Our marketing associate Rob Martin writes about what rats taught us regarding the value of community.
At times, when the state of global affairs feels overwhelming, and the temptation is to disengage and retreat, what can we do to ensure that we look after ourselves and those around us?
Yes, it can be easy to allow external forces to have a negative impact on us, and the strain this can put on people with existing challenges in their lives, such as mental health issues, can be huge. These feelings can be isolating, removing us from our support networks, and encouraging us to internalise very natural concerns and fears.
This week, World Kindness Day was a much-needed reminder that, despite what might be happening in the world at the moment, we can still have control over our own behaviours.
We can still be kind.
After a late autism diagnosis a few years back, I connected with a group of men in my area, all over 50, all newly diagnosed. We’d meet up once every two months and go for a meal and drinks. We were all very different but shared a common experience. Within that group, the two most isolated and lonely, who were also the highest on the spectrum, were regular drug-users. There seemed to be no question that, for them, drugs were an escape from confusion, isolation and depression. But the escape was temporary.
It brought to mind something I’d read about addiction and its causes.
Back in the 1970s, a series of experiments with rats examined addiction. In particular, the experiments were interested in exploring the possible impacts of the self-administration of morphene-related drugs. Scientists gave lab rats in individual cages two water options. One bottle contained pure water. The other contained water laced with heroin or cocaine. 100% of the rats overdosed on the drug-laced water. They all became addicted and died.
The clever scientists concluded that heroin and cocaine are addictive and will kill you if you take too much of them, suggesting concerns over people allowed to self-medicate. Job done, right?
But an even cleverer scientist, Bruce Alexander, thought that these experiments were missing something vital, and designed a version of the same experiment with one crucial difference - community.
He created Rat Park. Here, the same water options were offered to rats but what changed was the environment the rats were living in. Rat Park was an open space where the rats lived together, not in caged isolation. They were free to roam, to play, to eat as much as they liked, to make baby rats… And whilst some of them did opt for the drug-laced water occasionally, none of them became addicted, preferring the pure water, and none of them died.
The results had quite an impact on the way we now view addiction and its causes, and how social isolation contributes towards declining mental health, and some of the issues that can accompany that. It encouraged the view that addiction is sometimes a symptom of environment, one which can be beaten by a social community.
In other words, the opposite of addiction isn’t necessarily sobriety, it is, perhaps, connection.
Our work at Result is very much about connection. Our lived experience connects us to our clients and service users, and encourages people within organisations and communities to connect with each other.
Connection, being part of something, of a neighbourhood, a friendship group, a family (including family of choice), of a community, can change the way we feel about ourselves and those around us.
What was interesting about that group of men I used to meet with is how naturally we all supported each other, and how friendships formed and how that ability to connect made a difference. Gradually, where for some there had been isolation, there was now connection, and reliance on drugs seemed to slow down.
At the moment when there’s so much going on that divides us, a little kindness, making connections or reinforcing existing ones, can make a big difference.
And we've got the rats to thank for showing us that.
We are what we do and we love what we do.