This Much I Know About Mind Over Matter ...

Improving Mental Health in Our Schools

John Tomsett

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781785831683
• eBook ISBN: 9781785831898
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In This Much I Know about Mind Over Matter John Tomsett addresses, with refreshing honesty, the growing problem of the mental health issues experienced by children and young people, offering up a plan for averting a mental health crisis in our schools. Tomsett interweaves his formative and professional experience with strategies for addressing students' mental health issues and insights from his interviews with high profile thinkers on the subject including Professor Tanya Byron, Natasha Devon, Norman Lamb, Tom Bennett, Claire Fox and Dr Ken McLaughlin. The book is replete with truths about the state of children's mental wellbeing, about creating a school culture where everyone can thrive and about living in the shadow of his mother's manic depression. With his typical mixture of experience, wisdom and research-based evidence, Tomsett explains how he manages the pressure of modern day state school headship in a climate where you are only as good as your last set of examination results, a pressure which acutely affects staff and students too. He outlines his strategies for mitigating this pressure and turning the tide of students' mental health problems. The autobiographical narrative modulates between self-effacing humour and heart-wrenching stories of his mother's life, blighted by mental illness. His professional reflections are a wisdom-filled blend of evidence-based policy and decades of experience in teaching and school leadership. Tomsett writes with genuine humility. His prose is beautiful in its seeming simplicity. When you pick up one of his books you will find you have read the first fifty pages before you have even noticed: surely the hallmark of truly great writing. Topics covered include: the real state of the nation's mental health, the perfect storm that is precipitating a mental health crisis in schools, the problems of loose terminology what do we really mean when we talk about a mental health epidemic? and poor understanding of mental health problems and mental illness, the disparity between mental and physical health in public discourse, treatment and funding, beginning the conversation about mental health, the philosophical and psychological principles underpinning the debate, strategies to support students in managing their own mental health better, resilience, growth mindset, mindfulness, grit, failure and mistakes, coping with pressure, York's school wellbeing workers project, evidence-based strategies that have worked in Huntington School, metacognitive strategies for improving exam performance, interviews with professionals in the field, the reality of living with a parent with a serious mental illness, self-concept and achievement, perfectionism, the relationship between academic rigour and therapeutic education and, significantly, what the research says, what the experts say and what Tomsett's experience says about adverting a mental health crisis in schools. Suitable for teachers, leaders and anyone with an interest in mental health in schools.

Chapter 1

Un-love letter

Engagement day, 24 July 1956

My mother’s maiden name was Browning. Her first name was Elizabeth. The poetic connection might account for my love of words. She can certainly write, that’s for sure.

Despite her promising name mother wasn’t educated, having had to leave school when she was just 13 years old. She was a manic depressive, now known as bi-polar. For all that we might consider children’s mental health problems a modern phenomenon, they are, in fact, nothing new.

In 1939 electroconvulsive treatment, or ECT, was introduced to the UK. ECT was devised by an Italian professor of neuropsychiatry, Ugo Cerletti, after he had observed, during an abattoir tour, the passivity induced in pigs by pre-slaughter electric shocks.1 Mother was one of the youngest British recipients of ECT.

Sylvia Plath’s description of ECT in The Bell Jar is probably the most vivid I have read: ‘Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite.’ She goes on to describe how, ‘with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break’.2

Like all ECT patients mother remembers very little of the shocks, something considered a positive feature of the treatment. Of all the senses, however, smell is the greatest evoker of memory. Graham Greene said that smell has a ‘power infinitely more evocative than sounds and perhaps even than things seen’.3 Mother can’t recall what the doctor said to her. She can’t even recall what the room looked like. The one thing she can recall is the odour of her singed hair when she awoke from the therapy.4

Mother met my dad when he was delivering letters on his post round. She had been tipped off by a friend that the postman was quite dishy. She sat in wait for him on the wooden gate to the house. When he arrived, he offered her one of his Player’s Navy Cuts. She was impressed.

The next line of this romantic tale should be, ‘from that day forth they lived happily ever after’. But, to be honest, over the next thirty years the many joys were offset by more than just a few moments of despair.

Mother married my dad when she was just 20 years old. She tried to break off the engagement. She knew her manic bouts would test him. She knew her dark days would wipe away his smile. She knew she would bring him an unfair share of misery. Before they wed, she wrote to dad to end their relationship, but her father found the letter and destroyed it.

Mother could have finished with dad without having to serve her own decree nisi. Why didn’t she just tell him it was over? The answer to this question is lost forever in the thick mist of time. She was young. She was cowed by her father. She probably snatched at the chance of happiness. After all, we all want what Raymond Carver wanted, don’t we, ‘To call myself beloved, to feel myself | beloved on the earth’?5

So marry him she did. Miss Elizabeth Ann Browning became Mrs Ernest Harry Tomsett. And for purely selfish reasons, I’m glad my granddad found his daughter’s un-love letter.

1 See Norman S. Endler, The Origins of Electroconvulsive Therapy: The Myths and the Realities (New York: Raven Press, 1988).

2 Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 151.

3 See Marie-Françoise Allain, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 34.

4 Electroconvulsive therapy has improved considerably since those early days. Today, around 4,000 people with severe depression are treated successfully every year in the UK with a course of ECT.

5 Raymond Carver, ‘Late Fragment’, in All of Us: The Collected Poems (London: Harvill Press, 1997), p. 294.

Chapter 2

Mind over matter

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

John Milton

We use the phrase ‘mind over matter’ to describe occasions when someone has performed a seemingly impossible physical feat, like single-handedly lifting a car to free a trapped pedestrian caught beneath its wheels. More commonly, it is used to encourage people to show greater determination when faced with challenging tasks. It assumes that we can control our own minds to control our bodies. And that is a huge assumption.

For fifty-odd years I have been able to control my mind and have done pretty much what I wanted to do in life, despite the barriers I have faced. My close friend, Lester, said to me recently that, looking back, he thought that my success at golf was down to my mental strength more than any golfing prowess, and he’s probably right.

In my experience, luck has never been a major factor in what I have achieved. I subscribe to the aphorism often attributed to Seneca: ‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’ Determine to work hard and you’ll be rewarded. On the odd occasion when I confess that I am worried about something or other, my wife will deliver the wounding jibe, ‘Come on, it’s you who always says we can control what we think.’

Despite my own sense of mental strength, one might argue that it is odd for me to subscribe so fully to the ‘mind over matter’ mantra, since my family has been so blighted by mental health problems. Indeed, how we, as a family, have lived with my mother’s manic depression forms the narrative thread of this book.

It is a challenge, then, for those of us who have, thus far, been spared depression to understand why on earth sufferers cannot just ‘snap out of it’. In Matt Haig’s quite superb book, Reasons to Stay Alive, there is a short chapter entitled, ‘Things people say to depressives that they don’t say in other life-threatening situations’.1 ‘Why do you think you got cancer of the stomach?’ is a sharp rejoinder to the insensitive amongst us, and ‘Ah, meningitis. Come on, mind over matter’ is a cracker in the light of this book’s title.

The difficulty of understanding mental illness from the outside looking in was illustrated with utter clarity during a BBC week-long special on mental health, when journalist Lynn Barber interviewed the comedian Ruby Wax. The conversation explored Wax’s severe depression. At one point Barber asked a question which she knew was provocative, but she asked it anyway:

Lynn Barber: I probably shouldn’t … I’ll make a million enemies by saying this, it does strike me that a component of depression is self-ob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Preface
• 1: Un-love letter
• 2: Mind over matter
• 3: The signal and the noise
• 4: Going, going …
• 5: The view from here: Rt Hon. Norman Lamb MP
• 6: Let them do it
• 7: The view from here: Claire Fox
• 8: Heart-stopping
• 9: What’s the worst thing that can happen?
• 10: Live hard
• 11: The view from here: Natasha Devon MBE
• 12: Manic
• 13: Feel the fear but be a head teacher anyway
• 14: Inevitability
• 15: The view from here: Dr Ken McLaughlin
• 16: Perspective
• 17: Think to thrive
• 18: Failure
• 19: Mindfulness, growth mindset and grit
• 20: Embarrassed
• 21: The view from here: Professor Tanya Byron
• 22: Happiness
• 23: Wisdom
• 24: The best medicine
• 25: The view from here: Tom Bennett
• 26: Calm
• 27: Who owns the child?
• 28: Déjà vu
• 29: Metacognitive tools for performing well in examinations
• 30: Someone to do nothing with
• 31: Turning the tide?
• 32: Survival
• End note
• Bibliography
• Copyright
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