Self-esteem and jail

We can’t watch every programme that goes on air and has a relevance to our work because life and family rightly intervene. 

Yet there has been a run of informative “mental health related” programmes on the main channels, the most recent last week on guns and knife culture in a season called Disarming Britain (see here). Watching one of the programmes, I was struck again by the fact that all the protagonists who were prepared to defend their territory by using their weapons had issues about self-esteem – or rather, poor self-esteem, almost certainly caused by events in their short pasts. It’s the same in all the programmes: clothes related, pregnancy related, disfigurement related, parenting related… You long to bolster their self-esteem and say, “You’re OK.” Because someone, somewhere, didn’t. (And there’s an interesting piece here about how some researchers think the self-esteem movement has gone too far in making young people narcissistic.)

There are many views about what the “self” is, and we obviously think therapy helps to develop this notion more healthily. 

Nick Luxmoore in his excellent new book Feeling Like Crap – subtitled Young People and the Meaning of Self-Esteem – explores the socially constructed self that is “the product of relationships with other people, because that’s the one which gets damaged by those relationships from the very beginning and that’s the one that might, therefore, be repaired by other relationships later in life”. Luxmoore writes in the kind of verbatim way that means we can hear how he works to respect the client’s self – and help the clients to do so for themselves – even while he is explaining where the crap feeling comes from and how it can be addressed.

Anyway, this discussion started with television watching. And tonight, on Five at 9pm, they begin a four-part show called Banged Up. Ten teens who have been in trouble with the law (but not in prison yet) are locked in jail for ten days, and paired with reformed prisoners who talk them through it to show them what it’s like if you embark on a lifetime of crime. David Blunkett, who is on the parole board in this scenario, writes about it in the Radio Times (this is a summary link – the article is not online). He lists the young people’s backgrounds as including, among many other expected issues, poor self-esteem. 

Apparently, the issues and the complicated emotions that go with them are going to be explored. Blunkett says the series demonstrates that it isn’t simply punishment that will make the difference, and also admits that the current policy of expanding adolescent mental health services should have started 10 years ago – a humble admission from a former Home Secretary. He adds: “To change behaviour, it’s necessary to change the individual, their outlook and their self-worth.”  Hear, hear!

Although only the extremes of the “self-esteem continuum” need a mental health intervention, there is a clear link between mental health issues and ending up in jail (70 per cent of the prison population has two or more mental health disorders, according to MIND).

If Luxmoore is right, possibly it will be the attention and respect of their mentors as much as the threat of a life in jail which helps turn some of the kids around. 

This TV series may be worth giving up some free time for. If not, Feeling Like Crap most certainly is.