Abstract
I grew up in the emotional gutter. My social-phobic, sexually-abused, suicidal mother gained little benefit from twenty years of expensive psychiatric treatment. And at 52, although I had a CV which many would envy (registration as a psychologist, international authorship, a career in computers in its heady pioneering days, as well as postgraduate degrees in both physics and psychology), I didn't feel that I had faired much better.