Take care. I love you. Be well

Something has been bothering me, a lot, and I’ve gone back and forth on posting about it. Originally I was going to make a YouTube commentary, but couldn’t bring myself to do it without going off the deep end. Then I thought of Facebook, but knew I could get myself into all kinds of trouble there, and that’s the last thing I want.

This incident happened some months ago, when I saw a rare post from a Facebook friend whose posts never seemed to show up in my feed (and only about 10 per cent of my “friends” ever appear there. It's always the same old. The reason? Facebook assumes that, because they're in my feed a lot, it’s what I want, so gives me “more of the same”). 

In typical Facebook fashion, this is someone I know of, but don’t know personally, and with whom I have over a hundred Facebook friends in common. In part due to his platform as an edgy "alternative" arts journalist, he has been quite open about his lifelong struggles with mental illness, believing (and I truly agree with this) that this topic needs to be hauled out of the shadows where it never belonged in the first place. But something was very amiss with his post.

I went on his page to see what was going on. The posts were strange and kind of scary. He used the word “manic” several times, in a lot of different connotations (including some crude sexual references the likes of which I could not find anywhere else on his page). There were veiled and not-so-veiled references to self-destruction and violent death. This made me very uneasy, but far worse than that were the comments: the dozens of “LOLs” and “right ons” and even “awesomes”, as if his readers were finding all of it hugely entertaining.

In spite of or maybe because of the work he had done illuminating mental health issues, people apparently thought this was some kind of exuberant prank and were egging him on. Meantime, hints of suicide kept showing through. He mentioned looking down the seventeen stories of his apartment building and imagined “impaling myself on the maples below”. More LOL’s, more “right ons”, dozens of idiot emojis - and (worst of all) “Hey, we’ve all been there” (which we HAVEN’T. Nothing is more bogus and potentially dangerous as empty, false “empathy”, pretending to know what it feels like when you absolutely do NOT. It’s like saying you know about cancer from a mosquito bite.)

The posts escalated, becoming more florid and making less sense, along with photos that were increasingly alarming, until someone – a family member, I believe - posted with great urgency that anyone who had seen him should contact the family immediately. They didn’t know where he was.

Most of the comments by now expressed concern, but there were still a few dimwitted remarks (“Hey, it's all good! You’re Canada’s gonzo journalist, mate!”) People who compare someone to Hunter S. Thomson should be reminded of how his life ended, with a single gunshot wound to the head. 

When the family finally announced they had called the police, most were relieved, but others still went on and on about “oh, no, you didn’t call the COPS on him!” The trouble with unburying mental illness from its airless crypt is that you uproot a whole array of primitive, ignorant, even goddamn stupid attitudes that go with it, such as denial and misperception and totally inappropriate “seeing the funny side” when it really isn’t too damn funny at all. I'm not against it, but humor about such a subject only comes in retrospect. Perspective equals time plus distance. Can you make jokes about heart disease when you’re flat on your back and fighting for your life?

There was a brief update from his brother about how grateful he was to the police for getting him safely to the hospital. This seemed to shut up the idiot Greek chorus for a while. "Police" is such a knee-jerk term, especially to jerks who don't think. The police are trained to deal with people in all kinds of distress, for all kinds of reasons, and for the most part, they do their job very well. But people still use terms that reflect very dated, primitive thinking: "they dragged him off", "they threw him in a mental hospital", etc., when very likely no person was "thrown" at all. Some still use that most horrendous and dehumanizing of terms: "they put him away". It's one of those holdovers from another century (or two) that deserves to disappear.

I see two kinds of posts on FB about the “hot topic” of mental health (the term seemingly replacing “mental illness”, which assumed you could never be well): boilerplate posts as ready-made as a microwave dinner (“Most of you won’t even bother to read this far” and “copy and paste this message, DON’T share, just to show you care!”, emoji, emoji, emoji). I always have the vague uneasy feeling that someone is making money off these things. To alleviate that vague guilt that hangs around most of us these days, people WILL copy and paste the thing, hoping they've done their bit to "raise awareness" and can just get on with their day.

The other approach is much like the “cancer awareness” thing where it seems like a bunch of cheerleaders waving pink pom-poms. In this case, God only knows where your donations end up. I’m not saying we shouldn’t address the subject - quite the opposite. But let’s really talk, talk about things that are real and painful, not spout easy platitudes and rah-rah for the team. Believe it or not, there is a time when "being positive" is the last thing you need to do.

I think depression and PTSD have largely come out of the closet, which is a start, though celebrities still “admit” they suffered from depression years and years ago (NEVER recently – that’s still too great a risk). PTSD is associated with first responders, military heroes, sometimes cops, but that’s about it. If you were sexually abused as a child and can barely function, that’s not it, it has to be called something else. Due to media emphasis and a certain level of social discomfort, PTSD has been largely claimed by heroic figures running into burning buildings. People insist they’re even more heroic for the tremendously risky act of seeking help.

I won't say much about myself because it is too excruciating, except to say that when I "disclosed" to a literary agent that I have bipolar disorder, she emailed me back with two words: "You're brave." It struck me as a remark along the lines of, "I wish I had the nerve to wear that dress." The "brave" thing was weird, because I could have bipolar disorder and be the biggest chicken on the block. Having it doesn't automatically make you "brave". So I guess she thought I was brave to have the nerve to tell her such a thing. I was left with the feeling that I had done something that had made her profoundly uncomfortable.

I like to say, and often people don’t have a clue what I mean, that when it comes to mental illness, we haven’t had our Stonewall yet. Every day, people bandy about terms like “whack job” and “nut bar”, expressing casual contempt for people who, like my Facebook friend, COULD NOT HELP his behaviour, because that is the nature of the illness. The mentally ill are the very last group of people in our culture whom you can vilify, mock and dismiss with no penalties, because no one even notices you’re doing it. We all say those things, don’t we? Why is it such a problem? It doesn’t really mean anything. Why are you so damned oversensitive? 

I lost a beloved brother, the one confidante and support I had in a childhood lived in an emotional war zone, to the damaging effects of schizophrenia, back when all they could do for people was drug them senseless to keep them from “acting out”. And yes, sometimes we lost track of him, didn’t know where he was and had to call the police, and it was horrific. Then when the worst happened, my mother-in-law said to me in a terrible double-entendre, “at least now you know where he is.” 

Why does it have to get that bad? It doesn't. If the health care system were more complete, if there were enough beds, if people would drop their mockery and horror and act human, as human as they probably could be if they tried - but I digress. My point is, what you say reflects what you think. It displays your understanding or your ignorance, not just to your Facebook friends but to the world. 

Sometimes the less you say the better. Just keep it simple. Take care. I love you. Be well.

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?

Louis Wain: a cat's a cat

I think I was in my teens when I first encountered the enigmatic, provocative cat paintings of Louis Wain. Throughout his life he was moved to represent his beloved cats in a wide variety of artistic styles, including a highly abstract form which was so original and unknown that it sometimes scared the hell out of people. As is so often the case, fear and ignorance hardened the public's  perception of the artist into a distorted and only partially-true stereotype.

Thus a brilliant and inspired, not to mention significant, contributor to 19th century art was jammed into a box of conventional belief and nailed there, a condition made infinitely worse by constant replication on that mindless Xerox machine of a communications system, the internet. So how much of it is actually true?

When I was about 16, I remember reading  a Time-Life coffee table book called The Mind which was full of (I realize now) ridiculous, stigmatizing untruths about mental disorders. Wain was used as a classic case of "the tragedy of mental illness", with his charming magazine cats slowly and hideously devolving into foul fiends from hell: surely, the authors claimed, a sign that Wain had gone irreversibly "mad".

This "madness" was labelled "schizophrenia", at a time when 90% of the population would define the term as "a split personality". Nobody who wrote about this had the first idea what they were talking about, but all at once Wain's work was cemented in a sort of immutable chronology, with the most representative and realistic cats at the beginning, followed by the whimsically naughty greeting-card-style cats, then those oddball wildly-colored-and-patterned things, and finally, the horrendous, scary, oh-my-we-don't-like-that-one cats trailing along at the end. This was proof positive that not only had Wain gone mad,  his very art had slowly but relentlessly deteriorated from drawing-room respectability into something no decent person would ever want to look at.

There is biographical evidence that Wain WAS sometimes difficult to deal with, even antisocial, and could be "inappropriate" (which in Edwardian times was almost synonymous with being a "madman"), and spent some time in an asylum when his sisters had had enough of his strange ideas and angry acting out. As in too many cases, he landed there in part because his funds had run out and he had nowhere else to go. For as time went on, his charming anthropomorphic cats went out of style, as everything else eventually does. 

Because he was an artist in his soul and not just an illustrator, Wain kept on painting, even while hospitalized - and yes, he DID paint his cats in a tremendous variety of styles, from the most purr-rumbling, paw-kneading, whiskery realism to the most wildly, even disturbingly abstract - but none of these works was ever dated. Thus there is no evidence at all that as his mind supposedly deteriorated, his conventional cats relentlessly and sequentially devolved from whimsical creatures to bizarre psychedelic ones, to (finally) those dreadful Satanic figures that barely resembled cats at all.

Art historians who have actually taken the time to research his life have concluded that Wain was likely not a schizophrenic at all, but may have lived with another condition that was even less understood. We now know much more about autism and Asperger syndrome and the many gradations of it, and are even beginning to unlock its artistic/creative significance. From existing records, it is likely he painted his conventional cats in parallel with the wildly imaginitive, even disturbing-looking cats he became famous for. Yes, he probably DID experience a chronic mental or perhaps social liability that sometimes separated him from his fellow humans. But he never once gave up on his beloved cats, portraying them in every conceivable manner, with a few that were so startlingly original that no one knew what to make of them. They just didn't fit anywhere. Happens sometimes with these artist types, as with that other fellow. . . you know, the "madman" who painted all those sunflowers.

The little arrangement I give you here is NOT in any kind of chronology. Nor is it completely random. These cats are here because I like them. The more extreme ones aren't here, not because I dislike them but because they're already getting enough (if not too much) play on websites called Psychedelic Cats! and Wain's Schizo Cats. Each inevitably includes a rectangular diagram cut into squares, with each cube representing a stage of successive deterioration rather than a phase of inspiration. I even found a few paintings with labels like "early stages". Obviously, Wain's originality was a sign of sickness. We are still poking the madman with sharp sticks.

Anyway, as I sigh in my usual  exasperation at what a lot of ignorant lunkheads human beings are, I found this snippet on an art site, and it clarified things a little bit for me. 

"Dr. Michael Fitzgerald disputes the claim of schizophrenia, indicating Wain more than likely had Asperger syndrome (AS). Of particular note, Fitzgerald indicates that while Wain’s art takes on a more abstract nature as he grew older, his technique and skill as a painter did not diminish as one would expect from a schizophrenic. Moreover, elements of visual agnosia are demonstrated in his painting, a key element in some cases of AS. If Wain had visual agnosia, it may have manifested itself merely as an extreme attention to detail.

A series of five of his paintings is commonly used as an example in psychology textbooks to putatively show the change in his style as his psychological condition deteriorated. However, it is not known if these works were created in the order usually presented, as Wain did not date them. Rodney Dale, author of Louis Wain: The Man Who Drew Cats, has criticised the belief that the five paintings can be used as an example of Wain’s deteriorating mental health, writing: “Wain experimented with patterns and cats, and even quite late in life was still producing conventional cat pictures, perhaps 10 years after his [supposedly] ‘later’ productions which are patterns rather than cats.”

H. G. Wells said of him, “He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.”

His work is now highly collectible but care is needed as forgeries are common."

In my merry lobotomobile

Walter Freeman, who championed lobotomy in the US, toured with his “lobotomobile” demonstrating the procedure

Instant Articles
News Jan 14, 2017 Goran Blazeski

Throughout his life, Walter Freeman was obsessed with finding a cure for mental illness and he thought he found it when he became the first to introduce and popularize the prefrontal lobotomy in the United States.

He perfected the procedure by using ice picks hammered into each frontal lobe through the back of each eye socket and performed nearly 3500 lobotomies in his career.

Walter Freeman was born on November 14th, 1895, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. His father was a very successful otolaryngologist and his maternal grandfather was William Williams Keen, a prominent surgeon in the Civil War.

Dr. Walter Freeman left, and Dr. James W. Watts study an X-ray before a psychosurgical operation. 

Psychosurgery is cutting into the brain to form new patterns and rid a patient of delusions, obsessions, nervous tensions, etc.

In his early years, Walter wasn’t interested in medicine but after he received a bachelor’s degree in 1916 from Yale University he studied neurology at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a medical degree in 1920.

In 1935 Freeman learned of a frontal lobe ablation technique when Carlyle Jacobsen tried frontal and prefrontal lobotomies on chimps and came to a conclusion that the chimps became less aggressive and more manageable.

The same year Antonio Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurosurgeon devised a leucotome, an instrument for dividing the white matter in the brain, and performed the first procedure known as prefrontal leukotomy.

In 1936 Freeman modified Moniz’s technique and together with his colleague James Watts he performed the first lobotomy operation in the United States on a 63-year-old Kansas housewife suffering from anxiety, insomnia, and depression. He was convinced that the operation was successful and was satisfied with the results so he started to propagandize the procedure heavily recommending it for any type of disorders, from psychosis, depression or neurosis to criminality.

Egas Moniz

Trying to find a more efficient way to perform the procedure he developed the “ice-pick lobotomy”- an operation that didn’t require drilling holes in the skull. Instead, he inserted an ice-pick-like instrument above each eye of the patient by tapping it with a hammer.

Insulin shock therapy administered in Lapinlahti Hospital, Helsinki in the 1950s

Many of his colleagues criticized his method but Freeman was convinced that it was a success and recommended the procedure. Between 1939 and 1951, almost 20,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States and as Freeman claimed, the operation reduced the governmental costs from $35,000 per year for keeping a patient in an asylum to $250 for lobotomizing him.

He popularized the procedure and started traveling around the country in a van he called “the lobotomobile”, performing dozens of ice-pick lobotomies each day. He was able to do a lobotomy in 12 minutes and it is said that he once performed 25 lobotomies in one day. Known as a showman he often used carpenter’s hammers and also liked to insert picks in both eyes simultaneously.

A site of the borehole for the standard pre-frontal lobotomy/leucotomy operation as developed by Freeman and Watts Photo Credit

However, lobotomy’s popularity faded and Freeman performed his last lobotomy in 1967 when his patient Helen Mortensen, died on the operating table. After this incident, he was banned from operating.

Read another story from us: Egas Moniz invented the full frontal lobotomy and won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for it. He was also shot by one of his patients.

In the last 20 years of his life, he continued to tour the country in his “lobotomobile” visiting former patients and documenting their histories. He died on May 31st, 1972.

BLOGSERVATIONS. I don't know what to say about this, but saying something seems to be called for. In another era, I know I would have had my brain ice-picked into submission, no doubt to save those pesky bills from the sanitorium. Humanity has always been terrified of mental illness, and unfortunately remains terrified. There are those (radicals!) who say we've replaced straightjackets with chemical restraints. That instead of warehousing the mentally ill, we dump them out onto the street. And that would be true.

Rosemary Kennedy, sister of JFK, was lobotomized, not because she was violent or unteachable, but because she liked men a little too much. She was unruly and didn't fit the social mold. LOP, went her brain.

Maybe it would be better to have your brain lopped. What would it be like to walk around inside a lobotomized mind? Would it be as full of holes as Swiss cheese? The brain is nothing but a computer made of meat, and meat can be carved up, sliced, even eaten. 

I was going to call this post Borehole, but I assumed no one would be particularly drawn to read it. In any case, borehole was soon to be replaced with eye socket and ice pick. Though Freeman streamlined the lobotomy and made it readily available to the masses, he didn't win the Nobel Prize for it. That went to that Moniz character, ivory tower type, didn't even DO them like Freeman, just theorized. But theorized countless people to a living death. For that, they give the Nobel Prize.

My response to a narcissist

My last word to a narcissist I have known.

Mental illness: Let's NOT reduce the stigma!

Every day, and in every way, I am hearing a message. And it's not a bad message, in and of itself.

It's building, in fact, in intensity and clarity, and in some ways I like to hear it.

It's about mental illness, a state I've always thought is mis-named: yes, I guess it's "mental" (though not in the same class as the epithet, "You're totally mental"), but when you call it mental illness, it's forever and always associated with and even attached to a state of illness. You're either ill or you're well; they're mutually exclusive, aren't they?

We don't speak of diabetic illness. We don't speak of Parkinsonian illness. We don't speak of - you get the idea. Although these are chronic, ongoing disease conditions, we use different language to describe them that does not imply the person cannot be well.

Why should this matter? It's only a name, isn't - it doesn't change anything, does it?

I beg to differ. The name "mental illness" itself is problematic to me. It seems to nail people into their condition. Worse than that, nobody even notices. I have never in my life heard anyone mention it, because in the public consciousness, it does not exist. In fact, "mentally ill" is a compassionate term (so they say), if leaning towards pity and tinged with dread. But it is is definitely preferable to "psycho", "nut case", "whack job", "fucking lunatic", and the list goes on (and on, and on, as if it doesn't really matter what we call them). But it's still inadequate.

There's something else going on that people think is totally positive, even wonderful, showing that they're truly "tolerant" even of people who seem to dwell on the bottom rung of society. Everywhere I look, there are signs saying, "Let's reduce the stigma about mental illness."

Note they say "reduce", not banish. It's as if society realizes that getting rid of it is just beyond the realm of possibility. Let's not hope for miracles, let's settle for feeling a bit better about ourselves (hey, we're really helping the cause!) for not calling them awful names and excluding them from everything.





(Caption: To put yourself in another's shoes, you gotta first unlace your own.)

I hate "stigma". I hate it because it's an ugly word, and if you juxtapose it with any other word, it makes that word ugly too. "Let's reduce the hopelessness" might be more honest. "Let's reduce the ostracism, the hostility, the contempt." "Stigma" isn't used very much any more, in fact I can't think of any other group of people it is so consistently attached to. Even awful conditions (supposedly) like alcoholism and drug abuse aren't "stigmatized" any more. Being gay isn't either. Why? Compassion and understanding are beginning to dissolve the ugly term, detach it and throw it away.






"Let's reduce the stigma" doesn't help because it's miserable. It's the old "you don't look fat" thing (hey, who said I looked fat? Who brought the subject up?). Much could be gained by pulling the plug on this intractibly negative term. Reducing the stigma is spiritually stingy and only calls attention to the stigma.

So what's the opposite of "stigmatized"? Accepted, welcomed, fully employed, creative, productive, loved? Would it be such a stretch to focus our energies on these things, replacing the "poor soul" attitude that prevails?






But so far, the stifling box of stigma remains, perhaps somewhat better than hatred or fear, but not much. Twenty or thirty years ago, a term used to appear on TV, in newspapers, everywhere, and it made me furious: "cancer victim". Anyone who had cancer was a victim, not just people who had "lost the battle" (and for some reason, we always resort to military terms to describe the course of the illness). It was standard, neutral, just a way to describe things, but then something happened, the tide turned, and energy began to flow the other way.

From something that was inevitably bound to stigma in the past, cancer came out of the closet in a big way, leading to all sorts of positive change that is still being felt. But first we had to lose terms like "victim", because they were unconsciously influencing people's attitudes. We had to begin to substitute words like "survivor" and even "warrior".

One reinforced the other. The movement gave rise to much more positive, life-affirming, even accurate terminology. That's exactly what needs to happen here. We don't just need to "reduce the stigma": we need to CAN that term, spit on it, get rid of it once and for all, and begin to see our mental health warriors for who and what they really are. They lead the way in a daring revolution of attitudes and deeply-buried, primitive ideas, a shakeup and shakedown of prejudice that is shockingly late, and desperately needed.





Why do we need to do this so badly? We're caught and hung up on a negative, limiting word that is only keeping the culture in the dark. I once read something in a memoir that had a profound effect on me: "Mental illness is an exaggeration of the human condition." This isn't a separate species. Don't treat it as such. It's you, times ten. It's me, in a magnifying mirror. Such projections of humanity at its most problematic might just teach us something truly valuable. Why don't we want to look?

POST-BLOG. I ran this one two years ago on Let's Talk Day. Because it got twelve views, I thought I would run it again. I am not sure why I continue with this, except that it seems to satisfy some need in me. But when I try to put the message "out there", I find there is no "out there". The internet is all about numbers, totals, likes, views, and popularity, a thing I cannot bear because I thought I left the high school mentality behind a long time ago. So I do this for the only reason that matters to me: because I want to.

"I'm mentally ill, guys!" Why Carrie Fisher kicked ass

Neither of the videos I did on this subject were wholly satisfying to me, as I kept leaving out important stuff. I have no capacity to edit, and it's unscripted, so it goes down the way it goes down.

A lot of the stuff Carrie Fisher talked about was my stuff, too. I found aspects of her life history alarming, but she got through it all and would have kept on going, if she could. And she would have done a lot more good with her honesty and no-holds-barred approach. The thing is - and I have even said this to a psychiatrist - as far as mental health issues are concerned, we have not even had our Stonewall yet. We're in about 1970 now and have a lot of catching up to do. There are signs of it just starting, but I still get irritated at the way it is unfolding. No one has any imagination about this at all. Everyone still thinks in straight lines and stereotypes.

I try to hope. I saw a PBS documentary on Stonewall. An archival interview with the head of the Mattachine Society was most revealing. He defended gay rights, but insisted he wasn't gay himself: "no, I tried it once, but it's not my cup of tea." He also said, "society shouldn't feel threatened. Homosexuals will never want to marry or attempt to adopt children." He said it as if the very idea was preposterous. Which, I guess, it was.

I've written of all this before, and now I am tired of it because of the energy it takes to write, and the way it has to be "good", damn it, I mean not a mess. So now I make videos, and those aren't perfect either, but I know they come closer to expressing how I really feel. It's important that I do that, because Carrie Fisher proved to us all that life is a lot shorter than we think.

Why I felt like I knew Carrie Fisher

I started off to make a video of personal reflections triggered by Carrie Fisher's death. Ended up making two. Neither one of them really said it, so I am probably going to post both of them eventually. I don't script these things at all, so sometimes I leave out the most important thing. But I don't treat Carrie Fisher's idea as a joke. 

People tend to cringe when they think of "crazy" people, casually writing them off as whack jobs, nutbars, etc. (Sorry, but this is what I hear every day of my life.) This conveniently makes them less than human, which reminds me of another human practice that used to be OK and even "good business": back when one human being could own another, and force their will upon their property.

A great many people were incredulous that anything could be wrong with that. It was simply an aspect of mainstream society. If you were kind to your slaves, after all. . . But even after their chattel were set free, they were vilified by nasty, denigrating names and physical segregation.

That doesn't happen any more. Does it? Can you think of another (large) group of people being referred to as things, such as "jobs", with no one objecting because the injustice is so invisible?

What? You mean there's a problem? Aren't those people sort of oblivious to what goes on anyway, so does it really matter what we say?

We all need a good cleansing, perhaps an enema, and then we need to begin again. The thought of "pride" in a crazy person seems pretty much unthinkable, but pride in a gay person used to be an aberration, and perhaps a sign of mental illness. We have come a long way, and yet, not far enough.

P. S. I use some language here, one word in particular, that might shock people. It's not used lightly. In fact, it is meant to demonstrate just how devastating it is for a human being to be casually vilified, verbally punished and denigrated. It's not meant to hurt anyone, that's not why I'm doing it. It's a parallel, an example. This is what it feels like. I want to shake people up with it. Wake them up. Because as it stands, it's not OK to call gay people by nasty names - it never should have been - but "whack job" slips casually out of people's mouths, and no one turns a hair.

Reduce the stigma? How about the stupidity?

Like most writers in these parts, I’ve already written about the current Big Issue in CanLit, and don’t want to recap it. This is a side issue – maybe – but it’s an important one that, to my knowledge, no one else has touched on.

It's unpalatable to me to read about someone being “arrested”, “incarcerated”, subjected to a “Gestapo-style arrest”, and “thrown in a mental hospital” (all phrases I’ve read on Facebook), when to my knowledge this person was taken to a psychiatric facility for his own protection. It happened because according to two of his colleagues (now being horribly demonized by some), he was in danger of committing suicide. My understanding is that a person in this position is not “incarcerated” but under 24-hour observation only and can sign themselves out at that point.

I wasn’t there, of course, but the people making these provocative and alarming statements were not there either. Yet they report on it as if they were, in some cases even “naming names” about people who WERE there and blaming/shaming them for the incident, as if they caused it or at least allowed it to happen. 

The narrative has degradation/humiliation as its main theme. Being called "crazy" is still the worst, most career-destroying epithet of all - especially when, of course, you actually aren't but have been tarred-and-feathered with the same awful brush. I get the sense of people pointing at some dungeon of the soul and claiming that he certainly did not belong with THOSE people, who were being medicated to the gills and given ECT without their consent.

This is not 1962. He is not Jack Nicholson being shocked and lobotomized. And this is a stupid, stupid way to try to create sympathy for someone who, in my opinion, does not deserve it.

The implication of “incarceration” is alarming, because it implies punishment via imprisonment in the “madhouse” (a la Solzhenitsyn, a martyring rhetoric). It also displays the shame, horror and stigma STILL associated with psychiatric illness or even the suggestion of it, and portrays a scenario of a sane man being “committed” and dragged away in irons, kicking and screaming about his rights.

Did that happen? I don’t know. Though it does not seem likely, it’s being reported that way. At very least, it is being suggested by provocative terminology that smacks of "well, she told me" - "then HE told ME -" whispering around the campfire circle, the story amplified and distorted with each telling. As with campfire stories, ancient terrors usually pushed to the back of the mind begin to emerge, and the story takes on a life of its own.

Who better to invent stories (especially about the horrors of the madhouse, a favorite topic in fiction) than a whole bunch of pissed-off writers? What better medium than the Twitterverse, that strange otherworld of verbal hit-and-run? Stories and counterstories, letters and counterletters swarm around, and there is a virtually audible sense of heartbreak. 

Atwood's deliberate use of the phrase "witch hunt" (please forgive the Salem ads, they were left over from my last post) is a direct stab at the credibility of the complainants. Surely these claims were groundless, or at least blown far out of proportion: really, "not that bad", only what any attractive young woman should expect to experience with a charismatic, hip prof (and maybe even an advantage, come to think of it - why aren't these women more grateful?).

It's almost universal for abusers in positions of power to reverse the dynamics when under attack, suddenly flip-flopping into victim mode to gain professional and public sympathy: in which case, the dragged-off-in-chains scenario would only help. (If he were actually mentally ill, of course, it would be a whole 'nother story: he wouldn't know what he was talking about). It's obvious that the "victim" has tons of powerful supporters, a virtual Who's Who of CanLit - though some are apparently beginning to think better of it. Meanwhile, people post and tweet "at" each other. I have even seen Facebook posts in all-caps, displaying far more fulminating fury than that notorious “other side” who can’t seem to shut up about powerlessness. 

It's a kind of civil war among people usually exalted for their intelligence, insight and sensitivity.

Can’t we do better than that? This is 2016. I don’t know what happened there, YOU don’t know what happened there, but let’s dispense with this awful “thrown in the loony bin” rhetoric. The fact that people still think that way makes me wonder if there is any hope for the much-vaunted movement to “reach out for help” and “reduce the stigma”. 

Let’s reduce (eliminate!) the stupidity first.

POST-BLOG. Obviously I still need to write about this. It's the only way I can get my mind around the meltdown that is happening in my field (though, of course, I am forever on the fringes, and now quite relieved to be that way). So please forgive me if I seem repetitive. Illusions are biting the dust all over the place, elitism is rearing its ugly head, friendships are breaking apart, and new writers are wondering how they will ever have a future in this precarious field, or (given the bizarre, sick dynamics of it) if they even want to. And what are the alternatives? 

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