Learning from ‘healthiness’

I recently came across an interesting point about how professionals seek to understand and find therapeutic solutions to the ‘problems’ that their clients experience.

In the 1980s, Robin Skynner and John Cleese (the John Cleese of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers) wrote a book called ‘Families and how to survive them’. This was a self help book which used modern experiences of family therapy to provide understanding about family relationships and how to make them more ‘healthy’.

Their aim was to ‘make accessible the psychological aspects of how families behave and function; what makes some work and others fail; and how families can move up the scale towards greater health and happiness’.

It was a worldwide success and became established as a recognised textbook both for many in the mental health professions and the non-professional audience for whom it was written.

Ten years later they carried their studies further and wrote the sequel ‘Life and how to survive it’. In this book, they examine what really constitutes healthy behaviour in different aspects of life.

The authors describe the work as ‘focusing on the factors which make for health in individuals and families, going beyond clinical observation to include the recent and little-known research now available about exceptionally healthy families and then extend and develop the ideas outside the family context.’

Can we as professionals learn something here?

I haven’t yet read the book but was flicking through the first section and read the transcript of a conversation between Robin Skynner and John Cleese. In it they were discussing how there is very little research focusing on people who have particularly healthy mental health and how psychiatry seems to learn almost entirely from people who display ‘abnormal’ psychology.

John put it like this: ‘… the more you think about it, the stranger it seems. I mean, if you wanted to write a book about how to paint, or play chess, or be a good manager you’d start by studying people who are good at those things’.

Robin took it further saying, ‘I really took up psychiatry in the first place because I was interested in mental health, not mental illness’. He went on to say that he wanted to research healthiness and then apply this to help those who experience problems.

He also pointed out a potential issue when expressing such findings, ‘… in trying to describe excellent mental health, and compare it with ill-health, and with the ‘average’ health in between that most of us enjoy most of the time… it’s difficult not to talk as if they are quite different from one another, and inhabited by different people. But, in fact, our level of health is changing all the time.’

This discussion got me thinking. I’m not saying I agree with everything that the book says (particularly as I haven’t read it!) but I did think that this is an interesting point to mull over.

How do we view and approach addiction and the ways in which people recover? How do we seek to understand and promote recovery? Do we genuinely learn from those who have ‘recovered’?

How do we manage the fact that people don’t sit in two camps: those who haven’t recovered and those who have? Or, do they? And, how do we understand and apply the myriad recovery journeys and stories that are out there?

Happy mulling!