Dorothy Rowe, who has died aged 88, was one of the earliest figures in psychology to build a bridge between the sometimes arcane world of clinical practice and the general public. Coming to prominence in the 1980s, particularly with her book Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison, she made a career around the principle of listening to the patient in matters of mental illness rather than simply seeing them as problems to be solved – often by drugs or ECT, what Dorothy called “the equivalent of blood-letting”.
Dorothy’s thinking centred on the idea that depression was not so much an illness as a crisis of meaning that could be addressed by rethinking the ideas that underpinned the so-called illness. This crisis was not necessarily to be found in childhood, or trauma – as Freud might have suggested – but simply in the necessity for all of us to build our own subjective mental models, which we then might insist were absolute reality, however high the price might be psychologically. She was highly sceptical of drugs such as Prozac, which she considered little better than placebos. For Dorothy, every case was different, and required careful attention.
She was vociferous in her opposition to religion, especially Christianity, and in this was a precursor of the full-blooded attacks on faith by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. “The church keeps me in business,” she would often say. Her main complaints against Christianity were that it offered a sense of moral superiority for its in-group and that the sense of guilt it built and the certainty that it demanded provided perfect fodder for clinical depression – she thought most mental distress grew out of the need for a sense of certainty or security. Specifically it was the “just world theory” of such religions – the principle that the bad are punished and the good are rewarded – that led to distress.
It is easy to understand what appealed to the relatively modest audience that bought Dorothy’s books, and equally easy to understand why she never reached a truly popular audience, in the way that many so-called self-help gurus have done. The appeal of her work was that complex ideas were expressed with brilliant simplicity – Dorothy had the rare gifts of a great teacher and communicator. Her books produced practical results – countless people would testify how they helped them and even changed their lives. I was one of them.
Perhaps she never became a bestselling author for the reason that her ideas, however clearly expressed, remained complex. You had to expect to be challenged when reading a Dorothy Rowe book in a way you were never going to be in, say, Lucy Lane’s The Little Book of Happiness. And once you unpicked what it was she was getting at, it wouldn’t reveal a simple feel-good message. Dorothy challenged your deepest notions of self – for instance she often stated that “only good people get depressed”. This message was often misunderstood. Her clarification was: “Good people are those people who feel that they are never good enough.”
Furthermore, Dorothy’s message was not at first glance a particularly cheerful one. There was no magic formula for happiness, although possibly her greatest book after Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison was Wanting Everything: The Art of Happiness (1991). Life was tough. There was no escaping the vagaries of fate, or other people’s malice and ignorance. Tragedy came to us all sooner or later.
The solution she offered to this dilemma was a typical stoic one bolstered by clinical research – the degree of suffering you experience to negative life events is in direct correlation to the meaning you put upon those events. In an age of CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy, of which Dorothy was not actually a fan) this no longer feels like news, but Dorothy’s practical pioneering of the theory, plus a smattering of Buddhism for westerners in the style of Alan Watts, at the time felt fresh and novel.
Born in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, Dorothy was the daughter of Jack Conn, a travelling salesman, and his wife, Ella (nee Snedden). Her mother was depressive. She told Dorothy she was “fat, ugly and lazy”. Dorothy held her responsible for the development of bronchiectasis, the lung condition that caused her much discomfort during her life and from which she died. She said her mother ignored her childhood pleas for treatment. Her elder sister regarded Dorothy with “fascinated disgust”.
Despite these unpromising beginnings, Dorothy herself never suffered from depression – instead she worked out how to develop resilience. From Newcastle girls’ high school she went to Sydney University, obtaining a degree in psychology and a diploma of education. After teaching for three years, in 1956 she married Edward Rowe, and the following year their son, Edward, was born. She resumed teaching and trained as an educational psychologist, becoming a specialist in emotionally disturbed children and obtaining a diploma in clinical psychology. She got a divorce in 1964, and four years later she and her son went to Britain, where her career would begin to find real traction.
She took an NHS post at Whiteley Wood clinic in Sheffield, where she began to research the biological bases of mood disorder. Dorothy became increasingly doubtful about the “medical model” of mental illness, analysing it in terms of physical causes, and instead looked towards the personal construct theory, developed by George Kelly.
In 1971 she gained a PhD and the following year set up the Lincolnshire Health Authority department of clinical psychology. She continued her research on mood disorder and this became the basis of her first book, The Experience of Depression (1978, later called Choosing Not Losing), followed by The Construction of Life and Death (1982, later The Courage to Live). A chance discussion with the manager of a health food shop led the following year to Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison, which won the Mind book of the year award in 1984.
More books and much journalism followed, all ultimately restating her basic theory in a variety of forms – that the world is not made so much of people and events, as of the meanings we create for ourselves. It was a message that drove me to read all her books in a very short time after I discovered her while researching my own book on depression, The Scent of Dried Roses, in the early 1990s. My world would never look the same.
Dorothy was more than a clinical psychologist and author; she was a seer, voted one of the six wisest people in Britain by Saga magazine. In a 1997 poll she was named in the World’s Top 100 Geniuses, on an equal footing with the comic book writer Stan Lee. The irony of appearing alongside a world-class fantasist would have amused her.
Dorothy was also a passionate feminist: when I first went to her flat in Highbury, north London, I was greeted by poster declaring that A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle. Linda Grant, Fay Weldon and Nigella Lawson all paid rich tribute to her, Weldon observing that “Dorothy … has qualities that to my mind place her somewhere between sainthood and genius”.
But she wasn’t a kneejerk feminist by any means. “Why is it that more women get depressed than men? Because women set themselves unattainable targets.” She also pointed out that “women could imprison themselves without any male oppression”. Plain-spoken and honest to a fault, Dorothy’s philosophy at root was that of the wise through the ages – tell the truth about the world and yourself, be brave in trying to uncover it and then face it without flinching.
In 1986 she left the NHS and returned to Sheffield, moving on nine years later to London. In the new century she held visiting professor posts at Middlesex, London Metropolitan and Sunderland universities, and in 2015 returned to Australia, living in semi-retirement in Sydney.
She is survived by her son.
• Dorothy Rowe, psychologist and writer, born 17 December 1930; died 25 March 2019
