This is a response to a comment left in the comment is free section of the Guardian. The commentator hailed Ms. Jackson's remarks on Lady Thatcher as "Dignified".
These are my thoughts in response, in my reply to him.
"As a liberal, Jackson's speech may have been truthful - As one of "Thatcher's Children", and growing up in a family directly hit by the effects of the miner's dispute, then later affected by Clause 28 as young gay man, I have no truck with Thatcherism.
But Glenda Jackson's shabby homily was, perhaps unsurprisingly, unadulterated staginess and second rate amateur dramatics. Now I understand why she switched professions.
With respect, your usage of the word "dignified" is conceivably misplaced:
Definition of Dignified:
To invest with honour
To exalt
To lend an air of dignity to (as in dignify with the name of)
Ms. Jackson's PR stunt was contained no elements of Dignity. What it revealed was the stark truth that she had no sense of understanding, unlike many of her brethren in the political agenda of all colours and stripes, that regardless of one's own feelings regarding another politician's policies or agendas, they are human beings, with families, thoughts, emotions, faults, follies and qualities. The moment Ms. Jackson broadcasted this tacky wheeze, she immediately disposed of her humanity.
I have a serious illness which sees me fighting against ATOS for ESA and DLA, and for which I also fiercely advocate against. I have no issue with protest, indeed it is essentially the only way small voices are heard. But the death of Lady Thatcher has become a conduit through which people are venting misappropriated frustration, and a dead woman strung up on high has become the focal point of the anger many feel towards this car crash coalition in the manner in which it has dismantled the Welfare State and left the most vulnerable to be hung out to dry. I feel this anger too, but I think I know where it should be directed.
Collective hate and childish revelling witnessed at the likes of a song from a kid's film getting to number one, about a witch is not only misogynistic, it is simply mindless spite - again the immediate dispensing of humanity in a fast switch for a puerile, foolish titter at the death of an old woman who ceased to be relevant politically 23 years since.
No, there was nothing "Dignified", or come to that humane, about Glenda Jackson's naff, pompous yet ultimately throwaway little "broadcast". It was simply tacit encouragement for others to engage in the kind of actions, devoid of critical thought, reasoned analysis or humane reflection - replaced instead with sheep mentality and venomous invective. Hysterical hatred is the poor relative to a reasoned debate and protest with peace as it's intent - even if anger is it's motivator, unless one wants to simply tip their humane sensibilities down the plug hole."
Saturday 13 April 2013
Thursday 11 April 2013
Phantom or Friend
Mental Illness could almost be the Leprosy of the developed, modern world. In response to those who suffer it, many are reduced to a paralytic silence. Some, induced into insensible platitudes. Others simply turn their backs. A few venture to breach the gap of confusion and decode the puzzle within, and attempt to take the time out to understand. But it is only a few. Unearthing them isn't about pot-luck - it's far more atomised than that. Often the people you imagine will reach out, don't, and on the extremely rare occasion, one is surprised by the solitary individual who does.
This can be problematic for the individual with Mental Illness. This is because once the clarion call is heard that all is not well, a spiral of isolation can quickly ensue. The troubled person reaches out for hands he or she assumes will be there, to discover they have been hastily withdrawn. This compounds the individual's sense of isolation, and increases their perceptions of the stigmas attached to mental illness. From the perspective of the unwell individual, very frequently the most distressing element of all of this, is that those recoiled hands are from those they assumed were allies, friends and often family. Phantom hands. Fair Weather Hands. Accompanied by a deafening silence.
There are other illnesses which still provoke these kinds of responses - HIV still has that throttling ability to torpefy and immobilise other's empathic or active reactions. There a quite a few people I've spoken to with HIV who have recanted that unnecessarily predictable but disheartening observation, "When I was diagnosed with HIV, I learned who my true friends were".
Mental illness, in a completely different orbit of pathology to HIV, is slightly more insidious. This isn't to say there aren't people who don't have a completely misplaced, ill-educated fear of HIV in the Western World, there are many, many who do. But it's an equal, but different type of fear. In the minds of some, they feel mental illness has an almost Gothic, very-ever-so-slightly-sinister Mad Man quality about it - an unknown quantity. Which is sadly a complete inversion of the truth. Those with mental illness are more than seven times as likely to be a victim of abuse, harassment and violence than an individual without mental illness. The overwhelming majority of those who have committed serious violent crime in the UK are perfectly, utterly sane.
It can be difficult to reach out to a person when they are suffering mentally. There is a remarkably simple reason for this. When a person is psychologically troubled, or their thoughts are fractured, their mood is extremely low, or whatever is driving their distress, the entire ebb and flow of communication alters. And dealing with this takes patience and understanding, and sometimes shrugging stuff off.
I lived for almost three years with a man with Unipolar-Bipolar Disorder (basically meaning he never became depressed, but often became psychotic and manic concurrently), and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). He was an extraordinary person in many ways, but it took Herculean patience (about one of the only virtues I've got) to weather his cycling between normality and mania, hospitals and home. But he was my friend and my lover, and I owed it to him to try and see beyond the illness when he was well, and see him through the illness when he wasn't. In the end it wasn't the illness that spelled the end of our relationship, but something else entirely. I will never regret my time with Lindsay, because to many people he was nothing but a nuisance, and many times I silently felt I could have concurred with that view. But I've learned with hindsight that the nuisance was the illness and the chaos and distress it caused in Lindsay's life, not the person.
And, you know, very often, people with mental illness, have an awful lot to give - time, love, a listening ear, and whether they find lasting wellness or not, can be a worthwhile addition in a person's life. Mental Illness will affect one in three people in their lifetime. That's a three sided die. It's extremely doubtful that a person having gone through mental illness would ever pull their hand away in response to the feel of the fingertips of someone else in distress. It does that to you.
This can be problematic for the individual with Mental Illness. This is because once the clarion call is heard that all is not well, a spiral of isolation can quickly ensue. The troubled person reaches out for hands he or she assumes will be there, to discover they have been hastily withdrawn. This compounds the individual's sense of isolation, and increases their perceptions of the stigmas attached to mental illness. From the perspective of the unwell individual, very frequently the most distressing element of all of this, is that those recoiled hands are from those they assumed were allies, friends and often family. Phantom hands. Fair Weather Hands. Accompanied by a deafening silence.
There are other illnesses which still provoke these kinds of responses - HIV still has that throttling ability to torpefy and immobilise other's empathic or active reactions. There a quite a few people I've spoken to with HIV who have recanted that unnecessarily predictable but disheartening observation, "When I was diagnosed with HIV, I learned who my true friends were".
Mental illness, in a completely different orbit of pathology to HIV, is slightly more insidious. This isn't to say there aren't people who don't have a completely misplaced, ill-educated fear of HIV in the Western World, there are many, many who do. But it's an equal, but different type of fear. In the minds of some, they feel mental illness has an almost Gothic, very-ever-so-slightly-sinister Mad Man quality about it - an unknown quantity. Which is sadly a complete inversion of the truth. Those with mental illness are more than seven times as likely to be a victim of abuse, harassment and violence than an individual without mental illness. The overwhelming majority of those who have committed serious violent crime in the UK are perfectly, utterly sane.
It can be difficult to reach out to a person when they are suffering mentally. There is a remarkably simple reason for this. When a person is psychologically troubled, or their thoughts are fractured, their mood is extremely low, or whatever is driving their distress, the entire ebb and flow of communication alters. And dealing with this takes patience and understanding, and sometimes shrugging stuff off.
I lived for almost three years with a man with Unipolar-Bipolar Disorder (basically meaning he never became depressed, but often became psychotic and manic concurrently), and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). He was an extraordinary person in many ways, but it took Herculean patience (about one of the only virtues I've got) to weather his cycling between normality and mania, hospitals and home. But he was my friend and my lover, and I owed it to him to try and see beyond the illness when he was well, and see him through the illness when he wasn't. In the end it wasn't the illness that spelled the end of our relationship, but something else entirely. I will never regret my time with Lindsay, because to many people he was nothing but a nuisance, and many times I silently felt I could have concurred with that view. But I've learned with hindsight that the nuisance was the illness and the chaos and distress it caused in Lindsay's life, not the person.
And, you know, very often, people with mental illness, have an awful lot to give - time, love, a listening ear, and whether they find lasting wellness or not, can be a worthwhile addition in a person's life. Mental Illness will affect one in three people in their lifetime. That's a three sided die. It's extremely doubtful that a person having gone through mental illness would ever pull their hand away in response to the feel of the fingertips of someone else in distress. It does that to you.
Sunday 7 April 2013
The Debate That Opened A Door.
Last week, in a rather heated debate with a cherished friend and a friend of her's, I suddenly realised how one tend's to feel they are part of the world they inhabit, and know it too, but with it came a risk that this knowledge, imagination, and reality are based on somewhat precarious ideologies.
I consider myself, in my own world, to be perfectly "normal". Many of my friends remark that they perhaps feel I don't quite fit that descriptor, but like me, they might feel that nobody is normal. I secretly think that none of my friends and family are anything approaching normality, and I hope they would receive that as a compliment. What is the gauge of normality? Even embracing the miasma of neuroses, which most of us possess, yet many hide, or the rainbow of psychiatric disorders, the cast chosen as normal, by a massive trial, stood before us on a stage would, probably look and behave, well, as un-normal as you or I.
The most unprepossessing, ordinary, urbane, even boring people can be abnormal, simply in their excess of their boringness. I do know one extremely boring person, so fascinatingly, tediously stultifying, that he transcends Mr. Average and becomes instead a human barbiturate. That surely can't be boring? He is a kind-hearted, well intentioned person, but his every motivation becomes an arduous romp through a thick soup of boredom. If he attempts to tell a joke, you know it will it be a found Christmas Cracker affair, circa 1973. If he shows you his holiday photographs, they have all been taken by an unwitting tourist, of our friend, pulling the same bored expression, stood afore a variety of oddly boring backdrops - like a parking meter, or a funeral directors, or perhaps if he's feeling a little bit excited, an Ice Cream Van. In being boring he has actually made himself a curiosity.
Boringness put another way could be caused by a severe lack of imagination. Imagination is not only creative fuel, it's conversational fuel, thought fuel. And having too much can be paralysing if taken to extremes, where imagination rules and realism is reduced to a few neurones in the brain, screaming "For God's Sake You Idiot, What On Earth Are You Thinking?" My school reports always picked up on my fecund mental creativity, but they also picked up on my lack of self-controls, often worded in excoriating terms. I love creativity, but on my terms and my terms only. An extract from a school report: "Recently the children were asked to make clay snakes. Matthew spread his clay all over the floor". Perhaps if they'd asked "the children" to spread the clay all over the floor, I would have made a clay snake, or a clay porcupine, perhaps.
Childhood does so much to inform imagination, and I understand a little better now why my mind was left wander in all manner of directions, to creatively explode outward into to the clouds above, the rolling woodlands, the endless fields and rivers. And my direct surroundings affected my imagination too. We weren't a wealthy family, just comfortable, buy we did have an acre of gardens, with outhouses, old cucumber houses, chicken sheds, and what was once another house, at the bottom of our garden, which became a garage. Along with two green-fingered parents, well tended gardens, and a plum and apple orchard and a garden my brother and I had for our own devices with a gigantic fort-like climbing frame that straddled the stream below it. It remains in my mind a kind of Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie part of my life - deeply whimsical, where my body as well as mind were as free as a bird. A freedom never challenged by my parents - winter or summer, as long as we were "in" by the time darkness came, all was well.
My mental illness, I don't believe is caused by an excess of thinking too much, or creativity - though I recognise the colour and contrast are turned up to max. And there are certainly times where my imagination hinders it. Because now a weird kind of reversal has occurred. My mind is still allowed to run free, but because I don't go out, my brain has to create the imagery itself. And of course in the real world, you can reach out and touch that shadow, and realise it's a shadow. You can not stick your hand into your mind and do the same.
Trying to begin to untangle our perceptions of the world around us is a fundamental question philosophers would ask themselves. But to begin to understand ourselves this can not be separated from the above process, and this is something I learned last week. To begin to understand this seemingly fathomless question, perhaps, for myself at least, I have to observe as much as I dream.
I consider myself, in my own world, to be perfectly "normal". Many of my friends remark that they perhaps feel I don't quite fit that descriptor, but like me, they might feel that nobody is normal. I secretly think that none of my friends and family are anything approaching normality, and I hope they would receive that as a compliment. What is the gauge of normality? Even embracing the miasma of neuroses, which most of us possess, yet many hide, or the rainbow of psychiatric disorders, the cast chosen as normal, by a massive trial, stood before us on a stage would, probably look and behave, well, as un-normal as you or I.
The most unprepossessing, ordinary, urbane, even boring people can be abnormal, simply in their excess of their boringness. I do know one extremely boring person, so fascinatingly, tediously stultifying, that he transcends Mr. Average and becomes instead a human barbiturate. That surely can't be boring? He is a kind-hearted, well intentioned person, but his every motivation becomes an arduous romp through a thick soup of boredom. If he attempts to tell a joke, you know it will it be a found Christmas Cracker affair, circa 1973. If he shows you his holiday photographs, they have all been taken by an unwitting tourist, of our friend, pulling the same bored expression, stood afore a variety of oddly boring backdrops - like a parking meter, or a funeral directors, or perhaps if he's feeling a little bit excited, an Ice Cream Van. In being boring he has actually made himself a curiosity.
Boringness put another way could be caused by a severe lack of imagination. Imagination is not only creative fuel, it's conversational fuel, thought fuel. And having too much can be paralysing if taken to extremes, where imagination rules and realism is reduced to a few neurones in the brain, screaming "For God's Sake You Idiot, What On Earth Are You Thinking?" My school reports always picked up on my fecund mental creativity, but they also picked up on my lack of self-controls, often worded in excoriating terms. I love creativity, but on my terms and my terms only. An extract from a school report: "Recently the children were asked to make clay snakes. Matthew spread his clay all over the floor". Perhaps if they'd asked "the children" to spread the clay all over the floor, I would have made a clay snake, or a clay porcupine, perhaps.
Childhood does so much to inform imagination, and I understand a little better now why my mind was left wander in all manner of directions, to creatively explode outward into to the clouds above, the rolling woodlands, the endless fields and rivers. And my direct surroundings affected my imagination too. We weren't a wealthy family, just comfortable, buy we did have an acre of gardens, with outhouses, old cucumber houses, chicken sheds, and what was once another house, at the bottom of our garden, which became a garage. Along with two green-fingered parents, well tended gardens, and a plum and apple orchard and a garden my brother and I had for our own devices with a gigantic fort-like climbing frame that straddled the stream below it. It remains in my mind a kind of Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie part of my life - deeply whimsical, where my body as well as mind were as free as a bird. A freedom never challenged by my parents - winter or summer, as long as we were "in" by the time darkness came, all was well.
My mental illness, I don't believe is caused by an excess of thinking too much, or creativity - though I recognise the colour and contrast are turned up to max. And there are certainly times where my imagination hinders it. Because now a weird kind of reversal has occurred. My mind is still allowed to run free, but because I don't go out, my brain has to create the imagery itself. And of course in the real world, you can reach out and touch that shadow, and realise it's a shadow. You can not stick your hand into your mind and do the same.
Trying to begin to untangle our perceptions of the world around us is a fundamental question philosophers would ask themselves. But to begin to understand ourselves this can not be separated from the above process, and this is something I learned last week. To begin to understand this seemingly fathomless question, perhaps, for myself at least, I have to observe as much as I dream.
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