Covid Haircuts, Wellbeing Obsession

 Lockdown rules have left several people ruing the decision to get their hair done - not least 31 police officers who were revealed to have sat down for a trim while on duty. They now face the prospect of a £200 fine each...

Samson and Delilah
Pieter Claesz. Soutman (c.1580-1657) 
Photo Credit: York Museums Trust [Public Domain]

Our efforts to get our hair under control, whether legal or not, can reflect a desire to present an image to the world - possibly driven by vanity - that goes back millennia...

"Hair helps you feel good about yourself - there's a reason we talk about good hair days," says Rachel Gibson, a hair history expert. "Washing and styling your hair, or cutting and colouring it, makes you feel a bit more normal, which is something we're all looking for right now...looking put-together helps you feel like you have control over at least one part of your life."...

"A visit to the salon has so much meaning for so many and is a part of life that has been sorely missed," says Andrew Barton, a creative director at Headmasters, who was the first hairdresser to receive an Honorary Doctorate of Arts for services to hairdressing... "There's no doubt that groomed, well-cut and coloured hair physiologically gives people a boost."

Many of his clients won't attend a board meeting without a blow dry at the salon. "They tell me that the investment they make in their hair at the salon is their best purchase"...

(Pascale Hughes, The i, 2021)

Just let it grow. What's all this nonsense about our hair presenting an image to the world and hair helping you feel good about yourself? It's hair! And how come some barbers are now called "creative directors"?

Wellbeing Obsession

An English teacher called Dawn Wilson-North was interviewed on Radio 4's PM last Thursday... She was fed up with hearing how children weren't learning anything: her pupils were learning just fine, and online attendance was at 90 per cent, not much lower than normal.

"When you look at them as young people going out into the big, wide-world, particularly year 11s, they're going to have gained so many skills from what they're doing. They're learning self-reliance: they have to be there, work the technology, use the technology that adults are using. They help each other in the chat; they copy links if people can't quite get on. They're learning resilience. These are all employability skills that they're going to be well up to speed on in a way that perhaps other students wouldn't be." Her pupils, she said, were sitting in virtual classrooms for six hours a day, doing their lessons, doing their homework, participating, engaging. What they found demoralising was the narrative from adults that this all added up to a giant failure.

Anxiety, Head of a Girl
Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805)
Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

On Friday morning's Today programme the presenter talked to some students about how they were feeling. "We're calling them the Covid Generation," he said sadly, as though their granny had just died... enough misery chat about how Covid is affecting young people's education and future prospects! What happened to the idea of parents putting on a brave face and being can-do-ish and upbeat? No wonder teenagers are depressed: things are weird enough without adults feeling perfectly OK about going, "Poor you - this is an absolute disaster. You're part of a lost generation - it is the most tragic waste."

Of course everyone feels very sorry that some teenagers' mental health is suffering, but I don't know that endlessly telling them how awful things are for them is helping...

Any parent should be wary of encouraging a child to think of themselves as an external victim, a thing with no agency: these are not good foundations for emotional wellbeing... And what has happened to the idea of promoting resilience? It is the most discredited of qualities, because it has wrongly become equated with a sort of emotionally disengaged, dead-eyed, stiff-upper-lip kind of attitude to life, and no one wants that. But resilience is good. It's what gets you through stuff...

Mixed in with all this is the unhelpful fact that the phrase "mental health" has become close to meaningless because of our obsessive desire to pathologise every possible emotional state, especially when it applies to children and young people. We should really row back a bit from medicalising feeling anxious, bored, lonely, worried, cross, annoyed, confused. Everyone cycles through these feelings - along with some jollier ones - for the whole of their lives. They are not indicative of poor mental health...Feeling worried, sad or hacked off is not mental illness, any more than a headache is a brain tumour...

(India Knight, The Sunday Times, 2021)

 Thank God for a reflective, perceptive and pertinent piece of writing. Coping with the  challenges, problems and setbacks you will inevitably meet during the course of your life, including this pandemic is essential. It's called resilience.

(See Anxiety, November 24, 2020, Shyness as Social Phobia, October 16, 2020 and Anxiety Nonsense, August 25, 2020)