Mind Moves: To be a child is to be the recipient of a wild array of ambiguous adult messages. Many of us will remember the confusing contradictions inherent in these adult instructions. "Tell the truth/don't tell tales" was one of the more pernicious adult imperatives, leaving children like goldfish opening and shutting their mouths in circular double-bound confusion about whether telling was worse than not telling and in what circumstances.
Indeed, one of the preoccupations of childhood was cracking the complex code of adult communication: a task that required serious eavesdropping on adult exchanges, acute observation of the consequences when siblings or friends breached this indecipherable code, trial and error experiments and finally acquiring the assistance of other citizens of childhood who were more advanced in circumventing adult double-bind communications.
These early mental acrobatics probably account for our unique Irish communicative patterns of peeling back linguistic layers of messages before arriving at meaning - in other words, finding what we mean behind what we really mean underneath what we really, really mean. This is the same repetitive psychological rumination that forces us to ask "are you sure" several times before we will accept that someone "really" does not want the proffered biscuit with the offered cup of tea.
But if asking is complex, telling is fraught with danger. This is because we remember that attached to telling or tale-telling in childhood were words like snitch and sniveller and every telltale was a tattler, a sly sneaky sucker-upper despised by both adult and child. Worse, the history of Ireland as taught in times past was imbued with the duplicity of the informer - that most treacherous, seditious, unscrupulous sneak whose perfidy occupied chapters and chapters of prescribed text.
In school whole classes stood rigid, gaze avoidant at requests to identify the culprit while wishing that the culprit would own up before group retribution was unfairly required. Today many people suffer a similar anxiety in any situation where they may have to tell tale - the apprehension generated by past interrogations engendering a present angst at investigatory, transparency or accountability practices.
Perhaps that message from the past has permeated the present. Perhaps the childhood dilemma of to tell or not to tell made its bi-directional way into the adult psyche so that ethical ineptitude ensued. Perhaps the message that emerged was to do is fine but to get caught a crime and to stay silent pragmatically preferable.
Whatever the ambiguity of the past, the present is clear: many people suffer from a pathological inability to initiate a complaint or to answer direct questions that uncover corruption in the workplace. The fear of informing runs deep, even when such information is important for their own psychological health or that of their work colleagues. The moral milieu that facilitates corruption in the first place usually includes an emotional embargo on telling. This surreptitious injunction first confuses and then silences entrants to the organisation who may be part of what they observe before they observe what they are part of. Ethical exposé is not encouraged.
It is not easy to leave a workplace in precarious times, to leave a permanent pensionable position. Men in particular are often trapped by being the sole financial support for their family or by their sensitivity to the primacy of this prescribed role. To leave means finding alternative employment, confronting possible rejection, encountering issues of age, of securing a position of equal status and acquiring a reference from one's employer while the reason for leaving has to be either hidden or given. Many people also describe the terrible fear that having remained in a post while they were aware of unethical practices in that workplace, that they will be accused of collusion, will share culpability or will be made the scapegoat.
From a psychological perspective, each new public disclosure of individual callousness, professional mismanagement, institutional corruption or organisational dishonesty excavates and recreates the emotions of that childhood ethical quandary - to tell or not to tell, to whom, how and in what way and with what consequences?
The mental health sequelae of silence are considerable including feelings of unhappiness, helplessness and hopelessness and there is a high risk of depression depending on the seriousness of the situation. People experience anxiety every single day: apprehension in anticipation of the work day ahead; anger at being an uninvited, inadvertent witness to what is wrong; fear of the consequence of divulging: of being disbelieved, of being challenged, invalidated or ridiculed or of experiencing organisational retribution for being the informer.
While society excoriates its past, divulges discrepancies and trawls through tribunals, investigations and interrogations, psychological recuperation for those who have been caught in the tangled webs of others' deceit may require the catharsis of telling the tale and receiving unequivocal respect as informants to an ethical society rather than informers.
Marie Murray is Director of Psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview and co-author of The ABC of Bullying, Mercier Press.