Heya @CherryBomb,
Thanks for keeping a chair for me near the fire, while I've been off shuffling round the shelves in the musty library. 🙂
I can't imagine ever thinking of you as presumptuous; to me your sense of the appropriate is very finely tuned. So I wasn't upset about the vanishing "my friend", but I did want to acknowledge and say thanks that it was there in the first place.
I'm not really sure what to say to you right now, if I'm honest. I'm conscious of disappointment that ou conversational momentum was disrupted, but I'm conscious also of feeling that making too big a fuss of that will stamp the ground fallow and stop any further shoots from breaking the soil.
I'm really wrestling with the angel this week over all the "Mental As ..." stuff that's around. My gut feeling is that all this knowledge that's being spouted all over TV and radio (and I tend to be ABC-only these days, so I've no idea if other broadcasters have picked it up or not) may be all very well, and may be accurate, but it really doesn't take the place of lived experience. People hear these talks, and think they know about Mental Illness, but they know anything that wouldn't be made immeasurably more worthwhile by talking to someone with MI of some kind and simply asking, "What's it like for you?"
It actually makes me think of Peter Duesberg. You probably haven't heard of him, but he's a medical biologist -- an epidemiologist, I think -- and he attracted enormous derision in the 90s by pointing out that there is no actual evidence that HIV causes AIDS. In the late 80s, when the HIV retrovirus was discovered and an industry sprang up around discovering a treatment and hopefully a cure, it became established orthodoxy to say that HIV caused AIDS, because what was defined as AIDS required HIV to be present, and if you didn't accept that as a premise, then you simply didn't get funding. It was self-fulfilling. But Duesberg pointed out that no direct causal link has ever been demonstrated, and the mechanism for such a relatively simple retrovirus to cause the necessary cell changes and behaviour has never been enunciated. Duesberg notes that in central and southern Africa, where AIDS is truly an epidemic, there are large swathes of people who have all the same opportunistic infections and suppressed immune response, but who have no detectable presence of HIV or its related antibodies. Those with detectable HIV are diagnosed as having AIDS; those without HIV are simply considerd as suffering from medical issues common in southern Africa, even though there's no functional difference between the two groups. He worries that the presence or not of HIV is a false distinction that masks what's really causing the health issues for these people, and that our focus on HIV has stopped us looking for other causes. (As I remember reading somewhere once, there's nothing more dangerous than an answer that is both persuasive and wrong.)
Anyway, my point is: obviously I'm not pretending to be any Peter Duesberg, but I can't help feeling there's more to any mental illness I've personally experienced than the "experts" talk about. It's a response to life, an attempt to right the balance of a tilted ship, and the focus on what's broken often masks what's keeping it afloat. Maybe our own personal variant of the HIV spectre isn't where the real problem lies, and this drive to pathologize may make things seem manageable to the "experts" but I do wonder what it actually contributes to the people for whom this is their life.
I'm frightened of having yet another ppost summarily deleted if I say the wrong thing, so I'm cautious of saying any more. And I confess that my thoughts are also coloured by anger at the people I've turned to for help who presumed to believe they knew better than I did what my life experience was, and what I "needed". It's just so much flim-flam.
Acchh.
Aonaran
