DEMENTIA AND MRS THATCHER
Ian Deary and Simon Wessely
have discovered that the Prime Minister is remembered by lunatics
THERE are very few laws in psychology and it is not easy to break them. We have suspected for some time that Mrs Thatcher has been causing other people to break one of the sturdiest of psychology's laws, Ribot's law. It states that the most recent memories are the first to be lost, and is held to explain what everyone knows anyway: that we have little trouble in remembering the events of childhood, but we haven't the faintest idea of what hap- pened on the way to work. In particular, Ribot's law is advanced as the reason why some sufferers from dementia appear to live in the past, able to recall events from the two world wars, but out of touch with contemporary life, be it what they ate for their breakfasts or the current state of the nation.
In our practice as psychiatrists we came across four patients who were suffering from dementia to the extent that they could not remember where they were or what the day or year was; indeed, they could not even remember their own names. Yet, these disoriented patients recalled one piece of information correctly — the name of the current Prime Minister. From a patient whose own name was lost we got the response 'Maggie Thatcher' or `Mrs Thatcher'. In fact, this question is not asked in order to pass the time of the idle psychiatrist, it forms a part of the standard assessment of demented patients along with many other questions, one of which is to ask what the reigning monarch is called. We could not believe that any other leader of the government had made such an impact in the minds of the severely demented and we set out to investigate what we had now dubbed the Thatcher Effect. Our results, published in the Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal, confirmed our suspicions. Neither Mr Macmillan nor Mr Wilson in their fifth year of office was recalled as often by the demented population as Mrs Thatcher. The search through the files of 1963 and 1968 revealed one other confirmation. In the years examined Queen Elizabeth was recalled more frequently than the two Harolds, but by 1983 Mrs Thatcher had exactly reversed this trend and was clearly more prominent in our patients' minds than the monarch.
We saw three possibilities in attempting to explain our results. It might be the case that Mrs Thatcher is seen more on televi- sion and achieves prominence by exposure. Also, we considered the hypothesis that she has created a more effective and memorable image than her predecessors. Third, we entertained the likelihood that there is something about Margaret Thatch- er per se that makes her mental representa- tion indelible.
Our correspondence with Mori and Gal- lup had provided evidence that it was more than wide media exposure that makes Mrs Thatcher memorable. In fact, more people were watching party political broadcasts in Mr Wilson's time than did so in 1983. Also, the mere fact of her being female was not a sufficient explanation; as Leader of the Opposition Mrs Thatcher was recognised more often in photographs than the then prominent Cabinet minister Shirley Wil- liams. Similarly, we have shown Margaret Thatcher to be recalled more easily than the Queen, who has similar ex officio prominence and has been there longer.
But we were soon to notice a further clue in our own investigation. In the question- naires we looked at there was another question which began to interest us, that of the previous Prime Minister. This is asked in the expectation that it will be a more demanding question than either the name of the Queen or the name of the current Prime Minister. In the three periods we examined one name kept coming back as the name of the previous PM — Winston Churchill. What we now renamed the Churchill Effect was clearly a part of the Thatcher phenomenon. It was more than the mere creation of an image. Neither Mr Wilson with his pipe and Gannex, nor Supermac himself was a novice at image building, and both 'the pound in your pocket' and 'you've never had it so good' are just as closely associated with their authors as 'there is no alternative' and `never in the field of human conflict'.
Just what makes Mrs Thatcher's perso- nality so memorable is a moot point. In Hugo Young's 'The Thatcher Phe- nomenon' on BBC Radio it was clear that there was little disagreement with the assessment of her surprised civil servants at the Department of Education who found out that she was intelligent, tireless, never delegated and was ever-certain, 'the answer . . . springing from her character'. On the same programme Barbara Castle's estimation was that 'she is in love with power, success and with herself . Strange- ly, no one considered that well-known pychological phenomenon of the 'figure' versus the 'ground'. In this view one could state that Mrs Thatcher achieves her prom- inence by default owing to the dreary lot that surround her. After all, a tree will always stand out in a desert.
But there is more to it than that. As Charles Moore, for example, has noted: . . . she has almost become one of those perpetual characters with which the British stock their culture, expressive of elements of their national character. Just as we know what we mean when We mention Falstaff or Mr Micawber or Cromwell or Henry VIII, our descendants a century hence will know what they mean by Mrs Thatcher (Time and Tide, Autumn 1985).
This is Mrs Thatcher as Jungian archetype.
As scientists we eagerly await the end of Mrs Thatcher's reign. This will give us the opportunity to ask the question, 'Who was the previous Prime Minister', and to obtain the correct answer, 'Mrs Thatcher'. If Mrs Thatcher can erase the Churchill Effect from our brains she will clearly have been Britannia.
Dr Deary is a lecturer in psychology in the University of Edinburgh, Dr Wessely a registrar at the Maudsley Hospital.
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