You smoke. He drinks. We all need help

Banning smoking in pubs will do no more good than telling George Best to lay off alcohol, says Oliver James

Best always argued that nothing had gone wrong: what red-blooded male would not have wanted to be the world's greatest footballer ever (Pele's assessment), shag his way through all the young women he could handle and get as pissed as he could, as often as possible?

Our national attitude was more ambivalent. Part of us agreed with the story he told. We admired his freedom - not just on the pitch - and, in the Sixties, his slim, trendily mop-topped embrace of the role of working-class lad made good (the tabloids dubbed him the Fifth Beatle). We also vicariously enjoyed his subsequent refusal to grow up, settle down and realise the meaning of the word "enough". He was our (alcoholically) licensed Peter Pan.

But like the waiter in the anecdote, another part of us felt it had indeed all gone horribly wrong. Not just the prematurely ended soccer career, we felt his hell-raising life could end only in tears (the sad, incoherent drunk on Wogan's sofa). He was Sid Vicious singing My Way in that unforgettable parody of Sinatra's rendition, a stumbling, pathetic figure reiterating that he may have mucked his life up but at least he had done so according to his own rules.

As his contemporaries, our lives became increasingly bourgeois and sensible. We learnt to say: "Thanks, but I won't have another, I'm driving" and realised that there is more to life than endlessly shagging young women and covering beds with piles of money. We knew that Peter Pan is a fairytale. A tad poignantly, during the week in which Best seemed about to make the transfer to the great football pitch in the sky, a government that prides itself on being composed of Grown Ups who have put all that Sixties excess (political and personal) behind them, was squabbling about whether to ban smoking in the very places where Best has tried for years to kill himself. Their ambivalence reflected the national one towards hedonism and self-destruction.

In one corner were the puritans, calling for a complete ban. That it would be perfectly simple to have air-conditioned rooms where smokers could kill themselves without killing anyone else, was not acceptable: the smokers must be forced outside, sinners who must grow up and recognise the error of their ways. In the other, were the diehard former smokers who still dimly remembered the sense of freedom that had been so potent a force when they were teenagers in the Sixties, and felt that, if smokers (or Bests) wanted to kill themselves, it should be their choice.

As usual, and as with our attitude to Best and alcoholism, this dispute was untouched by even a minimal grasp of the scientific evidence regarding the causes of smoking. The astonishing truth is that most smokers who fail to give up are addicted, not to nicotine, but to its anti-depressant effects; it is probably many times more effective than Prozac.

A robust and large number of studies prove that half of smokers are depressive, four times more likely to smoke than the mentally healthy. About 90 per cent of schizophrenics and alcoholics do so.

Fully three-quarters of people with some history of depression become depressed after they quit, compared with only 30 per cent of people with no such history. Overall, 80 per cent of smokers use it as a drug of solace to self-medicate emotional problems.

This evidence has major implications for the debate about smoking in public places. Depressed people tend to agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that "hell is other people". They find socialising difficult, easily feeling irritable and shamed, worried that they appear ugly or stupid. To enjoy company, to ease these negative, paranoid ideas, they really do need to smoke. By denying smokers the right to do so when socialising, the Government would be worsening the social isolation of the already isolated one-fifth of the population who are depressed smokers, for no medical gain and purely puritanical reasons.

Just as the smoking debate is not based on science, so with our attitudes to Best. While our perception that his life has gone horribly wrong is correct, our understanding of why it happened is mistaken.

The most common explanation is that he was just a young man from a working-class home who was destroyed by too much adulation and money, that it was fame that did for him. In fact, it is highly probable he would have gone wrong had he followed his father into the Belfast shipyards.

When I appeared with him on a television programme, he was defensive, paranoid and irritable, like most depressive alcoholics. All those who tried to get close to him report that he refused to talk about anything difficult and would insist he could cope on his own, a strategy he must have learnt while a child.

He has said that "I've never been the type to talk about my innermost feelings" and always claimed that he could recall only happy childhood memories. Studies strongly suggest that anyone who says this is liable to be suppressing maltreatment. Even the happiest of childhoods is also accompanied by adversities and healthy people can remember them. People who had unhappy ones press the delete button.

His parents were regulars at the Free Presbyterian Church, a very strict denomination that prohibits self-expression, whether through drink or sex. If he stepped out of line, he says in his autobiography, his mother gave him "a good skelping, which is a good slapping across the legs". Like the source of so much exceptional talent, his freedom with a football at his feet may have been as an outlet for his anger at such abuse and for his sense of being inhibited by stunting moralism.

His mother became an alcoholic after he achieved fame and he has often claimed to have felt enormous guilt at causing this misfortune. In fact, it's highly improbable that his fame was its cause and illustrates his lack of insight.

Although entitled Blessed, a better word for his autobiography would have been Tragic: the key to his demise was a tragic incapacity to accurately recall his childhood.

Had he been able to do so in therapy and also been able to face opening up to Alcoholics Anonymous groups, there is a good chance he would have recovered.

The Government's censorious failure to understand the need of depressive smokers to indulge their habit when socialising neatly parallels the moralising and harsh childcare of Best's early childhood. We have been complicit in his demise, to the extent that we went along with his Jack-the-lad myth and in putting his pathology down to the effects of fame.

Nanny Hewitt can legislate all she likes, but it will not stop me from smoking. I cannot write books without it, any more than stigmatising George for boozing would have made a blind bit of difference.

Best, the Government, all of us, need to understand a simple point: childhood maltreatment is the main cause of depression, which is the main cause of both smoking and drinking. Therapy, not moralising, is the solution.

Oliver James trained and worked as a clinical psychologist. He is the author of 'They F*** You Up - How to Survive Family Life'