-up provided a powerful means of inducing false memories – 68 per cent of the participants’ memory ratings for the fake actions suggested they ‘remembered’ performing the actions. Their belief that they’d performed these actions was similar in strength to their memories. Four hours later, the participants returned for a final session in which they were told about the trickery. They were then asked again to provide ‘memory’ and ‘belief’ ratings for the different actions. The takehome finding is that for 25 per cent of the fake actions, the participants now reported significantly stronger memory scores than belief scores – their (false) memory of having performed the fake actions persisted even though they often no longer believed they’d performed the actions. The authors said that their findings raised questions about memory research: ‘debriefing might not always completely “undo” the effects of suggestive manipulation… Is it ethical for participants to leave research labs with remnants of nonbelieved false memory content in the forefront of their minds?’

How your ‘alternative self’ could shape your identity In Academy of Management Review Carter is at a formal drinks for a colleague back from secondment, part of a fast-track management scheme. He remembers opting not to apply for the scheme five years ago and wonders how things would be now had he taken that plunge: the overseas experiences, the pressures, the opportunities. What would that Carter be like? In subsequent months he finds himself returning to this idea, finally setting up a meeting with his manager, who is surprised to hear him reveal that he feels dissatisfied and wants to reinvigorate his career. Carter has encountered an alternative self: a version of him that could have been. This concept, unpacked by Otilia Obodaru in a recent Academy of Management Review article, can be contrasted with most theories of self that work within a temporal framework – the actual past and present, extrapolating the future from an actual now. The idea of an alternative self integrates research on counterfactual thinking – ‘if I had gotten that bus, I would be there by now’ – into the psychology of self. Developing an alternative self and integrating it with identity requires a few steps. First, you need a turning point, a fork in your life where you took one road over another. As the ‘job for life’ has given way to more boundaryless careers, there are more work-related turning points to reflect on than ever. Secondly, you must undo that turning point, imagining ‘what if?’, easiest to do when

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the event was controllable. Finally, the alternative self must have opportunity and motive to be rehearsed mentally or to an audience. Identity research suggests a self-narrative tends to be taken up when relevant to ongoing desires or fears; perhaps Carter has been wondering if he will ever get out of the city. Not everyone has an alternative self, the article quoting one interviewee from previous research, confessing ‘I’m a priest... I can’t imagine not being one.’ But many do: Obodaru cites research that reports of long-term regrets have increased fairly linearly decade on decade from around 40 per cent of people in the 1950s to close to 100 per cent in the last decade. Note that this measures only ‘better alternative selves’; worse ones are also possible, such as those that Alcoholics Anonymous encourage their members to reflect on – the active alcoholic

they chose not to be. Having an alternative self means you can compare it to your actual self, generating emotional responses, affecting satisfaction, and leading to better self-knowledge about strengths or weaknesses. As the AA example makes clear, organisations can encourage or dampen the formation of alternative selves, by drawing attention to turning points, inviting the undoing, or giving space for rehearsing what that alternative would look like. At its best, this can lead to insight and greater resolve, such as collectively considering ‘what if we had never dared to start the business together?’ It can also lead to the ‘crystallisation of discontent’ and a motivation to change circumstances. In this sense, the road not taken doesn’t always vanish: it can live on in our minds, affecting our present and shaping our future. I Written by Alex Fradera, for www.occdigest.org.uk

The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett. Visit the blog for full coverage including references and links, additional current reports, an archive, comment and more. Subscribe by RSS or e-mail at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Become a fan at www.facebook.com/researchdigest Follow the Digest editor at www.twitter.com/researchdigest

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controlling for factors such as the distance travelled, the presence of others and the activities undertaken. Highlighting its broad appeal, this story was featured by 18 radio stations including the BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show and BBC Radio Wales. It was also covered widely by the national and local press, attracting headlines such as ‘We do Gail Kinman on extensive coverage of the Society’s Annual Conference like to be beside the seaside’, ‘Life’s a beach’, and more creatively ‘Plain to sea – a hard-wired draw to the coast’. Reflecting eflecting the popularity of psychology on the findings, an editorial published in structure in violent offenders; how in the public domain, the Society’s The Guardian suggested that proximity to superstitions help footballers control pre2012 annual conference, held in London the sea should be taken more seriously as match anxiety; the benefits of t’ai chi for from 18 to 20 April, attracted a predictor of national well-being, and older people; and the influence of considerable attention from the media. possibly included in advertisers’ use of The Public Relations team, together with a world happiness celebrities in the Media and Press Committee, index. The reality of advertising on identified papers and posters that were many British seaside children. potentially ‘media friendly’ and worked holidays was Research with authors to prepare 24 press releases appropriately but presented at the that sought to communicate their unintentionally conference received research findings to the public in a clear illustrated, however, extensive coverage and accessible way. The press releases as the webpage in newspapers, reflected the diverse nature of research featuring this story magazines and presented at the conference, including: was also advertising periodicals, and the impact of electronic cigarettes on windproof umbrellas online within the smokers’ working memory; trauma in and woolly socks. UK, as well as on victims of online dating scams; prison Reinforcing the news and science gangs as sources of friendship; why stereotype of the websites in people need to believe in conspiracy British as a nation of countries including Walking the dog along the shore theories; impaired brain function and dog lovers, another the USA, Nigeria, popular story from New Zealand, the conference China and India. suggested that people are drawn to breeds Stories received high-quality coverage in that reflect their personality. An online several UK national newspapers, such as survey of 1000 dog owners conducted by The Independent, the Daily Express, the Jo Fearon and Lance Workman of Bath Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, as The bilingual brain boost Spa University (in collaboration with the well as the local press throughout the UK. http://t.co/ueJFl8zq Kennel Club) found considerable The research was also featured on Education research exists, so why isn't it variation between breed groups and numerous national and local radio used in policymaking? owners’ personality (measured by the Big stations including BBC Radio 2, BBC http://t.co/4GSoCMam Radio Wales and Radio 5 Live. Five) with owners of hound dogs, for Does Twitter know you better than you know One of the most popular stories from example, scoring more highly on yourself? http://t.co/RIg1RHQA a media perspective focused on the emotional stability, and owners of toy On the Zeigarnik effect, Socrates and benefits of visiting the coast. Katherine dogs (such as Chihuahuas) being more Hemingway http://t.co/SJ7sV8lP Ashbullby and Mathew White (Peninsula open to experience. This story was Years before Phineas Gage, Edgar Allan Poe covered widely by the print and broadcast College of Medicine and Dentistry) described his symptoms media: Dr Workman was interviewed by presented data from 2750 respondents http://t.co/3vG6QelA radio stations, national newspapers and drawn from a two-year study of public When Simon Baron-Cohen met Brian Eno websites; these interviews were then engagement with the natural and others to discuss testosterone and the distributed to over 180 media outlets. environment. The study examined the brain http://t.co/FGZlCwfU National newspapers such as the Daily relative impact of visits to urban parks, Fascinating pieces from the Centre for the Telegraph and the Daily Mail illustrated the countryside and the coast. Although History of Emotions, Queen Mary, their coverage of the research findings all three types of location were associated University of London, in Wellcome History with photographs of famous dog owners with positive feelings, such as calm, http://t.co/hYAsRtgf such as the Queen, the Duchess of pleasure and appreciation, trips to the Cambridge, Geri Halliwell and Simon seaside were most satisfying – even after Cowell suggesting that their choice of breed ‘gave away secrets’ about their personality. page coordinating editor, promoting and discussing The Media page is Psychological research that provides Ceri Parsons (Chair, Media psychology in the media. If coordinated by the Society’s insight into romantic relationships is of you would like to contribute, and Press Committee), on Media and Press particular interest to the media and the c.parsons@staffs.ac.uk please contact the ‘Media’ Committee, with the aim of public in general. Unsurprisingly, Adrian

An almost perfect media cocktail

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Banks’ (University of Surrey) findings that men tend to flirt at work through boredom and lack of emotional intelligence rather than genuine passion was widely featured – though the findings were sometimes interpreted selectively with one newspaper’s headline reading ‘The office flirt doesn’t fancy you – he’s just bored and a bit dim’. Contradicting ‘traditional’ evolutionary theory on mate choice, the findings of a study conducted by Fay Julal (Southampton Solent University) that women seek less dominant dates during a recession were also covered widely. Dr Julal presented a series of fictitious online dating profiles to more than 150 women; findings suggest that men who consider themselves ‘natural followers’ are more attractive to women than rich alpha males during an economic downturn, as they are seen as less likely to cheat on them. Focusing on relationships in the workplace, the risk to well-being of expressing your ‘real’ self at work compared to in romantic relationships was highlighted in research conducted by Oliver Robinson (University of Greenwich) and colleagues from the University of Houston, USA. Other research received extensive media coverage. Richard Keegan’s (University of Lincoln) findings that middle-aged unfit people benefit from being ‘nagged, nudged and cajoled’ by family and friends into being more active was popular with the print and broadcast media, as well as on health-related websites. The findings of a study conducted by Chris Pawson (University of East London) and Mark Gardner (University of Westminster) that students who take water into examinations may improve their grades were also widely disseminated. We received a great deal of positive feedback from researchers whose findings received attention from the media. The encouragement, guidance and support provided by the PR team and Press and Media Committee was highly praised. Moreover, with few exceptions, researchers felt that journalists were genuinely keen to represent their research findings accurately and highlight their real-world relevance. A degree of ‘spin’ in reporting findings within the media is, however, only to be expected. This is well illustrated by Lance Workman’s comments on the press coverage of his research on dog breeds and personality: ‘Looking back on it I think the reason the story took off was because it was about both dogs and their owners – it allowed the press to publish pictures of cute dogs and of celebrities walking them – perhaps an almost perfect media cocktail!’

Helping to process trauma? nders Behring Breivik’s trial for the A mass murder of 77 people last July has puzzled mental health experts trying to

decide one of the central questions in the case: whether he is insane or in touch with reality. As Norwich-based Chartered Psychologist Ged Bailes commented, in a piece for Reuters: ‘It’s a hell of a complex case. Mad people can do bad things and bad people can become mad. There are lots of areas of overlap.’ So to what extent is media comment from psychologists useful and, indeed, ethical? Society members have historically been advised not to comment on ‘celebrities’, the reasoning being that if a psychologist has insider knowledge then this should be confidential, and if they haven’t then they are in danger of straying beyond their own professional competence unless they can keep the comment very general. Could the same logic apply to Breivik? I turned to the guidelines for Society members on ethics and the media (see www.bps.org.uk/mediaethics). There seemed to be several pertinent points in terms of respecting the dignity and autonomy of contributors and other persons: I promoting fairness and sensitivity in portraying individuals and groups; I observing best practice standards for privacy, confidentiality and anonymity which are only infringed with the valid consent of the individual(s) concerned or where there is a clear overriding public interest; I refraining from public comment on the behaviour or psychology of identifiable individuals where there is any risk of offence, distress or other harms. Could it be argued that Breivik has surrendered any claim to privacy or protection from offence, and that there is clear overriding public interest? In terms of ‘supporting high standards of integrity’, the guidelines include: I maintaining high scientific standards of accuracy and evidence; I advocating coverage of a diverse range of views and fostering debate; I avoiding offering comment, opinion or advice beyond one’s professional competence. ‘Armchair diagnosis’ is certainly not without risks, and some commentators appeared to come unstuck. For example, Dr Raj Persaud and Ramón Spaaij speculated that Breivik may be

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considering suicide – ‘this is a person who appears capable of delivering death, against all odds’ – but just a couple of days later Breivik said, ‘I have never been suicidal and never will be.’ Some comment seemed uncomfortably black and white. For example, the Reuters piece explained that ‘people with antisocial or dissocial disorders include callous unconcern for the feelings of others, a low tolerance for frustration, incapacity to experience guilt, and a tendency to blame others, traits displayed by Breivik. “You only need to look at that and you can see Breivik Breivik has a dissocial or antisocial personality disorder,” said Michael Reddy, an associate fellow with the British Psychological Society who specializes in pathological behaviors within organizations.’ Of course Breivik has given commentators plenty of material to comment on, so opinion is at the very least informed. And the case is particularly interesting to psychologists because in other mass killings, the executor typically commits suicide or is killed by police. Many found themselves drawn to the case and Breivik’s testimony, including Simon Baron-Cohen in The Guardian (tinyurl.com/bu9sfbu) and The Times, and Simon Wesseley in The Lancet (tinyurl.com/d9t6fr3). Returning to the guidelines, perhaps of most relevance are those on ‘Being socially responsible’, including: I … acknowledging a shared collective duty for the welfare of human and nonhuman beings, both within the societies in which media production takes place, and beyond them I considering possible risks and seeking to minimise them while maximising benefits. If psychologists have weighed up these risks and benefits and are able to provide intelligent comment, then perhaps this is what the dissemination of a knowledge of psychology is all about. Perhaps there is also a wider impact than on the discipline itself: when I asked about this on Twitter, @avalloyd responded: ‘I think in the Breivik case psychs commenting help “society” to cognitively process such a traumatic event.’

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ARTICLE

Toilet psychology Nick Haslam argues that psychologists should stop averting their eyes from the bathroom

questions

Excretion is a universal part of the human experience, but it is veiled in taboo. Psychologists have torn the veil off other taboos, such as sex and death, but they have largely ignored elimination. Nevertheless, it is linked to a rich assortment of intense emotions, mental disorders, personality traits, social attitudes and linguistic practices. From psychoanalysis to neurogastroenterology, and from bathroom graffiti to shameful fetishes, the psychology of the toilet offers surprising insights into mind–body connections, culture and gender.

What accounts for the neglect of excretion in psychology: the decline of psychoanalysis, the neglect of ‘the body’, or something else?

resources

Haslam, N. (2012). Psychology in the bathroom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rozin, P. (2007). Exploring the landscape of modern academic psychology: Finding and filling the holes. American Psychologist, 62, 754–766. www.worldtoilet.org

references

What role does disgust play in social attitudes and in the socialisation of children?

Brill, A.A. (1932). The sense of smell in the neuroses and psychoses. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1, 7–42. Dundes, A. (1984). Life is like a chicken coop ladder: A portrait of German culture through folklore. New York: Columbia University Press. Elsenbruch, S., Rosenberger, C., Enck, P. et al. (2010). Affective disturbances modulate the neuralprocessing of visceral pain stimuli in irritable bowel

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ccording to a 2010 survey, the British public considers the flush toilet to be the ninth greatest invention of all time, just above the combustion engine. Toilet paper, ranked 22nd, wipes the floor with trains, shoes and e-mail, and nappies, at 62nd, are a better thing than sliced bread (70th). Are these rankings just another sign of British perversity, or do they reveal something important about human concerns? If they do, then psychology has failed to notice. In 30 years of studying the field I rarely came across any recognition that human beings are creatures who excrete. Much of what we psychologists care about is on the mental side of the mind/body divide, but even when we go corporeal we eliminate elimination. Psychologists have examined the psychobiology of eating, sleeping and sex at great length, and devoted numerous journals and professional associations to them. We have investigated how substances cross from outer to inner but largely ignored traffic in the other direction. When I did come across excretion in my psychological travels it was usually mentioned in titillating stories about the famous. An embittered former Nazi leader spread rumours that Adolf Hitler had a urinary fetish that put a dampener on his romantic life. For decades Charles Darwin was afflicted with ‘extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence’, each burst preceded by ringing of the ears. As a schoolboy Carl Jung experienced a vision of God, seated on a golden throne, dropping ‘an enormous turd’ on a cathedral. Martin Luther experienced his own spiritual

syndrome: An fMRI study. Gut, 59, 489–494. Giner-Sorolla, R., & Espinosa, P. (2011). Social cuing of guilt by anger and of shame by disgust. Psychological Science, 22, 49–53. Goldenberg, J.L. & Roberts, T. (2004). The beast within the beauty: An existential perspective on the objectification and condemnation of women. In J. Greenberg, S.L. Koole

revelations while seated on the privy, was afflicted by constipation and urinary retention and used a rich assortment of scatological expressions to denounce the devil. Constipation also bedevilled Sigmund Freud. It’s via Freud’s ideas, rather than his intestinal problems, that psychologists are likely to encounter excretion. Every psychology student knows that the founder of psychoanalysis claimed that toddlers take unseemly pleasure in retaining and expelling their faeces, and that conflicts at this age could find adult expression in an anal character structure. Fewer know that Freud also identified a urethral personality (characterised by ‘burning ambition’) and speculated that resisting the urge to urinate on fire was a pivotal moment in primal man’s ascent towards civilisation. Contemplating the absence of excretion from contemporary psychology, I wondered whether the topic was offlimits. Just as people wish to conceal their bodily waste and prize the inventions that enable them to do so, placing flush toilets 73 ranks above Facebook, so do they try to banish excrement from their minds. Suspecting that psychology does the same, averting its eyes from the toilet, I wrote my recent book, Psychology in the Bathroom (Haslam, 2012). As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in a review, ‘Imagine if 10% of human nature had been walled off by an irrational taboo. Wouldn’t you want to peek in and see what was hiding back there?’ Of course you would. It turns out that there is a significant literature on the psychology of excretion, but it is widely dispersed around the discipline and often obscure. Researchers have investigated a remarkable variety of phenomena associated with excretion, including diverse psychopathologies, personality traits, sexual aberrations, emotions, prejudices and linguistic practices. Let’s take psychopathology for a start. Excretion figures in many kinds of mental disorder, from phobias, obsessions, compulsions and delusions through to tics,

& T. Pyszczynski (Eds.) Handbook of experimental existential psychology (pp.71–85). New York: Guilford. Green, J.A. (2003). The writing on the stall: Gender and graffiti. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 22, 282–296. Haslam, N. (2012). Psychology in the bathroom. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Haslam, N. (2011). The return of the anal

character. Review of General Psychology, 15, 351–360. Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D.A., Knobe, J., & Bloom, P. (2009). Disgust sensitivity predicts intuitive disapproval of gays. Emotion, 9, 435–439. Jones, E. (1950). Anal-erotic character traits. In Papers on psychoanalysis, (5th edn, pp.413–437). London: Baillière, Tindall & Cox. (Original work published 1918)

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impulse-control problems and paraphilias. Intense fears surrounding public urination, dubbed ‘paruresis’, are common and often disabling, limiting people’s movements and causing humiliation and pain, as in one sufferer who blacked out and crashed to the tiles from the sheer effort of trying to find relief at a public facility. Although paruresis bears many hallmarks of social anxiety it is unique enough for one writer to propose a new class of ‘sphincteric phobias’. Milder forms of bashful bladder are widespread, a fact established by a study that used a periscope in an adjoining toilet stall to assess men’s urine-streams at a public urinal. Time to begin urinating increased steeply the closer another user stood to the unwitting participant (Middlemist et al., 1976). Anxiety of a different sort occurs in olfactory reference syndrome, whose sufferers fear that they are emitting a foul, often faecal odour. These fears have an obsessive-compulsive quality and sometimes reach delusional intensity, patients misreading gifts of perfume or even the barking of nearby dogs as evidence of their ‘alimentary stench’. In one celebrated instance farting became a source of safety instead of fear. A boy in Jungian analysis used flatulence to create a ‘defensive olfactory container’ to protect himself, skunk-like, against fears of disintegration and persecution and to create a ‘protective cloud of familiarity’ when threatened. The clouds started to lift after the analyst blew loud therapeutic raspberries back at him (Sidoli, 1996). Farting in the consulting room is one form of unwelcome and out-of-place excretion. Another form is incontinence. Among children the acquisition of bowel and bladder control is a major developmental achievement and a focus of anxious concern for parents, to the extent that ‘accidents’ are a frequent occasion for child maltreatment. Parents often seem to understand toilet training as a paradigm case for developing self-control, an inference that is not entirely without merit, as shown by a recent study in which adults made to drink five cups of water and not

Link, C.L., Lutfey, K.E., Steers, W.D. & McKinlay, J.B. (2007). Is abuse causally related to urologic symptoms? Results from the Boston Area Community Health (BACH) Survey. European Urology, 52, 397–406. Ljung, M. (2011). Swearing: A crosscultural linguistic study. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Middlemist, R.D., Knowles, E.S., &

Writing on the wall Toilet graffiti, dubbed ‘latrinalia’ by one scholar, has drawn attention from many researchers and theorists over the years. Many of them have focused on gender, using public lavatories as laboratories for studying sex differences in the content and form of these scribblings. Alfred Kinsey was one of the first researchers to enter the field, surveying the walls of more than 300 public toilets in the early 1950s and finding more erotic content in men’s and more romantic content in women’s. Later research has found that men’s graffiti also tend to be more scatological, insulting, prejudiced, and image-based, and less likely to offer advice or otherwise respond to previous remarks. Theorists have struggled to explain differences such as these. True to his time, Kinsey ascribed them to women’s supposedly greater regard for social conventions and lesser sexual responsiveness. Psychoanalytic writers proposed that graffiti writing was a form of ‘phallic expression’ or that men pursued it out of an unconscious envy of women’s capacity for childbirth. Semioticians argued that men’s toilet graffiti signify and express political dominance, whereas women’s respond to their subordination. Social identity theorists proposed that gender differences in latrinalia reflect the salience of gender in segregated public bathrooms: rather than merely revealing their real, underlying differences, women and men polarise their behaviour in these gender-marked settings so as to exaggerate their femaleness or maleness. Although early research found that women were less enthusiastic producers of latrinalia than men, later studies showed that they had achieved parity or superiority in quantity and explicitness. More recently still, toilet graffiti seems to have gone into decline. Arguably in the internet age there is little point writing taboo thoughts on bathroom walls: why scribble for a meagre one-at-a-time audience when you can make equally vulgar anonymous comments on a public discussion board or chatroom?

permitted to urinate were better able to resist unrelated temptations, such as shortsighted financial decisions, than adults with empty bladders (Tuk et al., 2011). Methods of achieving continence have varied widely through history and across cultures. In the Middle Ages one cure for ‘pyssying in the bedde’ was eating ground

Matter, C.F. (1976). Personal space invasions in the lavatory: Suggestive evidence for arousal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33, 541–546. Nussbaum, M.C. (2004). Hiding from humanity: Disgust, shame, and the law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosenwald, G.C., Mendelson, G.A., Fontana, A., & Portz, A.T. (1966). An

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hedgehog, and among the Dahomeans of West Africa repeat offenders had a live frog attached to their waist to shock them into self-mastery. In recent Western history the pendulum has swung between strictness and laxity according to changing fashions in child care. Although some psychologists once believed that childhood bed-wetting,

action test of hypotheses concerning the anal personality. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 71, 304–309. Rozin, P. (2007). Exploring the landscape of modern academic psychology: Finding and filling the holes. American Psychologist, 62, 754–766. Rozin, P., Hammer, L., Oster, H., et al (1986). The child’s conception of food: Differentiation of categories of rejected food in the 1.4 to 5 year

range. Appetite, 7, 141–151. Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G.L., & Jordan, A.H. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1096–1109. Sidoli, M. (1996). Farting as a defence against unspeakable dread. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 41, 165–178. Talley, N.J., Boyce, P.M. & Jones, M. (1998). Is the association between

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fire-setting and cruelty to animals were jointly associated with adult criminality, later evidence has failed to support a link. Excretion figures less literally in some other psychological disorders. Coprolalia, literally ‘shit speech’, is a prominent feature of Tourette’s syndrome. Although all manner of obscenities or indelicate expressions may be involved – one Peruvian man repeatedly blurted orders to make him coffee – scatological expressions are the most common. The first reported case, the Marquise de Dampierre, a woman of ‘distinguished manners’ presented by Jean Itard in 1825, would exclaim ‘shit and fucking pig’ at inopportune times, and one of Gilles de la Tourette’s original cases included a boy who favoured ‘shitty arsehole’. The preference for excremental language appears to be widespread across cultures, although admitting distinctive forms, such as the unique Japanese expression kusobaba (shit grandma). The universality of excremental blurting in Tourette’s syndrome is surely no accident, as cross-cultural studies of swearing find scatological expressions to be ‘the undisputed leader among the taboo themes’ (Ljung, 2011, p.135). Anal-themed terms of abuse are particularly widespread, especially in Germany and the USA. Controversial folklorist Alan Dundes (1984) saw the former association as part of a general pattern that was also exemplified by a supposed cultural preference for faecal foods (e.g. sausage), flatulent music (i.e. wind and brass) and toilet humour. His analysis did not spare the USA, finding anal themes to be rife in American football. Coprolalia only metaphorically involves excrement, but coprophilia and coprophagia are disgustingly literal. Eating faeces occurs frequently in several conditions, including intellectual disability, dementia and psychosis. It has even been recorded as a spectacular form of malingering in the case of a defendant facing a third conviction under California’s ‘three strikes and you’re out’ law, who stockpiled his excrement for several days before eating it in dramatic fashion.

irritable bowel syndrome and abuse explained by neuroticism? A population based study. Gut, 42, 47–53. Thornhill, R., Fincher, C.L., & Saran, D. (2009). Parasites, democratization, and the liberalization of values across contemporary countries. Biological Reviews, 84, 113–131. Tuk, M.A., Trampe, D., & Warlop, L. (2011). Inhibitory spillover: Increased urination urgency facilitates impulse

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Surprisingly, young children do not instinctively resist this act, one study finding that two year-olds willingly put into their mouths imitation dog faeces crafted from peanut butter and smelly cheese (Rozin et al., 1986). Fetishistic enjoyment of faeces is recorded rarely, but perversions that involve touching or sniffing other people’s urine, or urinating on other people or their possessions, are more common. One successfully treated sniffer turned his fetish into a vocation and became a florist (Brill, 1932). Many bowel and bladder complaints have a large psychological component, as researchers in the fields of psychosomatic medicine and gastroenterology have established. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), for example, is a very common condition that is characterised by chronic or alternating diarrhoea and constipation, accompanied by abdominal pain, bloating and discomfort. It has no definitive organic

control in unrelated domains. Psychological Science, 22, 627–633. Weinberg, M.S., & Williams, C.J. (2005). Fecal matters: Habitus, embodiments, and deviance. Social Problems, 52, 315–336. Wheatley, T., & Haidt, J. (2005). Hypnotically induced disgust makes moral judgments more severe. Psychological Science, 16, 780–784.

cause and co-occurs with a wide variety of somatic conditions including dyspepsia, asthma, chronic fatigue and pain, dysmenorrhoea and fibromyalgia. People with IBS tend to score high on measures of neuroticism, tend to somatise their distress, have problems with self-assertion and often report histories of abuse (Talley et al., 1998). Studies in neurogastroenterology are uncovering some of the roots of IBS in the enteric nervous system, the so-called ‘second brain’ that controls our viscera. Patients suffering from the condition frequently have elevated visceral sensitivity and pain-proneness, a phenomenon that is typically assessed by gradual inflation of a rectal balloon. Brain scans conducted during this form of distension reveal that IBS patients show unusually high activation of pain centres but also that this activation is partly explained by depression and anxiety (Elsenbruch et al., 2010). By implication, the mechanism of IBS is in part top-down, emotion states represented in the brain exerting an effect on visceral pain, and not just – pardon the pun – bottom-up. Gastrointestinal conditions are not the only examples of somatopsychic phenomena that relate to excretion. Bladder problems can also have psychological dimensions and causes, occurring in some cases as conversion symptoms. It is well-established, for example, that urinary retention is strongly associated with the experience of sexual

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and physical abuse, and other voiding disturbances, and incontinence also appear at elevated rates among abuse survivors (e.g. Link et al., 2007). In short, adversity, trauma and suffering commonly find bodily expression in disrupted excretory functions. Excretion is related to an enormous range of psychological abnormalities. It is also indirectly related to normal personality. The clearest example is Freud’s concept of the anal character, which most contemporary personality psychologists see as a discredited folly (Haslam, 2011). Freud argued that three character traits, the socalled ‘anal triad’ of orderliness, obstinacy and parsimony, cluster together in adults who recall having derived pleasure from emptying and holding back their bowels as young children. He proposed that these traits – which include a concern with cleanliness, a rigid conscience, stubbornness and tightness with money – represent sublimations or reaction formations against these bowel habits. Ernest Jones and Karl Abraham later embellished Freud’s portrait, proposing that anal characters are perfectionistic, pedantic, preoccupied with detail and classification, easily disgusted, work-obsessed and joyless (Jones, 1918/1950). Research has not been kind to Freud’s proposed link between early bowel habits or toilet training and anal traits, although these traits do seem to be associated with aversion to bodily waste. In the most amusing study of this kind, people with anal traits performed poorly on a task requiring them to perform a hand-eye coordination task while their arms were plunged elbow-deep in a smelly, ‘fecal-like’ medium composed of flour and used crank-case oil (Rosenwald et al., 1966). However, although Freud was mistaken about the origins of the anal character, there is consistent evidence that its traits do in fact form a coherent pattern. Indeed, the anal character lives on as obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), whose eight diagnostic features mirror it strikingly. People with OCPD are preoccupied with details, rules and lists, perfectionistic, and excessively devoted to work and productivity (orderliness); they have an inflexibly scrupulous morality, are rigid and stubborn, and are reluctant to delegate (obstinacy); and they have a miserly spending style and an inability to discard worn out or worthless objects (parsimony). Features of the anal character also live on in several inter-related traits

that are mainstays of contemporary their hands afterwards. Men are more personality psychology, including likely to use scatological language and perfectionism, disgust-proneness, less likely to be offended by it. Their toilet authoritarianism and conscientiousness. graffiti tends to be more libidinous, hostile The anal character stubbornly endures. and excrement-focused than women’s, as Although excretion plainly relates to well as being briefer and less issues of concern to clinical, health and conversational (Green, 2003). Evidently personality psychologists, it is especially the bathroom is a space that is bound up germane to social psychology. Although with masculinity, femininity and the social it is an intensely private matter it also codes that maintain them. resonates in our public emotions, moral A common thread running through judgements and prejudices. In the affective these differences is that women’s excretion realm excretion is most closely tied to is more hidden, emotionally fraught and disgust and shame, two until recently suppressed than men’s. The incompatibility neglected emotions that are intimately of femininity and excretion is nicely connected to the dirty and unreliable expressed in Jonathan Swift’s poem ‘The nature of our bodies (Nussbaum, 2004) lady’s dressing room’, in which a suitor and to one another (Giner-Sorolla & sneaks into his beloved’s room only to Espinosa, 2011). find evidence of her dirty corporeality, Shame reflects a belief that the self is including sweaty garments, beslimed soiled or spoiled, whereas disgust reflects towels and encrusted combs. Upon a perception that something outside the discovering her chamber-pot he slinks self is contaminating, either literally, as away in horror, lamenting ‘Oh! Celia, with faeces and rotten food, or Celia, Celia shits!’ The same sentiment is metaphorically, as with rotten conduct. expressed less poetically by an American Moral disgust is triggered by violations of undergraduate: ‘women are supposed to rules of purity and sacredness, and the be non-poopers’ (Weinberg & Williams, emotion can intensify moral condemnation 2005, p.327). Despite our enlightened even when it is unrelated to what is being modern attitudes to gender equality, condemned. For example, disgust elicited women are still judged more severely for experimentally by violations of this ideal of hypnosis or fart untaintedness than men. spray leads people to In one study (Goldenberg “In the affective realm express stronger & Roberts, 2004), a female excretion is most closely aversion to a range of experimenter who excused tied to disgust and shame” morally questionable herself to use the bathroom acts (Schnall et al., was evaluated more negatively 2009; Wheatley & than one who excused herself to Haidt, 2005) get some paperwork: no such difference From excretion’s link to moral was found for a male experimenter. judgement it is a small step to its Findings such as this reveal the association with social attitudes. There richness and fascination of a topic that is strong evidence that disgust-proneness might seem, at first blush, to be merely is related to prejudice. Yoel Inbar and puerile. Puerile or not, excretion is one of colleagues (2009), for example, have the neglected and underappreciated topics shown that disgust-sensitive people are in psychology that Paul Rozin (2007) especially likely to have anti-gay attitudes. refers to as a ‘hole’ in the field. Rozin Others have associated disgust-proneness singled out for special attention the ‘hole with xenophobia and ethnocentrism. hole’: a psychology of bodily orifices that Recently it has even been argued that has been largely abandoned following the partial eclipse of psychoanalysis. Our cross-national differences in closeddiscipline may not be ready for the Journal mindedness and intolerance are excretionof Toilet Psychology, but perhaps it’s time to related: countries with higher levels of start filling the hole hole. parasite stress, associated psychologically with disgust and materially with poor sanitation, are less likely to have robust democracies, individual freedom, equitable distribution of economic resources and gender equality (Thornhill et al., 2009). Nick Haslam Gender is itself a social division that is is Professor of Psychology intimately connected to excretion. Women at the University of tend to be more disgusted than men by Melbourne bodily waste, more censorious of nhaslam@unimelb.edu.au flatulence, more concerned about concealing their smells and sounds during bathroom visits and more likely to wash

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Blogging on brain and behaviour The British Psychological Society’s free Research Digest service: blog, email, Twitter and Facebook ‘An amazingly useful and interesting resource’ Ben Goldacre, The Guardian

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CPD Workshops Professional development opportunities from your learned Society EVENT

DATE

Mindfulness day retreat for practitioners (DCoP)

8 June

Introduction to working with challenging forensic clients (DFP)

18 June

Understanding and managing anxiety disorders in childhood (DCP)

21 June

Organisational applications of mindfulness (DOP)

25 June

An integral approach to coaching – A rigorous and compassionate way to support clients in their long-term development (DOP)

28 June

Offender profiling & linking serial crimes (DFP)

29 June

Mindfulness in the context of coaching psychology (SGCP)

3 July

Building bridges: East & west psychology and psychotherapy in practice (DCP Faculty Race & Culture)

4 July

Introduction to CBT in schools (DECP)

6 July

Motivational interviewing: A practitioner workshop in supporting client behaviour change in sport, exercise & health (DSEP) 12–13 July Doing dialogue: Creating structured, critical & creative discussion in groups (DOP)

16 July

Anxiety management – Theory to practice (DSEP)

17 July

Where do we go from here? History, theory and values in learning disability services (DCP)

18 July

Masterclass in career coaching: Challenging clients (DOP)

11 September

Preventing sexual violence (DFP)

13 September

Supervision skills: Essentials of supervision (Workshop 1)

21 September

Supervision skills: Enhancing supervision skills (Workshop 2)

22 September

Becoming an effective supervisor (Part 1)

24 September

Becoming an effective supervisor (Part 2)

25 September

An experiential introduction to Mindfulness: Compassion, choice and gratitude (DCP & DCoP)

2 October

Understanding social bias and its relevance to business psychology – How to measure it and how to manage it (DOP)

4 October

Supervision in coaching psychology: Professional practice day (SGCP)

5 October

Updates in CBT to work with OCD (DCP & DCoP)

8 October

Supervision skills: Models of supervision (Workshop 3)

12 October

Mental health at work: Improving well-being in the workplace (DOP)

17 October

Supervision skills: Workshop 4 – Ongoing development supervison of supervision (DCoP Scotland)

19 October

Introduction to compassion focused therapy (Psychotherapy Section)

24 October

Perpetrators of intimate partner abuse: Risk implications from research to practice (DFP)

25 October

For more information on these CPD events and many more visit www.bps.org.uk/ﬁndcpd.

www.bps.org.uk/learningcentre

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vol 25 no 6

june 2012

LOOKING BACK

The house of cure What was life like within Leicestershire’s first lunatic asylum? Diane Lockley turns to the historical records.

There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside – the asylum which our forefathers built with such immense solidity. Enoch Powell, Minister of Health, 1961

n 10 May 1837 the Leicestershire County Lunatic Asylum opened its doors to patients. Built at a cost of £17,948, the asylum was located on the current site of the University of Leicester in a rural landscape. There was space for 104 patients (the first recorded being a Mary from Shepshed). My research has turned the pages of the surviving admission registers, case books, superintendents’ journals and reports of visitors to discover what life was like for more than 7000 patients admitted before the doors closed in 1908. I spent many hours with the records, held at the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland at Wigston Magna. I lived with Sarah the Bible reader from Shepshed, Mark Anthony the warehouseman from Loughborough, Harry the timber agent from Syston: very real people, what brought them to the asylum and what happened to them. My own misconception that mentally ill individuals arrived hidden in carriages and often in restraints, to spend the rest of their lives behind locked doors, was soon cast aside. The Visitors Committee remarked in 1849 that the Asylum was to be ‘a house of cure and not a house of detention’, and it does appear that around 50 per cent of the people admitted were cured enough to eventually return to their former lifestyles.

treatment. They are extraordinary vehicles of historical research, because so much effort was originally made in compiling them. The patients had to have the necessary paperwork at the time of their admission, or they would be discharged immediately. At times, the admitting officer would reveal frustration at a lack of information: The previous history of the patient like that of most others is wrought in mystery, for the reasons so frequently assigned before and it is much to be regretted, that some more compulsory means are not adopted by legal enactment, to remedy so important a deficiency in the furnishing of information essentially useful in the treatment of the case and most invaluable in a statistical point of view.

However, we do know that around half of the admissions were recorded with mania and approximately a quarter with

melancholia. The strategic importance of an accurate classification of a patient’s medical condition at the time of admission is emphasised by the following inclusion in the Medical Superintendent’s Journal 15 Sept 1869, with one of the phrases being underlined by the superintendent: There has been considerable amount of excitement and confusion in the wards lately owing principally to the want of classification – and to the admission of some very maniacal patients.

The most difficult to classify accurately were those with severe mental handicap (over 400 of them), which was usually the result of congenital defect, a serious accident or a major infection. They were often very noticeably younger than the general clientele, with two boys being admitted aged just four. Young Frederick from Knighton was multiply handicapped:

The patient is completely unable either to walk, speak or feed himself, he is obliged to be fed with a spoon of the attendant and passes both faeces and urine apparently without consciousness.

Many family households would have found it exceptionally difficult to care for those affected with such a degree of disability. There are also many records made of incoming patients also suffering from epilepsy. For many, they did not have to be

The need for admission Twenty-six patient case books, which run from 2 January 1845 up until its closure, are the most informative documents, containing the basic admission details, plus a full description of illness and

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Etching of the Leicestershire and Rutland Lunatic Asylum, January 1890, by patient James Murray (by courtesy of University of Leicester Archives)

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mentally retarded to cause noticeable difficulties within their environments. A hosiery seamer from Wigston suffering from chronic mania was found cooking meat, sugar and tea together in a frying pan; Mary Theresa from Glenfield would go out gardening with a carving knife at 4am. Religious beliefs played a major part in the lives of almost all the patients being admitted, and around 200 patients were just too wrapped up in their religion, which was reputed to be the cause of their mental malady. William, a bricklayer from Castle Donington, complained of pains in the head due to his being ‘Too much engaged in the work of God’, and David the labourer from Earl Shilton ‘had a commission from God to destroy all unbelievers’. On occasion the case books reveal more everyday disquiet. Martha, who had apparently starved her children and believed herself to be the worst woman in the world, had:

positive things were inevitably going on too. The number of deaths within the asylum walls cannot be ignored. At least eight patients died on the day of admission or the very next day, 259 died within a month of admission, virtually 700 died within a year of admission with another almost 700 dying within the first five years as a patient. Yet equally we cannot ignore the fact that many patients were very seriously physically debilitated and critically ill at the time of entry. There A patient record (by courtesy of the Record Office for were also large numbers of individuals being admitted in Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland) old age, and outbreaks of committee of visitors would come in as smallpox and influenza to contend with. tasters, and diet sheets would be on view There were other negative inclusions …what has been commonly called an in the main hall. Those who had a total amongst the records, with the most ill assorted marriage, for her former disinclination to food unfortunately disturbed requiring, ‘strait’ ‘stout’ or husband she entertained the fondest had to be fed via an oesophageal tube. ‘short’ waist coats and manacles, which affection, for the latter unmitigated Some, by contrast, had ravenous hungers: were usually used to facilitate admission. disgust, hence arose a housewife from Bottesford had an The padded rooms those fruitful sources of absolute passion for potatoes, and had to were at times used domestic disquietitude be watched at meal times as ‘she would after admission, but “The staff appear to have [sic], unhappy bolt off with them from the plates of these corrective and been focused in finding comparisons, and mutual others’. protective facilities therapeutic activities” recriminations, until the One of the most important parts are very rarely domestic hearth became of the treatment process was to allow mentioned. desecrated and her home patients to experience some degree of ‘Confinement, probation a hell upon earth… how few of these a normal life. A troubled mind needed or punishment of any inmate’ was instances are ever recorded, yet how other things to think about, not directly forbidden without medical authority. fearfully, they add to the long list of related to their immediate problems. This There was to be ‘no deceit or terrifying misfortunes and insanity. was particularly important for those who of patients, or irritation by mockery or were not fit enough for their free time to mimicry’. The keepers ‘shall not indulge Patients of all ages, sexes, religions and be spent actually working for the asylum or express vindictive feelings’; they were occupations therefore came to the asylum in some way, such as in the laundry or to ‘forgive all petulance on the part of the as patients, and most entries in the case out at Newbold Unthank on the asylum patients and treat with equal tenderness books suggest good reasons for their farm. The staff appear to have been those who give the least trouble’. admission. However, one officer seemed focused in finding therapeutic activities Whatever the state of those admitted quite annoyed about the admission of for each and every patient, including – ‘curable’ or ‘incurable’, whether they William, an intemperate framework basic recuperative activities or lighter were desperately incapacitated, relatively knitter: tasks such as dusting, watering plants, healthy, in a filthy condition or cleanly This case is a very deplorable one… sewing and darning. dressed – their treatment always started he seems to be sent into the asylum Music, with its therapeutic potential, immediately. The Superintendent said of simply because he is dirty and appears to have taken a major place John from Ashby Folville: troublesome. Upon referring to the date of within asylum life. The weekly dances admission and the recent date of the were a much-favoured pursuit and even patient’s illness it will be seen how A few patients had the same answer to the young ‘idiots’ were given access to rapid the recovery was and how any question, like Mary from Shenton: this activity. After a few brass instruments important it is to subject insanity to ‘When can I go home?’ were purchased, a band was put together, adequate treatment in its early stage. composed of both attendants and patients. The Superintendent virtually Treatment within the The priority was for patients to have took up the role of an entertainment access to the basic necessities of life. ‘house of cure’ manager with dramatic performances of The records suggest that the asylum never Many were from desperately either outside, amateur groups or those lost its stated focus of being a ‘house of impoverished backgrounds, so the with staff as the cast. Ventriloquists, availability of an adequate and cure’. Many positive things continually conjurers, comedians, puppet shows, appropriate diet was essential. The happened within those walls, but less choirs, musicians also all performed

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within the Recreation Room. Fresh air was viewed as vital part of recovery and virtually everybody would have had access to the two ‘airing courts’. Several patients were allowed to go unaccompanied for excursions into town and a few were actually given a key to the door. When an elderly patient was mugged whilst out, the street lighting was improved, rather than the patients being kept in. The trips were often not just around the corner: the Superintendent’s Journal notes a trip by five patients down to London by train to view the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1855, and 350 patients and staff went for a day’s picnic by train to the asylum farm in June 1883. It certainly surprised me to find that in June 1885: …in the afternoon, Not one male patient was in bed, in the wards, or even in the airing courts – That is every individual male patient was free & beyond lock & key – and it may be doubted whether this ever occurred before in any Asylum.

In 1882, the Superintendent had commented:

I believe the whole asylum is going on

smoothly and without friction: which is greatly owing to our possessing a carefully selected and very respectable staff of servants all round, as well as the great liberty allowed to Inmates.

In case the reader thinks I am viewing the records through rose-tinted glasses, let me assure you that there are plenty of horrendous details to be found, including eight suicides. The Superintendent’s detailed journals really do enlighten us to life within the asylum, and there is a sense that no dastardly deed or tragic event will be covered up. Looking back, we have to understand that within the asylum’s 70 years of treating patients, many were admitted from such financial or experiential circumstances that breakdowns were perhaps inevitable. Despite this, counselling was a natural occurrence and patients were able to share their uneasy thoughts. When an extinct delusion was mentioned the patient was able to comment ‘Ah bah humbug’. Camaraderie amongst the patients was in evidence: the records suggest that many patients established vital parental roles with some of the

younger inmates or were helpful guardians to the frailer more elderly patients. Essentially, the prevailing positive attitude of the staff remains in evidence, even when dealing with a widowed knitter ‘wandering about with a face as long as a ladder’, or Henry: ‘unamused, glum, silent and unassociating’. Despite the tough task, the asylum recorded a statistical success of curing or noticeably relieving over two thousand patients within less than a year of their treatment. To me, the long-standing belief that once you were behind asylum doors you stayed there for ever totally devalues the extent of dedicated care and treatment afforded to the mentally ill of days gone by. I The book, The House of Cure, is available from the University of Leicester Bookshop, David Wilson Library Building, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH or http://shop.le.ac.uk, for £9.99. All profits go towards digitising the case books. I Diane Lockley is a retired teacher and avid historian, based in Leicester dtlockley@tiscali.co.uk

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vol 25 no 6

june 2012

2012 21 November, Nottingham Trent University 6 December, Kensington Town Hall These events are designed to inspire A-level, pre-tertiary and undergraduate students. There will be keynote presentations by established UK psychologists. Our aim is to give you a broad view of psychology, some of which will relate to the A-level curriculum, whilst others are designed to widen your perspective on where a psychology degree could take you. You can also explore the exhibition area which will include interactive demonstrations, book stalls, careers advice and much more. Booking information £16 per delegate (including a packed lunch). Delegate rate includes VAT at the current rate. For every 10 places you book you will get one FREE tutor place. Don’t delay – last year was a sell out.

For the latest information and to book visit

www.bps.org.uk/P4SNottingham2012 www.bps.org.uk/P4SLondon2012

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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