The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 15

GUARDIAN MISCELLANY iPiuraday November 32 197S 15 MART STOTT Age oM jpipolbileniin Picture of Mike Barnatt by Tina Tranter systtemm Psychiatry, as a concrete reality, does not exist. It is simply an elite group acting in patterns, with the rest of us colluding. It has the substantiality of a soap bubble Mike Barnett, ex-lawyer, ex-businessman, ex-pilgrim to the East, and founder of PNP, an organisation formed to explore alternative approaches to mental health, talks to Zibba Mays. inability to remember a nam or a word? No need to be embarrassed, much less ashamed. Don't you remember this happening when you were a gauche adolescent, and wishing the ground would open before your feet 1 It is only humiliating if you let it be, and have not the savoir faire to turn it into a joke.

We ought to have learned savoir faire, we ought to have learned patience, and tolerance of ourselves as well as other people. We ought to have learned that self-pity is one of the nastiest human vices. All these disadvantages of aging are things we ought to be able to cope with. Poverty is another story, for it is not something the elderly can or are allowed to do much about. I think it is monstrous that there should be an earnings rule for pensioners, preventing them from earning more than 9.60 a week (between 60 and 65 for women, and 65 and 70 for men) without loss of pension.

As a retired widow," I suffer no such reduction and feel bitterly ashamed to be in such an advantageous position compared with married people and with single women. Not all women over 60 and men over 65 want or are able to continue in work. The retirement pension should be sufficient to maintain them in decent comfort and if the ten million of us banded together, perhaps our votes would persuade the Government to accede to our demands. But to deny the right to the elderly to enjoy the financial (and psychological) benefit of earning what they can without loss of pension is to turn the pension into a kind of charitable benefaction for which you should be so properly grateful that you should not presume to add to it. But having said all that, and said it with the utmost conviction, I must also say that I do not think it necessarily worse to be old and poor, than young and poor.

It is horrific to think that this winter, threatened as we are with fuel shortages, some old people may die of hypothermia. So may some babies. Personally, I would rather die of hypothermia than of cancer. Personally I am more outraged to think of the agony of mothers unable to keep their babies warm than I am of old people drifting away from life. Poverty is a canker in our so-called Welfare State.

We should unite to remove it, and not sentimentalise over the plight of the old at the expense of the young. The only thing the old need more than the young (though not more than babies) is warmth, because, being less physically active they are less able to generate their own heat. There is-a very strong case for saying that some form of heating should be free to the old, as, in the Greater London area, bus transport is free during off peak hours. But the old need less food (provided that they can afford sufficient protein), fewer clothes, fewer possessions, than their sons and daughters, their grandsons and granddaughters. That is no excuse for.

society to treat the old meanly, but nor is it an excuse for the old to resent as alas some do the welfare state's support, by way of family allowances, for example, for other, vounger, people. To have got through life without being beholden to anyone should be accounted a blessing, not a virtue. To get back to where we started. old are still themselves, even, in flashes, in senility. In his interesting book First Light," W.

H. Boore has a revealing story of his maternal grandfather who after three years of what amounted almost to idiocy, turned to his wife and said Mari, what a trouble I have been to vou these last few years. I don't know what came over me." And Elders," a collection of poems by elder citizens there is a most powerful poem found, after she died, in the locker of an old woman who could not even speak. Here are its concluding lines "I think of the years all too few gone too fast, And accept the stark fact that nothing can last. So open your eyes nurses open and see, Not a crabbit old woman, Look closer, see ME." "First Light" by W.

H. Boore (Search Press, 2.50). published bu the Centerprise Publishing Project. 66a Dalston Lane, Hackney, London E.8. (30p inc.

postage). PNP is still with us, but his own energies are now principally devoted to "Community," a Growth Centre for Encounter Groups, of which he is the director. I am at my best in a Group, I know that I accept that about myself. Having to go out and build an organisation is something I'm really less turned on by. The great thing about PNP was that it was just people helping people a sort of self-perpetuating organism.

PNP was an early forerunner of the Growth Movement in England, and it was a part of the Alternative Society. Now it looks like the barriers between us and the Establishment are breaking down. We're getting a new kind of person coming to Groups fewer of the fringe people and more men in suits and ties. And we're getting a lot of inquiries from prisons, and hospitals, and colleges, asking us to go out and take Groups for them. Relief "It seems to me that the kind of thing we're doing in Groups is really the same as we started to do in PNP, only with a bit more awareness and with some very definite techniques.

The main thing is that it's up to people themselves to grow in their own way. I always think it's very good it gives me a great deal of pleasure at the end of a Group, when I see people exchanging names and addresses. Because that means the group's going to go on They're going to get together, and maybe they're even going to continue the actual work, because they've had a common experience. "And that's always a relief for me, and a good omen. Because what I-really want is for people to take charge of their own lives, make their own way, and not to rely on me, or any other therapist, or a guru, or anyone else come to that.

When a patient feels he doesn't need his therapist any more, in my terms he is cured. He can go it alone, even if he is not yet there. When a Group participant no longer holds the leader in awe, and feels equal to him, then both of them can really start to grow." People, Not Psychiatry by Mike Barnett, is published tomorrow by Allen and Vnwin, 3.50 hard back, 1.95 paperback. "MAN HAS got to change himself. Man has got to evolve himself; he cant wait for this to happen by Natural Selection any longer.

And it seems to me that what's happening now is that people are trying to help one another to change to be different from the way they've been for many centuries. People are getting together outside work-situations, because science and the reduction of long working-hours have at last made this possible. And they're using this time and this space to see how they can grow through personal interaction." Mike Barnett leads Encounter Groups, and perhaps you don't even know what Encounter Groups are. Well, what happens is that a dozen or so people meet in a room for a few hours, or for 24 hours, or for 48 hours, or for a long weekend, and they sit round in a circle and wait to see what comes up which is usually plenty. The only contract they make is to be' as emotionally honest and open as possible, and to live in the moment, which are both very difficult things to do.

And anyone who's ever succeeded in achieving either, even for brief moments, will certainly never feel quite (he same again. This business of getting together to help each other grow well, the traditional way for a long time of doing this was through the universities. And the professors were in some ways the equivalent of the group leaders and therapists of today, who have some kind of capacity to help others to grow. "But although the professor could help people learn, growth was seen almost entirely in intellectual terms. This is an incomplete way of dealing with growth simply to learn more and more, about more and more things.

Mike Barnett, 43-year-old ex-lawyer, ex-businessman, ex-pilgrim to the East, is the founder of People Not Psychiatry (PNP), an organisation formed in 1969 to explore alternative approaches to mental health. His book People, Not Psychiatry describes the whole thing came about how a successful career at Cambridge and the delights of the affluent society led to his own personal need for change. "Now, I was a pretty good student I was always near the top. And I read a lot in my time on psychology and philosophy, and God knows what else. And I realise now that I know know where they are they've bought the whole ticket.

The ticket of being Then someone probably says that it might be a good idea to go into a psychiatric wing for a short time. Next thing, they've got the equivalent of the pin-stripe suit, bowler hat and umbrella: that is to say they've got a career as a professional "Some years ago, I found myself working in a mental hospital and making official visits to others, and they're frightening places. My whole being just revolted against what was going on it just seemed absurd. The people who were in them were being made worse by the very treatment that was being handed out to them. They were being treated as objects, as people who had no right to trust themselves.

But that was why they were there in the first place, because they had lost trust in themselves That was partly why they had got into such a mess And now they were being quite simply rejected as people with full status. Now with PNP we are saying OK let's you and I get together and perhaps we really haven't a great deal of knowledge and understanding perhaps we only have our instincts and feelings and intuitions. But we do have a certain kind of commitment to one another we the human commitment that says I'm not going to dismiss you, I'm not going to reject you The great pioneer Fritz Perls talked about the progression from neurosis to health as being a progression from environmental support to self-suoport. Now, the hospital somehow the ultimate in environmental support it confirms an almost total dependency on others. And so there I was in the late sixties, seeing these hospitals and undergoing some orthodox psychotherapy myself as part of my personal search, and discovering a whole process of surrender people being encouraged to surrender their own capacity to live for themselves.

And I had an idea that a lot could be done outside The System not necessarily by experts, because all the experts seemed to be in The System. Apart, of course, from R. D. Laing and his circle, which was very small and often financially out of reach. So I wrote an article for one of the underground newspapers (International Times) saying, let's help each other.

The response was amazing the 'phone didn't stop ringing letters piled up and the whole thing burgeoned. And a lot was done practically nothing, and what little I do know I really don't believe is of much use to me. People have been absorbing knowledge and facts for centuries, but when it comes to actually living, all of that is almost useless. When it comes to getting on with your son or your mother or your wife what use is almost any of the knowledge that we get As far as Mike Barnett himself was concerned, the self-help network established by PNP was a natural prelude to something of greater service to students of living the more sophisticated Encounter Group, evolved by the American psychiatrists Fritz Penis and Bill Schutz. Groups are usually structured and may require a leader, but one of a rather special kind, whose credentials are based on common consent, not on any officially conferred status.

Groups that Mike Barnett leads are usually sell-outs, not only in this country but in France, Germany, and Holland as well. Soap bubble There are certain people who seem to have a skill or capacity to make things happen between themselves and others, and between other people, quickly and powerfully. These people are the new therapists and the group leaders or perhaps catalysts is a better word. Catalysts. They may not necessarily be fully grown in any complete sense themselves, but they have a way of helping people to break down those fixed structures which so often prevent movement or growth.

To break down what is constricted, to induce flexibility, to facilitate movement to another place a more full place. As you may suppose from the title of his book, Mike Barnett doesn't like psychiatry or psychiatrists much, and begins to say so from page one Psychiatry, as a concrete reality, does not exist. It is simply an elite group, thinking and acting in patterns, with the rest of us colluding. In real terms, psychiatry has the substantiality of a soap bubble." And he goes on to give a pretty scarifying account of his. personal experiences in official psychiatric circles experiences which led directly to the setting up of PNP from his own London flat.

Someone who's really up against it goes to his GP, who understandably suggests that they see a psychiatrist. And of course they do, and before they IN OUR SOCIETY the old are seldom revered or honoured unless they are artists like Picasso or musicians like Casals. They are regarded with pity, anxiety, or distaste as a Problem and what a hell of a problem, with more than 10 million of us over the age of 60, nearly a fifth of the population, costing goodness knows how many millions in pensions, benefits, sheltered housing, and other forms of support. Could as one of the 10 million, assert with some vigour that there is something offensive to human dignity in being regarded as a Problem, something humiliating in being regarded as an obiect of pity, and something infuriating as the writer of a letter to the Guardian last week was infuriated in being assumed to have become at the age of 60 or 65 a dependent on society instead of a contributing asset to it Perhaps there should be an Age Liberation movement, for age stereotyping is as bewildering and unreasonable as sex stereotyping. People are people, at 19 or 90, and are just as conscious of their own individual identity.

Old age is the common lot of mankind. How horrifying that almost everyone now dreads old age even more than death. What is it in the conditions of nur society that makes us so terrified of what is almost inevitable How can we learn to make old tolerable, respectable, respectworthy, even emnyable Tf we can't find a way to do this- there will be a shadow of fear over thp lives of evervnne from middle age onwards, over the lives of quite young people aware that thev may soon be responsible for incapacitated parents, and over the national economy, as the proportion nf the nonproductive elderly increases. Accepting that the evidences of old age come earlier in some people than others, and that gentologists like Dr Alex' Comfort may find ways to defer them for more people, for more years, we had better face hnnestlv what thev are the sight weakens, taste, smell, and hearing become les acute, muscles grow weaker, bones more brittle, lungs, heart and kidnevs less able to function efficiently, the memory is impaired, the eyes lose their soarkle, the hair thins and turns white, the skin wrinkles and becomes blotchy, the figure loses its shapeliness. It is a depressing list, calculated to make anv- ageing person drown in self-pity, though in fact most of these impairments of mental and physical vigour come on so gradually thsvt one is scarcely aware that they are happening.

It "is very important for the ageing to realise that there are degenerative and paralysing illnesss like multiple sclerosis, poliomyelitis. muscular dystrophy, Parkinson's disease, and arteno-solerosis, which strike quite young people and reduce them to helpless denendence while many of the elderly, the old, and even the aged, are gadding around cheerfully and energetically. Pity your neighbour if you will because he is growing mentally and-physicallv feeble, but never pity yourself for the disabilities you share with millions, and with many thousands of much younger people who have had no time to learn resignation, no time to build up a stockpile of experience, no reason to feel anything but bitterness at the necessity of withdrawing from the bustling busyness of life. Subscribe if you will for research into the degenerative illness we call senility but remember that its symptoms do not afflict only the people who are old by the calendar. To talk in everyday terms of the evidence of aging for we aren't all going to end up deaf and blind and dotty there are three things (apart from poverty, which I shall talk of later) that are troublesome if we let them be: loss of physical vigour, loss of attractiveness and loss of memory.

Who hasn't felt a pang of envy watching a voung man run twenty yards after a 'bus and fling himself on to it Lovely. But whereas he would be furious if he failed to catch it, you know there will be another bus. You have learned to wait. Who hasn't looked in the mirror in the morning and said Oh gawd If you hate your scant white hair you can have it coloured or wear a wig. that is for fun.

What reallv matters is to hold it firmly mind that your "attraction" lay for only a very few years in vour physical appearance. Who hasn't been maddened by the 1961, expected of it. As a community, it has not even developed facilities like a communal laundry or creche which are found in other country houses that have been divided into flats nor have its Fellows been able to shake off the need to teach usually two or three days a week, but occasionally full time to pay the rent and keep eating. This alone means that they are not as productive as they should be. Similarly, the links with the local community are almost nonexistent, apart from the Digswell exhibitions at the Gordon Maynard Gallery in Welwyn itself, whose coverage of art, craft and industrial design is also to be expanded.

In fact the gulf between the artist and society is as wide today as it has ever been. To try to bridge this gap and put the house itself into a better conditionthe trustees are now proposing to appoint a full time organiser, Digswell remains, however, an example of how the dedication and perseverance of one man created opportunities for other people which continue beyond his own lifetime, as is also the case in Cambridge where Morris's idea of the village college was to be given its finest architectural expression by the building by Gropius at Impington. Here, too, the aim was to integrate the activities carried on inside a building with the community around it. so that a real dialogue between people of different backgrounds and interests could take place. The philosophy, described in a new book.

Educator Extraordinary, by Harry Ree (Longman, 2.75) places Morris among the great educationists of this century. Unlike Steiner, Montes-sori and A. S. Neill, Morris has not yet received the recognition he deserves, though many current developments, from the sports centres in the Midlands to the campaign to improve and widen the range and quality of leisure recently announced by Lord Eccles, go back to the ideas developed at Impington and Digswell. Digswell House is open to visitors for the duration of the exhibition and work from Digswell is also on display at the Gordon Maynard Gallery, Composer Simon Emmerson plays the saw in his Digswell House flat 6 DIGSWELL is a large Regency house on the outskirts of Welwyn Garden City whose park once stretched as far as the eye could see, but has now almost vanished beneath the encirclement of post-war housing.

Gone too is the family within living memory, employed 28 gardeners and many indoor servants, together with all their furniture and possessions. Instead, the house, after a brief spell as a school, has become a centre for artists and craftsmen, some of whom have their work on show at the Victoria' and Albert Museum until December 9. It has also become a living testimony to the work of Henry Morris, Cambridge's director of education from 1922-1954, who set up the Digswell Arts Trust in 1957 and installed the first occupants of the house (called Fellows) In 1959. "What we have to do," he said, "is to relate the artist in a realistic way to the living community and, at the same time, to enable that community to become acquainted with the artist, to know him and to accept him as easily as they do' the doctor or technician." For Morris, this meant giving the artist an opportunity to be creative and the community access to his work. The Digswell Arts Trust was intended to achieve both these aims.

For the artist, there is little doubt that Digswell has provided invaluable opportunities to establish a career by offering flats and workshops in the house and grounds at reasonable rents. Altogether, there is for 17 Fellows (three Fellowships are currently vacant), varying from single flats to flats for families with several children, costing between 14 and 24 a month, which also includes Individual studios, and facilities like glass and ceramic kilns and a small printing press. Those who have benefited and the exhibition understates the success, of the early Fellows include Hans -Coper, the first contemporary potter to be' given a one-man show at the Mary Farmer and Peter Colling-wood, whose rugs and macrogauzes are also on show in a seoarate exhibition at the Crafts Centre in Covent Garden until November 30. Another early Fellow was Keith New, the designer of stained glass window in Bristol and Coventry New Duvets from Old Eiderdowns IF YOU'VE always longed for the luxury of a real continental quilt but never summoned up the courage to splash out and buy one, a Company called Aeonlcs have come up with a super money-saving Idea. Simply buy a specially eon-' structed cambric case from them and you can transform your old eiderdown into a spanking new top-quality duvet In under one-hour.

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They will send details and prices to anyone who writes to Dept. A500, Aeonics 92 Church Road, Mitcham, Surrey, and they have installed a 24-hour answering service so you can telephone 01440 1113 any time day or night. Richard Carr visits Digswell House, a centre for artists and a living testimony to educator Henry Morris ing Is carried on by Margaret Wilson and ceramics by Peter Hinton and George Stevens, who are Just about to produce a range of domestic stoneware. But the Fellows also include the first musician, Simon Emmerson, and the first industrial designer, Warwick Evans, who worked with Ron Hickman on the award-winning do-it-yourself workbench, the Workmate, and it is hoped to expand the range of work carried on at Digswell still further by setting up an experimental furniture workshop and a photographic studio. In spite of the success of some of the Fellows, however, Digswell has not achieved all that Morris, who died in mainly artists and craftsmen.

The sculptors include Robert Mitchell, who produces abstract shapes in resin inspired by music and called, for example, Rhythm 5 David Roft, whose glass fibre studies of the backs of naked women (shown recently in the Greenwich Theatre Gallery) are given titles like Bum Deal; and James Butler represented in the exhibition by a delightful bronze called Portrait of Kate aged 5. Among the artists are Berenice Ben-jelloum, who produces etchings based upon intricate geometric patterns, and Douglas Allsop, who has explored the visual effects of mathematical progressions on polystyrene sheet, while wett Cathedrals, who has described what It was like at Digswell in the early days. "Many difficulties and problems, practical, political and social, had to be overcome," he says, "and the clash of so many individual and independent personalities made the events at that-time dramatic and farcical by turns. Indeed, they would make the basis for an entertaining if bizarre novel." And of Morris he says, "Morris was my first contact with a visionary educator. Charming, eccentric, devious, witty and entertaining, a lover of the good things of life (he was an excellent cook), am glad now that I got to know him so well." Today, Digswell continues to serve.