Are Irish people predisposed to depression? He says there is no hard evidence that the Irish are more prone to it than anyone else is. “I think Irish people have this phenomenal capacity for humour and fun, but behind it there’s a sense of the tragic. We know life can break our hearts, and we’re wary of that.”
Creativity is the upside of this entanglement in dark corners. “We have an incredible gift of being able to articulate these troubled experiences because we’re very close to them. But the other reality is that often we cannot cope with the closeness of our hidden lives. We’re much closer to our hearts than other people, and we pay a price for it.”
Excellent interview/feature with Tony Bates, author, psychologist and founder of youth mental health charity Headstrong, in today’s Irish Times.
I wrote recently against “generalisations about national psychology” in the sphere of economics and society, but at least here there is both empirical scepticism and a subject matter which is more the personal and private than it is the public and political (not that it’s in any way a hard distinction, and that mental health shouldn’t be a political issue, especially when “social circumstances” and an “ecological analogy” are highlighted elsewhere). Unsurprisingly, it probably helps that I’m in agreement with his general philosophy already. Society, if not itself an allegory, maybe does need an analogy (one which applies across cultures).
