Am I normal?

Few people seem more qualified to ask Am I Normal? than Dr Tanya Byron. Despite the fact that she’s Britain’s leading TV psychologist, or that she was personally asked by Gordon Brown to write a report about the internet’s effect on children, Dr Byron has made down-to-earth, practical advice her stock in trade.

Nonetheless, BBC2’s Am I Normal? (Monday, 9.00pm) marks a departure from the shows such as Little Angels and The House of Tiny Tearaways that made Dr Byron’s name. She tells Matt Warman that these programmes about managing problem children have already started to make her feel uneasy. They’ve moved, in her words, ‘from education into entertainment’.

‘There was this one moment when it just hit me,’ says Dr Byron. ‘I was watching another of these shows where a child was being managed by a person who wasn’t qualified, and the strategy was so wrong that the child was being treated as if they were being naughty when in fact they clearly had sensory difficulties. We’re talking about kids and lives, and I just felt that if I carried on making my programmes, even though they were very different, in a sense I’d be colluding in that.’

The BBC, however, was eager for Dr Byron to stay on our screens, and the result is a four-part series that aims to examine what society at large calls ‘normal’, and what the harm is in deviating from that norm. Looking first at addiction, then at body image, spirituality and sex, the programmes all aim to investigate what Dr Byron calls a ‘preoccupation for all of us’.

The opening episode deals with how our notions of addiction have evolved in recent years. ‘Addiction is something we could all have nowadays: Michael Douglas has sex with lots of women and then he’s called a “sex addict”,’ says Dr Byron. ‘There is quite a lot of scepticism out there, and it’s not just me asking if this is really about people’s weakness.’

One of the show’s themes, therefore, is the increasing array of things to which people can now apparently become addicted. ‘It’s not just about substances, it’s about behaviours now too,’ says Dr Byron. ‘I wanted to look at whether these are really addictions or whether people are just being allowed, or even encouraged, to make excuses. So I’m comparing and contrasting different people with different addictions – sex, porn, video games.’

The other side of the coin is the ever-growing industry surrounding the treatment of people who define themselves as addicted. ‘This isn’t about blaming individuals,’ says Dr Byron. ‘If someone believes they have an addiction, you’ve got to work with that. But there are lots of very vulnerable people out there, and there are lots of people offering services to those vulnerable people. Sometimes they have no evidence to back up the claims they make and the money they charge.’

Some therapies, she says, show impressive results, but still have no scientific background to justify their use. Equine assisted therapy, for instance, encourages patients to interact with horses in order to help them (the patients, that is) communicate better with people. It appears to produce good results in some cases.

‘But there’s one woman who thinks she has a chocolate addiction because she eats three bars of chocolate a day,’ says Dr Byron. ‘She goes to see this guy who does something called Thought Field Therapy. He taps on her face and says that he’s reprogramming her like he would reprogramme a computer after it’s had a virus. He claims to have a huge success rate. Watch the programme and you can see the look on my face.’

As the series continues, it becomes clear that Dr Byron’s interest lies primarily in examining whether the unconventional is simply a lifestyle choice, or whether it’s dangerously ‘abnormal’. In the final programme she meets a man campaigning for the age of consent to be lowered, and seems to find his ideas to be repellent and harmful. But she also meets a woman who, recovering addicts say, is addicted to video-gaming. Dr Byron points out that this particular ‘addiction’ doesn’t appear to be harming anybody, even if it does mean the woman sleeps for only four hours a night. Plus, she adds, 60 per cent of addicts grow out of their enthusiasms anyway.

In which case, does it even matter what ‘normal’ is, if deviating from it so wildly is of no real consequence? Is Dr Byron even asking a useful question? ‘No,’ she says with surprising firmness. ‘And it can’t ever be answered either.’

The point, however, is not the answer; it’s the question itself. Dr Byron says her aim is simply to get people thinking. ‘It’s a polarised debate at the moment, and I hope people see that “normal” can be very dull.’

Am I Normal? is on BBC2 on Monday at 9.00pm