Have our worries changed over time?

A pep talk to teachers reveals whether our fears are age-old or not.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

In an egg box sit two eggs with faces drawn on them with marker pen. One looks worried, the other looks on.

‘You’re not going to mention the psalms!’ my colleague said. ‘Are you?’

She was doing alarmed eyes at me, the sort which show white all round. I could see why really. We were on our way to give a talk at a big secondary school in Birmingham – multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith. The sort where praying had been banned as divisive, and the wearing of crosses discouraged. Hijabs too, for that matter. Not the kind of place where you chat lightly about a part of the Christian bible, on the whole, unless you’re trying to be provocative.

I did mean to mention them though. ‘I can’t think of another example,’ I said. ‘And anyway, it’s too late now – I sent the slides through last night.’ Deep breaths.

Just to explain a little, as counsellors, my colleague and I had set up a programme of talks and workshops for schools in the area, aimed at improving mental health in the aftermath of the pandemic. We’d seen all the warnings about the ‘tsunami of mental health issues’ threatening to deluge the country and decided to take action. Recognising that we couldn’t get to every individual child who might need help, we’d focused our efforts on the adults in the schools. Steady the grown-ups and you steady the children, was our thinking. The young take their wellbeing largely from the pattern set by their elders, even in this age of smart phones and social media, and the levels of despondency were very high among teachers and school staff in our experience. Lots of people burning out and leaving the profession. Not a steadying influence then. Hence our topic for today: ‘How to feel better in difficult times’.

I was nervous as I stood in front of the large hall full of people. Several hundred of them, all ages and stages. Some looking attentive, many expressionless, a few sleepy. I could see my colleague at the end of a row near the front. She had one hand up to the side of her face and was making herself small. Great, I thought. Very reassuring. But too late now, so on we go…

I introduced myself. I introduced my colleague. I introduced our work. And then I mentioned the thing that needed no introduction. It was already familiar, a regular inhabitant – present here in the room, but also everywhere else we went: our homes, our classrooms, our friends’ houses, the streets, the supermarkets. Fear. Horrid fear, drifting through the air like smoke. I gave them some awful statistics I’d found, about the rates of anxiety and depression. About the levels of self-harm, about the fact that suicide is now the second biggest killer of children between 10 and 15. I let these sink in a bit.

Then I asked, ‘So what are we afraid of, exactly?’

It is accepted practice in all mental health disciplines to try to identify the causes of fear and face squarely up to them as that’s the only real way to defuse their power, I said. I was going to read them a list of potential causes – and while I was doing so, I’d like them to try and guess where the list had come from. Call out your guesses please.

‘Getting old,’ I started. ‘Drinking too much. Tyrants swooping on other people’s countries. Teaching our children to be better than we are…’

‘Twitter!’ someone called out.

‘Cutting down the forests. Loss of friends. Waking up sweating in the night. Other people saying awful stuff about us…’

‘This Morning!’ came another voice.

‘Feeling very alone. No sign of things getting better. Envying the rich. Death. Food being short…’

‘The news this lunch time!’

‘Plagues and pestilences. Being in despair. Cruel words. The evils of the class system. Not having work. Feeling low. Feeling weak…’

‘It’s got to be The Daily Mail,’ someone else shouted. Laughter.

I looked up. ‘Good guesses,’ I said. ‘All of them, thank you. Only they’re a bit out of date. By about four millennia, give or take!’

Surprise fizzed through the room.

I had wanted to find out what people used to worry about, I explained. To see how that differed from our current worries. I hadn’t known where to look though, until I suddenly remembered the psalms. ‘Some of you might be familiar with the psalms,’ I said, ‘but for those of you who aren’t, they are 150 ancient songs full of moaning.’ They varied in age, but the oldest were thought to have been written the best part of 4,000 years ago – making them older than the pyramids. I’d taken twenty of these songs out of the middle of the book – Psalms 60-80 – and listed the things they were moaning about… as just demonstrated.

A lot of the sleepy faces were looking more alert now.

Since this ancient list is more or less identical to our own, we can draw two conclusions, I said. Both very good news. The first is that, clearly, these are the things we worry about – if we’re human. People from a totally different culture/ period in history/ part of the world/ ethnicity/ stage of economic development/ political system/ level of education and so on and on, worrying about the same things as us? Doesn’t it show that… er, it’s normal? For living, breathing, average, sentient human beings like us?

And secondly it proves, surely, that we’re designed to survive this kind of worrying. We’re wired to cope. Our brains are built for it. Because – ta da! – here we all are, FORTY CENTURIES later, still moaning about exactly the same stuff!

I looked at my colleague again. Not only were both her hands now down in her lap, but like a lot of the rest of the room, she was smiling.

‘If we can clear fear out of the way, it’s much easier to get on with sorting out problems,’ I finished. ‘So now, shall we talk about where we can get started?’

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

Politics

7 May 2025

4 min read

Assisted dying is not a medical procedure; it is a social one

Another vote, and an age-related amendment, highlight the complex community of care.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Graffiti reads 'I miss me' with u crossed out under the 'mem'

Sidd Inban on Unsplash.

Scottish Parliament’s Assisted Dying bill will go to a stage one vote on Tuesday 13th May, with some amendments having been made in response to public and political consultation. This includes the age of eligibility, originally proposed as 16 years. In the new draft of the bill, those requesting assistance to die must be at least 18.

MSPs have been given a free vote on this bill, which means they can follow their consciences. Clearly, amongst those who support it, there is a hope that raising the age threshold will calm the troubled consciences of some who are threatening to oppose. When asked if this age amendment was a response to weakening support, The Times reports that one “seasoned parliamentarian” (unnamed) agreed, and commented:

“The age thing was always there to be traded, a tactical retreat.”

The callousness of this language chills me. Whilst it is well known that politics is more of an art than a science, there are moments when our parliamentarians literally hold matters of life and death in their hands. How can someone speak of such matters as if they are bargaining chips or military manoeuvres? But my discomfort aside, there is a certain truth in what this unnamed strategist says.

When Liam McArthur MSP was first proposed the bill, he already suggested that the age limit would be a point of debate, accepting that there were “persuasive” arguments for raising it to 18. Fortunately, McArthur’s language choices were more appropriate to the subject matter. “The rationale for opting for 16 was because of that being the age of capacity for making medical decisions,” he said, but at the same time he acknowledged that in other countries where similar assisted dying laws are already in operation, the age limit is typically 18.

McArthur correctly observes that at 16 years old young people are considered legally competent to consent to medical procedures without needing the permission of a parent or guardian. But surely there is a difference, at a fundamental level, between consenting to a medical procedure that is designed to improve or extend one’s life and consenting to a medical procedure that will end it?

Viewed philosophically, it would seem to me that Assisted Dying is actually not a medical procedure at all, but a social one. This claim is best illustrated by considering one of the key arguments given for protecting 16- and 17- year-olds from being allowed to make this decision, which is the risk of coercion. The adolescent brain is highly social; therefore, some argue, a young person might be particularly sensitive to the burden that their terminal illness is placing on loved ones. Or worse, socially motivated young people may be particularly vulnerable to pressure from exhausted care givers, applied subtly and behind closed doors.

Whilst 16- and 17- year-olds are considered to have legal capacity, guidance for medical staff already indicates that under 18s should be strongly advised to seek parent or guardian advice before consenting to any decision that would have major consequences. Nothing gets more major than consenting to die, but sadly, some observe, we cannot be sure that a parent or guardian’s advice in that moment will be always in the young person’s best interests. All of this discussion implies that we know we are not asking young people to make just a medical decision that impacts their own body, but a social one that impacts multiple people in their wider networks.

For me, this further raises the question of why 18 is even considered to be a suitable age threshold. If anything, the more ‘adult’ one gets, the more one realises one’s place in the world is part of a complex web of relationships with friends and family, in which one is not the centre. Typically, the more we grow up, the more we respect our parents, because we begin to learn that other people’s care of us has come at a cost to themselves. This is bound to affect how we feel about needing other people’s care in the case of disabling and degenerative illness. Could it even be argued that the risk of feeling socially pressured to end one’s life early actually increases with age? Indeed, there is as much concern about this bill leaving the elderly vulnerable to coercion as there is for young people, not to mention disabled adults. As MSP Pam Duncan-Glancey (a wheelchair-user) observes, “Many people with disabilities feel that they don’t get the right to live, never mind the right to die.”

There is just a fundamental flawed logic to equating Assisted Dying with a medical procedure; one is about the mode of one’s existence in this world, but the other is about the very fact of it. The more we grow, the more we learn that we exist in communities – communities in which sometimes we are the care giver and sometimes we are the cared for. The legalisation of Assisted Dying will impact our communities in ways which cannot be undone, but none of that is accounted for if Assisted Dying is construed as nothing more than a medical choice.

As our parliamentarians prepare to vote, I pray that they really will listen to their consciences. This is one of those moments when our elected leaders literally hold matters of life and death in their hands. Now is not the time for ‘tactical’ moves that might simply sweep the cared-for off of the table, like so many discarded bargaining chips. As MSPs consider making this very fundamental change to the way our communities in Scotland are constituted, they are not debating over the mode of the cared-for’s existence, they are debating their very right to it.