Last week’s Times investigation which revealed that more than 70,000 young people are being prescribed anti-depressants prompted a caustic letter from Clarissa Farr.
Until recently, Ms Farr headed one of the most successful schools in the country, the private St Paul’s Girls School in London, a veritable factory for high flyers many of whose alumni are household names. So it’s fair to say she knows a thing or two about what makes young adults successful, often despite rather than because of parental input.
Ms Farr was brutally succinct about the factors contributing to this alarming trend in the medicalisation and chemical treatment of what used to be called sadness and disappointment. She blamed today’s “reverence for the individual, our sentimental fascination with happiness and our lack of interest in the unfashionable virtue of patience” for creating unrealistic expectations among young people.
This newfound subjection to the age-old slings and arrows of adolescence and the clamour for instant fixes for them are but one facet of a new cult of vulnerability arguably more destructive than what it hopes that label will explain, excuse and cure.
Vulnerability does exist, of course. In simpler times it was located in the very young, the very old and the sick or disabled. Physical helplessness is a tangible reality and the welfare state was largely created to recognise and provide protection and dignity for those unable to help themselves. It’s not simply a means of categorisation, it goes to the heart of the civilised values baked into our consciousness since the end of the Second World War.
But we don’t live in simple times any more. Vulnerability has been recruited in the service of politics and as we know politics is seldom pure in motive. Whole swathes of our population are now regarded as vulnerable in some way, often having the label conferred on them by middle class ‘experts’ as their prime marker – the homeless, the poor, the lonely, the unhappy, those who offend, those who are victims, those who are unsuccessful in life’s race. The list seems to be added to every week.
Vulnerability has therefore ceased to have any practical meaning and that has implications for those less fortunate than their peers. On the one hand, it has become a means of explaining, excusing and perpetuating poor behaviours, lifestyles and choices which with practical help and encouragement need not be a default state. On the other hand it actually obscures a focus on people who really need our help. The parents of a child with special educational needs don’t want bureaucrats feeling their pain and emoting fatuous mission statements, they need direct and immediate help to allow their kids to reach their potential.
Similarly, the left’s infatuation with absolving the poor of any agency in their own lives by regarding them first and foremost as vulnerable is dangerous and patronising. Tell people repeatedly they are defined by victimhood and they will start to believe you. Tell them enough times and they will vote for you. “Is your life shit? Blame the Tories” isn’t the most responsible rallying call of all time.
Many people from my working class background and generation never allowed themselves to be defined or limited in such a way. Mind you, we had solid communities, access to grammar schools, free tuition and university maintenance grants giving us rocket boosters to break the orbit of low expectations.
The cult of vulnerability has also insinuated itself into the criminal justice system. Sex offenders, made vulnerable by the unique disapproval we regard their crimes are routinely separated from other prisoners. Whole prisons are now given over to them due in part to the proliferation of convictions.
While this is a pragmatic and sensible response to a safety problem – and while there are some attempts to integrate them – labelling offenders as vulnerable has always been problematic because this can all to easily be absorbed and rationalised as an excuse for behaviour outside the control of the individual. The list of prisoners who are vulnerable by reason of mental disorder, family history, trauma, substance misuse and self-harm is now so extensive, the idea of the old lag who just got caught and is quietly “doing his bird” seems absurdly old fashioned.
Again, and to be clear, this is not some weird Victorian argument that people in prison should not be helped – far from it. I’m a passionate advocate for radical reform for our hopelessly disordered prison system. My concern is that the ever-growing ways we look to explain and excuse behaviour through a victimisation lens will only make it harder to give people the help and inspiration they deserve to escape a lifetime as a label – vulnerable.
My experience of prisoners is that many of them want and need to be shown practical ways to break a cycle of offending that blights their lives and creates endless victims and public expense. They are little interested in the abstractions of a criminal justice commentariat explaining away their personal responsibility. That won’t hold a family together or find you a job on release. The little battalions of criminal justice NGOs doing miracles with barely any cash are the real game changers here, not the theorists.
By the same token, young people who are merely sad because they can’t meet impossible expectations (often set by their parents) very often need compassion, empathy and listening support to help them as opposed to a five minute consultation with a GP and a prescription for Prozac.
In this respect we can all agree surely that we need a public policy revolution that truly enables and inspires the “people who can” to move on. For those remaining – the truly vulnerable – we need to pay for world class not third class services as a statement of our civilised values. We’ve all been young once, some of us are or will be ill or disabled and all of us will die. In between, what we are and what we can become must not be killed with the kindness of “vulnerability”.
