An extract from Deborah Lipstadt’s Beyond Belief:
am overwhelmed by fear. There. Just had to get that out. I haven’t spoken properly to another human being, apart from a chat with Nobby on Thursday, since I got back from hospital! Binged yesterday and today. Slowly expanding. A huge and ugly scar on the landscape! Unproductive, carefree (or semi-carefree, you know what I’m like!) days rule. Today was pretty much in that category.
and the voice it says
you are not possessed
By demons
You are the demon
and you should jump
before you are pushed
I cannot swim
So I am cut adrift
On the whim
Of some carelessly capricious
Medical examiner
But I couldn’t stay there. Going into hospital is like being cast out. The hospital is like a leper colony, far removed from the city. Far removed from sane, civilized people. My mind had slowed and congealed through lack of use. I could not articulate my kind of hunger. Beyond food, beyond warmth, beyond anything worldly. A need that would never be met.
And now I emerge to see I am being targeted by the powers that be b/c I can’t work full time. The politics of distraction drives me to well, distraction except its not its fiction. You may have encountered this concept before unpopular governments adore a common enemy. And that’s usually okay as long as that common enemy is not you.
when I am not on medication I spent my days doing everything I can to prevent myself from spontaneously combusting.
I don’t think I can do this anymore.
When the rats start fleeing a sinking ship it is time to start looking for the nearest lifeboat!
According to Labour MP Tom Harris: (See here and here) “I remember scoffing when John Major said we should understand a bit less and condemn a bit more, but he was right.”
No he wasn’t. It was wrong then and it’s equally wrong now. Understanding should be an essential prerequisite to condemnation. For example you wouldn’t want a jury to find the defendant in a criminal trial guilty without a thorough understanding of the facts of the case. Or would you?
And, if I recall correctly, John Major made that comment at a time when members of his own government were falling far short of the standards of morality they were attempting to impose on others. Did he make that remark before, during or after his affair with Edwina Currie? Or is adultery acceptable in his moral universe? (Addendum: It was after but he only expressed public regret when the charming Ms. Currie ‘exposed’ him in her execrably written diaries. Am I the only person on the planet who believes that those who claim to be superior should actually be superior? I love the caption beneath the picture of what looks like Edwina Currie admonishing the then PM for some perceived wrongdoing: ‘Currie said she felt ‘forgotten’ when Major was premier’. Oh boo hoo! Diddums etcetera! Could somebody please remind me again why I should take advice on morality from an adulterer? Here is yet another blogger who seems to think we should. What is it with all this selective amnesia? Are they putting something in the water? I knew there was a perfectly sensible reason why I only drink diet coke! It is not, I suspect, that the Tories et al want us to lead morally flawless lives but that, like them, we should be seen to be living morally flawless lives while doing exactly what we please when we are off stage.)
John Major presided over a bunch of toe-sucking, duplicitous, avaricious, hypocritical adulterers but they were, at the very least, entertaining.
Mr. Harris proceeds to assert that: ‘Common sense dictates that, in general, children benefit from having the love of a mother and a father.’ Interestingly though, according to this wikipedia entry, he himself is divorced. One rule for him, another for everyone else.
According to a commenter in The Daily Mail (yes, like Lot’s wife I looked back) ‘Scummy mummies have been on Nu-Lab agenda since taking office, I’m of the opinion many blinkered Nu-Lab MPs are appalled at the speed a which Nu-Lying-Labour has destroyed our way of life and family values. ‘ My response (which was never published): ‘I think you’ll find that the number of single mothers rose exponentially under the Tories, as did the practice of shunting the jobless onto incapacity benefit in order to massage the unemployment figures. The major political parties seem to believe that the population of this country suffer from a kind of cyclical amnesia and I fear they may be right.’ Actually I’d go so far as to say that the population of this great nation have the collective memory of a retarded goldfish.
And we don’t really want to eradicate poverty, do we? The children of the impoverished (intellectually, spiritually and relatively) have traditionally made rather good cannon fodder and God knows we need some of that right now. And middle class parents should remember that the success of their children depends on the failure of the children of their social inferiors. If they don’t tolerate this then their children won’t be next.
Now more than ever before we are measured solely by the amount of money we earn. This means that, in the UK, the average footballer is of more worth to society than the average doctor or the average teacher. There are many people on low incomes who work very hard and make a valuable contribution to society. One example that springs to mind is an acquaintance of mine who is a care assistant who works in a retirement home. She receives tax credits and she deserves them too. Her low income is part of the reason people can afford to send their elderly relatives to these places.
It may also be useful to look at history. Many writers, artists etc who made lasting contributions to our cultural history were not particularly economically productive in their own lifetimes (examples include Emily Dickinson, Vincent Van Gogh, Jane Austen, the Brontes).
It is a barren, depressing world indeed if the only measure of our worth is our economic productivity.
one of HRH Prince Charles’s (or Charles Windsor for Republicans) best friends is a sock puppet…
Does he hang out with Sweep and Sue too? It’s good to see a member of the royal family reaching out to the puppet community.
And in other news, here’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown doing what she does best – responding to bigotry with bigotry. This is what she has to say about the ‘white working class’. Note the markedly more sympathetic tone with which she responds to Prince Harry’s latest faux pas. In Ms. Alibhai-Brown’s world you are allowed to be bigoted and prejudiced as long as it’s accompanied by power and prestige. I guess she owes them one. After all, they did give her an MBE and she probably doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds her.
Why should Harry be judged more harshly than others, she asks. Oh, Yasmin, if you had a brain cell we’d be able to hear it rattling. It’s because he is third in line to the throne and one day he may be head of state. Ms. Alibhai-Brown is hypocrisy on legs. In her strange, screwed-up little world racism is verboten (and rightly so) and yet class-based prejudice is permissible if not laudable. In my world they are equally reprehensible.
Addendum: The comments sections on both articles cited seem to have disappeared from the face of the web. ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Alice.
Maybe even Yasmin herself knows that she crossed the line. I won’t be holding my breath though. And maybe those responsible for the vitriolic racism in the comments sections realize that they too crossed a line. I won’t be holding my breath there either. A pox on both their houses!
Addendum 2: I had intended to comment upon this ages ago. According to Ms. Alibhai-Brown: ‘It will be decades before Britain elevates a man of African ancestry to the position that Barack Obama has reached. On this, the US has shown us a face that is wholly to be admired, impossible to reproduce on these isles, as yet.’ That’s because we’d have to abolish the monarchy. Barack Obama has been ‘elevated’ to ‘head of state’ who, in this country, happens to be a monarch. Duh! ‘On the other hand, we Britons would never cheer on, to teetering heights, a Sarah Palin’. Um, Yasmin, have you never heard of Margaret Thatcher? Do keep up!
What I about to write is so sickeningly cynical that I am reluctant to commit it to print. But it is something I simply have to articulate. I am compelled to. I just hope it’s not true. I hope it’s just a product of my own paranoia.
A couple of weeks ago I submitted a post entitled ‘A Conversation With a Friend’ in which I explored the unfavourable treatment received by those who have the misfortune to be diagnosed with any form of personality disorder. I had dealt with this issue on numerous occasions in my diary (the pen and ink variety). I came across an entry in which I described how a friend of mind had a ‘psychotic breakdown’ in her second year at university. She was hospitalised, sectioned and forcibly medicated. She tells me that, on one occasion, a senior male nurse sat on her while another nurse went to fetch the needle. The section was eventually rescinded and she returned to college. In spite of several relapses she managed to graduate. She resented the way she was treated in hospital but conceded that it may have been necessary. A few months after she graduated, as a result of her condition, she was allocated a housing association flat. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, all local authority support was withdrawn. She was told that she was no longer entitled to a community psychiatric nurse or even a twice yearly visit to a consultant psychiatrist. When she demanded and got access to her notes she found out why. She had been rediagosed. She was no longer ‘psychotic’, she now suffered from a personality disorder known as schizotypal personality disorder and, as this was untreatable, she was no longer entitled to any support. She had, overnight, become a member of a group regarded by the psychiatric profession as nothing short of untermenschen.
Since then I have come across many similar cases. These people have the same problems they have always had, the same low self esteem, the same despair, the same social exclusion but all the support that had hitherto helped them to cope with this is withdrawn. A diagnosis of ‘personality disorder’ supersedes any other diagnosis you have ever been given. At the stroke of a pen, at the click of a mouse, public expenditure on the mentally ill has been reduced. Now that’s what I call genius.
These people may well be ‘untreatable’ but I just don’t see how this makes them any less deserving of sympathy, if not empathy. If someone has a physical disorder that is considered untreatable they are not belittled, they are not scorned, they are not viewed as outcasts and, even if they do not receive ‘treatment’, they still receive ‘support’.
I have been told that ‘mental illness’ and ‘personality disorders’ are separate categories and require very different approaches. If this is so then why call them ‘disorders’ at all? Just chalk their problems up to plain old fashioned character defects but I guess if they did that then psychiatrists would have to section the entire human race, including themselves.
So Sick of Drowning 