I had to walk away.  I’ve just had to.  Somewhere between reading the accounts of abuse that were making me feel like someone was twisting my guts up in a knot, and knowing that every comment I made would be jumped on, and twisted, and misconstrued and misrepresented as though the only thing that mattered was winning a fucking pointless blog argument and the lives and the people destroyed by all this fucking complacency and self-serving look-the-other-way, I’m-alright-jack bullshit was just a minor incidental detail.

I’ve had to walk away.  I’ve just had to.  I can’t do it.  I can’t control the feelings, I can’t keep a lid on the desperation that wells up inside me when I read about this kind of casual, calculated, it’ll-never-come-back-on-me-so-who-gives-a-shit cruelty by the strong towards the weak.  I feel the same when I read about elderly people being abused in care homes, or kids being abused by teachers or priests.  How does anyone not feel it, this awful, desperate desperation on behalf of these people, the weakest of the weak who can have their lives destroyed by the tiniest little flick of cruelty while the person who inflicts it forgets it 2 seconds later, and the people who watch it worry about their careers, and themselves, and every fucking thing except the people who have no hope except that someone will notice and help.

I sit in front of my computer nd trying to drag my thoughts together long enough to say what I want, to think and think and think knowing that every word I type will be taken apart and picked over by people who aren’t interested in hearing what I say, buit only in trying to find the flaw, the unconsidered little detail that they can worry away at and make seem worse and worse and fucking worse and all so they can ignore what I’m trying to say and what they know damn well im trying to say by=u theu won’t just fucking listen  I can’t do this.  I can’t do this.  I can’t do it.  I couldn’t do it, I knew I couldn’t do it, but the part of me that knew is should keep quiet, and not get involved and just sit it out got dragged in because because because the whole fucking system is sick.  It’s not sick because there are bad people in it, but because the good people in it don’t hold back the bad.  It’s sick because the people who can help won’t help, not because they’re bad, but because they’re tired and worn down, and intimidated, and just to crawl home t the forget the patients who are lying in the dark lost and alone and and wiating for the next little flick of unregarded cruelty, the next little humililiation that will be piled on top of them

The system is sick, the world is sick, any world that can have this fucking shit i nit is sick, and it needs to change.  It needs to change.  I can see thast it needs to change but I cant fucking change it do it I cant do it I cant do it  I cant icanbt I acnt l8i9ke some fucking preiceless prima donna  and the people that get left in the shit by everyone else get left in the shit by me as well

You’re not going to fucking get me  Ill fight you and fight you and fight you and you won’t get fucking anywhere near me.  I amy not be able to defend anyone else but I can defend myself and this I s the last fucking warning so back off and leave me alone or youll fuckinbg get whatc you fucking deserve

Sod the victims, let’s defend the abusers

I am really bothered by this discussion over on Mental Nurse.  To summarise, a number of patients are setting out an appalling catalogue of abuse at the hands of the mental health system, principally in the UK, but also in Ireland and elsewhere.  This is truly horrifying stuff – up to and including rape, in one example, but all of it is sickening.  That is bothering in and of itself, of course, but what is really bothering me are the responses of the few healthcare professionals who are contributing to the debate.

(And, goodness me, but isn’t it noticeable how disengaged from the debate the MN regulars have been?  You can’t move for comments from them when they’re arguing about nursing becoming an all-graduate profession (something that will make slightly less than fuck-all difference to patients), but when it comes to a discussion of what ought to be the single most pressing issue any of them will ever encounter in their entire professional lives – the systematic abuse of the people they are theoretically meant to care for – suddenly there’s all sorts of other things they have to worry about instead.  That’s a very revealing set of priorities, I think.)

What’s really struck me is that none of the nurses (and allied professionals) have expressed outrage at what they’ve read.  (They have expressed a vague, hand-waving ‘concern’ or ‘disappointment’ instead.)  I don’t know if this is because they are familiar with this kind of abuse in their own working lives and so don’t find it shocking, or because the abuse is being described by patients who they are used to dismissing because, you know, they’re mentals…

Either way round, that’s already a fairly major problem right there – that the natural, human response of ‘Oh my god, this is awful.  Just reading about it makes me feel sick to my stomach.  What can I do to stop this happening?’ has been noticeable by its absence.  I would guess that’s what anyone except a mental health professional would think when they read about this kind of thing.  It’s not what the MH professionals contributing to the Mental Nurse thread think.  Instead, we’ve had a whole bunch of: ‘well, people burn out, what can you do?’; ‘there are faults in the system that make people behave in this way’; ‘sometimes things get really stressful’; ‘I’m a nurse and, I can tell you, some patients have been really nasty to me’; and so on, and so on.  Faced with this appalling testimony of abuse, this has been, collectively, their response: we need to think about the issues that cause these problems and see what we can do to address them…

Bullshit.

(Crystal) ball gazing

In light of the recent Queen’s-speech-related twitchings of the corpse of our present government, I’ve been inspired to write a post about the forthcoming general election, and politics in general.  No, wait, come back!

Ok, so the first thing to say to those few of you who are persisting with reading this is that the Conservatives do still have a mountain to climb.  That maybe sounds like an odd thing to say, when a poll this week has found that they are on 42%, with Labour polling 29%.  The reason the mountain exists is that, as things stand, Labour has a huge parliamentary majority.  Comparing the 2005 election with the 2010 one, it would take a 7.1% swing to the Conservatives for them to have a parliamentary majority of one.  A swing of 5.5% would make them the largest party in a hung parliament (and therefore, presumably, David Cameron the leader of a minority or coalition government), while a swing of 7.5% would give them a workable majority of 48.  This week’s poll, when compared with the results of the election in 2005, suggests an 8% swing to the Conservatives.  But all of these figures need to be put in context.

Around the world in 80 days

I quite enjoyed this series on BBC1, which reached its conclusion last night.  It’s been a take on the Jules Verne/ Michael Palin journeys, but with the additional twist that it has been a relay, with six pairs of celebrities (or, rather, ‘celebrities’, for the most part) undertaking different legs of the journey.

I haven’t enjoyed all the episodes equally.  Last week’s was something of a drag, partly because it involved John Barrowman – a man so obviously fake he infuriates me – but also because the attempts to make getting across about 2/3 of America by road look difficult were ludicrously contrived (‘don’t just use a car, use a battery-powered car that there are almost no recharging points for!’).  I probably enjoyed the third episode most, and not just because, in a meeting that ought to have launched a thousand slash tributes, Matt Baker encountered a slightly star-struck, wonderfully effeminate and ludicrously pretty British gap-year traveller alone and bored on an overnight train somewhere in Central Asia…  (Actually, Baker’s website seems to have been written by a slash writer as it is – especially the bit of his biography that talks admiringly of his ‘exceptional physical prowess’…)

The main problem with the show, though, for me has been with the central conceit, which suggests that getting round the globe in 80 days using all forms of modern transport except flying is something that’s difficult to achieve.  I know they made it look difficult (and only achieved their goal thanks to a daring mid-sea change of boats on the last day), but for the most part that’s because they followed a completely illogical route – they went to Turkey for absolutely no reason, for example.  The truth is, you could travel round the world in a lot less than 80 days.  And now, with all the pedantic exhaustiveness you’ve come to know and love despise tolerate me for, I’m going to prove it.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

Reviewing a biography of Beaumarchais, David A Bell, dean of the humanities faculty at Johns Hopkins University, has the following to say:

Beaumarchais was a manic character, of the sort who would now be diagnosed at a young age with Attention Deficit Disorder or something similar, and placed on medication designed to ensure a long life of obscure mediocrity.

So there you have it.  ADD is not a disorder, but a mark of non-mediocrity.  Medication prescribed to people diagnosed with ADD does not help them to manage their symptoms.  In fact, it isn’t even intended to do so.  Far from it: this medication is designed to take exceptional, gifted people and drag them down to the level of obscure mediocrity.

This isn’t, you understand, the result of valid research being deliberately manipulated by pharmaceutical companies who have a commercial incentive to identify all forms of childhood behaviour as a disorder that can be treated with a pill they just happen to manufacture.  On the contrary, the medication has been deliberately designed to have this effect.  A cabal of researchers, psychiatrists, psychologists, paediatricians, teachers and parents conspire together in a system of ‘diagnosis’ and ‘treatment’ with the explicit aim of taking the happy faces of exceptional children and bludgeoning them into mediocre submission.

Never mind the rather inconvenient fact that, far from trying to suppress their kids’ abilities, most parents suffer from an unshakeable delusion that their precious little Tabithas and Timothies are geniuses of the first rank, and that every finger-painting of an unrecognisable cat is proof that they have already surpassed Michelangelo.  Never mind that, in the very next sentence, Bell provides evidence that refutes his claim that Beaumarchais’ behaviour would attract a diagnosis of ADD:

When the first performance of The Barber of Seville unexpectedly bombed in 1775, he re-wrote the play in less than 48 hours and audiences hailed the second performance a triumph.

Someone who is capable of a sustained period of directed concentration like that can’t possibly have had the symptoms that these days get labelled as ADD.  The clue is in the name – it’s called Attention Deficit Disorder – and, far from displaying what he hoped would be an urbane, man-of-the-world wit, Bell has demonstrated that he’s prepared to write about things he simply doesn’t understand.  And anyway, just how ignorant do you have to be not to realise that ADD implies an inability to concentrate?

What has particularly annoyed me about Bell’s ‘contribution’ to the ADD debate, I think, is the air of patrician contempt it implies – that it is not necessary for David A Bell to consider that he might be wrong about something, for he is David A Bell, and thus is always right.  The same attitude permeates his whole article, and while it’s irritating when he’s writing about subjects he understands, it becomes maddening when he assumes certainty on subjects that fall way beyond his expertise.  Bell may provide a particularly egregious example of the phenomenon, but the truth is that this kind of misplaced certainty is everywhere, especially when it comes to talking about mental illness, and you know what?  I’ve had enough of it.

Sometimes the world can see us in a way that’s different than who we are

Ok, so I’m trying to tidy up my draft posts, and this is a film review I wrote a few weeks ago.  It was going to be part of a longer post (basically saying how much I had enjoyed my first alcoholic Saturday night in years, even though it had involved watching a crappy pre-teen musical), but the second part didn’t flow, and I abandoned it.  Still, the review works on its own, I think:

Not a good time to be a gay American

On Monday, residents in the state of Maine were voting on a referendum motion to overturn a law that had extended marriage rights to same-sex couples.  The motion carried – I haven’t been able to find the full results, but to be fair, I didn’t look very hard once I discovered that the ‘No on 1’ campaign (i.e. the people supporting gay marriage) had conceded.  This is, clearly, depressing.  So far, referenda to outlaw same-sex marriage have been held in 31 states, and every time the supporters of gay marriage have lost.  Last November, California – one of the most liberal states in the Union – voted to overturn gay marriage.  This November, Maine – in liberal New England – has voted to do the same.  The unpopularity of gay marriage in ‘red-neck’ states isn’t surprising, but the unpopularity in liberal heartlands is truly bizarre.

It hurts, as well, that in both California and Maine, the referendum was not a pre-emptive strike to prevent gay marriage being enacted, but a decision to overturn a law that was already in place.  People have got married, residents of California and Maine had seen the joy and happiness when people like Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were finally able to marry after 55 years together – and have then gone out and voted to take that opportunity away.  This isn’t just bigotry, it’s spite.

If they can’t get you coming, they’ll get you going

I’ve been doing some reading about personality disorders, and I came across the contribution of one Harry Guntrip to definitions of the schizoid personality type.  There are nine alleged characteristics of this personality type which Guntrip pulled out of his arse described, one of which is withdrawnness:

Meanwhile, in real life

I don’t really like writing about things that affect my real life on this blog, as you will have gathered.  I would like to give the impression that I am a disembodied intellect drifting high above the surface of the planet, occasionally focussing on some aspect of the scene below, but I am not, and real things keep happening.

Old Mr Buffett sat on a tuffet…

I was watching TV on Monday night, and I heard a man say, about Wall Street bankers and financiers, something like this (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

This idea that the class of people who move money around are somehow special, and deserve special treatment – well, it’s getting pretty far away from where we should be, I think.

And about the super-rich he said this (again, I’m paraphrasing from memory):

The super-rich aren’t as smart as they’d like to think they are.  They like to think they did it all themselves, they made all their money because of their own efforts, but they wouldn’t have made that much if they’d been in Bangladesh, or somewhere.  The society had a lot to do with it.  And that’s why I believe we need a taxation system, and a system of personal ethics, that says that most of that money has to go back to the society, to help the people who got a short straw in life.

Admirable sentiments, I think.  But who said it?  A trade-unionist?  A left-leaning academic?  Someone who’s just had their house repossessed?  Someone who can’t afford healthcare?  A successful businessman who’s just seen his business fold because the bank wouldn’t lend him the money to buy a new van?