Tag Archives: mental health

on silence


Posted by hallymk1

I read this by Kate Bowles about speaking words that are true, necessary and kind.

And I read this by Kate Bowles about how that social media joke isn’t funny anymore.

Those two posts led to me to ask the following, open questions of anyone who wishes to use mental health and/or alcoholism as an amuse bouche on their social media platform(s). They were triggered by writing here.

  1. How do we use our established social media platforms to refuse to joke about mental health and alcoholism? How do we avoid the glib use of these conditions, in order to escape our trivialising of them? How do we engage with those who have experience of them so that we can make reasoned, evidenced, and practical arguments? How do we write in ways that are true, necessary and kind?
  2. If we do not struggle with “regular bouts of clinical depression, temporary insanity and chronic alcoholism”, should we really be joking about them? Really? If we don’t then from what basis are we writing and joking about them and why? Why these conditions and not others?
  3. How do we generate a collective understanding of the damaging impact of misinformed assertions about those conditions? How do we refuse writing about conditions that can actually trigger? How do we refuse and push-back against those misinformed, poorly-evidenced, fatuous pieces of writing that risk being forms of trolling?
  4. How do we avoid making tenuous and poorly-researched connections about the association between technology use (e.g. blogging) and mental health or substance abuse? Wouldn’t it be better to try to understand the conditions first? There is plenty of academic and user-centred literature available. How does our writing help those who are campaigning for better mental health or alcohol awareness?
  5. How do we develop a collective understanding of the actual impact on families and relationships of chronic alcoholism? How do we understand the impact on families and relationships of caring for someone with Wernicke’s Encephalopathy and/or Korsakoff Syndrome? How do we understand the pain of caring for someone as they develop alcohol-induced dementia? How do we show kindness and care to those who are forced to watch the struggle in life and death of the addict?
  6. How do we develop a collective understanding of how depression and substance abuse don’t emerge from the pressure of writing? How do we develop a collective understanding of how debilitating clinical depression is? How do we write and speak in ways that increase societal understanding or care for those who suffer? How do we avoid amplifying societal misunderstandings and assertions and prejudices?
  7. How do we use our privilege to hear others, and to care about others? How do we speak and write in ways that are true, necessary and kind, so that what we say is true, necessary and kind?
  8. How do we recognise that sometimes we need to apologise rather than give poorly thought through excuses for our apparent thoughtlessness? How do we recognise that sometimes silence is the thing?

on the University as anxiety machine


Posted by hallymk1

I would be your king

But you want to be free

Confusion and art

I’m nothing but heart

(as we stumble to the shore… as we walk into the night …. this before can’t say it anymore…)

Low. 2011. Nothing but Heart.

We think we know what the narrative is. But over time it fractures and cracks and dies and is reborn. As we fracture and crack and die and are reborn.

Inside this world, inside our history, inside this capitalism we fracture and crack under the stress of it all. The toxic stress of being for economic growth. Of being for an entrepreneurial life. Of giving away our labour. Of alienating our labour. Of giving away ourselves. Of alienating ourselves. We willingly give it up. This is the new normal. We willingly give up our very selves so that they can accumulate value. We accede to their dominance so that we can survive and breathe and have hope. Hope in the face of the reality that our fracture and our cracking are driven by their hegemony and their economic growth.

The power of their narrative of economic growth, which subsumes our labour, and that is visited upon the University. Their common sense. Their intellectual rigour. The new normal.

As Jehu argues:

The sale of labor power has the effect of scrubbing all the concrete manifestations of labor from our consciousness.

We are scrubbed clean of our humanity, and this is done systemically:

It does this by validating the reduction of our capacities to just another commodity in the market.

This is all we are. A reduction. Scrubbed of the potential of what our lives might be. Marketised. Abstracted from reality. Made contingent on the production of value. And as we have witnessed in countless testimonies the University is increasingly a space inside which this scrubbing, this abstraction, this contingency, plays out psychologically. So that our desire to be something other than an entrepreneur is disciplined. So that we witness:

For many, like myself, like those closest to me, anxiety and depression are not technical terms but personal experiences.

And we witness:

Too many casual academics find themselves barely surviving as they are suspended in a state of near constant poverty.

And we witness:

The evidence of our anxiety is not exactly hidden – it’s scattered across social media and in discussions within session-by-session teacher networks, that universities mostly don’t see. More and more stories are emerging in these networks about the hardships of poverty, and families under immense stress.

And we witness:

Studies have found that graduate school is not a particularly healthy place. At the University of California at Berkeley, 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide,

This is insidious. This latter-day higher education. This University as anxiety machine. This University as means for the production of anxiety. This University that forces us to internalise the creation of value and the extraction of value and the accumulation of value. This University that is recalibrated for value as we seek to resist in the name of teaching and learning and becoming and emancipation and us. The anxiety of the future collapsed onto the present; trumping the present; devaluing the present. The University not as a place where students can find themselves, but where they can create themselves. This is the University that demands we overcome our present imperfections; our present lack of impact; our present lack of student satisfaction; our present lack of staffing efficiency.

Future perfect trumps our present tense. Our present made tense.

As Giroux argues in Border Crossings, we might seek redress through the politicisation of our relationships inside the University, and by reflecting on the politics of pedagogic power.

Gramsci points to the complex ways [through hegemonic control] in which consent is organised as part of an active pedagogical process on the terrain of everyday life. In Gramsci’s view such a process must work and rework the cultural an ideological terrain of subordinate groups in order to legitimate the interests an authority of the ruling bloc. (p. 163)

What this maps onto is a project for

the construction of an educational practice that expands human capacities in order to enable people to intervene in the formation of their own subjectivities and to be able to exercise power in the interest of transforming the ideological and material conditions of domination into social practices that promote social empowerment and demonstrate possibilities. (p. 166)

What we might therefore do as educators is rethink how our pedagogic practices reveal and reinforce the hegemonic and objective material conditions of capitalist society. We might rethink how those practices enable teachers and students to define new relations of power that are against privilege. Such rethinking demands new relations of power inside the classroom that are against the taking and accumulation of power. Such rethinking demands democratic and participatory alternatives through which the curriculum and the relationships that shape it and the assessments that validate it are negotiated.

This is the dissolution of the University as a means for the domination/hegemony of a particular world view or a specific class. This is the dissolution of the University as a coercive space that is re-forged inside-and-against student-debt and impact and research excellence and analytics and employability and entrepreneurship. This is the dissolution of the University as the civil society of tenured professors versus casualised precariat. This is the dissolution of the consensus that reshapes the civil society of higher education in the interests of capital through the ideology of student-as-consumer. This is the dissolution of a higher education that is for materialism and value.

This is for the production of a University rooted in solidarity and co-operation. This is for the production of a University that is active and critical and popular.

The purpose of popular education is to enable those who are marginalized to become more fully human.  I see it as essential to facilitate not only action, but also critical refection on the consequences of action as an essential element of educational practice.  It contributes not only to learning, but to what Paulo Freire call the act of knowing. (Carlos Cortez Ruiz, p. 6.)

As Gramsci noted in 1916 this turns into “a problem of rights and of power”. This is the meaning of education as culture, and it is the relationship between political and civil society played out in the curriculum. In the prison notebooks (p. 330) Gramsci goes on to state that in whatever context, the problem of rights and power is a deeply conflicted, political process:

The average worker has a practical activity but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his activity in and understanding of the world; indeed, his theoretical consciousness can be “historically” in conflict with his activity. In other words, he will have two theoretical consciousnesses: one that is implicit in his activity and that really unites him with all his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the world and a superficial, “explicit” one that he has inherited from the past. The practical-theoretical position, in this case, cannot help becoming “political”—that is, a question of “hegemony.”

Inside the University, our confronting this as a political pedagogic process is, as Mike Neary argues, potentially revolutionary. At issue is the possibility that we might frame a curriculum that:

is driven by a lack of faith in the inevitability of progressive transformation, based on a negative rather than a positive critique of the social relations of capitalist society… the future is not the result of naturally upturning economic cycles, nor the structural contradictions of capitalism, but is made by the possibility and necessity of progressive social transformation through practical action, i.e., class struggle… the logic of revolution is not based on the call to some lofty liberal principle, e.g. social justice, or the empowerment of the powerless, but the more practical imperatives driven by the avoidance of disaster beyond human imagination.

Here it is worth highlighting Neary’s focus on Vygotsky’s belief in the revolutionary nature of teaching, where it emerges from inside the student as a social being. As Neary notes, teaching becomes radical where the social context of the curriculum is arranged by the teacher so that the student teaches themselves:

‘Education should be structured so that it is not the student that is educated, but that the student educates himself’ or, in other words, ‘…the real secret of education lies in not teaching’ (Vygotsky, 1926).

This is therefore beyond the impact of the teacher. This is beyond the student’s adaptation to the given teaching environment. This is for the creation of a person able to create and organise her own life as a pedagogic project. As Vygotsky notes in Shorter Logic this depends upon the ability to become concrete; to become for ourselves; to be.

… the man, in himself, is the child. And what the child has to do is to rise out of this abstract and undeveloped ‘in-himself’ and become ‘for himself’ what he is at first only ‘in-himself’ – a free and reasonable being.

And I am left wondering how to reconcile the University as an anxiety machine with the idea that the teacher might be revolutionary where s/he gives herself up to the process of arranging a practical, political pedagogy. This is revolutionary in the sense that bell hooks argued for an education that was more real, rooted in vivid, personal struggle against alienation and estrangement. This is the internalisation of the pedagogic process as a form of emancipation inside the student; and the restructuring of the student’s world based on the radical organisation of the classroom; and the student’s challenging of the prefigured world of the teacher in her everyday life and her every day actions; and the student’s on-going struggle to overcome the prefigured world of our political and civil society. This is the student’s struggle to be heard.

This is the same emancipatory process that Gramsci highlighted through his focus on critical awareness, the role of organic intellectuals who emerged through everyday life, and on the place of ‘common sense’ in maintaining hegemonic positions of power through civil society. However, it is also the same emancipatory process that underscores the therapeutic relationship. In therapy, Martha Crawford reminds us that the client/therapist relationship is potentially revolutionary in its identification and acceptance of limitations and past injuries as they are replicated and represented in present actions and thoughts and hopes, in order that these identifications and fractures might enable the self to be healed. For Crawford the deepest therapies change both client and therapist because they work from inside the client as social being.

We might also argue that the deepest pedagogic encounters change both student and teacher because they work from inside the client as social being. This is a relationship based upon identification and empathy, upon humane values of love, upon what we are willing to share and to bear co-operatively. This is the revolutionary, emancipatory space for teaching that is threatened inside the University as anxiety machine: what are we willing to share and to bear co-operatively? In the face of the iron law of competition and of value; in the face of the projection of the entrepreneurial self onto the curriculum and its relationships; in the face of the hegemony of efficiency and impact and satisfaction and growth; what are we willing to share and to bear co-operatively?

This is revolutionary teaching as a mirror that enables the student/teacher to overcome her being “trapped, lost, hypnotized by images of our own projected soul.” This is teaching as therapy inside the anxiety machine. This is teaching and learning as the ability to reflect; as the act of reflection; as the act of looking into one’s soul; this is our looking in the mirror inside the anxiety machine. The power of this is not to be understated. The threat of this is not to be understated because says Crawford:

Mirrors reveal to us what cannot be shown to anyone else, what we do not know, and perhaps don’t want to know about ourselves at all.

Perhaps the revolutionary teacher always asks what we are willing to share and to bear co-operatively?

Postscript

Henry Giroux writes that:

The transformation of higher education into a an adjunct of corporate control conjures up the image of a sorcerer’s apprentice, of an institution that has become delusional in its infatuation with neoliberal ideology, values and modes of instrumental pedagogy. Universities now claim that they are providing a service and in doing so not only demean any substantive notion of governance, research and teaching, but also abstract education from any sense of civic responsibility. 

And we are caught and made fraught as our labour is stripped bare and alienated from us. As the corporate control of the University restructures our pedagogic agency into student satisfaction and consumption; as the corporate control of the University restructures our public scholarship into impact metrics and knowledge transfer; as the corporate control of the University restructures our solidarity into performance management; as the corporate control of the University attempts to restructure our souls, which have to cope with the dissonance of it all; as the corporate control of the University attempts to restructure our selves as we introject their performance management against our critical identity.

And Josh Freedman writes that this stress, this anxiety, this dissonance, is amplified though excessive University borrowing:

in the long-term, public and private nonprofit schools alike will find it even more difficult to provide a quality education to a wide array of the population. And in a battle between students, faculty, and creditors, the creditors right now have the upper hand – which calls into question the core of the future of American higher education.

And Eric Grollman writes about radical battle fatigue and survival:

Yet another painful reminder of how marginalized scholars are, at best, conditionally accepted in academia. Everyday, I am faced with the decision: group survival vs. individual survival.  Since these are opposing decisions, I rarely, if ever, experience both. Ultimately, I chose silence about the dining hall display; I picked “safely” keeping my job over the safety of Black people on campus.  By creating this blog, I am “taking one for the team,” enduring known and unknown professional risks in order to improve the lives of marginalized scholars.  Everyday that I wear a man’s suit, I am choosing professional safety (as well as safety from violence) over greater visibility of genderqueer people on campus.  Every interaction with a student or colleague — do I choose authenticity and social justice or safety and job security — carries the decision between my survival or my survival.  And, major decisions like making my research more “mainstream” to increase my professional status comes at the expense of my own authenticity and perspective. The very things I should and should not do as a tenure-track professor seem at odds with the very things I should not and should do as a Black queer person.

no chance of escape
now self-employed
concerned (but powerless)
an empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)
calm
fitter, healthier and more productive
like a pig
in a cage
on antibiotics.

Radiohead. 1997. Fitter Happier.


on academic labour and performance anxiety


Posted by hallymk1

 

ONE. The bleeding of our souls.

There is no escape from the living death of capitalist work (Dinerstein and Neary). This leads Cederström and Fleming to argue that our whole existence bleeds our souls in the name of value. The corporatisation of our lives bleeds our souls because:

The real fault-line today is not between capital and labor. It is between capital and life. Life itself is now something that is plundered by the corporation, rendering our very social being into something that makes money for business. We know them. The computer hackers dreaming code in their sleep. The airline stewards evoking their warm personality to deal with an irate customer…The aspiring NGO intern working for nothing. The university lecturer writing in the weekend. The call center worker improvising on the telephone to enhance the customer experience.

This is the world-for-acccumulation, against which Kate Bowles notes universities and academic labour are being restructured so that shame becomes a central tenet of everyday academic life.

We overwork because the current culture in universities is brutally and deliberately invested in shaming those who don’t compete effectively; as a correlative to this we are starting to value and promote to leadership roles people who really do believe in the dodgeball triumphalism of university rankings as a way of nurturing educational values and critical inquiry.

The cruelty of this shaming is that it passes itself off as supportive collegial celebration of the heroic few; it’s hard to call out precisely because it looks like a good thing.

Yesterday I argued that there is a broader set of questions for academics here, about how they approach organisational governance co-operatively, in order to generate solidarity that militates against the practices that devolve corporate leadership and responsibility for actions, and thereby enable performance management to become an internalised disciplinary activity. For Bowles, this is academic labour as labour that needs to stand against shame and being shamed through performance:

Being shamed isn’t the result of failing or refusing to participate in this system; it’s the result of being willing to supply your labour to enable competitiveness to work at all. Because there have to be losers, for there to be people who win.

TWO. Because there have to be losers, for there to be people who win.

The internalisation of performativity, alongside managerialism and marketization/the commodification of everyday practices, is as present inside the University as they are outside. Thus, academic labour is labour that needs to resist its reification and its alienation from its species. As Petrovic argued, as life, relationships, values, the soul, is recast for value or as value-laden, we witness:

[The] transformation of human beings into thing‑like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing‑world. Reification is a ‘special’ case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modem capitalist society

For Stephen Ball this is amplified by performativity that in-turn pivots around mechanisms for control and autonomy, and the deterritorialised nature of performance management so that it both appears and reappears inside-and-outside of the workplace. Thus, performativity is our lack of personal control over our labour, so that we seize on the enforcement of:

a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change – based on rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic). The performances (of individual subjects or organisations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of ‘quality’, or ‘moments’ of promotion or inspection. As such they stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organisation within a field of judgement. The issue of who controls the field of judgement is crucial. (p. 216)

This is the entrepreneurial turn inside the University, as that working space mirrors the need to generate the creative-commodity economy outside. This turn recasts the academic as innovator whose formation inside-and-outside the University can be witnessed and judged as creative and valuable, not because it is useful but because it can be exchanged. This is not about the relationships that the academic has either with her peers, her students, or most importantly with herself. It is about the enclosure and commodification of that life under the organisation of the market.

THREE. Zero autonomy and performance anxiety.

Elsewhere I wrote that the impact of this need to perform and to be seen to perform is a function of a lack of autonomy. However, it is also formed of the systemic myth that is peddled about how if only we were more resilient then the world would be ours.

We are conditioned to rely on the rugged, resilient individual. To develop the rugged, resilient individual. And in the process we are all demeaned. In the process we are all alienated from our humanity.

In this, recognition of our alienation not as academics, but as labour and as labour-power, matters. This is an alienation from our very selves, as more is demanded of us: more extensive lists of projects to manage; the next EU bid to chase; your team’s development reviews to finalise faster; your own research to be done on your own time; your need to bring in external income to justify performing at that conference; more value to create; more capital to set in motion; more surpluses to be generated. This is the restructuring of the University as a business through your work and your alienated self.

This alienation is witnessed in Miya Tokumitsu’s connection of the relationship between academic practices and academic psychology:

Few other professions fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output. This intense identification partly explains why so many proudly left-leaning faculty remain oddly silent about the working conditions of their peers. Because academic research should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts, if they are considered at all.

This underpins the increasing exploitation of the academic soul at work. It I why I was awake at 4am yesterday and today, worrying about those essays to be marked, about whether the three journal articles in review and the eight conference presentations accepted and the two book proposals and the proposed new Centre for Pedagogic Research are enough (enough already!) or made me a good enough academic (when I feel like a shameful fraud), and whether I am giving my team enough direction, and whether I need to find more time for trades union activities because solidarity is a weapon. Am I enough? Am I good enough? How am I judged, by you and by me? What is my value? Alienated from my self and my relationships through capitalist work.

And these fears and anxieties remind me that as I internalise a structural and structuring performance management, this is overlain on top of a hackneyed academic psychology that is prone to intense negativity, including: over-analysing my performance and my thinking until my mind bleeds; being convinced that everything has to be perfect for everyone forever, except for me; being unforgiving and overcritical of me; being unable to be in this world; being too deliberate in my use of language/discourse/action and search for hidden meanings where there may be none; making myself too responsible about stuff for which I am not responsible; and lacking faith in myself.

As Tokumitsu argues, this enables those in-power or with power-over the world to entreat educators to “do what you love”, and to give everything. This is hardly harmless. It reifies certain forms of work as loveable because they are intellectual or creative or social, rather than proletarianised, whilst its demands are made competitive and outcomes-focused and routine so that this very work underpins self-hatred. It is the sublimation and the very negation of the self; it is the identification of the ego with the performance; it is the bleeding of the soul. And the governor for this is the interplay between structural, organisational management, and crippling, personal, psychological self-doubt. Just work that bit harder, that bit faster, that bit better and we’ll tell you we are proud of you… And I read this into The Underbelly of Putting Yourself Last: Mental Illness, Stress, and Substance Abuse, and I read this into reports on mental health and Ph.D. study.

All this reminds me that a while back I wrote about courage and a friend’s cancer diagnosis that had been too long in arriving, and the realisation that “and now here we are.”

And now here we are. And for all sorts of reasons I read those five words with an intense scream against the pain that this life has become and the choices we are forced to make, in order to justify our lives as hard-working and worthy of justice. And I scream against the pain of the compromises that are contained in those five words. And I recognise that it is in the moment of a crisis that the things that we do, and the compromises that we make, to be a manager or a co-worker or for the clock or for impact or for efficiency or for whatever, resolve.

My alienated self; my soul at work; my mind bleeds; am I good enough? And I wrote to my friend over the weekend that this lack of autonomy was a form of structural domination, which wears us out socially and collectively, and which doesn’t matter to management because there is such a reserve army of labour to fill-in. The precariously employed, the casualised, the hourly-paid, the hopeful post-graduates, the lower-cost. So you have to perform, and this is their domination over us, reproduced through the logic of competition; competition between universities; competition between individuals; competition inside yourself.

FOUR. And it wears me out. It wears me out.

“You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend trying to get back what’s been took from you, more is going out the door. After a while you just have to try to get a tourniquet on it… Anyway, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from…”

“They sat quietly at the table. After a while the old man said: She mentioned there was a lot of old pictures and family stuff. What to do about that. Well. There ain’t nothing to do about it I don’t reckon. Is there?”

“No. I don’t reckon there is.”

Cormac McCarthy. 2005. No Country for Old Men.

The logic of academic competition that owns you as you ask “do I do enough?” “Prove it.” The future owned by fear. The future of “I do enough”, “I am good enough”, owned by the past of “do I do enough?”, “was I good enough?” Never thinking “I am” because the shadow of “am I?” is unforgiving. The logic of academic competition that uses the National Student Survey, Research Excellence, impact metrics, restricted promotions processes, and so on, as forms of academic cognitive behavioural therapy; as forms of restructuring what it means to be an academic; reifying what it means to labour in a University, so that performance is internalised. So that guilt and shame trump solidarity, unity and faith. So that in the battle to survive we forget that capitalist work is ‘a form of living death’ (Dinerstein and Neary (ht @josswinn)).

This means that, in Ball’s terms, we are subsumed under an imperative that makes:

management, ubiquitous, invisible, inescapable – part of and embedded in everything we do. Increasingly, we choose and judge our actions and they are judged by others on the basis of their contribution to organizational performance, rendered in terms of measurable outputs (p. 223).

This is the battle between an academic ego-identity that is increasingly status-driven and reified, a managerial cadre that seeks control through its own autonomy and performance management techniques, and the possibility of a socialised self that might refuse capital as the automatic subject. In this we need to recognise the duality that, first academic labour is labour and is locked in a struggle with capital over the production of value, and second that increasingly this form of labour is revealed as kettled inside a structure that exists for the autonomy of Capital.

This autonomy is a battle over productive and useful time. As Marx notes in Capital Volume 2:

It is plain that the more the production time and labour-time cover each other the greater is the productivity and self-expansion of a given productive capital in a given space of time. Hence the tendency of the capitalist production to reduce the excess of the production time over the labour-time as much as possible. But while the time of production of a certain capital may differ from its labour-time, it always comprises the latter, and this excess is itself a condition of the process of production. The time of production, then, is always that time in which a capital produces use-values and expands, hence functions as productive capital, although it includes time in which it is either latent or produces without expanding its value.

Inside a competitive market, all of life must become productive of value, and idle or working time, has to be annihilated. The self that produces things that cannot be exchanged has limited value and must be annihilated. The life that is consumed by working time rather than productive time is inefficient, and must be recalibrated by speed-up, always-on, the annilhilation of space by time. This is our internalisation of the capital’s necessity for perpetual time-space transformations, in order to generate and accumulate surplus-value and wealth. This is the time-space transformation through student debt, financialisation, the international university, the MOOC, and the University as an association of capitals.

This is the demand that academic labour fights against its fixity inside the walls of the University.

This is the demand that academic labour is always-on, always circulating, always looking for spaces to generate value.

This is the bind that academic labour now finds itself in: based in a belief system based on love or care or the student experience; courted and reified as special and high status and as commodity; kettled by performance anxiety and performance management; disciplined by academic cognitive behavioural therapy; forced to be responsive to the university as competing business in a landscape that is being reterritorialised on a global scale; forced to reinvent itself for expansion and accumulation; never allowed to be.

Never allowed to be.

Never allowed to be.

And it wears you out.


On students, teachers and the pedagogical alliance


Posted by hallymk1

We look for an idea that is beyond student-as-consumer, and we witness a reinforcement of a deterministic, manifest destiny of the student who bears the risk for her higher education. We witness statements that divide student and teacher: “we continue to use technology to reinforce 19th century teaching practice to meet out-dated assessment models.” We witness statements that tie information and employability to metrics and risk, through choice and accountability. We witness statements made about the rule of money in the creation of a market that will lever teaching excellence: “Without radical changes to how universities were financed however it was going to be difficult to change their behaviour. Now there is an opportunity to use our funding changes to push a real cultural change back towards teaching.” We witness statements made that reduce education to value: “Without high educational attainment, the UK will not maintain its wealth, quality of life and status in the world. A highly educated population is essential to Britain’s success in the global knowledge economy.”

Education defined by price; defined as value; defined for value. Relationships framed by price; defined as value; defined for value. Educational relationships framed by the ability of the student to manage her own risk: in finding £9,000 per annum to pay for access to her education; in managing her transition into higher education; in accessing and corralling sufficient resources to ensure progression across years; in enclosing and commodifying sufficient emotional and cultural and social capital to be employable. To become an entrepreneur in the face of the growth delusion of the UK economy, and the global assault on labour and the sociology of moderation that some would have us believe is opportunity, or skills for jobs as yet not invented, or the natural order.

Capitalist work as the natural order. The only alternative being there is no alternative.

And in this what is lost is the critical relationship between the student and the teacher. What is the complicity of the teacher in the entrepreneurial reinvention of the student? What is the definition of the pedagogy and of the curriculum worth in the face of the entrepreneurial reinvention of the student? What is the purpose of the teacher in the face of the risk- and compliance-based culture of higher education? What is the value of the teacher’s academic labour inside a marketised higher education? Where the social relationship between student and teacher is commodified around outcomes, performance, managerialism and risk, is there an alternative to a culture of performativity?

Where is the space to debate the alternative? We don’t witness this in the current UCU industrial action based on pay. We rarely witness this in the campaigns that claim to defend the British University. We are left, as Andrew McGettigan notes, with financialisation as the key determinant of the student-teacher relation.

Consumerism produces a new ‘teaching’ vector: customer-manager-ombudsman-regulator. It displaces traditional academic relations: it is essentially deprofessionalising. It cannot be emphasised enough that, no matter how many regulatory bodies, quangos and paper-trail hounds clog up the sector, the bottom line is that universities have degree awarding powers because they demonstrate (or are meant to) a ‘self-critical community’ of academics and scholars who safeguard standards.

As the pressures of the rule of money are exerted we wonder, what is to be done? Do we buy the idea that the University, governed by vice-chancellors as chief executives, and students as carriers of units of debt, and credit ratings agencies, and private providers operating with impunity inside its walls, and the realities of insurers of risk and bond markets, is lost? Do we cave to the idea that as a globally-competing business, the relationship between student and teacher is lost to the market, or as Neary and Hagyard argued to we re-radicalise the curriculum, and our relationships inside it?

In order to fundamentally challenge the concept of student as consumer, the links between teaching and research need to be radicalised to include an alternative political economy of the student experience. This radicalisation can be achieved by connecting academics and students to their own radical political history, and by pointing out ways in which this radical political history can be brought back to life by developing progressive relationship between academics and students inside and outside of the curriculum.

And this echoes and amplifies the radical, critical, pedagogical work of bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, that

to educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin (p. 13).

This is spiritual, because it is about the person, in the form of the teacher and in the form of the student. It is about having soul and spirit and connecting to the soul and the spirit. It is not about connecting through the base abstraction of money. Thus, she continues:

that means that teachers must be actively involved committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. (p. 15)

This is the testing of reality through the organising principles and values of the curriculum, in a way that Freire acknowledged in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side. (p. 39)

Transformation is liberation because it is deeply and politically personal and rooted in solidarity. It is not about the entrepreneurial internalisation of the risk of failure, it is framed by spaces inside-and-through which it is possible to challenge one’s perception of one’s place in the world with others. Thus, Freire maintains that this is about education and the politics of place, linked to identity, without which “there can be no real struggle.” In turn this is rooted in questioning and praxis: “For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” (p. 72)

Here the role of the teacher is not as liberator, but as member of a solidarity economy through which pedagogy is not done to the unfortunate student as a form of emulation, but is defined and produced by the student. For Freire, “The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption”. (p. 54) Elsewhere Freire noted that “The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” (p. 181)

This connects deeply to the idea that the teacher might hold the same liberation role, born out of solidarity, as the therapist who is able to effectively support the emancipation of her client as a human being. As Wampold has argued for psychotherapy, relationships that emerge from trust, care and love rooted in empathy tend to have an impact on recovery/liberation.

Putting aside the debate about whether some treatments are more effective than others, it is clear that if there are differences among treatments, the differences are quite small (Wampold, 2001, 2007, 2010). Thus, we are left with the question: If the differences among treatments are nonexistent or are very small, are there other factors that do have an influence on the effects of psychotherapy? The answer is yes—the therapist who is providing the psychotherapy is critically important. In clinical trials as well as in practice, some therapists consistently achieve better outcomes than others, regardless of the treatment approach used (Wampold, 2006).

Whilst Wampold highlights 14 qualities of effective therapists, the following seem especially pertinent in reflecting on Freire, hooks and Neary and Hagyard’s pedagogic radicalisation of the student/teacher relationship:

Clients [students] of effective therapists [teachers] feel understood, trust the therapist [teacher], and believe the therapist [teacher] can help him or her. The therapist [teacher] creates these conditions in the first moments of the interaction through verbal and importantly non-verbal behavior. In the initial contacts, clients [students] are very sensitive to cues of acceptance, understanding, and expertise. Although these conditions are necessary throughout therapy [the curriculum], they are most critical in the initial interaction to ensure engagement in the therapeutic [pedagogic] process.

Effective therapists [teachers] are able to form a working alliance with a broad range of clients [students]. The working alliance involves the therapeutic [pedagogic] bond, but also importantly agreement about the task of goals of therapy [learning]. The working alliance is described as collaborative, purposeful work on the part of the client [student] and the therapist [teacher]. The effective therapist [teacher] builds on the client’s [student’s] initial trust and belief to form this alliance and the alliance becomes solidly established early in therapy [teaching].

Moreover, this approach is reinforced in some analyses of the interrelationships between the client’s theory of change and therapist variables in psychoanalysis. Here what emerges is the critical “interplay between therapist variables (the person of the therapist) and the client’s theory of change. When these two vital factors meet, something new is created. It is crucial that the therapist becomes aware of, and manages, the effect of therapist variables on the alliance.” Just as the client’s theory of change in therapy co-evolves with the therapist through dialogue, meaningful pedagogic engagements are deeply political in that they involve the co-evolution of the spaces inside-and-against which the student and the teacher negotiate the liberation of the former from the latter’s power over her, alongside the understanding that the student has over the structural domination that de-limits her power to create her world.

Critically, this does not involve a uniform creation of the client/therapist or student/teacher model. That model might be revealed as advocacy or directive or designing or co-operative. They are individually framed and defined, and are grounded in phenomenological difference. As Robinson notes:

Research further suggests the most important aspect of therapy that involves the therapist is the therapeutic alliance. According to Assay and Lambert (1999), the therapeutic alliance accounts for 30 per cent of outcome variance. For Wampold (2001), the alliance accounts for more than half of the 13 per cent attributed to therapeutic factors, rather than client and extra-therapeutic factors. Put another way, the alliance accounts for seven times as much outcome variation as the model or technique being used by the therapist.

Thus, what is clear in the therapeutic situation, is understanding how the specific therapist meets the client’s theory of change, as it is revealed in the therapeutic alliance, precisely because: “each therapeutic encounter is a one-off encounter between a unique client with their unique theory of change, and a unique therapist with their unique response.” Here, for Robinson, two types of questions emerge in the therapeutic alliance: “They will ask ‘what part does my client’s theory expect me to play?’ They will then ask ‘Is this a part I have the skills to play and am capable of playing, and is it a part that ethically I am willing to play?’” In critical pedagogic terms teachers might also ask: “what part does student’s epistemological theory expect me to play in her learning? Is this a part that I have the skills to play and am capable of playing, and is it a part that ethically I am willing to play?

From a willingness to ask these questions emerges a social dialogue around: power and roles in organising a curriculum for liberation; the expertise, skills and knowledge to be shared; the practices to be uncovered, trialled and tested. This feels like the solidarity of connection that is beyond the rule of money. Pace Robinson, we might continue thus: “The client [student] comes to therapy [learn] with their presenting [pedagogical] problem(s), their solutions, their internal and external resources and, arising out of all of this, their own unique theory of change. The many variables that contribute to ‘me’ as a therapist [teacher] then come into play as I endeavour to meet the challenge to connect with this person and their theory.” At issue is then finding a dialogic solution that is constantly negotiated by student and teacher, which accommodates the student’s epistemological and ontological view of the world inside a pedagogical alliance. Such an alliance addresses what the student considers important and relevant, and helps the student frame a pedagogy that can support her action in the world. This needs to take place both inside and outside the classroom, in order to reflect what the student needs from the curriculum.

The question is whether educators have the will to struggle for a pedagogical alliance that is based upon the collective, socially-negotiated overcoming of power-over learning, teaching and the curriculum. Do they have the will to struggle for the humanistic connections between students and teachers, or will the abstracted power of money dominate and de-legitimise? How might a critical pedagogy enable self-actualisation and the genesis of the soul of the student through a pedagogical alliance?


For my friend, Derek Harding


Posted by hallymk1

On 21 August 2013, my friend Derek Harding told me he had cancer. In the months that followed we corresponded about his treatment and I learned so much about the treatment of cancer from a personal and medical perspective. Just as importantly, I learned more about Derek’s life growing up on industrial Teesside. It turned out that over the months Derek helped me to think more about my own childhood and family life than almost anyone else. Derek also made me reflect on how I could help other friends who were dealing with illness, in ways that were both compassionate and practical. It also turned out that his black humour about his own illness would help me deal with my own on-going battle with my mental and physical health than he would ever know. It is a deep regret to me that I never managed to tell him this before he went in for his final surgery immediately before Christmas.

I first met Derek in the autumn of 1998 when I applied for a Project Manager’s role at the University of Teesside. He was the Project Director of the funkily-titled, Chic Project (which was the acronym for the much more prosaic Courseware for History Implementation Consortium), a Higher Education Funding Council for England initiative. During this project we trailed round the country discussing pedagogy and practice, and the relationships between technology, the arts and humanities, and (increasingly) critical pedagogy. The Project’s focus was on developing courseware and then nascent web resources for History students in six universities. We then extended that in terms of curriculum areas and institutions, and focused more on institutional change.

The idea of change mattered to Derek because, as he would later tell me:

I took myself through my own efforts from the world I was brought up in which would have seen me as a working class bloke in a dead end job living in a council house somewhere wondering what the point of it all was through a career in engineering and then to the first and still only person in my extended family to get a degree and a career as a University lecturer. I did that, no-one helped me, and I did it by grabbing every educational opportunity I could get and exploiting it to the fullest extent I could. I ended up in a place I didn’t really fit into but I didn’t care about that and still don’t care because I didn’t fit into the place I started from either.

Derek had worked in engineering on Teesside and had gone to University late to study History. He was self-taught in terms of IT and always fiddling with hardware and software, and always looking for ways to circumvent established procedures and processes in order to get things done. His and my more maverick natures meant that we were never fully integrated into the work that we did at Teesside, but our collective energy meant that we were able to give the Project a more distinctive favour, as we extended its remit. It also meant that we were always looking for opportunities for “insurgency” against established positions.

Through our work, we ended-up presenting at 11 conferences, and we co-authored two articles and a peer-reviewed book about the project. However, our work also enabled me to start building a pedagogic research career, as he encouraged me to produce a further two single authored articles, and a piece for Cleveland History, on Eighteenth Century politics. My own career owed much to our work together, in terms of project management, understanding University politics and processes, in influencing and networking, and in fighting for learning and teaching to be discussed. Our work was a crucial part of my own journey towards becoming a Professor of Education and Technology. My award reflected Derek’s commitment to critical pedagogy and practice.

Over time Derek came to develop his strengths in technologies and pedagogies that support the art curriculum. Not only did he draw and paint, but he constantly attempted to fuse his practices as an artist to his teaching. When I needed someone to lead a session specifically aimed at pedagogic innovation for art and design teachers in my role at De Montfort University, it was inevitable that I would turn to him. For Derek, encouraging a wide-range of engagement for academics was critical, in formal learning settings, with local groups and through collective action. Not only did he fight for his labour in higher education, but he also edited Cleveland History for seven years and was a lifelong trade unionist.

I always felt that he was generous with his time and with his questioning and listening. When I had a breakdown in 2000, Derek was incredibly compassionate in how he managed our work and my rehabilitation back into work. Over the years, he always asked about my health, and about how I was recovering and managing. Critically, he always remembered, always wanted to know if I would like to talk about how my illness and the chronic fatigue that followed was affecting me, and he increasingly provided examples from his own life of how to manage mind and body appropriately. I loved hearing about how he conquered his nicotine addiction with hypnotherapy, and how he used a late obsession with running to improve his well-being. Both the hypnotherapy with a trusted therapist, and the work in the gym, were important to him as he battled his cancer. He made me consider how faith and trust worked in my own battle with depression.

It’s an odd thing but I often think about the office that we shared, which overlooked Teesside and the North Yorkshire Moors. We would often discuss that landscape. It was a constant reminder of the industrial colonisation of the landscape by humanity, and our battle to exist against the elements. It resonated with Derek’s fusion of his engineering background, his obsession with running in the countryside, and his deep love of this part of Yorkshire. His attempt to make sense of his life, and to live as full a life as possible, across a range of environments, was how I will remember him. Always fighting, always moving.

However, it was in finding ways to work with people on the margins and in getting things done that I will most remember Derek. He wrote to me that:

Above all I taught people and that really was the thing. During all of this I never lost the basic curiosity which has really driven my life. The question why? has always been there in my head as has our shared humanity. I fear that we have lost our way and that our humanity needs to be cared for and nurtured to get us back to what we aspire to be rather than blindly following the directions of corporates.

I will always cherish our conversations in the Lebanese Café on Linthorpe Road, and over a beer in the Star and Garter pub, and via email as both he and I struggled latterly with our health. Most of all I will remember that Derek made me feel heard. As he used to sign-off our conversations, “Keep looking for the positives.” I will miss him. I hope we meet in the next life.


On rage (as an empowered and productive member of society)


Posted by hallymk1

This blog is autobiographical. But then you knew that, right? You knew that when I talk about emancipation or the struggle for communism as the negation of my negation or against my alienation or for a world beyond false consciousness, that this was deeply personal as well as political. That I am against my/your/our life’s subsumption under someone else’s rules; against my/your/our alienation inside someone else’s structuring realities. That I am for the world made concrete and useful through co-operation, rather than its restructuring for exchange and the market.

That you can trace the tropes I talk about on here to my life in-against-and-beyond therapy.

That being in-and-beyond therapy is the most deeply political act of my life because it is emancipatory.

And in this process and in this moment, one of the things that is surfacing is anger at the world. Anger at our collective subsumption under the dictates of the market, which is enforced by the disciplinary hand of an increasingly securitised State. Anger that demands that I/we say no, and push-back, and refuse, and look for alternatives that are increasingly outside of the institutionalised realities of competitive, marketised higher education.

And this is also anger at the realities of my past. Framing this present.

And a boy left alone in the corner of a room. With fear framing his ever-present.

And that is one of my critical realisations; that the cognitive and emotional and past and present are interwoven; and that I can trust to this and have faith in it. That who am I now depends on who I was then. And that I need to integrate that eight year-old boy inside my adult-self. And that I cannot understand my adult-self that is presently in-and-against Capital and capitalist social relations, unless I understand my adult/boy-self that is equally in-and-against my/his past.

And although systemically academics are restructured against feeling and for critical thinking or critical reasoning or whatever neoliberal ideal will deliver REF-able, impactful outcomes, my struggle for integration and against further alienation reveals a struggle for a life that is much more qualitative. And so every time I hear about quantified time, or outcomes, or impact, I bleed a little. And I feel the screw turn. And this feeling of bleeding or constriction or enclosure is critical because it threatens to be disciplinary. It threatens to dis-integrate the emotional from the cognitive in me/us, or to map or codify or commodify our affective existence. To put our souls to work and to quantify them.

This is why communism, or the fight for the commons, or for co-operation, becomes qualitatively meaningful, in the face of the incremental objectification of our everyday existence, through cops on campus, or precarious labour, or the privatisation of public space, or the indenturing of our young people’s futures, or whatever. This is a qualitative turn of the screw in an anti-social or inhumane direction that is to be resisted. Everywhere. In this life.

This secular crisis of capitalism reveals the inhumanity of the objectification of my/your/our time and space, or space-time. And this is why I struggle against the living death of capitalist work. It is why I struggle for faith in humanity rather than the market. Because the loss of so much of my past makes me recoil at the threat to our collective futures imposed by austerity or debt or climate change or Fukushima or whatever. And which anaesthetises academia to the external realities of this world, in the name of money/impact.

And this qualitative turn of the screw is only amplified by the reification of critical reasoning or thinking. This reification that denies our need to integrate the cognitive and the emotional (and there is a reason that Bloom wrote about the affective domain although it was almost an afterthought), and that argues that I might think myself well. That critical thinking about depression and anxiety, or some other (cognitive) behavioural stricture or neuro-linguistic re-programming or coaching manualisation, might lead to recovery. That there might be a pill that will make me better/happy. That there might be a download from the Matrix that cures me. For the market. An empowered and productive member of society.

And it has taken me over five years in therapy to learn to listen to my feelings. To know that qualitatively my gut knows, and that I should trust it. Through experience and survival it knows, and I know. So when my chest is gripped with anxiety but my gut is calm, I know there is another way. When they are both in seizure, then we have a problem.

And this feels important because I am trying to reflect on what Clementine writes, in relation to her rage at her Mom’s impending surgery:

As I sit here in my chair in dads office, crying for the first time about all this shit, I want to just sit here and scream. But I don’t want anyone to hear me. I don’t want to be what they think that I ought to be. I’m not. I’m not crying because I’m sad or I’m breaking. I’m crying because I am so fucking mad. I am so mad that there’s nothing that can calm me down. There is nothing I can’t deal with but just because I can deal with it doesn’t mean that it’s not painful as fuck holding it back.

It took me years to realise that this was/is me, in this life at work and at home, searching for something and not knowing that what I desired was an integrated self. That I spent so long holding my rage back that it consumed me as depression and anxiety, although as it happens this was also formed through shame. And that I spent forever trying to cope with the anger that spilled out as a fight against injustice or marginalisation or power-over, of students or those without homes or those with no voice, and for a different set of organising principles. And that deep-down this was a fight against my own historical and social marginalisation.

And the more I think about Clementine’s pain in holding back her fucking mad-ness, the more I wonder about the ways in which as an academic I am trying to find mechanisms to integrate my fucking mad-ness and my rage at the world as it is, inside my life as a whole. And this stands against critical thinking and against medicating my emotions. And this, I think, is where critique emerges for me as a powerful, political and therapeutic tool for the systemic analysis of the ways in which I and my self are alienated in this world. And this prefigures the emergence of my focus on sociability and on co-operative alternatives. It is the interplay between rage, courage and critique that reveals and then co-opts the fucking mad-ness. For something different. Enabling me to feel it and live it and understand it, and put it to use.

For love.


on depression and alienation


Posted by hallymk1

 There is no us, there is only I,

Dropped like a tear from my mother’s eye.

Mother do you know your son at all?

Looking for the things he’ll never find,

Talks too much about suicide,

Who can tell what’s on his mind?

The Wonder Stuff. 1991. Here Comes Everyone.

 

“Then the boy realised, the penguin wasn’t lost, he was just lonely.”

Oliver Jeffers. 2005. Lost and Found.

 

I wrote this whilst I listened to this Spotify playlist that I made for my Mom.

This post is dedicated to Jo and to Tracey. For everything.

It was inspired by Joss and Lucy, who point me towards life.

A note

I originally posted this on Wednesday 4 December. Then, 15 minutes later and in the middle of the worst panic attack I have had for a decade I took it down. And that’s the reality of this illness; that crippled by self-doubt and an utter feeling of dread, I would descend into an anxiety attack that would last for 24 hours. The reality was that I would be sitting in meetings wondering what excuse I could use for leaving: sickness, headache, whatever. Only if I did leave, then what? Go insane? Self-harm? Run until I dropped? So, as I sat in an interview with a PVC, another Professor and a member of senior management, I survived the rage in-between my temples. They would not have known how close I was to screaming.

And then I had a conversation with my wife, and my friends dropped into place.

Preamble

There is a story that is not for telling here. It is about a boy who was abandoned, and abandoned, and abandoned again. A boy who refused to let anyone else be abandoned in-turn. A boy who raged against the injustice of it all. A boy with a beautiful ferocity of purpose. A boy who was relentless, focused, militant. A boy who fought so hard that he forgot himself, and who broke his self, and who spent a lifetime trying to recover. But that story is for another day.

On depression

In February 2009, seven years after I had exited therapy for the second-time I picked-up the phone. Five months of battling, living with and being scarred by the deepest depression left me in the worst of places. Given that I had spent most of the preceding nine years recovering from a physical and emotional breakdown, and in trying to manage panic and anxiety and their cloying sibling depression, I knew this was the worst of places. Unforgivingly bleak.

The inability to think straight for more than a few minutes. The moments of time dragging on for ever. The effort it takes to get out of bed. To eat well. To think well. The tinnitus. The fucking tinnitus, scarifying my mind. The crippling fatigue punching its way into my psyche, and coating my muscles in lactic borne of exhaustion. My black core telling me that I am nothing; that I am pathetic; that I am worthless; that I am a fuck-up; that I am one hair-trigger from failure; that all my relationships are broken and it’s all my fault; and that when I stumble then everyone will know; and when I stumble then I am fucked.

“Give up or go on, doesn’t matter. Because sooner or later, they will see you for what you are and then you will be fucked.”

Because I had no self. No safe space inside. Just despair. And this time it was back with a vengeance.

And this had happened pretty constantly from 2000-05, and it was accompanied by chronic fatigue. Body and mind working in tandem. Failing in tandem. No respite.

And then I forgot about it for a while. And I kidded myself that I had worked through it. And that the blackness and the bleakness that infected every waking moment would pass.

Only I forgot. I forgot that we may be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with us. And in despair I searched the bacp website for person-centred/gestalt/integrative therapists. And then I picked-up the phone.

A failure to cope?

On Monday 25 October, in the wake of Jonathan Trott leaving the England party during the Ashes, Stan Collymore spoke to Mark Saggers about his debilitating battle with depression. He spoke of the need to be tested for a range of physical illnesses like ME and chronic fatigue, because mental health was poorly understood and taboo, and his fatigue could never be psychological, could it? He spoke of the need to support men and women in their access to mental health professionals. He spoke of how the club doctor at Aston Villa FC told him he would be okay if he just scored a couple of goals in the next game. He asked a man who had claimed that those with depression were just weak and should get on with life, whether he would like to compete in any physical or mental task with him, so we could see who was “stronger or fitter.”

And he spoke about humanity.

And he spoke about care.

And he spoke of the long and very painful road to recovery.

Then Stan Collymore wrote this.

And he spoke of the need for more people to have the courage to stand-up and speak about their on-going battles with their mental health.

And before I go on, you might want acquaint yourself with some myths about clinical depression. Or you might want to acquaint yourself with some stories from highly-functioning people coping with mental health problems. Or you might want to acquaint yourself with some stories of highly-functioning people attempting to recover. Or you might want to hear the voices from coalitions of service-users fighting for solidarity and to be heard. Because this is about points of solidarity.

So here we are. A failure to cope?

Since February 2009, I have spent over 450 hours in therapy. I have been in therapy three times a week for a year. Before that I was in therapy twice a week for two years. Before that once a week for two years. I have had countless extra phone-calls, in order to get me through specific days. My therapist is amazing. And only human.

I have been taking anti-depressants under the guidance of my GP since June 2011. My GP is a rock.

In November 2012, after helping care for my Mom for four months as she battled early-onset dementia, I was forced to leave work for six weeks with depression and anxiety. I had always battled to be at work, because if I could not be there I was a failure, right? Without my labour, what was I? What am I? What is my point? Alienated at and through capitalist work, which demands that we are resilient, efficient, productive, whatever.

Never underestimate the importance of admitting that you cannot cope alone. We are conditioned to rely on the rugged, resilient individual. To develop the rugged, resilient individual. And in the process we are all demeaned. In the process we are all alienated from our humanity. Recovery is imbued with sociability just as the history that brought us to this point is a social failure on some level.

During the next five months with my Dad and my sister I learned more about care pathways and the prognosis for dementia patients than I ever thought I would. I attended a carers’ course run by the wonderful CLASP the Carers’ Centre in Leicester. And then in April 2013, another singularity. My Mom died.

My Mom died. And she broke my heart.

And since then I have battled vertigo, recurrent respiratory tract viruses, and headaches. And I have not missed a day of work, except through strike action. And just like in 2000, I have to live with daemons running wild in my mind and a body that just shut-down. A body and a mind that shut-down to stop me running, and that forced me to think about courage and faith and just trying to be.

And this is what failure looks like, right? The lazy depressive. The guy who just couldn’t cope with a bit of pressure. I just want to man-up, right?

And since I went back into therapy some other things have happened.

In June 2009 I was awarded a UK National Teaching Fellowship.

In June 2010 I was awarded a Readership in Education and Technology.

In June 2011 I formed and lead a new Centre for Enhancing Learning through Technology at De Montfort University.

In May 2013 I was made Professor of Education and Technology.

In September 2013 the digilit Leicester Project that I co-manage won an international award.

I have given 66 conference presentations, and had published 25 peer-reviewed papers since I went into therapy.

I have project-managed or worked on 13 HE projects. And I have mentored six Ph.D. candidates, and countless colleagues going for teacher/national teaching fellowships.

Since 2011, I’ve written 125 blog-posts consisting of around 150,000 words.

And I was a school governor/deputy-chair of governors; and a trustee of a homeless shelter; and a co-worker at a homeless shelter; and the Chair of a football club supporters’ trust; and a co-operator at a social science centre; and a trades union committee member; and a serial protestor on demonstrations; and a husband; and a friend; and a client; and a son; and a brother.

Always running; always busy; always a mess.

And I have thought about suicide more often than I care to remember.

And I have spent more nights awake drenched in panic-driven sweat than I care to remember.

And I have psychologically self-harmed more times than I care to remember.

And the jack-hammer in my head tells me that I am going insane more often than I care to remember.

And the visceral dread in my stomach as I sit in meetings from time-to-time, looking for the escape route. Wondering at what point in the meeting I will crack.

And sometimes the effort it takes to get out of bed rather than just wait for it all to end is suffocating.

And the jack-hammer in my head tells me that I am a fraud. That nothing I have ever achieved is worth anything. That nothing I have ever written has any point. That it is only a matter of time before I am found out when I speak. So I might as well shut-the-fuck-up.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

And yet…

The boy tells me that I need to write and that I need to speak, in order to be heard. Because we need to be heard. Because marginalised voices need to be heard.

And I speak for the boy who needs to be heard. Who was lost and who wants to be found. And we fight the fear that if we fail we will be abandoned. Again. And we fight the fear that we have nothing of interest to say, and that we are useless, pointless, nothing, alone, pathetic. Nothing. No thing at all.

And together we take courage and faith, and we fight to sit and to be. And to recognise our humanity.

So here we are

There is no neverland. There is no redemption or salvation. Except from the blackness and the bleakness. But there is the on-going search for solidarity with myself, and through that a solidarity with other people. The search for my own humanity. And the recognition that in getting-up and in going to work, and in managing a team, and in working co-operatively, and in writing, and in speaking, that I might recognise the courage it takes to stop doing stuff and just be. To stop and to find faith in me.

That my route away from crippling depression lies in my caring for me.

And this is an on-going battle that will end with my ability to cope with a few emotional problems. To learn to like and love and find faith in myself. And in you, too.

And right now this matters because yesterday Simon Hughes tried to rubbish Jonathan Trott on Twitter. And I remembered that Trott’s England Test career encompasses 49 tests at an average of 46 runs with a top-score of 226. And that Hughes’ England Test career was non-existent but that he has found a successful media voice. And that doesn’t make Trott better or worse than Hughes. It just makes him different. If only Hughes could have recognised that, and could have cared about the humanity in all of us.

Caring about our shared humanity.

#solidarity