"MENTAL HEALTH" is affecting my. . . mental health.

TOM UTLEY: How to beat the blues - award yourself £10 every time you hear the phrase 'mental health' on TV or radio

By Tom Utley for the Daily Mail

Earlier this month I invented a game to cheer myself up through these short, chilly days of January. I’m not claiming it will work for everyone, but readers may care to give it a try.

The rules are simple. All you have to do is award yourself an imaginary £10 every time you hear the words ‘mental health’ uttered on the radio or TV, or read them in the media.

I find that even on a thinnish day I can rake in a comfortable 50 or 60 fantasy quid — while if Prince Harry, a controversial statue or an internet influencer is in the news, I often notch up a sum well into three figures.

Indeed, those who follow the media may be forgiven for thinking most of the population is incapable of expressing annoyance or sadness about anything, from Covid restrictions to rising prices or even sexism in the works of Shakespeare, without complaining about the irritant’s adverse impact on his or her mental health.

Eavesdrop on almost any industrial tribunal these days and you’ll hear a sacked employee complain that the boss showed her too much affection, or too little, and that this was having a devastating effect on her mental health.

Read any report of a criminal trial, and the chances are that the defendant will say that he nicked his dad’s credit card — or drove at 120 mph up the M4, high on cocaine — because he was suffering from mental health issues.

Ask athletes or sports stars to explain a poor performance, and they’ll claim that mental health problems lay at the root of it. It’s an all-purpose, get-out-of-jail-free card. Instant victimhood for anyone looking for an excuse.

God knows, it’s no part of my intention this week to make light of genuine mental illness, because I know there is nothing more debilitating. I have a great friend who was so clinically depressed he couldn’t get out of bed for months on end, and I’ve known others whose despair was so deep that they took their own lives.

I must also declare that I’m extremely proud of the fact that one of my sons has decided to devote his life to the care of seriously disturbed adults. This seems to me to be among the noblest and most selfless careers imaginable.

No, what I object to is the modern habit of labelling every low we experience in the course of our everyday lives as a mental health issue, as if it were a clinical condition beyond our control.

The most obvious offenders are those misguided university students — often indulged or actively egged on by academics who should know better — who demand ‘safe spaces’ to protect their mental health from exposure to ideas with which they’ve been taught to disagree.

Tell them that the British empire wasn’t all bad, for example, or that unrestricted immigration isn’t necessarily an unalloyed good, and they’ll run for cover, complaining that we’re messing with their fragile minds.

Ask students of English literature to read Dickens, Trollope or Walter Scott — all of them riddled, it’s true, with the casual racism and sexism of their time — and they’ll wail that we’re putting their mental health in grave jeopardy.

On that point, it surely doesn’t help when a respected actress suggests, as Juliet Stevenson did this week, that plays such as The Taming Of The Shrew and The Merchant Of Venice should be ‘buried’, since they portray ‘unacceptable’ attitudes. Oh, how I wish actors and actresses would stick to acting, which some are quite good at, instead of spouting the half-baked political opinions apparently shared by almost everyone in their profession.

But this unhealthy obsession with mental health is by no means confined to Left-leaning students, broadcasters and Tweeters. Academics at University College London have even devised a ‘depression index’, which purports to measure the effects of the pandemic on the mental health of the nation, according to a survey of more than 30,000 respondents.

This week, if you’re interested, UCL found that between November 1 and January 3, levels of anxiety and depression in Britain rose by 24 per cent on the scale, from 5.0 to 6.2. That’s a pretty meaningless figure, if you ask me, but then misery-mongering is all the rage these days.

No less gloomy was this week’s announcement by the Oxford University Press that the word chosen by children as their word of the year for 2021 was ‘anxiety’.

This was the finding of a survey of 8,000 pupils, aged between seven and 14, who were asked to select from a shortlist of ten words the one they would use when talking about well-being and health last year (the other contenders were: ‘challenging’, ‘isolate’, ‘well-being’, ‘resilience’, ‘bubble’, ‘kindness’, ‘remote’, ‘cancelled’ and ‘empathy’).

I note, by the way, that the children picked anxiety ‘after discussing the words with their teachers’. Call me an old cynic, but this suggests that in some cases, the teachers may have prompted them to opt for it as their word of the year.

Certainly, I suspect if they had been left to their own devices, they would have chosen a very different shortlist of words to encapsulate their year of disrupted schooling. It would possibly have included ‘smartphone’, ‘Xbox’ and ‘pizza’.

But whatever the truth, I meant it quite literally when I described the modern obsession with mental health as unhealthy. Let’s face it, we all have our ups and downs as we go through life — and I know that many of us have truly dreadful lows from time to time. But I cannot believe it’s good for our well-being to label all such lows as symptoms of mental trouble.

I know it’s a terribly old-fashioned thing to say, but I can’t recall anyone of my parents’ generation complaining about the effects on their mental health of being rained on by Hitler’s bombs, night after night in the Blitz. But ask many of today’s young how they’ve been affected by gentle teasing or other ‘micro-aggressions’, and you’ll never hear the end of their suffering.

Nor do I remember anyone from my own childhood taking time off school because of feelings of stress, depression or anxiety. Measles, mumps or glandular fever, yes. ‘Mental health issues’, no.

Children given to moping or self-pity were told to cheer up, count their blessings, look on the bright side and generally buck up their ideas. I can’t help feeling that even in 2022, there’s something to be said for this approach.

These days, by contrast, I’m told it’s far from unusual for children to cite mental health reasons for taking time off sick.

Yes, I know that in many ways it’s harder for them than it was for us, given the cruelties of social media and other pressures of modern life.

But how can it improve their well-being to bombard them daily with trigger-warnings, helplines to contact if they’ve been ‘affected by any of the issues raised in this programme’ and endless items in the media about the effects of this or that on the nation’s mental health?

It’s almost as if they’re being invited to cast themselves as victims of a mental health pandemic as widespread as Covid.

I haven’t room here to rehearse the many proven ways of banishing minor woes, such as meeting friends, taking up a hobby or just staring out to sea. I will only say that if all else fails, you might try the little game I mentioned above.

The joy of it is that instead of being plunged into gloom every time another story comes up about mental health, you will think: ‘Kerching! That’s another imaginary tenner for me!’

If you’ve got to the end of this article, you may notice that I’ve mentioned the words mental health no fewer than 18 times. That’s £180 already in your fantasy bank. Look on it as a bonus to get you started.

BLOGGER'S LAMENT. I don't often copy and paste, verbatim, something I've read in the UK press, but this guy is making some valid points. He's a little too British for my liking: this "oh, buck up" and "your grandparents lived through the Blitz" attitude doesn't help a depressed person very much. But it's true what he says about mental health. It's everywhere, these days.

This, at a time when I have never EVER seen so much socially-sanctioned mental illness turned loose in the land, nor so much utter contempt for people (whack jobs, nut bars, head cases who should be in the looney bin) who suffer from the real thing.

I suffer from the real thing. I have suffered from the real thing at least from adolescence onward. Though I was never properly diagnosed, I now understand that I was clinically depressed at the age of 15. I suffered bouts of it, soul-destroying bouts that sometimes landed me in the hospital, for as long as I can remember. Not to mention the violent up-gusts that pushed me above the clouds, where the air is very very thin and may even damage your brain.

Bipolar, in other words. That's the word for it, or at least the nearest thing to describe it clinically. Am I proud of it? Not exactly, but I'm working on the shame bit. I know, in my intellect at least, that there is truly nothing to be ashamed of. But I DID create holy hell for the people I love the most, and was never able to explain it to them, because I'd "snap out of it" (at HUGE effort and strain) and try to right myself, so I looked and sounded "normal" again. For their sake.

This racked up a huge mental and emotional debt, and after years of struggle, there was a humiliating landslide. I cracked in 2005 in the most flamboyantly awful way possible. All I got out of it was a correct diagnosis, after the this-way-and-that-way that went on for some 30 years.

The average person with TRUE mental illness is misdiagnosed an average of five times before being correctly diagnosed. I will ask you to read that sentence one more time.

Five times? I think it was ten. Maybe more. Meantime, though I did moan a lot about the term "mental illness" being a trap (for how can you be "ill" and "well" at the same time?), there seemed to be no alternative. 

UNTIL NOW!

Until someone-or-other, probably an influencer on social media, decided to take "mental health", a perfectly respectable term, and squeeze and pump and inflate it until it was the size and bulk of the Hindenberg - and every bit as gaseous and overblown. 

Oh, the humanity! With this much gross and even ludicrous misuse and overuse, the whole thing becomes meaningless and - eventually - very easy to dismiss. The upshot of it is, those of us who really DO suffer, and HAVE suffered, and likely WILL suffer from "mental health issues" until we take our last breath, are still being marginalized, because we are lumped in with the chippers who are just jumping on the latest meaningless media bandwagon.

All right, I've chuffed and moaned enough for now. But I'm glad someone else is noticing this, and saying, wait a minute. It's very telling that it's a Brit. People in North America are still tiptoeing around the subject the way Tiny Tim tiptoed through the tulips. Except that when HE did it, it was at least entertaining.

I love you, Piers Morgan!

BLOGGER'S NOTE. I know damn well I am not supposed to be doing this. I have no permission from anyone to copy and paste an article from the Daily Mail. But posting a link is useless, no one will click on it anyway, and anyone remotely interested in "these two" HAS to read this! It's the most scathingly brilliant summation of this infuriatingly self-important, pompously narcissistic duo I've ever seen (with the possible exception of his LAST scathingly brilliant diatribe in the Daily Mail). Piers Morgan resigned from his job on morning TV when his views on Meghan Markle and her histrionics were censored, then was vindicated when the bigwigs decided he had every right to practice freedom of speech and say that he wouldn't believe a weather report from that empty-headed, self-absorbed, pretentious faux-royal piece of baggage. 

PIERS MORGAN: We need an urgent vaccine to save us from the Duke and Duchess of Polluting Hypocrisy and their cynical campaign to set up a rival money-grabbing renegade Royal Family

By Piers Morgan for MailOnline

There’s a new advisory on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s website Archewell, the one named after the son they were determined to keep private so he wouldn’t be used as a media tool.

‘We love having you here,’ the message reads, ‘but we’re mindful of screen time. Why not take a break? We’ll still be here.’

This disingenuous virtue-signaling guff was presumably crafted by one of the couple’s partners, the Centre for Humane Technology, which counsels how to remove toxicity from one’s life.

I’d certainly welcome a break from the world’s most toxic royals whose laughable mission statement is to put ‘compassion into action’ but who never miss a chance to spew unsubstantiated abuse about their own families that they persistently trash and disown.

As with everything in Meghan and Harry’s ludicrous world, they love to preach one thing and do the exact opposite.

They’ve just finished a four-day trip to New York which even by their two-faced standards set a new low bar for hypocrisy.

Ostensibly designed for them to lecture the world’s ‘ultra-rich’ pharmaceutical firms on ‘equality’, something the privileged, pampered prima donnas know all about from the palatial comfort of their Californian mansion, the trip was in fact a ruthlessly cynical attempt to establish their new alternative Royal Family.

And it made me puke.

Let’s remind ourselves that the Sussexes quit Britain and royal duty because they supposedly wanted privacy.

Yet ever since they landed in the United States, they’ve been engaged in a shameless, relentless orgy of self-publicizing, money-grabbing duplicity.

The duplicity comes from their pretense to loathe everything the Royal Family and Monarchy stands for, but at the same time gleefully milking their royal titles with the obscene greed of a sounder of swine, the term for a group of feral hogs that destroys everything in its path.

Meghan and Harry have their noses permanently rammed in the regal trough, and it’s obvious that they now intend to keep them there until they’ve made themselves repulsively rich and famous.

In this regard, they’re the royal version of the Kardashians – people with no discernible talent other than for pimping themselves out to the highest bidders and a craven desire to air their dirty family linen in public for financial gain.

But at least the Kardashians’ mission to be billionaire TMI merchants is founded on a basic honesty: they don’t pretend to be talented or saving the planet.

By contrast, at the heart of the Sussexes’ stated campaign to ‘uplift and unite’ us all with their searing compassion – unless you’re related to them, then you can go **** yourself - lies outrageous two-faced deceit.

For a prime example, the self-styled eco-warriors never stop lecturing the world about the environment.

Only last month, Harry warned us that climate change is one of the ‘most pressing issues we are facing.’

And one of the purposes of the Global Citizen Live concert they attended on Saturday night was to demand tough new eco laws halving US emissions by 2030.

So, you might assume they lead by example in deliberately reducing their own carbon footprint?

Don’t be silly!

In fact, they deliberately do the complete opposite.

On Saturday, the Sussexes flew back into Santa Barbara from New York in a private plane, a Dassault Falcon 2000 jet. It will have produced around 17 tons of carbon emissions for the flight.

It’s the same mode of transport they have repeatedly used – often as guests of celebrity pals like Elton John and George Clooney - despite being criticized for obvious double standards.

Now, I’ve nothing against private jets, and have used them myself, but I’m not constantly lecturing the world on the urgent need to reduce its carbon footprint.

The hypocrisy is breath-taking.

Their mode of road travel follows a similar theme.

Waiting for them on the tarmac in Santa Barbara was a large gas-guzzling 4x4.

In New York, the Prince and Princess of Pollution sped around Manhattan in a luxury convoy of at least three Range Rovers and SUVs.

To quote from their own speech on Saturday, this willful disregard for their own eco-hectoring is ‘like throwing away life vests, when those around you are drowning.’

And what were they doing there anyway?

Ostensibly, the Sussexes were in the Big Apple to harangue pharmaceutical firms for not doing enough for ‘equality’ when it comes to dispensing vaccines to poorer countries.

As with everything else these two harp on about, the real issues surrounding vaccines and patents are far more complicated than they suggest, and the companies they’re attacking have already saved tens of millions of lives with their brilliant work in this pandemic.

But one of Global Citizen’s main objectives is also to ‘defeat poverty.’

Well, I’m sure we can all agree that nothing screams defeating poverty more than Meghan Markle sporting $100,000 worth of designer clothes – though whoever paid her to wear that unflattering bulky winter wardrobe on warm sunny days probably deserves a refund - and lavishly expensive jewelry as she trotted around impoverished parts of Harlem where she read schoolkids extracts from her own book, The Bench.

We were told this cringe-making display of self-aggrandizement was to ‘promote early literacy’ but as reviewers of this god-awful pile of bilge have attested, The Bench is to literacy what Madonna is to growing old gracefully.

It takes a special kind of brazen shamelessness to use children who can barely read to fire up your book’s flagging sales.

Just as it does to film yourself doing so, as Meghan and Harry reportedly did throughout their trip, to fulfil your massive multi-million-dollar contracts with paymasters like Netflix.

It also takes a special kind of brazen shamelessness to attack big pharma for being ‘ultra-rich’ and not doing enough to promote equality, when you are making yourselves ultra-rich by preaching about equality from your private jets and nine-bedroom, 16-bathroom mansion.

But my biggest concern about this New York trip though is not about the Sussexes’ shocking hypocrisy which happens with such regularity now that it’s lost all ability to surprise.

No, what worries me far more is the ongoing damage they are doing to the Royal Family and Monarchy with their very transparent attempt to establish an American-based renegade royal entity.

One that’s not based on the kind of quiet, admirable, stoic, modest, duty-led majesty of the Queen, but on a cheap, tacky, noisy, toxic, Kardashian-style 24/7 invasion of our senses that’s specifically intended to fleece royal status for maximum personal commercial benefit.

Meghan Markle’s incendiary but still-unproven claims of racism and callousness against the royals during her Oprah whineathon back in March have already caused very real harm to the Monarchy, especially in parts of the Commonwealth.

Now she and her hostage victim husband are striving to be a rival Royal Family that bestrides the globe like a woke colossus, and they’re being enabled in this delusion by the likes of New York mayor Bill de Blasio and the United Nations who treated them like world leaders in the past week.

New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio hasn’t found time to pay an important long overdue trip to Rikers prison but did find time to suck up to the Sussexes.

Governor Kathy Hochul took time out from her presumably busy schedule to join de Blasio for a photo PR op with the Sussexes at One World where they also met the UN Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed.

And the US Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield was so thrilled by rubbing shoulders with the royal couple that she excitedly posted pictures of them all on social media.

All of them were treating Meghan and Harry like world leaders.

But they’re not.

They’re a retired actress and a retired Prince pretending to be world leaders so they can fill their royal boots with as much filthy lucre as possible before the penny finally drops to their gullible acolytes about what their real game is.

I see right through these ridiculous little chancers.

We need an urgent vaccine to protect us from these right royal hypocrites.

PIERS MORGAN: Meghan and Harry? . . . PLEASE SHUT UP.

PIERS MORGAN: You're right, Meghan, confronting inequality is uncomfortable – but not as uncomfortable as watching unemployed Harry lecturing the world about it from the comfort of your Hollywood mansion hideaway

By Piers Morgan for MailOnline

Published: 09:06 EDT, 7 July 2020 | Updated: 09:29 EDT, 7 July 2020

I've seen less disconcerting hostage videos.

That was my thought this morning as I watched Prince Harry staring blankly into a camera and lecturing the world – yet again - on our need to face up to our privilege.

As he spoke about why we all have to right the wrongs of the past, his wife Meghan stared intently at him, boring her eyes into his skull as if she was virtually transporting her own pre-programmed thought processes into his brain.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but at one stage it looked like his lips were moving in sync with her blinking eyes.

We're going to have to be a little uncomfortable right now,' said Meghan when she herself spoke.

No s***.

She continued: 'Because it's only in pushing through that discomfort that we get to the other side of this and find the place where a high tide raises all ships.'

This sounded very profound.

Then I remembered where I'd heard it before.

President John F. Kennedy famously said the words 'a rising tide lifts all boats' in a 1963 speech.

Meghan just forgot to credit him. 

An easy mistake, perhaps, when you're desperate to impress everyone with the power of your own world-changing rhetoric.

What was even less palatable than her linguistic plagiarism was Meghan's next claim: 'Equality does not put anyone on the back foot, it puts us all on the same footing - which is a fundamental human right.'

The essence of this assertion is entirely correct.

But there's something quite breathtakingly unedifying about a very rich deeply privileged Duchess banging on about equality from her $20 million borrowed mansion in Hollywood.

One of the few benefits of the coronavirus crisis has been that fame-hungry attention-seeking narcissistic celebrities have been put firmly back in their boxes.

From Madonna sitting naked in the rose-petalled bath of her lavish home as she told us COVID-19 was 'the great equaliser', to Gal Gadot's grotesquely tone-deaf annihilation of Imagine with a bunch of other tuneless virtue-signalling stars, the pandemic has exposed the utter irrelevance of celebrity culture when there's a killer virus on the loose.

For Meghan and Harry, this moment of reckoning has come at a particularly awkward time.

Six months ago, they quit the Royal Family and Britain in a blaze of aggrieved self-righteous glory - and announced big plans to be newly liberated global superstars, trading off their royal titles to make themselves enormously rich.

We were informed that they had 'never been happier' and were 'very excited' about their new lives of freedom from control by evil racist palace courtiers and the even more evil racist UK media.

It was a spectacular two-fingered snub to the Queen and the Monarchy, and to all the British taxpayers who had funded their lavish lifestyle.

And for a few weeks they were one of the most discussed and debated news stories in the world, dominating newspaper headlines and TV bulletins – all fuelling their superstar status.

But then came the biggest health crisis for a century, and suddenly we all forgot about them with the same speed that all their big plans for global domination got cancelled.

Meghan and Harry's terrible 'struggle' that they'd spent months moaning about was now put sharply into perspective by horrendous, chaotic scenes at hospitals around the world as heroic health workers risked their lives to save people infected by the disease.

Frankly, as Rhett Butler might say, we didn't give a damn about them or any other self-absorbed celebrities.

The REAL stars were the doctors and nurses on the Covid frontline.

As the threat of lockdown loomed, the Sussexes faced a dilemma: should they return to the UK from their vast Canadian riverside hideaway so Harry could help his family support the British people in our darkest hour since World War II?

Or should they hop on a private jet to Los Angeles?

They chose the latter, decamping to the sprawling $20 million Hollywood home of American actor Tyler Perry.

And that is where they have stayed ever since.

The house is an eight-bedroom, 12-bathroom Tuscan-style villa, which sits on 22 acres on the top of a hill in the ultra-exclusive Beverly Ridge Estates guard-gated community, offering sweeping views of the city from the backyard and with a massive swimming pool as its centrepiece feature.

It's hard to imagine a more luxurious or spacious place to spend lockdown.

Or a more incongruous place from which to lecture the world on equality.

'It's not going to be easy,' said Harry, 'and in some cases it's not going to be comfortable - but it needs to be done, because guess what, everybody benefits.'

Hmmm.

Again, there's nothing inaccurate about that statement, especially when applied to racism.

(Though his direct attack on the Commonwealth for its racist colonial wrongs suggests a poor grasp of history given it was formed in 1932 to bring an end to the British Empire and make amends for all the racist colonial wrongs with the British Empire.)

But there's something horribly inappropriate about it coming from a jobless prince sitting in a Hollywood mansion, living off his father's money and still reportedly using British taxpayer cash to fund his family's very expensive security costs.

In fact, it's hard to think of a more privileged, elitist life than the one they're now currently living – one that has all the luxury and glamour of royal life without the need to perform any of the duty.

I really didn't want to write about Meghan and Harry today.

I've managed to avoid it for four months and know there genuinely are far more important things to worry about.

But by making such overtly controversial political pronouncements, they are deliberately forcing themselves back into the news cycle and that makes it impossible to ignore them.

Their latest outburst follows last week's extraordinary revelations by Meghan in court documents filed in her privacy case against the Mail On Sunday.

She claimed, with zero evidence and quite staggering delusion, that her wedding to Harry made $1.2 billion in tourism cash so more than paid for itself.

She said she was 'unprotected' by the 'institution' of the Royal Family and was unhappy she couldn't take paid work like minor royals including Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie - who don't carry out public duties, so the comparison is completely irrelevant.

She complained that the Palace didn't correct 'hundreds of thousands of inaccurate articles' about her, which is a laughably exaggeration and, as Palace sources responded, the Duchess didn't seem to understand the difference between untrue stories and negative critical ones that were true.

But honestly, who cares about any of this trivial first world bleating when so many people are losing their lives and livelihoods?

In several weeks, a new biography of the couple, written by friends to 'correct' all the supposed myths about them, will be published and doubtless spray more dirt at the Royal Family, causing further embarrassment and upset for the Queen in her 94th year.

None of this sits well with Meghan and Harry's claim when they quit the Royals that they were doing so for the sake of privacy.

It's now clear that this pair of royal renegades have no intention of remaining 'private' and every intention of continuing to lecture us how to think and behave from behind the protected walls of their gilded new Hollywood life.

This wouldn't matter so much if people weren't suffering so badly from the terrible impact of the coronavirus and the horrific economic fallout as a consequence.

The last thing people want to hear right now is yet more whining from Meghan and Harry about how badly they've been treated, yet more digs at the Queen and other members of the Royal Family like William and Kate who have stepped up so commendably to comfort the British people during the pandemic, and yet more of their haughty, patronising, hypocritical sermons about equality.

So, before I return to more important things, three final words of advice for the Duke and Duchess: please shut up. 

(Please note! I don't own this material and am re-posting it here for educational purposes only, and because Piers Morgan KICKS ASS.)  

Why is it still OK to mock mental illness?

This is extremely painful for me to write, but I’ll try. Today I saw a YouTube video by a very entertaining duo of filmmakers who make videos of things and show them in extreme slow motion. They often use the word “crazy” to describe them, which is a loose term that can mean practically anything (including mental illness), but they also frequently use the term “mental”. “Look at that! That is totally mental.”

I hear this kind of expression daily, and if I say anything about it I’m pretty much attacked for being oversensitive or having “no sense of humor”. But this casually-used slur against hurting, needing people is done without any thought that it might be disrespectful, let alone abusive.

Can I explain? Daily, I hear people react to news items of over-the-top behaviour with “oh, he’s just a whack job.” “She’s a nut bar, what can you expect?” Then, cheek-by-jowl, we see news items about the rising tide of suicides and “mental breakdowns” and PTSD and being “triggered” and society's noble attempt at “reducing the stigma” (never getting rid of it – that’s too much to ask).

What is going on here? Many think it’s “progress” and enlightenment, but as someone who has lost several dear ones to suicide, I don’t think so. “Reach out for help” is the new “thoughts and prayers”, and it means almost nothing because in most cases the “help” just isn’t there. The most that desperate families can expect for their suicidal teen is a wait list or a misdiagnosis (and people with mental illness are misdiagnosed an average of FIVE TIMES before the medical community gets it right), or poor treatment or mismedication, or even moralizing, while at the same time they have to endure the “whack job” mentality, the daily heedless slurs that still prevail in a culture that only poses as compassionate.

The “reach out for help” isn’t a bad thing, and I’m not saying “don’t do it”. But it is a bandaid solution and a way of dismissing an uncomfortable topic, so you can entertain the illusion that you have "raised awareness", and thus done something important. But it gets worse. "Reach out for help" completely puts the onus on the sufferer to make themselves better. Depression is immobilizing by nature, and perhaps you’d be surprise to learn that the heavy stigma and general contempt for mental illness that still lurks under all the trite phrases causes people to try to hide it.

I am sure no one will be too interested in reading this, as it will be seen as “negative” and not acknowledging the great strides society has recently made. "Brave" celebrities come forward and "admit" they have suffered from depression (admission being a form of confession). This does not help the cause and only helps us distance ourselves. It is only very recently that anyone even thought of having a walk or fund-raising for “mental health”. Ten years ago the very idea would have caused bafflement, even a bit of embarrassment. Why are we just now beginning to look at an “issue” which has ALWAYS affected the human race throughout its history? Why does mental illness still represent the last target of acceptable abuse?

Plastic Jesus

ARTIST: Trad and Anon
TITLE: Plastic Jesus


Well, I don't care if it rains or freezes,
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far.

{Refrain}
Plastic Jesus, plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far.

I don't care if it rains or freezes
As long as I've got my Plastic Jesus
Glued to the dashboard of my car,
You can buy Him phosphorescent
Glows in the dark, He's Pink and Pleasant,
Take Him with you when you're travelling far

{Refrain}

I don't care if it's dark or scary
Long as I have magnetic Mary
Ridin' on the dashboard of my car
I feel I'm protected amply
I've got the whole damn Holy Family
Riding on the dashboard of my car

{Refrain}

You can buy a Sweet Madonna
Dressed in rhinestones sitting on a
Pedestal of abalone shell
Goin' ninety, I'm not wary
'Cause I've got my Virgin Mary
Guaranteeing I won't go to Hell

{Refrain}

I don't care if it bumps or jostles
Long as I got the Twelve Apostles
Bolted to the dashboard of my car
Don't I have a pious mess
Such a crowd of holiness
Strung across the dashboard of my car

{Refrain}

No, I don't care if it rains or freezes
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
But I think he'll have to go
His magnet ruins my radio
And if we have a wreck he'll leave a scar

{Refrain}

Riding through the thoroughfare
With his nose up in the air
A wreck may be ahead, but he don't mind
Trouble coming, he don't see
He just keeps his eyes on me
And any other thing that lies behind

Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Though the sun shines on his back
Makes him peel, chip, and crack
A little patching keeps him up to par

When pedestrians try to cross
I let them know who's boss
I never blow my horn or give them warning
I ride all over town
Trying to run them down
And it's seldom that they live to see the morning

Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
His halo fits just right
And I use it as a sight
And they'll scatter or they'll splatter near and far

When I'm in a traffic jam
He don't care if I say Damn
I can let all sorts of curses roll
Plastic Jesus doesn't hear
For he has a plastic ear
The man who invented plastic saved my soul

Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Once his robe was snowy white
Now it isn't quite so bright
Stained by the smoke of my cigar

God made Christ a Holy Jew
God made Him a Christian too
Paradoxes populate my car
Joseph beams with a feigned elan
From the shaggy dash of my furlined van
Famous cuckold in the master plan

Naughty Mary, smug and smiling
Jesus dainty and beguiling
Knee-deep in the piling of my van
His message clear by night or day
My phosphorescent plastic Gay
Simpering from the dashboard of my van

When I'm goin' fornicatin
I got my ceramic Satan
Sinnin' on the dashboard of my Winnebago Motor Home
The women know I'm on the level
Thanks to the wild-eyed stoneware devil
Ridin' on the dashboard of my Winnebago Motor Home
Sneerin' from the dashboard of my Winnebago Motor Home
Leering from the dashboard of my van

If I weave around at night
And the police think I'm tight
They'll never find my bottle, though they ask
Plastic Jesus shelters me
For His head comes off, you see
He's hollow, and I use Him for a flask

Plastic Jesus, plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Ride with me and have a dram
Of the blood of the Lamb
Plastic Jesus is a holy bar

I did not write any part of this song. I remembered Paul Newman singing it in Cool Hand Luke, and wondered if I could find a video anywhere (which I could), then looked up the lyrics. Most versions had one or two verses, but this one went on forever, apparently written by that celebrated lyricist, Arthur Unknown (sometimes known by his pen name, Anon).

It's a strange thing, obviously a sour parody of What a Friend We Have in Jesus. The thing is, it was not so very long ago that I was a churchgoing Christian and even a lay minister, a preacher. Seems like a lifetime ago. So I can't quite join in wholeheartedly. But when I saw what was happening to "my" church, its slickness and desperate attempts at hipness to attract a "younger" crowd (i. e. people under 80 with more disposable income), I felt sickened. All of it was done in the name of finance. In all the time I was with that church, the main thing I heard about was not the gospels, but a desperate lack of money and the need to give, give, give.

This wasn't about hungry people overseas or Christian education, but (mostly) paying a mortgage 

which always seemed to be shockingly in arrears. If we as individuals had conducted our finances that way, the bank would have put us in foreclosure. As it was, the larger church carried us as perpetual deadbeats.

Guilt trips abounded if you didn't or couldn't raise the amount of your offerings annually, because after all, the church's expenses kept going up, and it was up to us to take up the shortfall. Don't you want to support your church? Tell us, then, just what are your priorities? Didn't we hear you went on a vacation last year? (WHAT, you went to Vegas?) Once a year, incredibly, someone came to each person's house to ask them how much they were giving, and gently but firmly pressured them into giving more. I hated this and felt it was a violation of privacy and completely unfair, but I never said anything because you just didn't say anything.  I knew if I did, I would likely be gently pressured back into the beliefs and policies of the fold (with a vague but palpable ostracism as the penalty
if I didn't), or perhaps genteelly labelled "mentally ill" (well, dear, she can't help it, you know). 

As a symptom of a structure that had been rotten for years , leadership finally caved in, and no one had the first idea why it happened, or how. It's like my "do husbands fall from the sky?" post. Jobs don't fall from the sky. Husbands don't, friends don't. WE PICK THEM. We vote our leaders in, then bitch about them endlessly, even demonize them. We were snowjobbed by a shallow huckster, fell for him hook, line and sinker, then turned him into some sort of Satanic figure who had destroyed our innocent little lamb of a church.

Bullshit!

So I walked away, even tried a few other churches and was suffocated and frankly bored. The wheezy hymns, the lack of life, the lacklustre attempts to inject some enthusiasm and relevance into the services, all of it fell flat for me. More than once, when I tried to sit down, someone put their hand out to cover the spot on the pew and said, "My family sits here." No hello, not even a "sorry", just a "go away".

It left a hole, because for some fifteen years I was deeply involved, but the last several years were just hell for me, because there was absolutely NO ONE I could talk to about it all. It would be seen as "disloyal".

But I could no longer adhere to a church with such shallow values, a church which would not or could not or just didn't want to take responsibility for all its bad decisions.

Plastic Jesus, indeed.

(CODA. As usual , while I work on these things, or after I post them, more comes to me. In this case, it startles me that I wrote the words I just wrote. I had no idea I was going to. Not that I've never written about church disillusionment before. I have, and I will again. But in this case, I merely came across a YouTube clip from Cool Hand Luke, then thought of the song, then Googled the lyrics. Funny stuff, and strange, too. And that, I thought to myself, would be that. But in the world of exploration through writing, "that" is NEVER "that" - and I thank whatever God I still have for the process.)

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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People you know very well

(From the Gospel According to Facebook, chapter 946, verse 22:)

Adding Friends/Friend Requests

Adding Friends

How do I add a friend?

A quick way to add your friends is to import your contacts. You can also add friends from their Timelines:

1. Search for the person you'd like to friend using the search bar at the top of any Facebook page.
2. Click on their name to go to their Timeline.
3. Click the Add Friend button next to their name. You might not see this button on some people's Timelines, depending on their privacy settings.

Once this person accepts your request, they'll show up in your Facebook friends list.

Note: If you've been temporarily blocked from adding new friends, you'll need to wait until the block is finished. Learn more.

You're reading the Desktop Help answer. Learn more in our other Help Centers.

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Who should I send friend requests to?

You should send friend requests to people you have a real-life connection to, like your friends, family, coworkers or classmates.

If you're interested in receiving updates from people you find interesting, but don't know personally (ex: journalists, celebrities, political figures), try following them instead of sending them friend requests.

(Emphasis mine.)

OK, so this is the official word.

Then why do I know so many people who have literally THOUSANDS of Facebook friends?

If I ask anyone about this, they quickly look away and change the subject. Myself, I've received stern warnings  about "friending" people I don't "have a real-life connection to", and have even been threatened I'll be cut off Facebook forever if I even think of approaching someone in my field whom I merely admire. The shaming and even mildly threatening tone of these warnings is really something else. 

So how do these people make over a thousand (or two, or three, up to FIVE thousand) close, personal friends without being cut off like I almost was?

Inquiring minds want to know.

But no one, NOT ONE person, not even Google will tell me what is going on here. I've tried and tried, but apparently it doesn't happen.  Did each of those, say, 3000 people receive a friend request from someone they have a real-life connection with? A close friend or at least a colleague? I've never met that many people in my entire life. Not only that, carefully friending people one by one would be a mighty slow process, unless you're so gol-dern popular that friend requests just come flooding in every day.

The message seems to be: OK, Margaret, once again, you have no friends because nobody likes you. If they liked you, thousands of friends would be magnetically attracted to you with no effort on your part at all. In fact, the entire world would decide in unison that it liked you. But no, Margaret. It's not like that. Not for you.

You DON'T have 3000 or 4000 Facebook "friends" and you never will. Even if you approach someone you DO know well, and for some reason they don't respond right away (i. e. they almost never check their Facebook page), it will appear on a list that will some day flash in your face: all those requests you sent that were "refused". This is seen as a security issue and leads to stern warnings that you are about to be thrown out of Facebook.

The real reason being, not that you have TOO MANY friends, but that you have NOT ENOUGH friends and aren't cool enough, not knowing enough to stay on-board. It's the bloody schoolyard all over again.

So most people just sit there while wave upon wave of closepersonalfriend requests billow in daily. That doesn't happen to me.

I am also on LinkedIn, and joined in an attempt to find a person I needed to talk to. This time, surprisingly, I wasn't punished, but I don't know WHY I wasn't. I get "link requests", or whatever they are called, at least every week, if not every day. In most cases I have never even heard of these people, and I have no idea where and how they found my name.

I've tried this myself, and it never works. I get another stern finger-shaking warning. To "link" with someone, you have to know them well and have their email address. That's the rule. In other words, to be in touch with them, you already have to be in touch with them. It's a security thing, see.

Is this hypocrisy, or what? Why am I the ONLY person I have ever known who even talks about all this? If I had someone's email, I would never bother to "link" with them because I AM ALREADY LINKED WITH THEM! It's kind of like Facebook, you see, a hopeless Catch-22 that nobody else ever mentions because they are comfortably "in", and don't want to do anything to threaten that position (i. e. consort with someone who is hopelessly "out").

I had the thought, once, upon seeing someone on my page with something like 3,120 "friends", that there must be a whole lotta cheatin' going on. Bribes, maybe? The person never strikes me as a celebrity, in fact many of them look like ordinary schlubs. Like me. So there must be a way around the stern, quasi-legal warnings about "security", the implication that you might only have "one more chance" to make good before you are drummed out of the club forever.

I am a hopeless dinosaur, I know it, and any attempt to join in will be seen as a pathetic effort to be "cool" when it is patently obvious I don't belong here and never will. The harder I try, the more pathetic I look.

And that's just the way it is.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm