Today’s assembly comes from the confluence of two separate aspects of my own weekend.
On Sunday afternoon, I re-read all of your comments in the mental health survey you took earlier in the year, and your suggestions for any improvements. Thank you for doing it and for thinking about it. We have, I think, come a long way on this front as a school – and most certainly so given the relatively recent history. The term ‘mental health’ was not even in common use until about 15 years ago, so when I was growing up, nobody ever used that phrase. Nevertheless, curiously for me, I studied Classics at A-Level, and one soon realises that the concept was in fact already there in antiquity – it was the poet Juvenal in the second century AD who coined the famous phrase “mens sana in corpore sano” (a healthy mind in a healthy body) as recognition of the fact that mental and physical health are equally desirable. Indeed, the context in which he used this phrase is as follows:
You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death,
and deems length of days the least of Nature’s gifts;
that can endure any kind of toil;
that knows neither wrath nor desire and thinks
the woes and hard labours of Hercules better than
the loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus.
What I commend to you, you can give to yourself;
For assuredly, the only road to a life of peace is virtue.
So, says Juvenal in the second century AD: a healthy mind seeks virtue; and one should embrace hard work and not worry too much about the wrong things. He thinks that we always ask for the wrong things: money, strength, power, good looks, fame – when really we should be looking to lead a good, simple, hard-working life.
One of the suggestions that came out of your feedback in the survey was that the school, though dealing with poor mental health issues well, might consider promoting how to have positive mental health more regularly. Well, there’s Juvenal, leading the way; and I think, to some great extent, the truths still remain – a lot of what we wish for does not in fact make us much happier; we should instead consider carefully what might.
Then, also on the weekend, the Ashes started. And what a start. To those who know anything about cricket, this was a clash of styles. England, under an innovative new captain, Ben Stokes, was playing the most attacking, some would say reckless, style of cricket ever seen in over 100 years of Test Matches; Australia, ever the pragmatists, were picking a more prosaic route to plot victory. Stokes’ England has been a revelation. He has thrown caution to the wind, even to the extent of saying publicly, as England captain, that he does not care much about losing – he just wants to attack the game and play carefree cricket, free from fear. “Play free from fear”. What might that mean? Well, Stokes would know. Test cricket, indeed any international sport, is played out in front of millions; every move, on and off the field, is scrutinised by the press, replayed by fans and critiqued in the most minute detail. The response to failure is harsh and very public, and it takes its toll on the mental health of the players. For Stokes himself, coupled with the death of his father and a brush with the law late one evening outside a night club, this pressure all became too much and he endured a period of severe depression and even lost his love of the game altogether. Interestingly, the current England coach, Brendan McCullum, Stokes’ partner in crime for developing this attacking style, also had depression during his playing career, and lost his own love of the game. England’s best ever captain, Mike Brearley, who is now a well-known psychoanalyst, sees a link between Stokes’ depression and the way his team now plays. In an article in The Times last week, he wrote that “this attitude [of Stokes and McCullum] now is a reaction to that depression. It brings them back to life, and others to life, infectiously from them. Intuitively, I do think they know themselves through those experiences and recognise if it is happening in them or other people.” Both Stokes and McCullum talk about England players “reconnecting with the child within them” – the playful little boy who fell in love with the game – but (Brearley also says) “this must be balanced. It needs some maturity, too, some slowing down. In every area of life, if you are too excitable, manic, over the top and you ignore the drawbacks, then there is something lacking in your ability to grow. Stokes is the hardest trainer of anybody in the whole England team – so [this attacking approach] is not just devil-may-care.”
Now there are, I think, two key messages from this. The first is that you can recover from depression. You will need to reach out for support (Stokes did), but you can recover – and indeed come back stronger. Stokes is partly the great leader he is because he had a period when his mental health was significantly challenged. It is not uncommon – just like with physical health, we all have times when our mental health feels strong; and other times when it is not so good. If you are having a really tough time, then you must reach out for support; but know that, like Stokes, you can grow stronger.
The second is that Juvenal had something good to say, even two millennia ago. Hard work brings its own rewards: Stokes would not be where he is without it. Listen to these lines from Juvenal again in the context of Stokes’ cricket captaincy: “you should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body; ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death and deems length of days the least of Nature’s gifts”. Stokes, too, now has strong mental and physical health; and he also works hard and plays ‘free from fear’.