Mayhem

by Sigrid Rausing

  Understanding, and forgiveness, are associated with the idea that in some contexts certain acts may seem, or even may be, “normal” or at least understandable, whilst in others they are not. “May seem” if we believe in absolute ethical values; “may be” if we are true relativists.

  I am now an editor, but I was trained as a social anthropologist, and I will probably always lean towards cultural relativism. Anthropologists are dedicated to context; to making sense of culture in its own terms. But contemporary conversations shift between relativism and absolute values; between exploring the unknown territories of the psyche and tabloid truths; between genuinely trying to understand and relying on simple and judgemental rules of right and wrong.

  The nature of addiction weaves in and out of these conversations and these paradigms. Nothing is certain. Is the addict born or made? Is addiction a genetic mutation; a psychological condition; a culture of rebellion? Are addicts victims or perpetrators? Addicts destroy families—perhaps by seeking so desperately that which they missed, or believe they missed, as small children: the safety of parental love? Do addicts reject love by becoming unlovable? Or do they destroy families blindly, incidentally, indifferently, overcome by cravings, numbed by drugs?

  The addict doesn’t care. But could the vast indifference of addicts to the pain of others perhaps also reflect their perception of others’ indifference to their own pain? Or do addicts self-medicate because they are in fact more acutely sensitive to pain than the rest of us, as some neuroscientists argue?

  —

  I believe that addicts are born in the sense that the child carries a biological kernel of emotional dysfunction, which in certain conditions can grow into an addictive syndrome. But we all spin narratives from unfolding time, and those narratives are also true. Those stories become our lives. The addict is born and the addict is made. As we all are.

  Perhaps what I am trying to say is that I got trapped in a web of uncertainty, which haunts me still. I fumble in the dark.

  I am not alone of course. We all fumble in the dark.

  “The chicken is a little dry and/or you’ve ruined my life,” writes Ben Lerner in one of his poems.

  Suddenly I am laughing.

  6

  In the spring of 2013 I was onstage at the Charleston literary festival in Sussex, moderating an event with authors Patrick McGrath and Olivia Laing about the relationship between creativity, madness and alcoholism. My mother sat in the audience, her long sleek hair in a bun, smiling benignly and only slightly ironically. She nodded at me, willing me on. It was a year after Eva died, and my brother was still in court-mandated care.

  A woman from the audience asked a question. We seemed to be implying, she said, that addiction is genetic or at least innate, whereas of course the real cause is a lack of security in early childhood. She knew this as a treating psychotherapist, she added. I looked straight at my mother as the therapist spoke, feeling a wave of anger on her behalf. She had to endure decades of my brother’s addiction to be condemned again in this cosy marquee, the cows lowing outside, the promise of the South Downs and the sea beyond. But she looked back at me so calmly I wondered if she had even heard the question.

  —

  My mother was a child once. She lay in the snow with a broken leg and the other children left her behind, thinking her attention-seeking (of course she had intellectual aspirations, even then, when her main inspiration was still a cheap edition of How to Be a Japanese Samurai).

  I guess my mother’s Samurai ethos stood her in good stead in the snow and the subsequent months in the women’s ward in hospital, her leg in traction, surrounded by cases of infectious disease and blood-poisoning.

  My father was a child once, before his mother’s illness and death.

  She watches over me as I write, her face so gentle. She was certainly ill when this photograph was taken.

  I will not judge anyone. And science, less judgemental than popular culture, bears me out.

  —

  DSM-5, the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, reckons that 40 to 60 percent of the risk of alcoholism is genetic and adds that any given gene is likely to account for only 1 to 2 percent of that. The genes involved are many and varied, in other words, but enough studies have been done to conclusively establish the heritability of alcoholism.

  The DSM-5 arguments for the genetic component of opiate addiction are perhaps a little less compelling:

  The risk for opiate use disorder can be related to individual, family, peer, and social environmental factors, but within these domains, genetic factors play a particularly important role both directly and indirectly. For instance, impulsivity and novelty-seeking are individual temperaments that relate to the propensity to develop a substance use disorder but may themselves be genetically determined. Peer factors may relate to genetic predisposition in terms of how an individual selects his or her environment.

  Psychiatrist and addiction expert Markus Heilig has argued in a recent book that all addictive disorders are moderately to highly heritable. He estimates that some 50 to 70 percent of any single addiction is caused by an inherited component. Free will and environment, particularly growing up in poverty, exposure to violence, and limited education, make up the rest of the risk factors. He, like the authors of DSM-5, believes that addiction is associated with impulsivity and a poor ability to delay gratification.

  There have been many studies on the capacity to delay gratification. The most famous one was conducted at Stanford University in the early 1960s—the so-called marshmallow test. Psychologist Walter Mischel tested a group of children who attended the Bing Nursery School at the university. The children, who were aged four to six, were placed on a chair by a table in an otherwise empty room. They were shown a treat and given the choice of either eating it or getting two treats instead, if they waited for fifteen minutes on their own.

  Some of the children were filmed. On the table was a bell to call the researcher back into the room, and the treat itself, a marshmallow (or a pretzel or an Oreo cookie) on a small plate.

  I watch the footage: the children fidget as children do when they are supposed to stay on a chair; they stare as though hypnotised at the marshmallow; they make faces at it; they surreptitiously lick or gnaw on it. It’s mesmerising but also painful to watch: I want to step through the screen and through time to be with them, those children, who are now older than I am. I imagine that some of them might have eaten the marshmallow just in order to draw the experiment, and the enforced isolation, to an end. But perhaps it makes no difference whether the child is resisting the marshmallow or resisting an easy end to boredom and loneliness—either would take self-discipline, and either would be correlated with age, which indeed turned out to be a strong factor in the ability to resist.

  But isn’t it odd that if the children were adults, the sanest choice would in fact be to eat the single treat and end the experiment? Time is precious; boredom is bad; social interaction is healthier than isolation. Delaying would be seen as neurotic; an inordinate time sacrifice for an insignificant award, analysed, perhaps, in terms of excessive submission and obedience, a depressive lack of agency. But for very young children, the same behaviour is interpreted as a positive capacity to delay gratification. We posit that the marshmallow is a symbol of everything worth waiting for: all the rewards that come with patience and discipline. But surely a marshmallow is just a marshmallow? Even the children must have known that.

  But as the Stanford children grew up, they were tracked, and strong correlations with the original results were said to emerge in adolescence. SAT scores turned out to be higher for delayers, and ratings by parents and teachers on social competence were higher, too. And when the cohort of marshmallow children were followed up again, aged thirty-two, delayers were less fat; and they also, apparently, used less cocaine.

  The idea that poor impulse control is linked to drug addiction is by now embedd
ed in popular consciousness. It is hard, reading the original research, to tell what the tests actually show—how far the delay time was correlated with age; how much the subsequent SAT test scores did in fact differ, and how many of the “impulsive” kids were overweight or used cocaine, or both. The papers are dense and require a sophisticated knowledge of statistics. The effects seem to be small, though they are still significant—but of course one of the difficulties of translating science to popular science is that the term “significant” has a different meaning in the world of statistics than in common speech. In statistics it only indicates a variation in the data (of any magnitude) that is not random. Mischel himself in fact cautioned against overinterpreting the data linking the capacity of preschool children to delay gratification to adolescent and adult outcomes.

  More important, Mischel soon concluded that willpower and impulse control were not, in fact, entirely innate. “The ability to voluntarily delay immediate gratification, to tolerate self-imposed delays of reward, is at the core of most philosophical concepts of ‘willpower’ and their parallel psychological concept of ‘ego strength,’ ” he wrote in 1973. But the ability to defer gratification could, he argued, be taught:

  After many false starts it occurred to us, at last, that our young subjects really might not be basically different from the rest of us and hence were capable of following instructions—even instructions to think about marshmallows, or pretzels, or fun things that might distract them. Indeed we soon found that our subjects even at age three and four could easily give us vivid examples and elaborations about endless things that made them feel happy, like finding lady bugs, or swinging on a swing with Mommy pushing, or dancing at a birthday party. And we in turn instructed them to think about those fun things while they sat waiting for their marshmallows.

  He developed this thinking in later papers. Current theories, he and a coauthor wrote in 2002, whether psychoanalytic, behaviourist, or genetic, ignore people’s capacity for positive change. Akrasia, the ancient Greek term for deficiency of will, could be overcome by training. If marshmallow children were told to think of the pretzels as “little logs,” or of the marshmallows as “puffy clouds,” delay time could be increased by up to thirteen minutes. If the children had toys to play with, delay time was extended too. When the children were told to think “fun thoughts” (“If you want to, while you’re waiting, you can think about Mommy pushing you on a swing”), delay time was extended for as long as when they were given toys to play with.

  *

  I think of my mother sitting on that double swing with my brother, singing, over and over: I love you and you love me.

  Did it help him to remember that? Could he have been patiently taught, like Mischel’s experimental subjects, to delay gratification and curb his cravings?

  We grew up in the era of the original marshmallow experiments, the 1960s, with its fine line between neglect and freedom. We were not taught to understand and moderate our feelings, or to share them. Were we neglected, or were we free? It’s hard to say. Perhaps the occasional holes in our socks and the tangles in our hair, our freedom to run a bath in the evening or not, to do our homework or not, was a form of liberation—the price we paid for being free.

  Freedom was the Zeitgeist. In the spring of 1969 the students occupied a university building opposite our Montessori nursery school, where we tied shoelaces in frames (so mysteriously hard for me; so seemingly easy for others); where we were lined up at break to race to the swings, to swing so high. We watched the students on the roof from the swings; we heard the slogans through crackly loudspeakers.

  It was such a peaceful town, otherwise. We walked to Montessori through quiet streets. We walked in line to the bakery to buy a plain bun for morning break, or maybe afternoon break, or maybe lunch. If you carried on, you reached Domus, the co-op, and the town market square. If you walked back towards our house, you passed the pet shop and Folkets Hus on the other side, the trade union cultural centre.

  For a long time it felt like fifteen or twenty years ago. Now it feels like a hundred years ago.

  We thought we were so modern. But then so did our parents, and so did their parents before them.

  The students burnt their caps, those traditional symbols of graduating from high school. Palme and Geijer, Nixon’s lackeys, they shouted then, or maybe later—the slogan rhymes in Swedish and doesn’t translate well, but you get the gist. Olof Palme, Social Democratic prime minister, and Arne Geijer, the head of the trade union, lackeys of Nixon. In Lund, young men refused to do military service and were prosecuted; students demonstrated in the cathedral against a South African visit.

  Those were radical days, and Olof Palme adopted some of the causes as his own, chiefly the demonstrations against the Vietnam War (leading to the American ambassador being recalled in May 1968) and anti-apartheid activism.

  —

  My mother had been a Social Democrat when she met my father. She travelled to political conferences in Yugoslavia and other places; she believed in progress and equality. She taught at the university, worked on her PhD, and didn’t expect to get married. Then one day she was introduced to my father, and was married within three months.

  Her radicalism was transformed into liberalism, maybe because she was influenced by my charismatic grandfather, a dedicated liberal who believed that true progress was industrial. But she never quite became domesticated. On weekends she made us breakfast and Sunday night pancakes. Other than that, this is someone who never cooked, and whose own mother’s loss of a university education was associated with a quiet sense of defeat. This is someone who had held on to a student room long after she was entitled to one; who told my father that she would marry him but she would never cook. He didn’t mind—he loved her, and he loved cooking. It became part of the story of who they were.

  Everyone was busy. My father was building up the company, with my mother’s help—“Doing well by doing good” was the slogan. Clean milk for schoolchildren in Kenya and India. Clean milk for everyone.

  —

  My mother’s grandfather came from a well-off landowning family from Jämtland, one of the northern counties bordering Norway. He was an alcoholic, who drank and gambled until the family eventually shipped him off to an estate on the island of Gotland, where he died young. Not much money remained. He left two sons, one of whom was illegitimate. When my great-grandmother discovered this boy’s existence, she adopted him and brought him up as her own. That boy, too, became an alcoholic (his son in turn became a great man, but that’s another story). “I think of my grandfather,” my mother would say, in reference to my brother. That genetic thread running through us, weaving in and out of generations.

  Motherlove. I don’t think love was lacking. Perhaps my mother didn’t quite understand, or accept, the principles of motherhood. But who amongst us has a firm existential idea of that mysterious concept—what it is and what it means?

  Women get blamed. Remember the now debunked notion of “refrigerator mothers,” the idea that autism is caused by emotionally distant parents, mothers in particular? Psychologist Leo Kanner came up with that idea in the 1940s (and later distanced himself from it). Bruno Bettelheim made it a household concept.

  Every woman has to invent herself, as Simone de Beauvoir said.

  *

  The neurological research carries on. RISKY RATS SHINE LIGHT ON GAMBLERS, The International New York Times reported in March 2016. Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, had found that certain neurons in rats’ brains determined behaviour. Rather like Mischel’s marshmallow children, rats given a choice between a steady flow of sugar or an alternating trickle and flood divide into those who go for thrift and those who go for bust, defined as risk-averse and risk-prone individuals. Professor Deisseroth showed that if part of the risky rats’ brains were stimulated with light, they could be turned risk averse. He was also able to dampen risk aversion with a drug for Parkinson’s disease, reversing the process.

&n
bsp; “We know from other work that this is all relevant to human addiction and gambling,” Dr. Trevor Robbins, chair of the Department of Psychology in Cambridge, commented. I wonder, though, about framing rats’ appetite for sugar in terms of risk, rather than in terms of stability, or intelligence, or metabolism. Once you use that term you are in the field of addiction: risk, like impulse control, or deferred gratification, is not a neutral word.

  And why is it that we problematise the behaviour of the risky rats, rather than the behaviour of the thrifty rats? I genuinely wonder which is the mutated state, the thrifty or the risky one, but I sense my own sibling syndrome in the question too. Am I the risk-averse rat pressing the lever of modest returns; hiding in the wood shavings wondering why all the attention is on the risky rat? Am I the self-righteous sibling reluctant to join the celebration of the brother, the one who once was lost and now is found?

  We recognise the type: he was risky, that prodigal son. But surely our view of risk, and our propensity for risk, is historically and culturally constituted, too. In London we like it in wartime and bull markets. In bear markets, especially post-crash, we value caution more.

  Different drugs have different effects, and addicts have marked preferences. I associate cocaine with a certain manic quality, which makes sense of the idea of “risk taking” as a gauge to measure that addiction. But opiate addicts may not be risk prone at all. What if their existential condition, in fact, is that they can’t face the risks of life without the honeyed prop of drugs?