DR MAX PEMBERTON: The Queen was right: psychiatrists know that memories do vary

Amidst all the discussion about the accuracy of Prince Harry’s tell-all memoirs, Spare was struck by a quote from him in the book that Harry’s ghostwriter JR Moehringer later tweeted: “…there is so much truth to what what I remember and how I remember it as there are in the so-called objective facts’.

It’s the dismissive phrase ‘supposed’ that gets me. The strong suggestion, of course, is that truth, reality, facts, and objectivity are not important. However, these things are the cornerstone of enlightenment and the foundation of science.

This is all part of a troubling idea that has taken hold in modern society, namely that an individual’s subjective belief wins out, or is at least as valid as the verifiable facts.

It is absolutely absurd, and it is also fundamentally dishonest.

If I made some wild and completely false claim (that Harry and I went skinny dipping in Loch Ness together last Tuesday, for example), he would rightly counter by providing facts to refute it.

It doesn’t matter if I said it was ‘my truth’ or not. The objective truth of the matter trumps everything. Or of course it should.

Many factual errors have been found in the book, especially in the Saturday’s Mail, such as the Duke’s recollection of where he was when he was told the Queen Mother had died. He wrote in detail about being at Eton when he got the call, but evidence has emerged that he was actually on a ski trip in Switzerland.

He claims he was given an Xbox for his 13th birthday in 1997, even though it wasn’t released for another four years.

Retailer TK Maxx has pointed out that despite Harry claiming he loves his yearly sales, he actually has no sales. He also said Meghan bought her father a first-class ticket from Mexico to Britain, only for the airline to claim it has never operated flights between the countries and does not offer first-class service.

And, of course, there is the mistake that he claims that his stepmother, Camilla, leaked details of their meeting to the press, despite the fact that it is on the public record that this was not the case and that it was his assistant who left. apologized and resigned immediately, who was responsible. for the news to come out.

As a psychiatrist, none of this should surprise me: there is a considerable body of psychological research showing just how unreliable our memories are.

Memories get tangled and confused. Feelings, emotions, and many other things combine events, create scenes that never happened, and cloud our recollection of conversations and experiences.

Despite what we may think, we are actually very bad at remembering details accurately. Very often, we mentally play with times and chronology, for example.

There was a fascinating study done after 9/11 where researchers asked people to remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the terrorist attacks. Years later, the researchers went back and interviewed the same people again, asking the same questions. However, this time the responses were astonishingly different: about 60 percent of the details had changed.

Despite this, they swore blindly that they were not only correctly describing what they had experienced, but that this new version of events was also what they had originally told the investigators.

Here’s the really amazing part: When the researchers later confronted the interviewees with the mismatch, they were still convinced that these new ‘memories’ were, in fact, the correct ones.

Listening to the recordings of the first interviews, the participants were stunned and confused, saying things like: ‘I don’t know why I said that; It’s not true’, and they still stuck to their most recent version of the facts.

The point is that all this psychological research on the fallibility of memory is incredibly important to understand if you’re writing a tell-all book that effectively throws your family under the bus. Isn’t this something to think about a lot before you put pen (ghost) to paper? That your ‘truth’, as Harry loves to say it, is not always, or even not very often, objectively true?

‘Your truth’, of course, is at the very center of therapy.

What you are encouraged to say in the safe and private confines of the therapist’s room is how you experience and understand things, what you believe, and how it makes you feel. The facts don’t really matter at this point.

But then comes a crucial second step. Over time you explore this understanding of events and gradually learn to appreciate that there are alternatives to your story; different ways of understanding and interpreting it. That maybe things aren’t as clear and direct as you once thought.

It seems that this part of the therapy has completely bypassed Harry. He insists that only his version of events is “true,” but he has made blatant mistakes regarding his memory. How can she not wonder if he’s been wrong about other things too, like the fight with his brother, for example, or any number of private conversations he’s divulged?

You should have listened to your grandmother, who summed all this up perfectly and very scientifically. “Memories can vary,” she said. Pretty.

WHY LOVE ISLAND IS SO HARMFUL

The island of love is back. As regular readers of this column will know, I’m not a fan of the show. The participants are everything that is wrong with society: ignorant, superficial, vain, arrogant, narcissistic.

I understand that for many viewers it’s just something to gossip about, but I still worry about the impact it has on young people.

The fact that they are all so emphatically attractive: all the women have slender figures with puffy breasts; the chiseled men, polished torsos with rippling abs, suggests that this type of physique is normal when it is not. Worse yet, the guaranteed fortune in post-show winnings each contestant will make when they leave the island sends the worst possible message. Character, personality, and what you achieve in life through hard work count for little; it’s about how ‘fit’ you look to the opposite sex. Depressing.

DR MAX RECIPE…

If YOU ARE struggling a bit with the January blues, consider this fantastic book, Mind Over Mood, by Dennis Greenberger and Christine A. Padesky (£19.99, Guildford Publications). It is one of the most successful self-help books ever written and uses cognitive behavioral therapy to help people challenge unhelpful thoughts and anxiety.

• Random acts of kindness have been shown to help people with depression. Counterintuitively, new research shows that the benefit goes to the person who does the kind act. It is one of the reasons why I have recommended volunteering to those who come to me with depression. Showing kindness can be a tremendous boost to your own mood. I remember a young patient of mine who was so depressed that he could barely get out of bed. He was wary of the medication, so I suggested that he volunteer while he waited for therapy. So he started helping out at a nursing home. Over the months, the transformation I saw in him was incredible. Ultimately, he was released from mental health services entirely. Depression is a disease of isolation: a disease of disconnection. When you are kind to another person, it connects you. It’s just one part of the arsenal with which to attack depression, but it’s certainly a useful tool.