School daze #1

One thing I rarely think about these days is high school. I know I've made barely any reference to it on this blog, apart from noting that my reluctance to attend was one of the factors that precipitated my induction into the mental health system. But my high school experience was critical in a number of ways - not only was I deviating from my prescribed role as an adolescent in Western society by skiving off, playing hooky or wagging, but I was also incurring the wrath of individuals in positions of authority, and last but not least, I was very distressed by what was happening when I was there. A triad which was a perfect inducement to psychiatric intervention if there ever was one.

In contrast, the shortcomings of the education system within which we were trapped continue to preoccupy some of my contemporaries. I suppose I'd be looking back in anger too if all that other stuff that was going on at the time wasn't getting in the way. But while my boyfriend expresses his irritation at not being allowed to take extra subjects to increase his university entrance score, and my high school friend Rose blames Catholicism for the mind-numbing conformism and anti-intellectualism that we had to contend with, all I can really think of is how scared I was of not being let out of hospital in time to sit my exams, and thus of being kept back for another year.

I did most of my time in the Catholic education system, but completed my final year at a state school. What happened to me at primary school is something best left for a session of EMDR followed by the intravenous administration of massive amounts of Valium. What happened at high school is well documented, as I was a compulsive diarist and letter writer at the time. I suppose one day I might sit down and read what I've kept and dredge up everything I've suppressed, but even without doing that I can say that back then I was very angry with the situation in which I found myself. A bit like some of my friends are now, but they generally weren't back then, something which rendered me very isolated in my opinions and thinking, and thus vulnerable to pathologisation.

What I mostly remember now about high school is the cold, or at least that's what I talk about when such reminiscing is called for. The heating system would often grind to a halt at the most inconvenient of times, usually the coldest days of the year. I brought a rug to school and Rose and I would wrap ourselves in it as we sat at paired wooden desks still covered in graffiti from the 1960s. The temperature in this classroom is not conducive to learning, she once wrote on the blackboard in her scythe-like handwriting just before an English class was due to start. The more extraverted types sat in rainbow-striped sleeping bags and gossiped through the mouth-holes of balaclavas, while the rest of us learned to write neatly wearing mittens. School rules forbade the wearing of socks, no matter how discreetly, under the regulation brown stockings, so during my first few months there my feet raged with chilblains. Of course I was always going to break that rule. The principal's secretary ordered me to remove the socks. I refused. It was the first of my many battles with teachers and other authorities, and is notable for being the only occasion on which my mother took my side.

I also remember how in Year 9 they made us do a six-kilometre run in gale force conditions, ostensibly to choose a team for the inter-school cross-country competition, when in fact the team had already been chosen. I remember trees being bent into hyperbolae by the wind, my clothes being soaked through, and that it was dark by the time we got back to school. I stumbled inside and saw panic in the face of the principal. The foyer looked like the corridors of the Louisiana Superdome, packed with drenched and stunned teenage girls. Somebody's mother drove me home, I think, and I spent the next few days in bed, in a kind of half-light, not knowing whether it was morning or evening. I took a pissy little overdose of aspirin and paracetamol, most of which I vomited up and then slept the rest off. I remember how a girl in the year below me stood up in class one day and started screaming Well, you're perfect, and you're perfect and you're perfect, pointing her finger at various other girls, and got carted off.

Rose and I have had many discussions about our school and what was wrong with it. She's still processing it, and needs to talk about it still, which is sometimes hard for me to swallow since back when it was actually happening and I wanted to talk about it - look, Rose, can't you see what's going on - she'd just tell me I was paranoid. She's right about the mind-numbing conformism and anti-intellectualism, that's for sure - we spent double the amount of time on the domestic sciences we did on the physical sciences and were told that the school's main goal was to produce good Catholic wives and mothers. There was no such thing as dux or valedictorian, and the only prize was the one given each year to a graduating student deemed by the teachers as being the most "Mary-like". (As I never managed to fall pregnant while still a virgin, I was unfortunately never a contender.) But while I'm no apologist for Catholicism, I don't consider it to be the root cause of the phenomena Rose describes. For relatively poor Catholic schools such as the one we attended were very dependent on the Federal Government for funding, and as responsibility for policy, curricula and so forth was delegated to the states, the thinking of the sitting State Government was highly influential as well. Our school could dress their policies up as "Gospel Values" all they liked, but it was politics - that of the governments, teacher training institutions, and teachers' unions - not religion, that fundamentally dictated them. And the politics at the time, er, weren't good.

I've always preferred to conceive the political spectrum as circular, with totalitarianism and democracy occupying opposite poles, as opposed to a linear left-right continuum. So we can create a totalitarian state either by moving sharply to the right or to the left. Now, it would be a gross and irresponsible exaggeration to say that Victoria, Australia, under the Labor government of 1982-1992 was a totalitarian state. But policy-making for education at the time was heavily influenced by Joan Kirner, a former school teacher and member of the party's socialist left faction, who became Minister for Education in 1988 and Premier in 1990. While Minister for Education, Kirner initiated a series of reforms aimed at reducing what she saw as the class-based inequity of the education system. As noble as this may sound, what Kirner tried to establish was a system that valorised "equality of outcomes" over "equality of opportunities". The concept of failure, along with any healthy competition, rapidly became verboten, and the notion of striving for excellence attained a decidedly elitist air. But one of the most pernicious and absurd implications of the "equality of outcomes" doctrine was that intellectual potential was, or at least should be consistent across the school population - that any variation in it was due entirely to class-based inequity, which of course had been scheduled for extirpation. This combined with the good old-fashioned Aussie tall poppy syndrome (that applies to just about everything but movies, pop music and sport) meant that many of us were encouraged, or even forced, to tone it down academically. To be something we weren't. To participate in the denial of the obvious that we are not all the same, and that our differences cannot wholly be attributed to class-based inequity.

It's not hard to explain this to Rose or anyone else. What is difficult to explain is how the denial of reality that is characteristic of totalitarianism, whether subtly or not so subtly enforced, manifests itself in epistemological terms, and how it replicates itself insides the minds of those required to participate in it. Essentially, some ideology - or theory in its ossified form - that was once presumably developed via a process of induction, is used to determine reality itself through the process of deduction. So the hardened theory ends up taking precedence over reality, when it was once a mere extrapolation of same. Educationalists observed that socioeconomic standing influences performance in school (induction), therefore any differences in performance were due to differences in socioeconomic standing, and nothing else (deduction). According to the dominant ideology, kids like me and Rose were just a bunch of spoilt rich brats, who needed to be cut down to size. Little matter that some of us came from families that were really battling, and not in the sense that 'battling' is used in the contemporary Australian political vernacular, that is, to describe people for whom it is somewhat a struggle to afford plasma screen TVs, five bedroom houses and SUVs.

Another example of this process, which will be familiar to many readers of this blog, is the habit of psychiatrists fixating on a particular diagnosis, and viewing your symptoms entirely within its framework. The diagnosis itself - a constellation of symptoms - might meet certain conditions of validity and reliability for it to be considered reflective of a tendency for such symptoms to co-occur, but rarely is a particular symptom indicative of a single diagnosis, and psychiatrists prone to leaping to conclusions will consciously or otherwise ignore any evidence that either contradicts or fails to confirm them. A patient who cuts can be diagnosed as borderline; another who hears voices can be diagnosed as schizophrenic - it usually isn't too difficult to extract from the miasma of psychological distress that accompanies these phenomena evidence that the patient meets the remaining criteria.

When this is going on outside, what happens on the inside? The message, loud and clear, was that I was a constellation of attributes and circumstances that couldn't, indeed didn't exist. In the face of this, my self contracted like a pupil, refusing to let the light in. Terrible memories I thought I'd gotten a handle on suddenly overwhelmed me, knocking me sideways into dissociative trances, which eventually became my stock response to any strong feeling whatsoever. I'd wander off between classes and 'come to' an hour or so later in the Botanical Gardens, in a nearby park or even at home, not recalling how I'd gotten there.

Then, owing to a complicated series of events, meetings and circumstances, I woke up one morning at the centre of the universe. I felt as if I was trapped in a glass cage, moving through a world populated by puppets and androids, dancing to my discordant, uncooperative tune. I was the tablecloth upon which the crockery and cutlery and the finest Waterford crystal was laid out - pull on me at your peril; it all hung, or sat, on me. Of course, at the same time I was told we're trying to change things, you and I, so don't fuck this up with your disappearing acts, Ruth. Are you listening to me? I'd go to the bathroom for a smoke and to inspect the nascent bruising on my upper arms (where my co-conspirator had grabbed me) or my shins (where he'd kicked me) or all over when he'd enveloped me in a rib-crushing hug. You can't go to the school up the road. There are boys there; they'll hate you, they'll call you a lesbian because you're good at maths.

I visited Rose, uninvited, not long after the first time I was hospitalised as a teenager. She was wearing her "Yay Team" school t-shirt and wasn't particularly pleased to see me. She gave me her usual lecture about how paranoid and negativistic I was, and when I told her I'd been in a psychiatric ward, she began talking about Sylvia Plath and Janet Frame and asked me if they'd given me any shock treatments. She seemed disappointed when I said no. We didn't speak to each other for a couple of years after that. The next time I saw her she was coming out of the building where the university's counselling service was based, doing the depressive shuffle.

In her early twenties, Rose spent a year or two doing nothing but watching daytime television, swallowing a now-banned anti-depressant, and ricocheting between the couch at home and the one in "shrinky's" office, where she pondered her need to infantilise him and everything, while being eaten up from the inside by a vulturous guilt. (I know that guilt well. It kicked in when I was 19 and I rode it out for a few months before resorting to Prozac, after which I completely nosedived.) Another girl, who'd been the quintessential quiet, polite type at school, suddenly lurched to the opposite end of the spectrum when she started uni, ranting and raving about nothing and everything, alienating all of her old friends, and putting off potential new ones. Another actually tried to set fire to the place. (Out of all of us, she's the one who's gone to enjoy the most social, academic and occupational success.)

In 1992, the Kirner Government was voted out in a landslide victory to the opposing Coalition parties. To a certain extent they were carrying the can for various major cases of financial mismanagement that had occurred both within their ambit and without, but they left a $2.2 billion budget deficit and $33 billion public sector debt nevertheless. The new Liberal Premier, Jeff Kennett (note that 'Liberal' has very different connotations in Australian politics to what it has in America and elsewhere; when we want to use the word the way Americans do, we say "small-l liberal") immediately took to the State's budget with an economically bone-dry scimitar, sacking public servants, closing down schools and privatising everything from utilities to prisons. While these had obvious economic benefits, there was an inevitable backlash, with thousands of people left jobless and many questioning the social costs of his initiatives and decrying his arrogance. He was re-elected in 1996, and remained popular for a while, but his cavalier attitude to criticism, his attacks on formal mechanisms in place to ensure accountability and his apparent failure to recognise that there was more to Victoria than its capital city, all led, gradually and then suddenly, to his then utterly unanticipated downfall at the 1999 election.

I've spent a bit of time on Kennett here because of his adjunct role in the mental health system in Australia today. He is chairman of an organisation called beyondblue, a "national depression initiative", and was one of the driving forces behind its establishment. A lot of people find this puzzling or hypocritical, given the devastating consequences his economic policies must have had for the mental health of the thousands who suddenly found themselves redundant. But while it's not exactly NAMI or TAC, it does promote the mainstream, medical-model approach to depression (to the extent that some local consumer groups have complained of censorship by moderators of its online forums), so to me his position there doesn't seem particularly incongruent with his earlier activities. After all, the mainstream, medical-model approach to depression localises the pathology within the individual, not in his or her social circumstances, such as being laid off by give-a-fuck economic rationalists.

Things are very different now, needless to say. The current Labor state government carefully puts one foot in front of the other in the middle of the road, as if auditioning for a certificate of economic and ideological sobriety. Meanwhile, enrolments at state schools are in decline, with those still operating perceived in very black and white, 'good' and 'bad' terms. Lying about your address to get your kid into one of the 'good' state schools is commonplace, as is the private schools' practice of 'poaching' talented athletes or the academically gifted from the state system, offering generous scholarships as enticements.

In a curious irony, the day I began drafting this post I got home to find that I'd been mailed a promotional magazine of sorts by my old school - God only knows how they got my address. Sixteen glossy pages of oh-aren't-we-fabulous, produced by a Fundraising and Public Relations Committee that certainly didn't exist sixteen years ago. The brown tights and serge dresses have gone, the nuns have been replaced by a lay principal with peroxided hair and a crocodile smile, and at least a couple of last year's graduating class have gone on to study medicine or law. The gangly Adams-appled history teacher I had in Year 8 now looks like Liam Neeson; about the only thing that hasn't changed is its domination of local inter-school sport. Then again, this being Australia, we were never expected to doubt the reality and desirability of excellence in that particular endeavour.