14 December

The idea of ‘mental illness’ came from having to deal with conditions that were beyond the limited understanding of medicine. For example the horrendous injuries many men suffered in World War 1, which couldn’t be healed by fixing the parts of the body that had been broken. So ‘mental’ is literally just a ‘I give up’ category, ‘it must be psychological’ (as if that explains a single thing). We even call organisations dealing with these illnesses things like ‘headspace’. To me it’s important because it also creates a far too narrow focus on the causes of these illnesses, which are not in peoples’ heads at all. They’re just conditions that are too complex for very narrow medical categories. And often there are quite simple treatments for these conditions, that involve understanding how a person is related to the world around them, not to what is going on in their head. Nothing is going on inside anybody’s head, except some flashes of electricity. (I also think images of injured soldiers like this would be much better ‘Lest We Forget’ photos than the syrupy, sentimental horseshit we usually get that makes us forget exactly what it is we’re not supposed to forget.)