A cursory search for cruel and unusual psychological fixations leads to the online forum of Lip Balm Anonymous, a group of self-described addicts for whom the mentholated kick of Carmex and co has proved damagingly compulsive. While keeping in mind that the web abhors a vacuum and adores a parody, it is nonetheless manifest that the internet age is generating access to information, guidance and support mind-boggling in its specificity and sometimes suspect in its provenance for an ever-expanding range of secretive, sad or salacious behaviours. Got troubles? Get Googling.
What the redoubtable Claire Rayner, who died this week at the age of 79, would have made of the perils of excessive lip lubrication is open to question. But Rayner, whose accomplishments as a writer, broadcaster and campaigner are ill-contained by the bosomy epithet of agony aunt, was all for openness. Whether tackling the hitherto taboo subject of premature ejaculation in the Sun or chatting about sanitary towels with "wings" on a primetime advert, it was this educated frankness that garnered her such devoted esteem. She was equally honest about her own experience of depression.
While the advice column has existed in the popular press since the early 18th century, with Daniel Defoe once offering his services as an agony uncle, it was only in the 1960s that public problem-solving took on a genuinely pioneering position. While Peggy Makins, writing for Woman in the 1950s, recalled a ban on the word "bottom", Rayner – contributing to Woman's Own a decade later – relied on her nursing training to bring a no-nonsense professionalism to the role. Insisting that every letter should receive an answer, she operated as a prototype search engine, employing six secretaries and a research assistant to distribute existing information or compile tailored leaflets of her own.
We now inhabit a time of seeming saturation, when every start and stutter of strangers' maladies are documented blog-wise or cravenly catalogued if they happen to fall into the definitional chasm that is celebrity. And so, casting back, it is easy to forget the shame and ignorance that persisted only recently around basic bodily function, sexual anxiety and emotional distress. Single women, for example, were forced to fabricate a wedding ring in order to obtain a prescription for the pill well into the supposedly liberated 70s.
What Rayner and her contemporaries offered was informed straight-talking and the generous belief that, given adequate practical and sympathetic advice, people would find their own solutions. The very naming of marital foibles or mental illness in the cosy context of women's publications, and the acknowledgement that men had problems too, was in itself revolutionary.
A further revolution in the public articulation of private angst has since occurred, and whether the development of the internet has been horse or cart for this is a diverting imponderable. The fact is that there is now a global stretch of detail available on every conceivable, and occasionally inconceivable, dysfunction. And the admission of dysfunction, be it minor or major, has taken on a currency beyond the value of identification with fellow sufferers. To publicly confess one's struggle is to lay claim to the democracy of human imperfection.
But whether this seeming emotional fluency exists on the continuum of openness Rayner championed is doubtful. Unguided access results in a pick-and-mix approach to information-gathering. Thus, adolescent sexual understanding may have progressed from ignorance as to which hole gets you pregnant to a working knowledge of the practice of double anal, yet the risks of chlamydia remain mysterious. Behaviours that might otherwise be dealt with prosaically are given pathological legitimacy, while others requiring professional intervention become normalised. So infidelity is rebranded as sex addiction, while the suicidal discuss exit tips.
Likewise, the insinuation that blurting problems is sufficient as well as necessary for their resolution is a dangerous one. Discovering identification among a community of sympathisers is an invaluable first step, but the constant reassertion of original pain can militate against the action that is also needed for healing. It is expertise, in addition to empathy, that promotes such action, which is not to suggest that advice is only valid when handed down from on high but rather to recognise that information without the encouragement of its practice leaves a subject treading water.
Meanwhile, the narratives seldom take account of the hours, application and humility required for genuine recovery. The celebrity trajectory from rock bottom to bounce-back, via detox, divorce or an audience with the Dalai Lama, is accomplished within the time it takes to turn a page of Closer magazine.
As any agony aunt worth her salt will tell you, the path of private problem-solving is altogether less glamorous but altogether more satisfactory. It involves guided knowledge, and taking individual responsibility for the tools this provides. It means embracing the basics: regular meals, enough sleep, a little exercise, time spent being present with those we love and who love us. And an acceptance that the turbulence, time-tabling and distraction of modern life is such that fulfilling these basic human needs can be a mountainous challenge.
