State of Mind

I was lucky enough to be born into a world where complete strangers would routinely bid you a good morning, or simply greet each other with a hearty ‘hello there!’. Although such niceties may seem alien to modern city folk, the rural north was a haven of pleasantness even through the odd bit of grim. We knew what was normal and we would recognise the odd with mostly indulgent indifference. It was not our place to single people out for their peculiarities; that was between the families and their doctor, so long as it was contained.

As I grew older people would ask “How are you?” and later on, “All right?” and whenever this came from somebody I knew I took it at face value, often (to my later embarrassment) relaying the fine details of the progress of my day. I don’t know why nobody explained to me that a casual inquiry was merely another way of acknowledging ones existence and not a freedom of information request regarding my medical history. I eventually learned to return such entreaties with a simple “Grand!” or else some other non-specific affirmation. It was a simpler world.

You didn’t pry and (when you had learned) you didn’t volunteer. But now we live in an age where people teem and swarm in city masses, never catching a glance or, if accidentally doing so, apologetically lowering our eyes and pushing on. Heaven forfend that you would politely hail a fellow passenger on life’s journey. Yes, people are talking out loud but rarely to those in their immediate vicinity; a casual observer from the past might assume they are talking to invisible folk… or more likely that they are all mad.

But here’s the thing. When once the phrase ‘mental health’ was reserved for those in genuine need of professional help, nowadays it is almost part of the standard litany of social interaction. “How was the party?” “Nice weather, lately.” “Did you see the match?” and “How’s your mental health?” Not “How are you feeling or, the ubiquitous “All right?” but, right on the nose “Are you some sort of nutjob?”

Maybe it is the desperation in modern society for everybody to have some form of ailment which impedes their progress, or else explains the lack of it. Maybe it is meddlesome interest in the private affairs of others. Whatever it is it has become all pervasive. Listen out for it and everywhere you will hear interviewers raising the subject. Not “How did you feel about it” but, “What was your mental state at the time?” And of course, once you trot out this sort of invasive line of questioning, along come the body language experts, the sexperts, the perversely curious, all of whom construct labyrinthine arguments and convoluted buy-my-book explanations.

Stop asking me if I'm okay!

The cure for ‘mental health’ (which everyday contraction I find somewhat sinisterly simplistic) it seems is always lengthy, expensive and increases, rather than decreases the burden people feel. Whereas once you’d have said “Fine, son, how about you?” now you are enjoined to share your anxiety, unload your pain and generally bring down everybody around you. I don’t think this is an improvement; I don’t think it is of any help. I think we should all do our bit for good mental health by responding to enquiries about it with a traditional, “None of your fucking business.” 

Mental State

Pull yourself together, pull your socks up, man up and get on with it… While not decrying all self-diagnoses of mental illness, the majority of people now openly talking about their inner wellbeing would probably benefit greatly from ‘a good talking to’. The nebulous endeavour of exploring the mental landscape struck gold when Sigmund Freud made psychology into an opportunity to make easy money by exploiting the natural human propensity towards dissatisfaction.

No tools, no heavy plant or machinery and no troublesome employees are necessary, and in many cases, it seems, little in the way of any formal objective training is insisted upon. Incline your head thoughtfully to one side, murmur the occasional non judgmental ‘I see’ and sit back as your cash cows pour out their identikit psychobabble. Repeat back to them their own assessment of their condition, reinforce the need to repeat the process at the same time next week and trouser the moolah.

Of course, this is a caricature of a part of the mindscape mining profession, but it is the most visible, most accessible and arguably the most harmful sector of the mentally-industrial complex. The Talking Cure, it strikes me, gives licence to the self-indulgent therapy culture to let the weak talk themselves ever weaker. Everybody experiences unhappiness, loneliness, occasional helplessness, grief and anguish; you wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t. But a kick up the arse would often be better medicine than prolonging the state.

Worse is the way that perfectly normal, universal, small sufferings are labelled, dressed up and sold back to the patient as some form of licence to continue demanding attention. As a result, those who can afford it (and many who can’t) spend years, decades even, engaged in a process that first validates and then exacerbates the condition for which they sought counsel in the first place.

The Covid Crisis has given people who already needed little excuse the licence to talk even more openly about their own personal mental health, a subject which was once, like religion and politics, verboten at the civilised dinner table. But if talk about it we must let’s get real. The way things are going with scarcely a day going by without some cry for ever more funding to treat the mental state of the nation, we may soon the rent-seekers in the ‘poor me’ trade competing with the burgeoning and ever-fragmenting grievance culture.

Can we really survive as a nation if the only people making money are those doing so by perpetuating the harm they undoubtedly cause. Give a man a fish and he’ll fry up some chips. Tell a man he can’t fish because his daddy didn’t love him and he’s already had his chips. It’s like taking candy from a baby – a great, big baby – and the country churns out more with each generation.

As I said, I don’t wish to decry those who genuinely need help. But to divert ever more resources to salve the self-inflicted mental wounds of those who merely seek attention looks to me like a one-way street to pitiful dependence on others; the very opposite of what you should wish for your children. So, if you have a friend who is weepy, filled with despair, anxious that the virus stalks them like a wraith… give them a slap, from me.

Sexy Beast

News just in - it’s everywhere; they’re all at it! If there was such a thing as a divine creator he would be banging his head repeatedly on his desk. Why oh why, he/she/it would be asking, did he/she/it create the laws of sheer cussedness? You know them: Sod’s Law, Murphy’s Law, Parkinson’s Law and here, the inevitability going under the monicker of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Who could possibly have predicted – save for an omnipotent, omniscient god – that a design feature that ensured the survival of the species would turn out to be so, er, problematic.

Animals fuck; they can’t help themselves. And when they aren’t fucking, they are thinking about fucking, talking about fucking, trying to create the opportunity to fuck or slagging off somebody else for any or all of the above. The selectively sanctimonious media just love it. Take Gove gate (what a long time ago Saturday seems now). My, what opprobrium was heaped on Michael Gove when he observed that an interview with John Humphrys was akin to entering Harvey Weinstein’s bedroom.

The weak punchline was lost amid the howls of derision and anger, completely ignoring Neil Kinnock’s follow up repetition of the arguably closer to the knuckle comments about groping. As ever, there is a divide between the punishment tariffs for left and right; it took several days for Jeremy Corbyn to approve sanctions against Jared O’Mara’s transgressions, even in the face of petitions from most of the rest of the party, while Gove was hung out to dry before he’d even finished talking about losing his dignity. Maybe Jeremy was reflecting on his own sexual shenanigans before passing judgement?  

And suddenly the entire male population of the planet seems to be getting in pre-emptive apologies for advances, real or imagined, from their dim and distant past. It’s a bloody minefield. In a phone-in radio show I heard a presenter undergoing all sorts of linguistic contortions to try and grasp what was considered acceptable. At which point does a compliment become an unwanted advance? I mean ‘nice bangers’ is probably out in most circumstances, but given the lengths some women go to, ‘your breasts look very attractive in that tee-shirt’ would surely be a welcome observation? ‘Top top’ hardly cuts it.

And having negotiated the unsolicited advance without rejection, at what point of persistence does that morph into sexual harassment and that in turn into sexual assault? If there are indeed rules, then we should be told. Men especially are very good at rules, if only we know what they are. Seriously, if you lay down exactly what is and isn’t acceptable we would behave so much better. But this is just the problem; nobody knows at which point any given woman will switch from interested to repelled and we’ve all seen it happen... or is that just me?

Filth!

Honestly, the world has gone stark, staring bonkers over all this. And it isn’t even particularly recent; negotiating the sexual battle ground has always been fraught with difficulty but it seems to have become increasingly awkward in direct proportion to the amount of sexual freedoms won by groups with ever more diverse proclivities. All we want to know is, how do we ‘know’... you know? In other news it has been reported that up to 300,000 people in the UK leave jobs in the UK every year due to mental health issues. Is it any wonder?

The meaning of Life

The Protestant Work Ethic could have been invented for me. I’m not saying I work all hours-although I frequently have – just that work has always featured far more centrally in my life than any other activity. Like many of you, possibly most of you, I have had jobs that I enjoyed but, mostly, work has been the thing that gets in the way of doing whatever it is I vaguely think I should be doing; working to live, rather than living to work, or the other way round (the more I read that expression the less I understand it). And it’s not setting me free; far from it, I get almost anxious if I don’t give myself at least the illusion of daily achievement.

Of course, if I believed in a higher power I could ease the pain-in-the-arse by dreaming of my reward in heaven, but what’s the point of deferred gratification if there is no gratification to be had? What am I saving myself for? And none of this is made easier by the passage of time. In every phase of my life my thinking has been dominated by the feeling that if only I can get over this hump, this present difficulty; if only I can just struggle on through, the good times are just around the corner. It’s not helped by occasionally being reminded that ‘life is not a rehearsal’. It’s a bit bloody late for that to be finally sinking in.

Because if this is really all there is it’s astonishing that we don’t regularly herd ourselves over cliffs. I mean, what IS the point of it all? And of course, to rub it in, the television schedules are packed with uplifting stories about people ‘living the dream’ doing exactly what they believe they were put on this earth to do. Don’t you just hate those people? There is nothing quite so smug as those who seem to have found their nirvana, although it’s interesting to note that those who find contentment in work are always more believable than the fragile egos who turn to gurus and the pursuit of enlightenment.

It’s probably a form of remote bullying (hate-watching in today’s parlance) but don’t you get a delicious sense of schadenfreude as you observe those caught up by the holistic hullabaloo slip inexorably towards their inevitable fate; deferred mental breakdown, the only enlightened part of the whole experience being their wallet. It strikes me that if you seek the answer to the mystery of life by paying somebody to tell you - and the class meditating around you - you’re likely to only ever be disappointed, evidenced by those who go on a journey of serial soul-searching only to end up on the psych-wards.

And still the nagging feeling that there must be something else. But what is that gets you out of bed each day? And once up, what gets you through? I marvel that we don’t get more madmen in the streets, shouting at the traffic and gurning at strangers. Life is inherently pointless. Of course, you say, the ultimate purpose of our existence is to have children, to create more life. But surely that is just crazy? That’s not solving the puzzle, it’s just passing it on a generation; and worse, it’s passing the buck to vulnerable new people who didn’t even get a say in whether they wanted to carry this burden.

No wonder then that we have created a world of distractions to avoid confronting the awful void. Men in sheds, women who lunch, fast cars, survival games, cupcakes, allotments, soft furnishings, arts and crafts… judo, or ludo, for that matter. All just harmless ways of passing the time until we find what it is we are really supposed to be doing. I reckon if there’s no purpose to it all we may as well occupy ourselves doing things that make us happy whenever we can, which makes the motivation of those who spend their time being angry all the more perplexing. Life is taxing enough without setting out to making enemies.

Be afraid...

Maybe it’s a kind of madness comparable with those who seek the sunny uplands of religion to assuage their life fears, but why anybody would make their raison d'être the alienation of themselves from both sides on the sex-war battlefield baffles me. The unfathomable Caroline Criado-Perez has been out on manoeuvres again, upsetting both men and women for no other purpose I can surmise than to keep herself from thinking about the true insignificance of life. Well, Caroline, whatever your pain, I don’t have the answers – perhaps Kirsty Wark’s documentary on Thursday will shed some light on it all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do. 

Pucker Up!

It's no good, I'm all out of angry right now. I can't seem to get riled about anything very much at the moment.

I've tried. I tried shouting at a recording of Andrew Marr yesterday, but what with it not being live I somehow didn't have the enthusiasm.

I've done Europe to death. I've ranted myself hoarse over the diversity and leftification of a once independent Britain and there can barely be a raggedy-arsed, fake-Roma, pikey metal thief in all the land who has not raised my ire.

I've had it with politicians, I've railed all I want about the monstrous children some of you are raising and the pointlessness of your moronic welfare-fuelled existences and  I've come to the realisation that pretty much the entirety of modern society isn't worth a weak wank into the winceyette .

Then, just when I'm thinking it's all over, the Daily Mail gifts me with this: a young woman is described as "A woman addicted to lip filler injections " FFS Addicted? Addicted to having poisonous fillers pumped into her lips to make her look like she's wearing a pair of bloated pink slugs on her face? Get out of here. Oh my giddy, piss-soaked aunt - what in the world of sweet Jesus-fuck do these deluded princesses think they are doing?

Leslie Ash, Meg Ryan, that ridiculous Jordan woman, Patsy Kensit, Amanda Holden... the list goes on and on and depressingly on.

Fortunately, I harvested the article before the DM pulled the link. It goes on to say: "[Her] problems started while growing up in Hampshire. At the age of 12, she was diagnosed with acute anxiety, insomnia and obsessive compulsive disorder. Poor self-esteem saw these problems develop into body dysmorphic disorder - a mental illness in which people become obsessed with perceived physical flaws or imagined ugliness - by 15. Following a breakdown, [she] was admitted to Warneford Hospital in Oxford and was prescribed anti-psychotics for her increasingly obsessive behaviour. At no point did any of the doctors who administered the injections attempt to stop her, despite knowing that she was taking medication to combat mental illness."

Dear Lord, seeking such treatment is itself a sign of mental illness. And most of her head conditions are actively promoted by a mental health system driven by a deep desire to pathologise the entire population; only when we're ALL mentally ill and self-harming to suicide music will they finally be satisfied.

They give this look the cutesy epithet of The Trout Pout, as if wearing the rubbery-lipped look of a young Mick Jagger gurning like a malevolent, thwarted child was a desirable thing. In case you didn't get it the first time - it looks bloody ridiculous. You want to look like that, you're seriously screwed up and it doesn't take a deluded shrink to say so.

But the body-chop-shop industry really doesn't give a shit either, does it? You want to have a nose shaped like a shovel, Jodie Marsh? Go ahead! What else awaits the poor woman? Tummy tucks, tit jobs, arse-implants, botox... cut it out, stick it in, move it here. Picasso wasn't just an artist, he was a prophet.

And talking of profit - it's this sort of shit that passes for industry these days. If we just took a step back down the road to simple, fruitful and worthwhile endeavours, such as making stuff we actually need, the whole country would benefit from better prosperity, dignity and - who knows - we may even recover our once-proud sense of humour.

Angry? Don't talk to me about angry! Grrrr!