But the whole idea of new year, new you got me thinking as I became aware of how many celebrity couples seemed to announce their separation either as the year closed (Katy Perry & Russell Brand), or as the new one began (Heidi Klum & Seal, Tulisa Contostavlos & Richard ‘Fazer’ Rawson, possibly Jonny Depp & Vanessa Paradis). Certainly, psychotherapists often see a spike in enquiries in January. So what is it about this month?

Even though I love the crisp mornings of January (plus the fact that lots of shops have sales…), some people loathe this month and get very down about it. Some people find the weather depressing, some dislike the contrats between January and the fextive excitement of Christmas. Some people find the prospect of a new year ahead quite daunting. And some people are so exhausted from the year before that they do something radical or dramatic. Some relationship splits can be down to similar factors. Some people might be too focussed on the negatives and want out. Other people might find the high emotion of Christmas too disturbing to the relationship. And yet others might feel energised to change their lives so radically that they kick out their partner.

Maybe a helpful new year’s resolution for all of us, not just celebrities, should be ‘Reflect’ not ‘React’.

This task is extremely hard to do, especiallly when every news bulletin leads with the crisis in the Eurozone, when unemployment figures keep rising, shops and pubs are closing down and the pre-Christmas crush on Oxford Street seems a little thinner this year. And self-confidence is a fragile thing. But slowly but surely, we should be lifting the spirits to celebrate successes, no matter how small.

You wouldn’t refuse to praise a child just because the painting they bring home from school is no Leonardo da Vinci. News pick-me-ups are vital for our ongoing well-being because they start to boost confidence levels. I was thinking of this when last Saturday, I saw new recruits being escorted around the Peter Jones department store. Hired for the festive season, no doubt. For every person taken on, that is a good news story. It makes them feel good about themselves to have been chosen. More widely, their hiring is a good news story for the department store. Which is also good for its customers and its shareholders – which means your and my pension.

But do we hear about these good news stories? Hardly. But if we did, there would be one more spike of national cheer in an otherwise apparently gloomy period. So, broadcasters and news channels, from now on, make a point of featuring a positive ‘recession’ story: a shop that has opened, jobs created (no matter how few), orders won. This will have a knock-on effect of acting as a morale booster for the nation. And the psychological implications of this will be tremendous.

Cricket does put very specific pressure on its players. It is the only team sport I know where the emphasis is perversely on your ability as an individual (the goalies in football have similar issues). The loneliness of standing at the crease is in direct contract to the fact that you are meant to be part of a team.

Sledging is also a part of elite cricket and this behavior (when the fielding side barrack the batsman) requires nerves of steel to withstand.

But above all, it is the nature of the modern game of cricket which is putting to much pressure on players and perhaps commentators alike. Modern cricket de-skills you from being an all-round cricketer, turning you instead into an opening bat, a middle-order bat, and seam bowler, or whatever it might be. And cricketers are prone to breakdowns today largely due to the amount of international cricket in the schedule. Excessive touring plays havoc with social and family relationships.

It is for this reason that this sad story about Peter Roebuck should make the ICC wake up. There is simply too much cricket being played and not enough concern about the effect on the mental health of physically fit men. Suicide is about believing you have no other way to communicate your terror or pain. Cricketers need more of a voice.

My collecting tin certainly benefitted from the feel-good vibe the morning after many Hallowe’en parties. But two young cockney Goths and a woman with 17 facial piercings also cited Afghanistan as their reason for donating. The soldiers fighting there are their generation. War has become personal, less abstract, again. Which is how I came to be pinning a poppy on a squaddie dressed as a pumpkin. He has four kids and returns to Kandahar next March.

And prospective poppy sellers take note: very few donations are planned. Lots of people think fondly of buying a poppy, but then procrastinate. For these, I relied on a big, permanent smile, and lots of noisy, come-join-the-party tin-shaking. I showed I was having fun, and people seemed to respond positively to that. They gave what they could, and I made sure I thanked them profusely, wishing them a safe onward journey.

What struck me most was that many who gave also wanted conversation. In this era of Twitter, Facebook and eBay, givers of all ages crave the added pleasure of face-to-face human contact. They wanted to tell me their stories; why they were donating; why today.

Tourists wanted to know about the cause. The man from Lagos in a cream linen suit gave 20 quid and discussed the morality of war. With a few, I swapped tales from World War Two. A Canadian told me about her father who served in North Africa with the British Army. An American’s father helped liberate Paris. My father was in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp.

Giving, especially in these economically unsettling times, makes us feel good about ourselves, feel less self-centred. Our inner child is as thrilled with a poppy as we used to be with a going-home party gift. But on Sunday, many gave money without taking a poppy. They just wanted to give. And a few simply wanted the lift/the loo/the exit and made a donation for the answer. I am now a world expert on the Victoria Line.

And in the process I’ve found out some curious facts. Two hours shaking a tin is a better work-out for my incipient bingo wings than the gym. The most smartly dressed people do not give the most money (the gentleman from Lagos excepted). It is not a myth that more men than women will give to a poppy seller wearing a short skirt. And commuters in a desperate hurry will still find time to dig out the coins deep in their pocket.

Wearing a poppy isn’t morbid. It’s not about supporting a war, or endorsing killing. It’s about acknowledging that in all our separate cultural histories there are people out there who have made bigger sacrifices than
we ever could. They sacrifice limbs, their minds, sometimes their lives. And all I’ve done is spent time jiggling my tins, flashing my smile, and being humbled. It’s the least we can all do.

This education pack is a superb idea, particularly as hopefully it will stimulate debate (among peers outside the school gate as well as in the classroom) about body issues and self-esteem.

At the same time, we must remember that the aetiology of poor self-esteem, and eating disorders or body dysmorphic disorders is extremely complex. Families must show children that love and approval isn’t simply linked to what you look like. And this means Mums not fretting about their own weight in front of the children, or studying the gossip magazines with their unhealthy obsession with celebrity weight loss or weight gain. Have debates in schools, by all means, but recognise that the seeds for poor self worth are often sown early in life.

But this slightly misses the point. Love isn’t measured in time. It doesn’t take time to be home to read a bed-time story to a child (organisation yes, time no). It doesn’t take time to boil an egg, to watch your child doing a drawing, to go for a walk, to kiss your child or give them a hug.

What the report touches on is our hideously materialistic culture. We imagine that possessing certain items makes us more valuable, they make us feel more worthy, more secure. And we pass this distorted logic onto our children.

Time, then, that we spent time thinking up ways – free ways, mind – to show the kids in our lives that we love them. That’s the challenge.

So I was watching the TV last night. And this morning I have been listening to LBC Radio and watching Sky News. Twitter (inappropriately blamed for ‘causing’ or spreading the riots), is coming into its own as it promotes hashtags to do with cleaning up part of riot-affected London (#riotcleanup). We are gripped by this story not least because we all want to know if we are likely to be safe. On some primitive level we are always focused on our survival.

And yet perversely the media attention also has the effect of highlighting the riots, which kicked off in Tottenham last Saturday. The flip side of the broadcasters’ public service remit to ensure that people know what is happening in their country is that we are imitative creatures and we learn how to function in the world by copying others. We copy mummy smiling and daddy shaving and grandma cooking and granddad painting the fence. We copy our siblings, we copy our school friends. We long to part of the group.

At the moment, the group mentality appears to be a force for bad. The downside of The Group is its herd mentality. Copy-cat rioting is on the rise this week. But the group can also be a major force for good. Parents need to take responsibilty for their children’s behaviour and model for them caution and restraint, forcing them to be indoors – for their own safety as much as anything. Only by modelling healthy control can we expect young people to develop self-control.

Hope keeps us going. It’s energizing and motivating. When we want something to happen, we say ‘I hope so.’ We often fear the worst but, through everything, we like to imagine that we hope for the best.

Freud talks about the survival instinct, something that kicks in when things get really rough. And perhaps that’s how hope evolved anthropologically – as a survival strategy to help lead us out of the dark times and on to the sunnier side. Viktor Frankel explored what gives our live meaning and, for many, holding on to hope is what gives life meaning or structure.

But in truth hope is a more complex value. Sometimes patients of mine have long been grappling with an issue in their lives and what lies at the heart of it is the hope that something will be other than it is: I wish my mother loved me more, I wish my brother wasn’t an alcoholic, I hope my child is alive.

I was thinking about this recently with the anniversary of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. Every parent will understand her parents’ efforts to find her alive. But I also wondered at the downsides of too much hope. Because, occasionally, holding on to hope is not only fruitless (e.g. the person concerned or the situation is not going to/ not able to change) but it causes a distress which borders on the masochistic. It’s a fraught dilemma many of us will recognize: when to keep hoping (about a situation, a relationship, a dream) versus when to let go and move on.

Knowing what is reasonable hope is the key. Not least, because to abandon hope completely, carries with it echoes of Dante’s definition of Hell. Healthy hope acts as a spur to our ambitions, but there must be balance. We see it with nations, as Andy Murray was expected at Wimbledon to carry Britain’s hopes on his admittedly well-toned shoulders. Or in the way hopes are projected onto Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge to save the monarchy/resurrect the British retail industry/cheer us up out of recession/exorcise the ghost of Diana.

Let them be. Let Catherine and Andy be who they will be, instead of weighing them down with our own hopes and fears, dreams and disappointments. If I have one hope for this post, it’s that we are realistic for our own hopes. Or is that, as Samuel Johnson would say, a triumph of hope over experience?

But last November I felt what can only be described as a nurturing pang. After seeing patients at The Priory, Roehampton, I drove to East Sheen Pet Shop and bought the aforementioned peanut bag, some seeds blended specially to attract song-birds, and half a coconut shell filled with a fatty mixture which looks like caramel ice-cream, but which on smelling definitely isn’t. The lady in the shop told me it would take two weeks for the local birds to get to know about the food – and she was spot on. Two weeks later, to the day, and my first robins appeared, to be followed soon after by a family of four blue tits.

Since then, a dear friend has sent me an iSpy booklet and I have been excitedly ticking off birds I’ve spotted. I’ve taken the book to York for a literary conference, and down to Cornwall on holiday, although local Hyde Park has proved to be the most abundant source of ticks. But nothing beats standing in your own garden – and ours is barely the size of a pocket handkerchief – and listening to the evening sounds of the blackbird calling or seeing the flit of small birds between the trees. Many of my 40-something friends have become similarly captivated: one leaves crumbs on the sill of her kitchen window for a female thrush; another has recently taken up membership of Barnes Wetlands.

But above all, it’s the simplicity of feeding birds which delights me. In fact I’d go so far as to say it’s been therapeutic. The recession may have put pay to all sorts of activities for all sorts of people, but seeking out life’s simplest pleasures can be disproportionately rewarding.

But above all I am trying to work. Some of the time I’m researching for my next novel which will be set in India. And some of the time I’m helping out at a psychiatric clinic

The work at the clinic starkly raises the question of ‘what is mental illness?’. Here in India, there is still the sense that if you are physically or mentally unwell this is so because of your misdemeanours in a past life (for Indians, rebirth and karma are real and vital, not abstract constructs to joke about). And if this is the case, then there is little point in seeking treatment because your condition, your suffering, is your destiny.

In the West, we tend to assume that our diagnoses are the only possible options for the way a patient feels. And yet here in India I am starkly reminded of how different cultures do things, well, differently. And to ask myself – does that make our way ‘right’ and their way ‘wrong’? If you give someone a diagnosis in the UK, some would argue that you run the risk of labelling them for life, and not always in a helpful way. You might be pathologising. But if you don’t regard a certain constellation of symptoms as an illness, say bi-polar or schizophrenia, if your society doesn’t recognise them as conditions deserving of treatment, what are the longterms risks then?

I was chatting about this to a physiotherapist at the weekend, in a noisy bar while the men watched the IPL cricket final. She agreed that in India, educating people about ways to improve their health – or getting people into treatment at all – is an ongoing issue. And I was reminded of efforts back in the UK earlier this month, by the mental health charity MIND, to remind people about the imperative to challenge the ongoing stigma of mental health in the workplace. Despite the differences between our two countries, the message in both places would seem to be the same: we can’t be complascent.