Apologies in Advance: Some things are hard to hear

This is how things used to be:

Why is it that the mere mention of mental illness arouses such extreme reactions?

We are freaks, outcasts, deviants.  We  arouse hostility and fear.  Unlike Bedlam today’s lunatic asylums do not attract tourists.  Nobody wanders through the wards laughing, joking, pointing at the inmates. But I  know that if they could they most certainly would. We are  protected by the thin veneer of civilisation.  But something tells me that in the years since Bedlam closed its doors, humanity hasn’t changed a bit.  The stage occupied by the mad has moved to that voyeur’s paradise: reality television.

The mentally Ill represent devastation.  Lives laid to waste by some invisible force over which we  have no control.  We do not follow the rules.  We do not obey instructions.  We are weak, we are feckless, they are helpless.  Our very presence corrupts society.  The industrious middle classes are the most hostile.  It is  not that they lack imagination.  It is not  that they are devoid of empathy.  Far from it.  They posses those qualities in abundance.  They understand more than they want to.

People are afraid because one day they know it could happen to them.  Like aerial bombardment.  No one knows who the missiles will hit next.  But they will never acknowledge that.  Not in a million years.

If you have a problem with this then please tell me why you have a problem with this. I need to hear alternative views.

 

The Good Doctor (no 999)

Resentment is the monster that lives within me. My favourite former psychiatrist, Dr Anthony Daniels/ Theodore Darymple has written an essay on the subject. I can only concur with its premise which is that resentment is corrosive and destructive and, in the long term, pretty damned useless. It is insidious though and once it has you in its jaws it will not willingly release you. You have to fight your way out. I’m hoping that my own resentment has plateaud and will soon subside. For to sustain resentment you have to keep feeding it fresh meat. I am nourishing it. It is eating me up and, if I don’t kill it, it will kill me.

Speaking of Doctor Dalrymple: this article (hat tip to his ‘groupies’ here) reminds me of why reading his output frequently leaves me incandescent with rage. ’Narcissist’ is one of the good doctor’s favourite insults but this time he should direct it at himself, for is there anything more ‘narcissistic’ than writing about the heroism of the Chilean miners, making it fit into your latest little pet peeve (sense versus sensibility) and then twisting it round so that it becomes about you and your own putative heroism? And, naturally, he never misses a chance to malign his native country: ‘Of course, I was talking of the British as they once were, not as they now are—world-champion snivelers’. Well, one less ‘sniveller’, Doctor Dalrymple, now you’re temporarily absent from the country. One accusation you could never level at Dalrymple is that he is afflicted with an excess of patriotism.