DEVALUING THE CURRENCY OF CARE OR ‘HELP! THERE'S A WOLF COMING! (AGAIN?)’

Here is one of Aesop's Fables:

Once there was a shepherd boy who had to look after a flock of sheep as they grazed next to a remote dark forest. It was lonely job for him and he wondered how he could get some people to come and keep him company. Then he had what he thought was a brilliant idea: he rushed back to his village crying out 'Help! There's a wolf coming to eat the sheep!' The villagers rushed out to meet him and he soon found himself surrounded with people anxious to talk to him and find out what was happening. Seeing how well this trick worked,he tried it again a few days later. Again the villagers came to see him and find out what was happening and found that it was a false alarm. Then, one day, a wolf really did come out from the forest. So the boy cried out: 'Help! There's a wolf coming to eat the sheep!' This time he cried out much louder than before, because this time it was true. But the villagers, who had been fooled twice before, thought he boy was lying again, and they didn't bother to take any notice. So the wolf did come and it did eat the sheep (and in one version of the story, it ate the boy as well!)

Aesop's take on this story was that a liar will not be believed, even when telling the truth. That was over 2500 years ago, but Psychology as Religion now scares us silly sheep with a whole range of wolves. 'Clinical Depression' is just one of them. :

I woke up this morning still feeling tired. My job's not been going to well lately. Don't worry; Psychology as Religion tells me that I'm suffering from 'Clinical Depression'. Great! I can use society's obsession with mental illness to manoeuvre a way of only working when I feel like it.

Meanwhile, here is an example of a Real Wolf, as Dr Richard Braithwaite, consultant psychiatrist, St Mary's Hospital, Isle of Wight wrote to the Times newspaper in September 2012::

There are a small proportion of people who genuinely suffer from the debilitation of a mental state that makes it frighteningly terrible to just get out of bed; never mind do anything else.

While I applaud efforts to eradicate stigma towards those with serious mental illnesses, I must take issue with assertions that 12% of British adults suffer with 'crippling depression or anxiety conditions', that too many 'mentally vulnerable' people are put in prison, and that half of all absenteeism is due to 'mental problems'.

Anxiety and depression, known to most of us as worry and sadness, are normal human emotions. Some people experience these emotions more intensely or frequently than others, but this does not make them mentally ill. Neither does it give them an excuse for committing imprisonable crimes or for not making efforts to work to support themselves.

Mental illness has become massively over-diagnosed in recent decades, partly due to Big Pharma's tendency to play on doctors' natural instincts to help people in distress. True depressive illness is far less common than cancer and, like schizophrenia, affects perhaps 1% of the population. The unfortunate sufferers of these brain diseases experience more, not less, stigma by being lumped together with the millions of Employment and Support Allowance claimants and habitual absentees who choose to let their dissatisfaction with life prevent them from working.

Since this was written over a decade ago, the misuse and abuse of term 'mental illness' has grown further. In popular (and therefore political usage: see The Democracy Fraud) it can now be used as a reason to justify any behaviour which is convenient for the user, while being inconvenient to those around them. Laziness, self-indulgence and destructive behaviour, can now be explained away by attributing them to mental ill health. At the same time, any attempt to condemn such behaviour is denounced as unfeeling judgementalism. Those raised by Never Say No to a Child have now become adults devoted to the 'worship of self' as in Vitz's book  Psychology as Religion

More Symptoms . . .