Dorothy Rowe has spent 50 years writing about the psychological aspects of mental ill health
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST and prolific author, Dorothy Rowe, was in Dublin last Thursday, speaking on the topic of Depression and Happiness.
The 81-year-old Australian, who has been included in Who’s Who of Australian Women and a British newspaper’s list of the 100 most powerful women in business, academia and politics in Britain, has been in the vanguard of health professionals who have changed the way depression is viewed over the past 50 years.
“When I started to lecture and write about depression, the word wasn’t mentioned. It was whispered that someone had a nervous breakdown. Nowadays the word depression is used to cover so much,” she says on the phone from her London home.
“Sometimes, when I hear people say [glibly] they are depressed, I want to say, ‘How dare you?’ [because] they don’t know how difficult it can be to be depressed.”
Rowe grew up and worked in Australia as a teacher and school counsellor in her early adult life. After her marriage came to an end, she moved to England with her son Edward.
She took a job as a National Health Service psychologist in a clinic attached to Sheffield University and soon began scrutinising the research into the biological basis for mental disorder.
She now says, “For all the research done looking for a biochemical change that causes depression, nothing has ever been found yet still some psychiatrists cling to the idea that depression is caused by a biochemical change in the brain.”
So, instead, Rowe turned to psychological explanations for depression and drew on the Personal Construct Theory which was developed by English psychologist, George Kelly.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, this theory gave psychologists the tools to help their clients analyse the meaning (or personal construct) that they placed on certain issues and relationships in their lives.
It was a popular approach that was later superseded by cognitive behaviour therapy.
Rowe realised both through her research and her clinical work that self- blame was a key to understanding depression.
“So many people blame themselves when something goes wrong in their lives. Many of us are taught as children to blame ourselves and this stays with many people into adulthood,” she says.
“When you turn against yourself and hate yourself, you start cutting yourself off from everybody and become frightened of being with people. When you are withdrawn, you don’t enjoy free and easy relationships with others because you are always guarded.
“This barrier that you put up between yourself and other people is the experience of depression. It’s different from unhappiness because you [tend to] share your feelings when you are unhappy.”
Through her books, Rowe teases out many of the arguments and concepts in philosophy, religion and even politics, looking at how they impinge on the individual’s self-understanding, frames of reference and ultimately happiness or unhappiness.
Books such as Breaking the Bonds – Understanding Depression, Finding Freedom (Harper Collins, 1994), The Successful Self – Freeing our Hidden Inner Strengths (Fontana, 1988) and Wanting Everything – The Art of Happiness (Harper Collins, 1991) are jargon- free books that offer readers a chance to explore and question the personal and cultural influences in their lives.
In her most popular book, Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison (Routledge, 2003, third edition), she describes depression not as an illness needing drugs, but a defence we use to hold ourselves together when we feel our lives are falling apart.
Rowe is also not afraid to examine her own life in her books and references to personal difficulties or life experiences that have moulded her (including her marriage break-up) are scattered through her books.
Her mother’s volatility was, for instance, a strong influence on Rowe’s own personal evolution.
“My mother’s family was pretty crazy. She was prone to sudden fierce tempers. And although she was also very loving, I couldn’t rely on her, so I watched her carefully to work out what was about to happen,” she explains, now well aware of what a formative influence this was.
So, as for many psychologists, her quest for knowledge and understanding has a personal genesis. Her most recent book, Why We Lie (Harper Collins, 2010), explores the reasons we tell untruths and the consequences of doing so.
“For the smooth running of society, we all tell white lies and that’s not important, but where it is important, we should know what the truth is and speak about it and we should never lie to ourselves because we create problems when we tell lies to ourselves,” she says.
Recently, Rowe has also become interested in climate change and the climate change deniers, particularly in her home country of Australia.
Asked about the most important insight she has gained during her long years working with people with mental health issues, Rowe says, “The main thing we all need to understand is that it’s not what happens to us that determines our behaviour, but how we interpret it. A lot of people don’t understand that – and you can always change how you interpret things.”
She also says that it is so much easier nowadays if somebody wants help. “There are so many counsellors and therapists and excellent self-help books. All the help people need is out there, if somebody wants to find it and put their mind to it.”
