Patrick McGrath has written a new novel ‘Trauma’ (Buy at Waterstones Amazon) which has a psychiatrist narrator. McGrath probably knows quite a lot about psychiatric disorder as he grew up in the grounds of Broadmoor Prison, where his father worked. Interviewed in theguardian Saturday July 12, McGrath said something interesting and flattering about why people might become psychiatrists.
‘It has seemed to me that for a long time the writer and the psychiatrist have been up to very similar things in terms of the exploration of human dysfunction. The writer wants to create forms of entertainment and to give pleasure, the psychiatrist is engaged in a therapeutic task. But we are both essentially engaged in the exploration of human nature.’
Tangentially, but with knowing how people end up as they do in mind, I came across this interesting analysis concerning how parents can cause behaviour problems in children in the book ‘Managing Children with Psychiatric problems’ Edited by M Elena Garralda and Caroline Hyde (Buy at Amazon Waterstones)
‘Analysis … has shown that the moment to moment responses of parents towards children have a powerful effect on their behaviour. In families with difficulties, the children are often ignored when they are behaving reasonably, but criticized and shouted at when they are misbehaving. The consequence is that, in order to gain attention, they must behave badly. What is perhaps surprising is that they prefer negative attention to none at all, and are prepared to elicit often unpleasant and frankly painful reactions from their parents. By contrast, children who receive a reasonable amount of positive attention within a family tend not to behave in a way that elicits negative attention. All of this can be summarized as the ‘attention rule’ which states that children will behave in whatever way necessary to gain a reasonable amount of attention’