Tag: mental health

Psycho Paths Lead To Greatness

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There is something unnervingly hypnotic about a psychopath. The eyes have it. They stride into ours and rearrange what we think is normality. In some ways it’s akin to having a change of internal scenery with the sofa inhabiting a different area of the room whilst the armchairs are perfectly placed on the ceiling. When that happens, we are left to follow the madhatter down the hole.

Mankind likes a monster. We like the gothics of Dracula, Frankenstein (the real monster being the doctor) and a Mr Hyde (the real monster being the doctor). They tickle our fears whilst taking us into a realm of darkness that we can emerge from at the end of a reading or viewing. Once we leave the covers of a book or the darkness of a cinema, we are free to enjoy the sanity of the everyday. The only problem is that the everyday is more frightening than fiction.

Scientists at Harvard have come to the conclusion that psychopathy is a trait that many of us share. They even go so far to say that the more psychopathy we have the more likely it is that we will succeed in life. A lack of empathy, a conscious effort to make others see us in a false light, and a driving desire to turn everything to our own advantage. Aren’t all the self-help books for success all about this? Ask not what you can do for others but what others can do for you. And the sad thing is that the others find this trait appealing.

Contrary to what the movies might have depicted, they are not the knife-wielding demons of movies like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs or Patrick Batemen in American Psycho.

Many are walking among us, leading completely normal lives, and are even some of the most successful members of society, precisely because of their psychopathy. These are the ruthless business people who do whatever needs to be done, regardless of the human cost.

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Research suggests somewhere between 0.2-3.3% of people have psychopathic tendencies.

We may work with one. One of them may be our boss, headteacher, member of parliament, or church leader. We may even be married to one.

HOW TO TELL IF PEOPLE YOU KNOW ARE PSYCHOPATHS

Antisocial, the medical term for psychopathic, personality disorder is defined as having unpredictable, erratic and overtly dramatic behaviours.

According to the NHS, a diagnosis can be made if any three of the following criteria apply to the person’s everyday personality:

  • Repeatedly breaking the law
  • Repeatedly being deceitful
  • Impulsive behaviour or being incapable of planning ahead
  • Being irritable and aggressive
  • Having a reckless disregard for their safety or the safety of others
  • Being consistently irresponsible
  • Lack of remorse  

 

When studying texts from the Second World War, ones that deal with the death camps, I am often at a loss to explain why decent people sat back and let it happen. Other, apparently normal, folks actively participated in those evil events. I look at my students devoid of explanation and some way off understanding. My job is to inform them, make them the type of decent human beings who will heed the lessons of the past, but I too was part of the generations growing up after the war and we have not learnt. Indeed, we now seem closer to psychpathological politics as we have ever been since then.

Could it be that we are beyond being saved?

Or could it be that we are predisposed to act and think in this Fascist fashion?

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Could it be that this is the path to success?

 

 

Blessed are the Piss-makers.

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Subject A woke up in the middle of darkness and felt for the glass of water at the side of his bed. He found it just as his fingers decided to add some urgency to their search. The resulting action was a slow, slow-motion tipping of the glass and its contents off the bedside table and onto the floor.

His wife stirred beside him, but did not wake.

“Shit, shit, ducky shit,” he muttered to himself. But the spilt milk, or water on this occasion, was the least of his worries.

Subject A felt the dryness of his mouth and tongue. He struggled under the pounding in his head. And he felt the sure and powerful flood of his vital blood coarse through his veins.

It was Fryday and the wolf was returning.

Keeping himself together, he eased out of bed. He left behind a fresh layer of hair on the sheets which he would have to blame on the cat later. The cat was sleeping in another room. She would know that he was moving about, but she would also know that it was wise not to investigate.

Subject A descended the stairs and walked to the door.

With all the stealth he could muster, he undid the locks and eased it open before stepping outside. He always found this last procedure to be better and quieter than merely stepping through the door.

Outside, he breathed deeply beneath the cold, full-moon that gazed lovingly down at him.

 

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In moments, he was off and running towards the open common-ground where he hoped to find some rabbits, a piece of virgin ground to crap upon, and a tree to rub his scent over before he anointed it with his bursting bladder.

Better Than Sex (Don’t Procrastinate).

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The little death is a translation from the French “la petite mort”, a popular reference for a sexual orgasm. The term has been broadly expanded to include specific instances of blacking out after orgasm and other supposed spiritual releases that come with orgasm.

Speculations to its origin include current connotations of the phrase, including:

* Greco-Roman belief that the oversecretion of bodily fluids would “dry out” one of the believed four humours, leading to death
*Islam’s reference to sleep
* Buddhist Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’s quote: “Life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change.” (Existence through many changes, “births and deaths”)

 

Before my father died, he asked me to buy him this book: 

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It’s about horse racing. My dad never knowingly rode a horse, perhaps he did in his dreams, but he never actually got astride one and let it canter down a field or furlong. The closest he ever came to this was when he would place a bet on others, professional jockeys, racing at the various meetings around the country.  Betting on horses was, for him, a release.

I have never been bitten by the betting bug. Okay, so I have but a few quid on a Grand National sweepstake but nothing else. My brother-in-law, who had lots of insider knowledge, once gave me the name of a ‘cert’ that had wonderfuly tempting odds and which would make me a fortune if I dared to back it. I didn’t and it lost.

My dad would occasionally win BIG. Nothing ridiculous, just a few hundred or maybe a thousand. He wasn’t ostentacious, never bragged, showed little emotion, and definitley wasn’t vainglorious, but he did win; he knew his stuff. If anybody were to be asked, however, who the big gambler in the family was, they would probably point to me.

I was the risk-taker, I gambled on life.

 

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Yup, you guessed it. That poor schmuck on the left is me.

Origin of schmuck

First recorded in 1890–95, schmuck is from the Yiddish word shmok (vulgar) literally, penis (of uncertain origin)
The Dice Man is seemingly an autobiography, narrated by a bored, clever New York psychiatrist, Luke Rhinehart. He is a nerd run mad. He decides that, in pursuit of ultimate freedom – or nihilism – he will make decisions using dice. He offers the dice options, and they choose for him. The dice tell him to rape his neighbour, but he fails because she wants him. The dice make him tell his patients what he thinks of them (my favourite dice decision).
Ultimately, the dice leads to downfall and death. But doesn’t everything?
I read this when I was in my late teens and it left an impression on me. I am only just coming to terms with the impact that my choice of reading had upon my embrionic id.
Anyway, the smart schmuck followed the dice. Some may argue that he only followed what his subconscience wished him to do. It was he, after all, who lay down the options for each of the dice numbers to follow. He devised the parameters of the game and he accepted the potential consequences.
After the novel’s publication there was a slow growth in its readership. Nevertheless, it is still in print today and has sold more than 2m copies.
Amongst those who have read it are Richard Branson (he of Virgin), who ‘diced’ as a way of breaking through a sort of capitalist conundrum. He did it for twenty-four hours because “it was too dangerous to carry on longer”. Others have used ‘dicing’ as a non-subjective, left-park way of acting. perhaps it liberates us from the fear of consequences because, if the dice rolls that way, we are certainly not to blame. It also adds a little zest to lives that may have become a little lacking in taste.

 

Schmuck is a Yiddish word for penis. Le petite mort is French for little death. Betting is claimed to be better than sex. the Greeks and Romans may have believed that too many orgasms dried you out. Whereas, Islam points to sleep.  Bhuddists take a more balanced view that tells us that in the great scheme of things (assuming there is a scheme), it doesn’t mean a thing. Life continues ragardless of what we do.

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George Cockcroft, the real Luke Rhinehart.

Inspirational Quotes.

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Back when the world was still young and very, very big, somebody thought it wise to employ inspirational quotes as a way of lifting the general mood out of abject depression.  Life, you see, sucks.

But so does a vacuum cleaner.

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“Don’t wait until you feel better to live your life, get your coat on and live it now.”

 

Perhaps I agree with some of this, but question why I need my coat on to live my life. Surely, this is a little prohibitive.

 

It was a Year 7 lesson in which an inspirational quote was unknowingly uttered:

 “Sir, is Ancient Greece something from the nineties?”

Laughter was my initial response. Kids sometimes don’t get it. They may overlook a century or a continent in the same way that others overlook an occasional misspelling or punctuation error. After explaining that Ancient Greece was some several thousand years in the past, I realised that her misconception had not been rectified; time, centuries, eons were just so much other things to fall out of a busy mind.

images-814I had turned away momentarily before having to turn back again and remind her not to continue to wrestle a pencil case off her friend.

But then again, she was only getting on with it and living for the moment. Are teachers such myopic tyrants that we would deny the life out of any kid in our care just so that we can educate the hell out of them?

This week I heard that slippers are the answer.

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One primary school teacher had carried out some research that suggested that the wearing of slippers in the classroom improved educational outcomes. It was, apparently, part of their ‘wrap-around’ learning environment in which the students had opted to take more responsibility and control of their learning episodes.

When I was at school, the slipper was the softest of the hard options for learning.

The other thing that I heard this morning was that in South Korea, the entire student population go to sleep for at least one hour after lunch. This was being lauded as good practice as the South Korean offspring tended to get much better results than our own.

So now, somebody in the Department of Miseducation will command all schools to be ‘lounge lizard aware’ and to adopt the manner of the sloth.

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In that respect, I can report that I am probably ahead of the game as many of my after lunch lessons bear a striking resemblance to an episode of  The Walking Dead (during nap-time).

 

Why I Still Blog

I started blogging as a way to tell the story of my journey back from burnout.

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My first few days were astronomical with hundreds of views and likes. Then, as the tale became more than an instant hit of somebody else’s mental misfortune, views fell away quicker than flies on a drying turd. For a self-confessed lunatic with self-worth issues, this was bad.

But eh, with my newly found self-confidence regarding my madness, I pushed on through the barren patch and completed my book-blog. I was certain that I would be discovered. I still had issues with reality whilst reality just plain ignored me.

Like a good friend of mine, I met people online. Unlike that good friend, the people I met shared an enthusiasm for writing (mainly about their issues). The people (women) my friend met had issues concerning gratification of their earthly parts. In many ways our interactions were similar: exposure, engagement, a clearing of the creative tubes, and then another post. For once, my writing appeared to be reaching a consenting audience.

After about two months in, I had completed the blogging of the book, so turned my attention to writing sharp observations of the human condition. I also wrote amusing nonsense, reposted a few good pieces from others, completed short stories, dumped a few episodes of my various novels on the unsuspecting; even wrote a poem. Literary whore, I had become.

Oh, and blogging can make you famous. I was soon followed by one young woman who added me to her followers by following me. I was new to this, so it felt as if somebody had  crossed the dance-floor just to boogey with me. I was flattered and could even forgive her massive following (thousands and thousands) all lapping up some form of self-help/ amazing-house-magazine type nonsense. All the while I had been opening the crypt to my darkest fears. Why view the dead when the living have so much more colour?

Round about that time the first waves of jealousy began flowing from my wounds.

Another thing happened. I met other people, read their writing, learnt how to cut out the crap, and liked these others more than many people I have met in the ‘real world’. Unfortunately, as with the ‘real world’ people sometimes disappear. One charming older woman just fell off the airwaves. I tried to chase up any evidence of her later existence, but she was gone.

Recently, another lady went missing for a while and, as I knew she was older and had various conditions, my heart began to wane. Fortunately, she turned up again today. But the thing is that blogging is similar to having seances, there is nothing corporeal about the beings that we believe we are speaking to and sometimes something happens to whisk them away from us and the space around them.

I have a guy in New Zealand who I follow and he follows me.

He has become a stalwart of support throughout this last year. He has a good take on things and turns them into verse. He is wise and funny in an ideal cocktail sort of way. Like me, he is rather crap at garnering followers. We don’t do the right things. We don’t seek out and follow for those targets to follow us. We don’t comment and engage. We just put our stuff out there like smalls on a washing line. Whoever happens along can smell the freshness of our undergarments or just pass on by. The latter is the wiser option.

Another blogger lives in France and she has had such a devastating period of existence that I admire her resilience whilst occasionally worrying about her well-being. I miss them all when we are not communicating.

So, why do I still blog?

                                           Beats me.

My Wife, The Piper, Liam Flowers and The End of The World…

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We had a conversation this morning. It was one of those not quite awake conversations that happens on Saturday morning when there is no work to put a stop to them. 

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. I knew that there was some honesty coming. “I like your blog, but it’s not going to support us. It’s not that tunnel that you are looking for.”

In the last twenty months or so, the writing has been coming thick and fast. It’s as if all my old injuries and wounds have set about healing themselves, all at once. It’s a Doctor Who thing; complete regeneration and a new-build exterior. I have been careful not to become all nice and good about the world, as a born-againer would likely be. The world still exists in its pre-breakdown mode, shit and getting shittier, so no amount of glossy- over by an inner ‘positive-mindset-self’ is likely to change it. But what I am doing is expurgating myself of the false beliefs about my life and its values.

“I wish you would rewrite The Piper. I loved that book. It is as real to me as yesterday.”

The Piper was my first novel, an imperfect issue that came kicking into life just less than a decade ago; on the eve of my father’s death. The book was my way of showing that I wasn’t a dreamer, that I had real talent. So, I chose a book about the coming apocalypse, set in a school, led by an imaginary Piper who was based on Pan, an Anti-Christ type boy, an animated corpse that had turned to leather and the holy trinity in the form of three brothers. What type of dreamer would dream that up? Anyway, my father escaped having to read it as a result of him dying. And I escaped any redemption.

“I want to rewrite it. It’s just finding the time.” But I knew that I was lying.

I have a friend who didn’t want to upset me when he told me that he thought my writing now was much better than the writing of The Piper. That was my baby he was talking about. It may not have been perfect, but it was mine. It’s a thing that is rarely done, offer an honest critique about the appearance of another person’s baby.

“Your kid is as ugly as a mule’s arse! If you don’t mind me saying.”

That’s why I have kept it in darkness. My ugly mule-arse baby sits on my bookshelf, lonely and wanting to be loved.

“I love it,” my wife said. “I love it.”

Now I am being asked to become Victor Frankenstein. My little imperfect issue needs a face-lift. It needs rewriting for a modern world. It needs to be accepted.

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Liam Flowers, come forth.

 

 

 

 

Are You Burning Out?

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Signs of burnout:

· You are exhausted all the time, no matter how many hours you spend in bed

· A sense of isolation from other people, and even from yourself, to the extent of becoming a virtual recluse

· Ineffectual, no matter how much work you put in

· A feeling of emotional deadness

· Chronic anger even in the previously mild mannered

· Loss of empathy for other people’s problems even when it is your job to be empathetic

· Feeling of being trapped

· Increase in cynicism

· Loss of sense of humour

· Loss of sex drive in a relationship but increased interest in casual sex and other activities that can become addictive such as drinking, shopping and internet chatting

· Increase in physical problems including back and heart pain, headaches, frozen shoulder, chronic fatigue, adrenal and thyroid problems, irritable bowel syndrome, post-viral illnesses, viral meningitis and even heart attacks

· Rising dislike for yourself and others