IVOR BROWNE

Ivor Browne on the crown of Martello Tower No.7 Killiney
Photos: Niall O'Donoghue

Ivor is now 92 years of age; he climbed the narrow spiral staircase right up to the crown of the Tower; he now has the photo above to prove it. In the background is Killiney Bay and Bray Head.

But another important view for Ivor is the house directly across the road. This was known as "Marathon" and Ivor lived there with his family from 1966 to 1980. Now thanks to Niall O'Donoghue's restoration of the Martello Tower he can get a decent view of his old house.

Today it is the residence of the Turkish Ambassador.

Ivor with his son Ronan and daughter in law Máire
on the crown of the Tower with "Marathon" in the background

When it came to choosing a career, Ivor opted for psychiatry. In view of his later strongly held views, his first contact with the profession was ironic. He started his internship in a neurosurgical unit, where he assisted a surgeon. He said of his work there:

Nearly every Saturday morning one or two patients would be sent down from Grangegorman to have their brains 'chopped'... this was the major lobotomy procedure... where burr holes were drilled on each side of the temples and a blunt instrument inserted to sever the frontal lobes almost completely from the rest of the brain.

I have actually seen and handled one of these little drills way back in the Grangegorman archive. It made me sick at the time and gave me nightmares for a while afterwards.

This savagery and the subsequent reliance by the greater part of the profession on medication as a solution to trauma and mental illness was something Ivor would spend the rest of his life combatting.

His view of the mechanics of trauma are very clear.

Once that shut down (through a traumatic experience) happens, then that experience is frozen. So it is not a case of a threatening memory being repressed, it is that it has never gotten in properly. Once it is frozen it is outside of time, so twenty years later this can be activate - some everyday event can trigger it – and you then experience it as if it is happening now. You don’t think about it and remember it - you feel it and experience it. And of course at that point you think you are going nuts because you look around and nothing traumatic is happening, yet you experience this traumatic feeling. That is why I called it “the frozen present”, because when it comes, it comes through as the present, not as the past. Eventually when it works its way through and you experience it a few times then it moves into the past.

This is very clear to me and it explains why when it activates in later life, as it does, it has to be worked through afresh and this means probing the trauma as new. It is a painful but necessary experience.

Many psychiatrists have funked this over the years. They have not been trained or prepared for this, or are not willing to put in the work, and they have opted for box ticking and medication, effectively postponing the evil day, leaving their patients in a state of disequillibrium, and likely as not addicting them to medication that will ultimately get in the way of their healing. I know this.

Ivor's approach was to seek the cause of the patient's current state. This requires patience and dedication and he had this in spades. He sometimes called on a little help from Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds to bring out the patient's story. This did not endear him to many of his colleagues but he was not a man to be put off.

I know myself the cost of not following Ivor's line.

My wife was abused as a child and the trauma did not activate until she was in her thirties when she suddently started getting panic attacks. Alcohol mitigated these for a while but then she became addicted. This was not helped by an idiot consultant prescribing her very large doses of tranquilisers. She eventually went into rehab in John of Gods where all alcohol and tranquilisers were abruptly stopped. This should not have happened. Whatever about alcohol, this is not the way to treat tranquiliser addiction.

Even worse, no effort was made to discover the source of the trauma. In fact the trauma was seen as irrelevant. You drank because you drank. Period. Anything else was just making excuses. So the boxes were ticked. But the trauma hovered in the background for the rest of her life.

She died last month and I did not hold back in my eulogy at her funeral.

She had a friend way back who had twice attempted to take her own life. Her friend had been raped and had an abortion. This was never probed nor did it arise in the course of her friend's "treatment". Needless to say, the treatment was a waste of time.

These are the reasons that Ivor Browne is one of my heroes.

Despite his "unorthodox" approach, Ivor had a very distinguished career. He has been an author, Chief Psychiatrist of the Eastern Health Board, and Professor of Psychiatry at University College Dublin.

Ivor signs the Tower's distinguished visitor's book
under the watchful eye of his daughter in law Máire

So the Tower chalks up another distinguished visitor along with Ronan and Máire.

It'll all make great reading for the French if they ever manage to come in force.