Mental about being Mental

Quentin Cockburn gives a superficial and unsubstantiated look at mental illness, homelessness and domestic violence.

mental 1

Feather-bedder may have looked a bit like this.

Heard another person on the radio banging on about mental illness. Talked about poorer resourcing, talked about ‘staff, levels, expertise and balance, and picking the right leadership moving forward to progress the current policy initiatives on mental health and international benchmarks’. He prattled on. He then described enthusiastically how his team at the University of Melbourne were committed to ‘long term strategies to impact the mental illness epidemic’, and before he ceased and the obligatory voiceover; “ if you have mental health issues or know of someone who is experiencing mental illness please ring the hot line, before you jump off a tall building, run into a tram, gas yourself, (harder these days) or just blow your brains out’, I was shaking with rage.

The shock was I thought he was talking abut the mental cases on the streets. Nup he was talking about his own “resource needs”

The sinking feeling I had was, this bloke, wasn’t talking about understanding the people on the streets, the dispossessed the deranged, the ice addicted, but furnishing himself and his annointed sinecurists with a deluxe A grade feather bed. That’s the trouble with mental illness these days, it’s spawned an army of mental effectives seeking to improve the lot of mental defectives. Curiously, (aren’t you surprised yet?) hardly any of then really ever get down and dirty and talk to each other. It’s just like white man’s relationship with Aboriginal Australia. Excellent policy initiatives for those who prefer to stay within the comfort zone. And hand’s-off, provided you don’t get dirty with the poor bastards on the other end of your annointed beneficence.

mental 2

His ‘support team’ may look like this.

It sucks.

Mental illness is everywhere for the simple fact that ice, wife bashing violence, and everything is there. There’s nothing meaningful for the under-skilled to do. There aren’t worthwhile lower tier jobs any more. There aint no cameraderie at the workplace, unless you want to be berated by some managerialist knob on positive thinking around the water cooler. And there’s no end in sight to the manipulative rent seeking training schemes designed to make the unemployed completely and utterly fucking useless.

mental 4

He could look like this.

And so this sinecurist is the core of the problem. The experts are ex-officio members of an elite. The mental cases, the hard nuts, the refuse are the gonners, who are to be pitied. Because they are symptomatic of a broader undiagnosed mental illness in a society that worships financial capital over social. And if these discards can just go of quietly and top themselves they’ll help with the bottom line, provide more funding for conferences, white papers, discussion papers and a conga line of psychic suck-holes to exploit this human suffering in the name of compassion whilst paying off their investment properties and swimming pools.

WE don’t get mental illness in this country. We have a society that manufactures mental illness, and we do nothing to change the fundamentals, because we can’t see what’s wrong with our very narrow view of winners and losers, outcasts and optimists.

mental 3

Certified looney with publicly funded support structure.

From personal experience, if you’ve got family support, you may be able to function. Without it you’re a gonner. The institutes, government health specialists and aparatchiks are there to turn your misery into an income stream.

There’s a lot to be glad about for the winners, the indices are off the scale! But for the initiatives? I’m beyond blue. Give people dignity, even if they’re fucking stark raving looney. And if you don’t, ask Corey Bernardii. He’s secured six years tax payer looney funding just for standing alone. At least he stands for something.