News avoiders

More and more people are deliberately avoiding news reports as they find them too depressing and alarming. They're actively looking for alternative media content that's more cheerful and optimistic.

At the start of this year, 39 per cent of people questioned said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29 per cent in 2018. They're overwhelmed by rolling news alerts and commentary, much of it horrific or worrying.

I must say my own attitude to the news is somewhat ambivalent. I want to know what's going on in the outside world, but I also recoil from so much outright brutality and misery - which I can do nothing about.

Of course journalists will argue that they have to give us the full horror of events like wars or mass rapes or barbaric regimes, so we realise just how dreadful they are. To skirt over sickening details or play them down in order to "spare people's feelings" is simply irresponsible.

But at the same time as we're made aware of all these appalling events, we're usually unable to do anything about them, which leaves us feeling not only depressed but frustrated and helpless. I have no influence over any of the public figures who could give us a better world. I can only watch as horror after horror unfolds.

In the end the only thing I can do is turn off the news and retreat into my comfortable domestic bubble, watching episodes of Simon's Cat, listening to Bonnie Raitt, and re-reading my favourite authors. Thank heaven for culture, which is always a reliable antidote to the savagery of the outside world.

All too much

Suicide is a very strange business, isn't it? How come people feel so desperate, so helpless, so beleaguered that they resort to such an extreme solution? How come they just want to leave everything behind and end their life?

Sometimes it's understandable that someone has taken that drastic step. Their life is so terrible that more of the same for years to come is simply too much to contemplate. Other times it's a complete mystery. Someone seems to have a great life, with everything going their way, and out of the blue they're found dead.

Why do some people struggle on, however dismal their circumstances, while other just give up and decide it's all too much?

It was very understandable when one of Jenny's old school friends killed herself. She was a diagnosed schizophrenic and had had severe mental health problems for many years. Her quality of life was drastically limited and there was no sign of that ever changing.

But other people are found dead and there were no warning signs whatever. Why they did what they did leaves everyone baffled. Even people who were close to them and knew them really well (or thought they did) can't begin to explain it.

What's truly shocking though is when someone doesn't just take their own life but takes other people with them. This seems to be getting more common. Like the man who killed six people before turning the gun on himself at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. And the man who killed his wife and three children in a domestic dispute in Phoenix, Arizona, before taking his own life.

They might have been able to explain their own suicide, but how do they justify ending other people's lives as well as their own?

A sad decline

Dementia is a cruel and distressing illness. Cruel and distressing both to the victims and to their family and friends who have to watch their gradual mental decline but can do nothing to reverse it.

Both Jenny's parents developed dementia before their death, and so did my mother. My father died of lung cancer at the age of 70, but if he had lived longer, who knows, he might also have succumbed to dementia.

It still haunts me, almost three years after my mother's death, that she slowly deteriorated from a bright and lively woman to someone who barely knew where she was or what she was doing.

She seemed to have forgotten most of her life, and any question I put to her would prompt nothing but a vague smile. She wasn't capable of a coherent conversation and showed no interest in my own life. It was if I was talking to a total stranger, and one who had withdrawn into some remote corner of her mind that was inaccessible to anyone else.

I felt helpless and demoralised, knowing there was nothing I could do to wind back the illness, nothing I could to reawaken the vibrant woman I had once known. I could only watch sadly as her mind crumbled.

Naturally I look for signs that I might be developing dementia myself, but so far things seem to be okay. I may have a terrible memory, but I gather there's no established link between existing poor memory and dementia. Some very smart people with excellent memories, like Harold Wilson and Iris Murdoch, were struck down just the same.

It must be dreadful to be aware your mind is going but you can do nothing to restore it. It's a horrible way to go.

Pic: not my mum!

Mountains or molehills?

People's real-life identities are very different from the ridiculous gender roles that follow us all around, but if there's one way men fit the stereotype, it's their urge to be rugged, self-sufficient individuals.

The evidence is that men are less likely to ask other people for support and tend to keep their problems to themselves, even if they're being torn apart by grief, sadness, hatred, or other extreme emotions.

It's a step forward that so many male celebs have admitted recently to their battles with depression, anxiety and other psychological issues, things that in the past they may have kept strictly under wraps, but there's still a long way to go.

It seems to me most women tend to spill out their troubles to anyone who'll listen, and their close friends for sure. They're less likely to bottle up agonising emotions and pretend everything's fine.

Certainly when I was young I conformed to the male stereotype and kept my miseries to myself. When I was bullied at school, as far as I remember I never confided in the housemaster or the head prefect or anyone who might have helped me. I guess I would have seen such an admission of weakness and helplessness as too humiliating. Men are meant to be strong and resilient and all the rest of it.

Now I have Jenny to confide in, of course I share my negative feelings with her all the time, and I'm lucky to be able to. But I still hesitate to show them to anyone else, even people I know very well. I ask myself, why would they want to listen? This is simply the emotional buffeting and turbulence of dealing with life. They'll think I'm making a big fuss over nothing.

It's not that I'm trying to be rugged and self-sufficient, just that I think I'm making mountains out of molehills. Desperate sadness? Overwhelming grief? Crushing helplessness? Who am I kidding? People out there know real distress, real trauma, not the petty emotions I'm peddling.

How am I feeling? Absolutely fine, thanks. On top of the world.