Lessons From The School Of Me

Recently I was pre-approved on Netgalley to read Alain de Botton’s ‘A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons From The School of Life’. It is described as, ‘The essential guide to mental health.’ I thought I ought to give it a go, being as how I am a person with a lot of mental health and there is a significant amount of room for improvement.

I shall start by saying that I did not like this book, so if you are a great lover of Mr. de Botton you might want to wander off and make a cup of tea.

I review a lot of books. My general rule is that just because I don’t like something, it doesn’t mean that it’s bad. What it means is that I don’t like it. As nobody made me king recently so I can’t smite anyone for disagreeing with me, I suck it up. I always try to find something positive to say about a book, because writing a book is a hard, largely thankless task and people generally do their best. I write as kind a review as I can, save all my rude words for home and move on.

I am making an exception for this book, because as a woman who is currently going through the wringer with her mental health, I found it actively unhelpful and at times both infuriating and upsetting. I have had many decades in which to work on my shit, and I am a much wiser woman than I once was. I can choose to actively ignore the advice in this book, such as it is. More than once in the last few days I have talked myself out of writing this post because it seems mean and churlish. It’s clear that Alain has had a hard time of things himself, mental health wise and that he is, I am generously assuming, trying to help.

Having said all that, I kept coming back to the thought of young me, mad beyond mad and desperate for answers. I thought about the damage that reading this book might have done. I’m writing this for that girl, to throw her a lifeline. I want to let her know that just because people might be trying to help you, it doesn’t mean that they are helping you. Sometimes, like Alain, they are actually trying to help themselves. Sometimes those are the people who damage you most. You don’t have to be polite when it comes to knowing yourself best and saving yourself first. Your job is to survive this shit in the very best way you can, for yourself. If that means telling Alain de Botton to shove it, so be it.

I have no problem with people writing about their own experiences of mental health. Some of the most helpful things I have read were by people who were writing their truth. That isn’t what this book does. This book attempts to teach us. It is a lecture disguised as a book. It makes some bold and sweeping statements about what poor mental health looks like and what things will make a person better. It uses the word ‘we’ and ‘us’ a lot as if we are all in this together. We are not. It feels like it’s attempting to set out universal truths. These seem largely predicated on Alain’s own experiences of mental health which he has generously impersonalised and enlarged upon to include us.

There is prolific use of the word ‘should’ in this book. The ill person ‘should’ attempt to eat nourishing food. They ‘should’ train themselves to sleep like a toddler. They ‘should’ bathe like a pensioner taking the waters at Baden Baden. They ‘should’ read improving books and muse upon uplifting artworks to raise their spirits. They ‘should’ get better parents who didn’t Philip Larkin them and then selfishly die before saying sorry. They ‘should’ set fire to this book at the bottom of the garden.

I made that last one up.

What I have found to be true for me in my many and varied periods of derangement is that all the ‘shoulds’ line up and march about skreeking at me in a never ending loop of recrimination that don’t help a damn bit. I might be mental but I’m not fucking stupid. I do know that a bowl of porridge is going to do me more good than eating an entire packet of Hobnobs under the duvet with the lights off. I know what I ‘should’ do, but one of the quirks of my poor mental health is I find it almost impossible to do the things I ‘should’ do because I am not very well. I have found that reminding myself of all the ‘shoulds’ that I can’t do generally tends to make me feel about a thousand times worse until they eventually paralyse me completely.

I do not subscribe to shoulds. I subscribe to whatever gets me through the day, because if I get through this day, tomorrow might be better. Sometimes a day is a bit of an ask, so I allow myself to work in whatever time increments seem doable.

The main thing that this book taught me, is what an incredibly privileged man Alain de Botton is, and that the rarefied air that he breathes makes him fundamentally unsuitable when it comes to telling me anything at all about how I ‘should’ go about getting well.

Alain suggests that fresh figs are very nourishing when a person is mental. Even better is feta drizzled with honey. Nuts are also marvellously soothing. He says: ‘They seem to rein in the ambitions that ordinarily torture us.’ That’s a lot of pressure to put on (unsalted) pistachios - let alone the person eating them. I am bewildered by his dietary choices, coming as they do, hot foot from Ancient Greece - or that really good grocer on Camden Parkway.

He says that we must go to sleep early and sleep like children. If we are sad, we must allow our salt tears to bathe the pillow before we sleep to soothe our minds before blessed rest descends on us. Alain has two children. I wondered, as I read the sleep section of the book, if he had ever actually put his own children to bed. He seems to have an extremely rose tinted view of the sleep patterns of children, which is not evidenced by my lived experience. For me, the idea of sleeping like a child evokes memories of being pestered every fifteen minutes for ‘a glass of water’ for at least two hours after the official bed time. Any salt tears were usually mine and were rage induced. Generally fretful sleep would ensue until at least five a.m. at which point there would be a great deal of gleeful wakefulness.

As for soothing sleep during my own bouts of madness, it made no difference at all when I went to bed, how much camomile tea I swallowed or indeed, how many cathartic tears I shed. It was, and largely remains, as elusive as Scotch mist.

I was particularly aggrieved by Alain’s suggestion that ‘we’ might want to embark on some light household duties to distract ourselves from our woes. He says that washing up is a helpful activity. At this point in the book I actually put my Kindle down and shouted ‘FUCK OFF’ so loudly that Jason, who was working, took his headphones off and asked if I was alright.

I was not alright.

Nor was I alright when he went on to say that sometimes, we must put aside ambition and striving in our career and accept that we may have to take some time out to look after ourselves. Once we have eaten all the ambition dulling nuts and climbed into Baby Bear’s bed after a little light housework, we can consider doing a job that nourishes our soul instead of our pocket. Alain suggests teaching someone to read, or becoming a horny handed man of the soil.

Alain also has opinions on the required qualities and duties of our friends, our lovers and our parents. He tells us how much gentle exercise we must do and what pictures we must look at. He exhorts us to stop thinking about ending our lives. If washing up doesn’t stop us thinking about killing ourselves, we could do some Sudoku or read improving novels.

Alain has an answer for everything - that has helped Alain.

I am glad these things have helped him. I am glad that he has found an obsession with apricots uplifting, that he has worked out all the grudges against his parents and finds extremely dull Eighteenth Century pictures of women looking out of windows help him feel better. Maybe I am jealous. I probably am. I would love to be able to find the things that Alain prescribes helpful, but I don’t.

This book is the musing of a man who looks at housework as soothing because he has never had to scrub shitty stains out the bottom of the toilet on his hands and knees, weeping with exhaustion and despair. A man who thinks his children come bath time clean and pyjama clad, delighted to see him as standard, and not as the result of all the hours of unpaid labour his wife has put in before he got home from work. A man who has enough savings to never have to lie awake, sick with fear, thinking about the catastrophic consequences of being too ill to work. A man whose life is so generously proportioned that it allows for poor mental health to exist in its own sphere, separate to the myriad problems and terrors that daily life adds to an already overburdened brain. This is the therapeutic journey of a privileged, educated, wealthy white man.