Talking of Collective Guilt

Peter Hitchens has some rather interesting things to say about psychiatry.

He has taken the debate to a whole new level.  Thus far the mainstream media have focused on the pharmaceutical industry.  But they merely produce, they do not prescribe.  This task is in the hands of psychiatrists.  There is an understandable reluctance to criticize doctors.  We have elevated them to the status of minor deities who, even when they do wrong, are acting as a result of the purest of intentions but this does not accord with contemporary and historical reality.  The reason people wind up on pedestals is because other people put them there.

 

A Public Service Announcement

Or: Another Dog That Failed to Bark

The Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night Time

The wheel that didn’t squeak.

I am really uneasy about the ‘Jimmy Savile’ case and associated events. I wasn ‘t going to mention this but then one of my favourite bloggers David Duff http://duffandnonsense.typepad.com/duff_nonsense/2012/11/when-im-nicked-i-want-anna-raccoon-as-my-brief.html

Passed along this link: http://www.annaraccoon.com/annas-personal-stuff/trial-by-posthumous-innuendo/#comments

And this led me here: http://www.annaraccoon.com/annas-personal-stuff/past-lives-and-present-misgivings-part-one/

To the blog of Anna Raccoon. It is part of a series. Aside from being a damned impressive piece of writing it offers am alternative take on the reportage which is emanating from the so-called ‘mainstream media’.

My vague memories of Jimmy Savile consisted of his TV show ‘Jim’ll Fix It’. I was a bookworm as a child and my parents rationed television so I didn’t get to watch it much. An exception was Dallas on a Friday evening which we watching in the sitting room with plates of toast and homemade jam balanced on our laps.

I have tried to avoid stories about Jimmy Savile because the whole thing, to me, seems utterly pointless. The man is dead. What can this whole thing possibly achieve? I remember reading about Oliver Cromwell (star of our ill fated republic) In 1660 they had his corpse dug up, hung in chains, and beheaded. But then people were so primitive back then. Not at all like the contemporary era.

I Will Rise, I Will Return

A Potentially Seismic Move

http://mindhacks.com/2013/05/03/national-institute-of-mental-health-abandoning-the-dsm/

Things Aren’t Always What They Seem

A young woman has lost her mother toç. She is my friends and she is bright and vivacious in a way that belies the psychiatric diagnosis that lurks beneath the surface.  My friend was devoted to her mother, in old age at least.  After years of bitter family infighting they had at last arrived at a form of rapprochement.  They parted on good terms

Then she remembered the back handers that left her face momentarily claret coloured.  Her mother took care never to leave bruises.  She recalled the conversations she had had with her, unforeseen, curving, shifting, turning.  You never could tell when she would snap, when she would reach out and push her over the precipice and then you would be falling, falling down some vast canyon.  And still the blows reigned down like bits of masonry and falling stone.  It was not a fair fight.  She was far too small to retaliate.  And then she would detach herself from reality.  She would escape inwards, into a land with valleys and swelling rivers and the sharp peaks of mountains.  A higher land of bent trees and shrunken shrubs. Then in her dream world the banks of the river burst and when she came round her mother would be grabbing her hair and slamming her head against the wall.  And then she was well and truly back in reality once again. She could feel her fondness for her mother fading.  There was a grotesque chasm between them.  They would never be close again.  And that made my friend’s heart feel like it was about to crack open.

But then we must never speak ill of the dead.

Jesus Loves Me Fine

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act”. George Orwell quotes (1903-1950).

Mother

Blue of My Oblivion