Why I hate "mental health"

 

I hate buzzwords and fads, and they exist in every single area of human endeavour. The one I hear repeatedly now is "mental health". But what does it mean? Scratch a little deeper, and it usually refers to a celebrity or public figure "admitting" he or she experienced depression, but always in the deep past, at a safe distance.

Anxiety is big these days - it always has been - but it's just what folks get when things are this bad, hard-wired into our brain evolution. But what about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and - the big, bad boogeyman of "mental health" - PSYCHOSIS?

One day I tried to count the number of times I heard or read terms meaning "crazy", and I stopped after fifteen. It includes nut case, whack job, cracked, batshit crazy, psycho, and on and on (I don't even need to tell you, do I?), with facilities to house these undesirables called the nut house, the booby hatch, the funny farm, the whatever. 

Want to know what Merriam-Webster's dictionary has to say? I've copied and pasted all the synonyms, verbatim. Buckle in.

Insane

as in psychotic

having or showing a very abnormal or sick state of mind 

"only an insane person would intentionally jump off a skyscraper"

Synonyms & Similar Words

psychotic 

lunatic
mad
nuts
crazy
maniacal
maniac
mental
gaga
paranoid
crazed
psycho
paranoidal
deranged
looney
whacky
disturbed
demented
strange
irrational
unhinged
loony
whacko
nutty
unbalanced
cuckoo
wacko
screwy
eccentric
certifiable
wacky
ballistic
batty
bonkers
cracked
bedlam
daft
unreasonable
around the bend

haywire
kooky
foolish
odd
barmy
depressed
daffy
loony tunes
obsessed
crackbrained
bughouse
meshuga
out to lunch
moonstruck
loco
crackpot
unsound
scatty
non compos mentis
brainsick
kookie
hysteric
bats
meshuggah
frantic
looney tunes
distraught
meshugah
hysterical
distracted
schizophrenic
balmy
meshugge
delusional
fruity
off
wud
paranoic
neurotic
delirious
cranky
loopy
fey
sociopathic
schizoid
out of one's mind
off one's rocker
obsessive-compulsive
paranoiac
delusionary
off one's gourd
crackers
queer
disordered
off one's head
oddball

aberrant
tetched
out of one's head
nuclear
touched
dotty
berserk
witless
pixillated
pixilated
amuck
raving
senseless
monomaniacal
frenzied
potty
teched
ape
amok
wigged-out
monomaniac
fixated
bananas

These nasty epithets have INCREASED in the past couple of years, and I sense that public contempt for "crazies" has grown exponentially. At the same time, every day and in every way, we hear the term bandied about: mental health, mental health, mental health. I suspect there is considerable schadenfreude involved, in that people love to watch other people's crises. It's a great spectator sport. And it's almost (but not quite) a badge of honour now for a celebrity to take a little break from their multi-billion-dollar career to "work on their mental health".

But they don't know what they are talking about. 

These people who so delicately refer to "mental health" know nothing at all of the real deal, how it can be life-threatening, and how it can take every fibre of your being to put your life back together after an "episode". The confusion and the lurching moods, the baffled and frightened loved ones, the endless trials on medications that seem to make matters worse - but this is only part of the story.

I don't know how many times I've been in psychiatric wards, because I don't remember those horrendous passages in my life very well, nor do I wish to. But there were no cards, no flowers, and most definitely, no visitors. Who would want to go there? Or did they just assume someone in that "state" did not want or require visitors? The people around me just pretended it hadn't happened, or told people I was "away".

No doubt if I'd had my tonsils out, it would have been a different story. But it's obvious that something as horrendous as a  tonsillectomy would require sweet gifts and cards and visits, whereas that other thing - well - 

I remember sitting in a women's group in which we were encouraged to "share" some particularly vulnerable experiences in our lives. I made the huge mistake of saying I had recently been in the hospital, and as I talked, I noticed the woman sitting next to me was acting as if she had suddenly developed an all-over body rash. Then she said, "I'm sorry", got up from the chair and moved away from me. She apologized profusely, saying "I'm sorry, I just can't hear stories about the psycho ward." No one objected, and the group went on talking, though the temperature of the room had dipped slightly.

I've heard people blow off "psychos" with such utter contempt that I have been tempted to grab them by the collar and say, "Look into my eyes. You are talking about ME." Not only that, it might be YOUR closest, dearest loved one, or even YOURSELF who may be next to bear that label of utter disgrace and contempt. 

There is no disgrace in a condition which has been part of humanity forever, and which is poorly-understood at best, even by professionals. Why people are now pretending so hard to understand it, or at least pretend to be more compassionate about it, is beyond me. I guess it's better than nothing - but not much. Maybe it's just an updated version of "thoughts and prayers", 

I say fuck the genteel, sanitized label of "mental health", particularly to display how compassionate and enlightened you are, and instead STOP referring to whack jobs and nut bars and try to see human beings as human beings. Is that such a tall order?

AAAAAND, just for reference, here are the ANTONYMS of "insane" from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

sane

reasonable

sound

balanced

rational

clear

normal

wise

sensible

lucid

uncrazy

judicious

compos mentis

healthy

well-adjusted

unneurotic

Doesn't quite match up. Does it?

POST-BLOG THOUGHTS. I wrote this post several years ago, and if anything, it's even more true now. I believe you can still order "mental patient costumes" online for Halloween, and in my very own neighborhood, I've seen lawn decorations that said things like "DANGER! ESCAPED MENTAL PATIENT" (or looney or whack job or whatever the epithet of the day is). "The Mentally Ill" (a separate species, apparently) are still the stuff of horror, violence, and dread. The more extreme depictions in pop culture are virtually indistinguishable from that other celebrated cultural icon, the zombie.

That means I'd better join the club, or grab a club or something, and start stalking the neighborhood. But I will ONLY pursue people who spew the meaningless term "mental health" left, right and centre - because everyone else is saying it now. It's just the thing to say.

This Cat is DRIVING a CAR!

Maybe it's the mental space I'm in, but lately I am obsessed with cat memes. These are ludicrously primitive animations which have been cropped out of cat videos (and primitive animation is right up my alley!), with cats usually having conversations with each other, or, in this case, confidently and casually driving a car. I think most of them appear on TikTok, which means they make their way to YouTube as well. Who knows how long my obsession will last, but I'm enjoying this one, and it's so much better for me than cults or bad religion (two more of my obsessions). 

"Yayayayayayayoo!" Green Screen Cat Memes

Given that I have decided to DUMP anything remotely royal on YouTube (at long and bitter last), I had to fill the void with something. Then - somehow, some way - I discovered CAT MEMES, featuring the same two cats having a "conversation" which  never varies:

"Yayayayayayayoo"

"Aiw"

"Yayayooyayaaaayyayo"

"Aiw

  R-aiw"

There are a number of variations on this, but for the most part, the only thing that varies is the background and subtitles. Since then, I can't stop watching these, even though most of them are ten seconds of non-sequiturs. But that's the whole point, that they aren't very good, that they don't ask anything of me - and already, I'm making some of my own.

These are silent films, of course. . . I don't yet have the technical know-how (do you love that "yet" part, as if I ever will?) to add a soundtrack to a gif. The green screen is supposed to allow you to add your own background, subtitles, other cat memes, etc., but I doubt if I'll bother. 

But making the gifs is such fun! And some of these are being converted into YouTube videos, with the usual abysmal results. My views are in the toilet now, whereas that ONE video, a really stupid one, is now at nearly THIRTEEN MILLION views, with tens of thousands of comments. But the ones I spend hours on just crash and burn. 

I will undoubtedly reach 20,000 subscribers in the next few weeks, because the stupid 13M one has pushed the count up by 650+ in four weeks. I still don't know why, but even more than that, I don't know why my lovingly-created videos are getting 15 views. If that. But I swore I wouldn't get into this! YouTube is a hobby, and it should be an enjoyable one. It's not the same game at all however, and the changes in the past year or so are alarming. It's just a mad scramble for views, likes, subs, etc. etc. And there are so many things you can't say, or show, or do. 

But these were still fun to make. And fiddling around with cat meme gifs is easier on my soul than the terminal boredom and endless irritation of "it", the issue I just had to dump after realizing it was basically the same story endlessly repeated for five years. If anything actually HAPPENS, I may start watching again.

Or not.

KING of the WIND: The Glorious Horse Art of Wesley Dennis

The horse stories of my childhood were brilliantly illustrated by Wesley Dennis, who captured movement and even facial expressions in a way that was almost uncanny. Marguerite Henry's horse stories, which now seem terribly sentimentalized, were brought to life by Dennis's whimsy and fierceness. Misty of Chincoteague and King of the Wind would not have been the same without these works of art. 

🌞RETURN of the KEYBOARD CAT!🌞

One of the very first videos I saw on YouTube, back in about 2008 when the whole thing was new, was this Keyboard Cat. I found it in green screen and was able to add my own soundtrack (Darktown Strutter's Ball), which syncs up surprisingly well!

😀CLASSIC Maxwell House Commercial: A Cup-and-a-Half of Flavor!☕

As a child, I thought this ad was pretty magical and didn't know how they achieved the effect. Now that I'm an adult - I still don't! In the era before special effects, it was some accomplishment. Maybe I should research how they did it. 

OK THEN!!! I'm back. I did a bit of googling around, and different people had different ideas (no one has kept a record of how they actually did it), but I like this long, impossibly convoluted explanation (from an obscure 2007 message board) the best:

My first reaction was that they had used a slightly buoyant black plastic cylinder with a small hole in the bottom. If the coffee was poured in at roughly the same rate as it exited the hole (trial and error), it would have floated on top of the coffee pooling under it. Of course, this would work in a mug, but not the kind of cup shown, and we seem to be able to see well into the cup before the coffee is poured.

I was about to dismiss this theory when I noticed the large vortex that actually continued to grow after the coffee was no longer being poured – as if there were a hole in the bottom of the cup. It’s visible through the coffee, too, once it rises above the rim.

So here’s the sketch of a possible method:

1.      two white cups, say a coffee cup (which we will now ignore) and a cylindrical mug, filmed separately in almost the same spot, so the lips of the two coincide against the background.

2.      The cylindrical mug contains a black plastic buoyant cylindrical cup in it. (Think: an inverted cap from an aerosol can.) There is a hole in the center of the bottom of the black “cup”, blocked by a spring-loaded flap valve, adjusted to open under a pressure equal to the pressure of coffee filling the cup almost to the rim.

3.      The black cup has a high, but adjustable, buoyancy due to a styrofoam disk (with a hole for the valve) affixed under it. The total mug.valve/cup assembly can have any height: we will only see the very lip of the white mug, and the black cup as it rises out of the while mug

4.      Coffee is poured into the assembly at a rate that matches the outflow through the hole. The black cup, perpetually almost full of coffee, rises out of the white mug, floating on the coffee that flowed out through the flap valve. Outflow stops when no more coffee is added, but the “bathtub whirlpool” remains, and actually consolidates and grows a little without the interfering flow of poured coffee.

5.      A static (still) matte is created of the white “coffee cup”, up to the rim, and composited against each frame of the film of the (lip of the) white mug/black cup/poured coffee.

If the mechanical effect seems finicky, please recall that this was an analog/mechanical era. Every man wore a mechanical watch, and most woke to mechanical alarm clocks. All car ignition and control systems were mechanical, and adjusted by he man of the house every few months. Now that I think about it, the cup system I just described would have seemed familiar to the average carburetor-float-adjusting, toilet-fixing 1960s man

The still vs motion composite I suggest would have been far cheaper and less complicated than a masked motion vs. “phaser beam” composite ing 1966 Star Trek or even the motion vs. Motion compositing of the “identical cousins” on the 1963 sitcom The Patty Duke Show.

In the mechanical/analog film age, masking and compositing wasn’t just for Sci-fi effects. Cathy and Patty Lane (both played by Patty Duke) appeared together several times in every episode, on a sitcom budget. It was pretty much the whole gimmick of the show. Also Cathy’s and Patty’s fathers were identical twin brothers, both played by William Schallert – so the producers clearly weren’t worried that it’d break the budget.

Heck, it’s much easier, faster and cheaper than 1920s-80s rotoscoped or hand-drawn animation or claymation, all widely used in 1960s commercials.

The Troll Doll Channel: Birthday Unboxing of SWEET Grandma and Baby!

Another birthday. . . another family unboxing, though this time we couldn't get the crawling baby to crawl. My first birthday dinner was on the actual day (February 9 - I was 70 on that day, a nice round number which I actually like, so I may stay that age for a few years), and Bill and I went to Red Robin where I had my free birthday burger. But that was just the beginning! When our long-awaited dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory didn't materialize last weekend (Shannon and crew were all sick with the flu), we invited Erica, Lauren and Jeff over, and had a jolly unboxing along with the cake and flowers. If all goes well this weekend, I will have my THIRD birthday dinner, which I guess will make me 210 years old. 

"The Tacky is Scrumptious and Easy to Chomp": Worst Product Translation in Human History!

(Blogger's note. In my endless quest to find some sort of non-pharmacological pain relief, I've tried hemp gummies (made with hemp seed oil, which apparently has some medicinal properties without the THC). Whenever I find a brand I like, Amazon stops stocking it. This sublime advertisement for the latest iteration was so glorious that I couldn't bring myself to edit it very much, except to put a few spaces between words. It is certainly the best and the worst translation I've ever encountered, likely from Chinese to English. Buckle in, it's quite a ride!) 

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One year in 40 seconds

Stunning.

The Teddy Bears' Picnic

If you go down in the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise 

If you go down in the woods today, you'd better go in disguise 

For every bear that ever there was 

Will gather there for certain because 

Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic 

Every teddy bear who's been good is sure of a treat today 

There's lots of marvelous things to eat and wonderful games to play 

Beneath the trees where nobody sees 

They'll hide and seek as long as they please 

That's the way the teddy bears have their picnic 

Picnic time for teddy bears 

The little teddy bears are having a lovely time today 

Watch them, catch them unawares 

And see them picnic on their holiday 

See them gaily gad about 

They love to play and shout 

They never have any cares 

At six o'clock their mummies and daddies 

Will take them back home to bed 

'Cause they're tired little teddy bears

If you go down in the woods today, you'd better not go alone

It's lovely down in the woods today, but safer to stay at home 

For every bear that ever there was 

Will gather there for certain because 

Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic.

✨GANDALF the Great Blue Heron!✨

I was mesmerized by this guy! This was a senior Great Blue Heron, with a shaggy beard and wings which he preened while I filmed. There is something mystical about this bird, which is why I called him Gandalf. 

ASMR: Cat Crunchies (late at night!)

I spend some quality time with Bentley, late at night. This is an unvarying ritual in which he paws at me, yawns, paws at me some more, then finally gets his treats. I love the crunchy sounds in this video - very soothing!

💥HIP HOP SPECTACULAR: Lauren Owns the Stage!💥

More incredible dancing from Lauren and crew!

The Hampter Tango (a mystery solved!)

OKAAAAAY, you may ask, and rightly so, what am I doing posting all these YouTube videos today? What I'm doing is finally connecting the dots on something that has been driving me crazy.

For some inane reason, very late at night, maybe just to ease the wear and the tear on my mind, I began to watch hamster videos - no, HAMPTER videos, which are a completely separate genre and generally last no more than a few seconds. Hampters falling down, hampters spinning in wheels, hampters stuffing their cheeks. I was confused at first, but soon saw the light. Either the creators can't spell worth a damn, or - more likely - this is the new, cool, internet/social media way to spell "hamster".

But the hampter I'm talking about - it wasn't even the hampter itself, but the music that came with it. It was just a few bars of a very familiar melody, but played on what sounded like mariachi trumpets, with a loud sort of synthesized percussion and somebody yelling hip-hop-ish things in the background.

BUT THE SONG! What was the name of that song?

I became transfixed by the melody, mainly because it was both so familiar and so impossible to pin down. Surely it was one of the most familiar tangos of all? For it HAD to be a tango, in spite of the mariachi-style inflections added by whatever group was playing it.

So what did I have to go on? I HAD to find out what this was called so I could track down a decent version of it. But did you think I could? 

So I listened to the goddamned "angry hampter" one over and over again, while I scrolled and played and searched, and kept finding those other two classics, La Cumparsita and Jalousy (which is the only tango I ever attempted to play on the violin). But nothing would match up. It was so frustrating I finally had to just give up.

But just now, in the last half-hour or so, I decided to give it another shot. 

AND THEN.

To my astonishment, BINGO, here it was, sounding nearly identical to my beloved Hampter Tango. Not only that, I easily found three different versions of it by three brass ensembles, but thought this had that extra little sassy edge. It sounded more Mexican, though the original piece is Argentinian.

But the weird thing is, now I realize I DID listen to the HampterTango (El Choclo, which makes me wonder if it means "chocolate tango") and just could not make the match. Tangos have an irritating habit of long, ornate introductions, I suppose to get the dancers out on the dance floor. Maybe I never got past that?

But, oh, then! THEN I had the actual title of the piece and could go wild. There were hundreds, if not thousands of arrangements for this piece, but when I hit on this one I went into raptures. I'm not a big accordion fan - I always thought of them as cooling devices - but in this case, as a purveyor of tango passion, it sounded just right. So I was about to hang it up, satisfied I'd made my match with the hampter video. 

But of course, there was more. 

This string ensemble version is simply exquisite, and the music video that goes along with it is charming - though are those women really that gorgeous, that sexy? How many serious musicians actually look like that? Never mind. The three versions - brass, accordion and strings - rounded out the tastiness of the piece very nicely.

But then this one came to mind. . . one of the very first YouTube videos EVER, and one that I listened to endlessly when the grandkids came over in about 2008. 

This is the root, the original, the ur-video, the Hamster Dance (sorry, "Hampter") which took YouTube by storm in the early '00s and never quite left. Who knows, it may even have inspired the Angry Hampter video that started this whole mad chase. 

THE KICKER! I simply had to look up El Choclo, to see what it actually meant - just assuming it had something to do with chocolate - rich, dark, flowing chocolate with a bittersweet edge, sensuous, luscious, just like the tango itself! 

Here's what it means.

"El Choclo" (Spanish: meaning "The Corn Cob") is a popular song written by Ángel Villoldo, an Argentine musician. Allegedly written in honour of and taking its title from the nickname of the proprietor of a nightclub, who was known as "El Choclo". It is one of the most popular tangos in Argentina.

(I'm going to bed now.)

Harry and Meghan: "Florid, banal psycho-babble reeking of opportunism"

 

Florid, banal psycho-babble reeking of opportunism - Harry and Meghan are riding other people's grief like trams

By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail

Published: 21:24 EST, 1 February 2024 | Updated: 04:09 EST, 2 February 2024

Veteran Sussex watchers were ­yesterday in their power-showers, trying to scrub clean after the latest hosing of treacle from Meghan and Harry.

The couple had issued another of their press statements, this time about child safety on the internet.

Such announcements have become a regular part of the Sussexes’ modus operandi, linking them to a topical issue on which they can parade their empathy.

Their statement, not for the first time, was peppered with American emotionalism, tear-stained platitude mixed with a certain self-serving preachiness. Florid, banal, breathy, reeking of opportunism, it is an art form the exiled royals are fast making their own.

Commenting on a US Senate hearing into dreadful instances of internet child abuse, the duo applauded the ‘bravery and determination’ (one noun alone will never do) of parents whose children had suffered.

As they clawed their way into the circle of virtue – outta the way, people, this is about us –the Sussexes boasted that ‘over the past few years we have spent time with many of these families, listening to their heartache and their hopes for the urgent change that is needed’.

This was ‘an issue that transcends division and party lines’. They also disclosed that one father had told them ‘if love could have saved them, all of our children would still be here’.

Journalistic scepticism may seem harsh given the sensitivity of the issue at hand; yet when an issue is this delicate, would it not be seemly for minor royals to keep their self-promotional psycho-babble to themselves?

This is not the first time that Prince Harry and his actress wife have contributed their unremarkable thoughts on a raw area of public debate.

If they did so spontaneously after, for example, having a microphone thrust into their faces at some public event, it might feel all right.

But the Sussexes come out with sentimental saws on the level of low-grade greetings cards, and they do so by placing them under the ‘news’ section of their personal website. Sorry, but this is pure PR puffery. ‘Turn pain into purpose,’ said Harry at a World Mental Health Day event in New York in October. As it happens, he was talking about how those who suffer misfortune can sometimes become stronger as a result.

‘Days are long but years are short,’ added his consort at the same event.

Eh? It’s the sort of inscrutable gibberish guru Master Po used to say to Grasshopper in the 1970s TV show Kung Fu.

Or take this corker. ‘I’m confident,’ said Meghan, again on mental health, ‘that with more ears and awareness and visibility of what is really happening, we can make some significant change together.’ More ears? Are two not enough for anyone?

As part of her payback to Netflix, from which she and her husband received millions of dollars, the Duchess disclosed that in her wedding speech she spoke of ‘the everlasting knowing that, above all, love wins’.

If you said that at most English county weddings there would be a ripple of mirth and a teasing forest of fingers down throats. Heaven knows what Harry’s old muckers made of his bride’s claim.

Guy Pelly must have almost done the nose trick.

But Meghan appears impervious to British taste. She is immune to the most diabetic-high levels of rhetorical saccharine.

Along with the unfortunate, droopy-tailed Harry, the duchess is a devotee of California psycho-babble and of anxieties being worn as social and political badges.

Look at me, these say, I’m sensitive, I’m not a viciously ambitious, multi-millionaire, West Coast actress cynically adopting positions for career purposes. I’m a genuinely humble, vulnerable, touchy-feely soul. And if you suggest otherwise my attorneys will bust your ass.

If British politicians issued the sort of emetic press releases that Harry and Meghan do, they would be swiftly denounced for gross misjudgement and for trying to surf on other people’s misery. Again, you may think this a harsh comment.

You may say ‘but Harry and Meghan are not politicians’.

I am afraid I would disagree with you. They are behaving in an intensely political manner, beating their breasts for public consumption. Note, too, the repeated calls for ‘change’. These smack of political campaigning.

The Sussexes may think that their press releases are powerful and poetic. To British tastes they will, possibly, more likely look manipulative and opportunistic.

Merely as literary ventures, they are cloyingly mawkish, viscous in their sentimentality.

Whoever writes them has the prose style of a schoolgirl diarist. It is sad that the prince has lost sight of the British virtue of understatement. When it comes to expressions of sympathy, less is always more.

Instead, we are subjected to this mush and gush. On Planet Sussex, ‘light’ is always being ‘shined’, be it on empowerment or inequality. Trite stylistic doubles are deployed.

Writing in Elle magazine, Meghan said that women should ‘focus less on glass slippers and more on pushing through glass ceilings’. And then there was ‘a ripple of hope can turn into a wave of change’ – a phrase the couple pinched off the late Robert Kennedy and used at some humanitarian awards in 2022.

There is much ‘focusing on wellbeing’ and ‘relating to shared experiences and challenges’ and ‘discovering of opportunities for growth’.

‘Mentoring’ is a must-have, both for mentors and, dreadful word, ‘mentees’. And ‘hearts’ are invariably ‘heavy’.

Other people’s disaster and grief are ridden like trams.

💥COCKATOO JUMP SCARE! The Best Moment in CITIZEN KANE💥

The famous cockatoo jump scare from Citizen Kane. I watched this movie again recently, and it slapped me in the face just like before, but in all different places. It is truly astonishing and can't really be analyzed. But it's a cautionary tale. To peak at age 26 is a sad thing, particularly in light of Welles' later performances in commercials:  frozen peas, fish sticks, beef burgers, California plonk, board games, cameras, photocopiers, Japanese whisky. . . and the list goes on and on. Most memorable were the Paul Masson drunken outtakes. I would feel sorry for Welles, except that  I don't, because everything I have ever heard about him would indicate he was a big overgrown baby (later, a bearded baby) who treated everyone around him like shit. And never let anyone forget that he was a genius. Well, Citizen Kane WAS genius, but I am not so sure about Welles.

💗Erica Dances her Heart Out!💗

                                               The amazing Erica Gunning.

🔥💗My Heart's on Fire! An Incredible Dance Performance💗🔥

I have no words! The amazing Lauren Gunning, who has trained as a dancer and choreographer from the age of three - an incredible thirteen years. I can't even cry when I watch this, I am too busy gasping.