EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT!
Luna gives the adjective lunaticus. This appears in the Vulgate (405) of the Dalmatian Christian writer Saint Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus, 348–420) as an epithet for “a moon-struck” person, whence “crazed, insane, lunatic.” It was used of epilepsy, from the notion that the seizures were precipitated by moonlight. The paroxysmal nature of the disease was thought to be dependent upon the phases of the moon.
Lexicon Orthopaedic Etymology
I was just wondering if it was the moon-landing that was responsible for my oft’-felt bouts of mental illness. It was probably about his time that things started to happen for me: walls closing in; God-bothering; sleepwalking. In previous times, I could have been successfully charged with being a witch. In a much more benign age, I would have merely been sent to a mental institution, a place I know that at least one on my relatives went to. This is my claim to a luna-lineage.
Below is a list of reasons that could have prompted a stay in the local loony-bin.
I must admit that the first thing that drew my eye was the inclusion of masturbation. It gets five mentions, and this is not counting the implied listings. On second glance, after stopping again and considering the implications of Deranged Masturbation (there is a disturbing picture in my minds’ eye), I read, Novel Reading. Now, I think that I tick a number of these boxes although I have never fallen from a horse in war. I did, however, like Ralph Harris’ hit song, Two Little Boys. Now, however, I find this less palatable that it appeared in 1969, when it was first released. There’s that year again, spooky. There is something to my original hypothesis.
I was seven when a bunch of adventurous Americans set foot on the moon. I was seven years of age and the world was still in black and white. I was seven and sitting crossed-legged on the parquet-flooring of my junior school’s assembly hall. I was seven and the universe had touched us. I was seven and life, for a moment, offered unlimited possibilities. Being seven meant that the men from the moon had almost another fifty years to work on my mind.
Now, don’t misunderstand me, I am not blaming moon-men or masturbation on my mental fragility; I have never met a moon-man. But now, things are starting to make sense. What if, on re-entry, one of the astronauts still had some luna-dust beneath his finger nails? Ha, ha, I hear you say (voices again).
And yet there is method in my muddled machinations.
Psychiatrists were once known as alienists because they cared for individuals who were thought of as alienated from both society and themselves.1 In the past 150 years or so, the terms psychiatry and psychiatrists have become more prominent and are used almost exclusively. Despite origins in the mainstream of medicine and the medical training of its practitioners, psychiatry is often not seen as a medical specialty or as scientific.2 Other medical professionals might see psychiatry as touchy feely and lacking intellectual rigour, resulting in poor recruitment and retention.
Dinesh Bhurgra first published The Lancet August 12th 2014
A big IF, but what IF that moon-dust got into our atmosphere and started to work its magic? People wouldn’t be thinking of me as some undercooked fantasist who spent his time inventing any range of reasons why he’d started to bark at the proverbial moon, would they? Look at the dates. August 12th is just a couple of weeks after July 21st and, considering that alien incubation roughly takes place over thirty-five years, it’s definitely possible that Dinesh, if I may be so familiar, had stumbled on something. Is it not strange that other members of the medical elite failed to take psychiatry seriously? The words, ‘touchy feely’ suggest that it is a practice performed by art or drama teachers. Hey, I’m onto something here. They can’t get people to apply for the jobs that psychiatry has to offer and, when they do, they can’t keep them. Something is rotten in the state of mental illness.
You may have gathered that I am writing this as a way of warding off the darkness. The last few days, it has been waking, stalking me, trying to pull me back into its embrace. It’s a real thing, not touchy-feely but Scary-Mary. In the middle of the night, while everyone else sleeps, it creeps up and suffocates me with its black pessimism. It sucks the wind from my newly-found sails and leaves me at the mercy of some approaching squall. And when I wake, finally wake, to the world of my wife and children, there is something tainted about my belief that hope is just beyond the horizon.
So I sat down this morning, with my old friend and Apple Mac in order to summon up the words to drive it off into it’s own world.
I didn’t know where any of this was going before I started to write. I still have only a nebulous idea, but it has brought it out into the open. We have glimpsed each other across the battlefield and now I am able to mask my anxiety. It seems a long, long time ago since this thing turned up in the middle of the night and kicked my arse all over the house. It kicked so hard that it almost kicked my out of my own life. Yet now, I think I know a little bit more about it.
Every day, in every way, I getting better and better.
Say it quietly.
Rain always threatened.