The Psychosis of the British Electorate

Vox populi, vox diaboli: the ‘Daily Mail’ salutes an unexpected Machtergreifung by the self-styled “party of the workers”

 

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, palsied, pulseless lot that make up England.

D.H. Lawrence

 

Casting one’s vote for the Conservative Party, it seems, is the love that dare not speak its name. It is an act so base, so sordid, so lacking in the most elementary decency, that the present writer, Mark Conlon, has encountered no one in recent weeks willing to own up to it. And yet, on the morning of 8 May 2015, in defiance of all the polls, prognostications and tight-lipped prevarications of intent, we awoke to the dawning reality of a Conservative parliamentary majority. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in The Social Contract of the ephemeral sovereignty allotted the English people during elections, commented that “by the use they make of their brief moments of liberty, they deserve to lose it.” Rarely can his prose have resonated with such mournful truth. Those inclined to grasp at straws can take consolation in the ejection of the putrid Esther McVey from her Wirral constituency, but otherwise the Tories are back, 331 of them, emboldened that they have a mandate to “finish the job” of eradicating the last vestiges of the post-1945 social democratic settlement. Henceforth neoliberalism will reign uncontested, its victims judged unworthy of life or remembrance.

How did the catastrophe come to pass? By means of coalition, the Tories have adroitly manoeuvred the Liberal Democrats, who before 2010 stood for some residual values of social justice, into irrelevance. Deservedly, the bulk of Nick Clegg’s abject Petainists are out of their lucrative jobs in the House of Commons, though it’s improbable they’ll need to visit the food banks to which their treachery has condemned a million of their fellow citizens. Maladroitly, through an obstinate refusal to countenance coalition with the Scottish National Party, Ed Miliband has steered the Labour Party in Scotland into oblivion, while doing nothing to ignite enthusiasm for it in England. The Party under his stewardship, aside from half-hearted flirtations with rent controls and living wage legislation, remained doggedly wedded to what Tariq Ali calls an “extreme centre” ideology, whereby exponents of hard-right economic policies posture as centrists in the hope of fooling inattentive electorates. Were there an afterlife, his father Ralph Miliband would be looking down – or perhaps up – attempting telepathically to din chastening passages from Parliamentary Socialism into the head of an errant son. It’s too late now, however, to heed the call of Miliband pere to veer leftwards; already the Blairite vultures will be circling, orchestrating a return to the verities of New Labour as Thatcherism en travesti.

During the election campaign, I read Danny Dorling’s Inequality and the 1%. The book documents, in exhaustive and enraging detail, how that 1% have enriched themselves fabulously at the expense of everyone else. It is a mindboggling account of the rampant greed that, with the abetment of Westminster parliamentarians, has made the UK the most divisive polity in Europe. One wonders, if the 99% have even a dim awareness of the scale of wealth sequestration, how they possibly could have voted for politicians whose very raison d’etre is to accelerate the process. The electoral “roar of Middle England” may have been eulogized by the Daily Mail, but the vociferation of the petit bourgeoisie might have been muted if they knew quite how petty their assets are by comparison with the riches of the elite; as for those further down the social hierarchy who assented to having their pockets picked, seldom can false consciousness have breached such outer limits. At a Pathways meeting recently, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land came up in discussion, and the forlorn leftist is tempted to take the title of that novel as self-descriptive. Has a form of mass psychosis taken hold, or a virulent strain of Stockholm syndrome infected the populace? Mutatis mutandis, substituting Katie Hopkins for Ann Coulter as virago of reaction, and disability benefit claimant for food stamp recipient as governmentally targeted folk devil, has the UK – or, more specifically, England – transformed into a simulacrum of its boorish transatlantic cousin?

To forestall the urge to launch into a Lawrentian invective against the country of my birth, I should of course note that the election results were skewed to a ludicrous degree by an indefensible voting system. Douglas Carswell, a Tory defector to UKIP, correctly identifies first-past-the-post as “dysfunctional” now that his currently favoured comrades have racked up 3.8 million votes but, with the exception of his own Clacton constituency, no seats. The SNP garnered barely 300,000 more votes than the Greens, yet the former is hegemonic in Scotland, the latter confined to a lone enclave in Brighton. The Conservative tally was 36.9% of those who voted, equating to 11.3 million persons out of a total population of 64.5 million, or in other words a proportion that confers zero legitimacy by the criteria of Tory trade union laws. Fully one third of those registered to vote abstained. Clearly, it is risible to suggest that this constitutes “democracy” in any meaningful sense of the term, though it dovetails well enough with Tory avidity for the reins of power, and will do so all the more when boundaries are redrawn to the advantage of Conservative candidates. Add in the influence of a press and broadcast media that are overwhelmingly hostile to progressive politics, and you are left with something closer to farce than an apotheosis at the ballot box of possessive individualism.

Porcine vulgarian Eric Pickles, local government minister in the coalition and reelected to his Essex seat of Brentwood and Ongar, tweeted that a “perfect day” had been had by the Conservatives on 7 May. It hardly requires adding that the divinely personified “markets” concur. Triumphant Prime Minister David Cameron promises that “something special” is in the offing from his administration, while Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, with utter predictability, vows to press ahead with an economic plan that thus far has cut an insufficiently harsh 10% from the wages of British workers. The “special” ingredient, rather than any Elysian Fields of prosperity situated at the distant end of an Osbornian budgetary canard, is likely to be a financial crash, of a still more shattering magnitude than that which convulsed the world in 2oo8. Meanwhile, millions will suffer grievously as intensified austerity hacks away at the NHS, social care, subsidized housing and anything else that renders life tolerable for those at the bottom of society. I fear that members of the Pathways group may be among them. None remotely deserve it, but then indiscriminate collective punishment is the whole point of waging class war from above.

The Prison as Neoliberal Madhouse

An American Konzentrationslager: Wallen Ridge super-maximum security prison in Virginia, a 700-inmate experiment in the propagation of insanity

 

Jails and prisons have become the final destination for the mentally ill… it’s the most pressing issue facing psychiatry today.

Psychiatrist Steven Lamberti

 

At the Pathways session on 15 July 2014, the present author, Mark Conlon, together with other members of the group, watched a disturbing television documentary. An investigation in the BBC’s veteran current affairs series Panorama, ‘Bedlam Behind Bars’ addressed an especially reprehensible aspect of America’s neoconservative devolution, namely the hyperbolic growth of US prisons and their role in the criminalization of the country’s mentally ill citizens. It was originally broadcast on 11 July, and we’re grateful to Darren, one of our recent recruits, for bringing his recording of the show to the meeting.

Reporter Hilary Andersson discussed the plight of more than a million psychiatrically disturbed prisoners immured in a carceral leviathan from which, on the evidence of the programme, all vestiges of humanity have been obliterated. Viewers were shown a young bipolar inmate in a Michigan prison, Tim Souders, jailed for the heinous offence of stealing paintball guns. He was seen heading into solitary confinement as punishment for an infringement of prison rules. In the middle of a heatwave, the water to his cell was disconnected, and he was shackled to a concrete slab. Within a day, he had become delusional. After five days, he was shifted to another cell and again chained down, this time stripped of his urine-soaked clothing. He strained to feed himself slices of bread flung onto his bare chest. Eventually, death resulted from dehydration and the excessive temperature. Moving on to Chicago’s overflowing Cook County Jail, we glimpsed a fraction of the 30% to 50% of inmates, totalling possibly 30,000 per year, assessed as having significant psychological ailments. The jail, along with Rikers Island in New York, is effectively one of the two biggest psychiatric facilities in the United States, even if not officially classified as such. The sheriff in charge, Tom Dart, conceded that it is no place for those with mental health diagnoses, and it was impossible to disagree after hearing of detainees assaulted by his own officers, or left to languish in squalid cells for twenty-three hours a day. And so it continued through a litany of hideous malfeasance, from pepper spray-assisted cell extractions ruled “cruel and unconstitutional” by a federal judge, to frigid isolation cells and recourse to leg irons and belly chains in a panopticon-like suicide unit in Houston’s Harris County Jail. By the end one was thankful that, in the era of dumbed-down media and dwindling attention spans, Panorama has been truncated in length from an hour to thirty minutes. As with Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, sometimes concision is preferable to a surfeit of horror.

‘Bedlam Behind Bars’ was a cogent indictment of institutionalized savagery, but nevertheless it may be useful to have some context beyond the programme’s largely ahistorical and wholly apolitical examination of its subject, not to speak of the Corporation’s tiresome insistence on “balance” via prison administrators’ insidious defence of the indefensible. (For much of the information that follows, I’m indebted to Alan Elsner’s book Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons, a critique all the more damning for being written from a standpoint of irenic reformism.) It is a sorry tale indeed. The US imprisonment rate, which for most of the twentieth century hovered around a normative 0.1% of the population, began in the mid-1970s to soar to grotesque levels. A landmark was reached in 2008 when it passed the 1% mark; since 1980, it has risen by a colossal 790%. As psychologists Craig Haney and Philip Zimbardo (of Stanford Prison Experiment fame) put it, a “runaway punishment train” has been set in motion, one that has overtaken in punitiveness such exemplars of penal enlightenment as China, Iran and Thailand. A “war on drugs” rhetoric, bolstered by zero-tolerance policing and rigid “three strikes and you’re out” legislation, furnished the alibi for a sweeping incarceration of those deemed surplus to requirements in the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes of ascendant neoliberalism. In his memoirs, Edwin Meese III, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, summed up the paradigm thus: “At the Reagan Justice Department, my predecessor and I carried on a continuing crusade… arguing for tougher and more effective sentencing, stressing the protective rather than the ‘rehabilitationist’ model of penology, and pushing for construction of additional prison space so that convicted criminals could be kept away from society.” To state it in language less redolent of the banality of bureaucratic evil, prisons expanded to become, to quote Angela Davis’s fine polemic Are Prisons Obsolete?, “a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited.”

All this, a tightening “culture of control” as penologist David Garland characterizes it, would have been bad enough merely as state-orchestrated repression. Worse, in a process the Wall Street Journal dubbed in 1994 an emergent “prison-industrial complex” – a counterpart to the bloated “military-industrial complex” identified by Eisenhower – prisons have morphed into privatized businesses, or what Mike Davis more piquantly terms “hell factories” in a 1995 scrutiny of the phenomenon in The Nation. The trend has been exacerbated by budgetary constraints in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. Crony capitalists such as the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group pocket government fees for running institutions dedicated to wringing profits from wretchedness and despair. GEO, in its former incarnation as Wackenhut, issued a statement fulsomely priding itself on “a turnkey approach to the development of new correctional and mental health institutions that includes design, construction, financing, and operations.” Translating from corporate cant, what this means is that staffing ratios and per capita inmate spending are drastically cut, while prisoners toil, across a vast range of jobs from clothes manufacture to computer assembly, for wages of less than $1 per day, a resurrection of the “contractual penal servitude” of the 1820s and slavery in all but name. After drudging for their nominal remuneration, they have insult piled on injury through being charged preposterous sums for accessing substandard medical services. “There is no way to justify handing convicted criminals free health care while law-abiding taxpayers are required to make co-payments for health services,” thundered Republican Senator Michael F. Nozollio, touting his sponsorship of 2002 legislation designed to impose on felons charges of $7. “By revoking this policy, we will bring justice to both the criminals who thumb their noses at the law and to the law-abiding citizens struggling to pay for their own health care.” No matter that some of those billed will be in custody because they cannot afford bail, or that others are incarcerated for transgressing laws that would not be on the statute but for the avid lobbying of GEO and its ilk.

US penal doctrine is deeply entwined with race and class: one in three black and one in six Hispanic men will be imprisoned at some point in their lives and, with rare exceptions, only the poor find themselves behind bars. There are more African-Americans in prison than there were slaves in the antebellum South. Increasingly, however, prisons function too as substitute asylums; as the latter were emptied from the 1960s onward, prisons assumed the task of inoculating society against the “deviancy” of people who could not adapt themselves to the iron-cage “rationality” of a capitalist economy. An assertion of Michel Foucault, that asylums, factories and schools are all cognates of the prison, is being verified more palpably than Foucault foresaw. It hardly needs emphasizing that prisons are ill-suited to serve as surrogate sanatoria. Rape, with the posttraumatic symptoms that arise from it, is rife, perpetrated by inmates and wardens alike. Prisoners whose reactions are slowed by psychotropic drugs may struggle to obey orders with the mandated alacrity, but often dosages are increased with the aim of enforcing conformity, a vicious circle whereby shambling wrecks of human beings – victims of what sardonic prison argot calls the “Thorazine shuffle” – are handed ever harsher punishments for falling short of the brisk deference demanded. Those harder punishments include solitary confinement, something that in short order can corrode the psyche of even the mentally robust. Psychiatric professionals, where they exist, typically ally with prison officers in taking an antagonistic stance toward those ostensibly under their care. At the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, currently being sued on behalf of inmates by the American Civil Liberties Union, a psychologist’s treatment plan for a suicidal prisoner comprised three words: “Encourage behavioral compliance.” The method of compliance chosen was to use Mace to asphyxiate the man in his cell. The worst conditions prevail in the seclusionary “supermax” facilities that proliferated in the 1990s, where an almost total lack of human interaction seems calculated to induce psychological turmoil, up to and including florid manifestations of psychosis. Then there is death row, a setting so depressing that many elect to escape it by waiving appeals in favour of the desperate “volunteerism” of embracing execution.

Where America leads, Britain as piteous lapdog generally follows, in this area by adhering to the US template of populist “law and order” asperity generating a plentiful supply of convicts ripe for exploitation in pursuit of the sacred goal of shareholder value maximization. Britain’s prison population is at a record high of 85,000, housed, or perhaps one should say warehoused, in 126 institutions, with more serving life sentences than in all other European nations combined. The sharp rise in numbers is entirely due to stricter sentencing rather than an escalation of crime (in Foucauldian terminology, a discourse of punitive reason has become detached from actual illegalities). In November of last year, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, not content with the morbidly tyrannical prisons-within-prisons of such “close supervision centres” as the notorious Woodhill in Milton Keynes, introduced a gruelling regime of solitary confinement throughout the system. The practice was castigated by the United Nations in 1990, and declared unconstitutionally torturous by the US Supreme Court as long ago as 1890, yet is championed by Grayling as a counter to what he ludicrously portrays as the “frills” of liberal governance. Even when not subjected to this ordeal, the default status of inmates is now a “basic level” of obligatory prison uniform and deprivation of personal possessions. Grayling’s bibliophobia has occasioned greater press coverage, but arguably these dehumanizing moves are more ominously contemptible than his restrictions on reading matter. Predictably, they contributed to a leap in cases of suicide from 30 in 2013 to 42 in just the first six months of 2014. No fewer than 23,183 incidents of self-harm occurred in 2013, a statistic in unabated expansion since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to office in 2010. In an act of Oedipal horror, a prisoner at HMP Nottingham recently gouged out his own eyes. As highlighted by the chaotically violent Glen Parva in Leicestershire, a “toxic environment” in the estimation of the Howard League for Penal Reform, little effort is made to ameliorate conditions in young offender institutions. The Chief Inspectorate of Prisons found our local specimen, HMYOI Werrington on the outskirts of the Potteries, to be weak in preventing self-harm and bullying, but vigorous in conducting forcible strip searches.

At present, approximately 15% of this dismal gulag is privatized, but that will only increase when policy is steered by a mania to transfer public revenues – in this instance one flinches from saying “assets” – into private hands. It might have been assumed that scant leeway existed for an aggravation of conditions, but corporate involvement is demonstrating otherwise. A cloacal purgatory of violence and illicit drugtaking in consequence of being placed at the tender mercy of Serco, HMP Doncaster, in advice offered by the Howard League’s Frances Crook that is sure to fall on deaf ears, “should no longer be left in the hands of a multinational which puts shareholders’ interests before public safety.” G4S, which also manages the lethal “security” apparatus guarding Israel’s West Bank settlements, obliges inmates at HMP Oakwood to wait five weeks for a mental health referral after slicing an astonishing £10,000 from the standard cost of a year-long prison placement; occurrences of self-harm topped 600 last year, in comparison to 56 at the similarly sized, state-run Wandsworth. Because insufficient profits beckoned, A4E has just unilaterally torn up its contract to provide education in London prisons as a participant in the Offender Learning and Skills Service (OLASS). Denied education, “offenders” are herded into menial and repetitive work as a super-exploited proletariat, in what amounts to a particularly obscene species of post-Fordist outsourcing. Average earnings are £8 a week. Unlike the riots that regularly erupt at private prisons, this is not hushed up as a dirty secret. On its website, which features encomia from legal aid despoiler Kenneth Clarke and the head of the Confederation of British Industry, G4S rhapsodizes as follows on the advantages of a literally captive labour force unencumbered by sick pay, holiday leave, trade union membership or the ability to strike: “We have a dedicated workforce with a variety of skills which can work around business’ needs with the minimum of bureaucracy.” No mention of a minimum wage, it is to be noted, but the definite assurance of minimal “bureaucracy” (i.e., workers’ rights). I.G. Farben and the ideologues of Arbeit macht frei could not have boasted of a rapport more unabashed in its amorality.

Prospects for enlightened reform are bleak. What is referred to in government circles as the “prison estate” – remove the first “e” from “estate” and you have an example of Freudian parapraxis – is, to borrow a phrase from the prison letters collected in George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, the most “terrible, ugly machine” the ruling class has at its disposal, and unlikely to turn prettier at a time of indurate political reaction. Georg Ruschke and Otto Kirchheimer, the forefathers of radical criminology, pointed out in their 1931 study Punishment and Social Structure that reforms are constrained by the “heuristic maxim” that, in order to deter crime, circumstances in prison must be grimmer than those endured by the “lower strata” of the working class in the outside world. As the labour market under neoliberalism is relentlessly degraded, and poverty deepens, correspondingly prisons can be expected to become sites of ever fiercer disciplinary coercion. Quite transparently, the objective is to decant into prison as many as possible of the scroungers, troubled families and feral underclasses (the various labels of priggish contumely are interchangeable), where surplus value can be pumped out of them under compulsion, or they can simply be forgotten about. They will be joined by mentally ill prisoners guilty of no offence save that of overburdening an NHS buckling under endless fiscal austerity. Meanwhile, corporate crime on a breathtaking scale goes unchastised, confirming Bertolt Brecht’s mockery of bourgeois notions of criminality – “robbing a bank’s no crime compared to owning one” – to be no less incisive today than it was in the age of the Wall Street Crash.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who had first-hand knowledge of the brutalities of Tsarist imprisonment, wrote in his 1862 novel The House of the Dead: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Given what we know from the Stanford Prison Experiment of the implacable tendency of a carceral milieu to make rabid authoritarians of the jailors who control it, and abject victims of inmates, I would contend that a society disfigured by prisons has forfeited its claim to be considered civilized, even before factoring into the equation that prisons under capitalism have their raison d’etre in sustaining inequities of power and property. For prisons to have become moneymaking enterprises, and a repository for mentally ill people whose confinement is a source of profit, is monstrous beyond words. When we viewed the Panorama documentary, I was struck by the fact that the programme drew spontaneous cries of outrage from Pathways members. A situation readily perceived by the mentally “ill” as repugnant is, by contrast, regarded with equanimity by its political overseers, or reckoned by them to be not nightmarish enough. A section of the “normal” populace, moreover, revels in callow fantasies of battling “crime” – the ideological and socially constructed nature of which is rarely questioned – with retributive sadism. I was left wondering whether our whole codification of sanity is fundamentally askew.

A Dialogue with Dr Xenofon Sgouros

 

On 26 November 2013, the Pathways group was visited by Xenofon Sgouros, a consultant psychiatrist who hails originally from Greece, but who since 1998 has spent part of the year working in the British NHS. He kindly consented to answer our questions on psychosis and related mental health subjects. The present author, Mark Conlon, recorded the meeting on a laptop computer, and I’ve structured this article around the conversation that unfolded. The topics addressed are complex, and in attempting a condensed overview one thinks of Gustave Flaubert’s witticism about historians gulping an ocean and micturating a cupful. There may, however, be a role for the simplificateur as counter to the trend of academic specialization, of knowing more and more about less and less. I should make it clear that any factual inaccuracies in what follows are my responsibility, rather than in any way attributable to Dr Sgouros.

As preamble, Dr Sgouros talked about his attraction to psychiatry. The profession has a sometimes alarming history – whirling chairs, lobotomies, the bizarre “treatments” of Julius Wagner-Jauregg – and Ewen Cameron’s sinister experiments of the 1950s and 1960s, sponsored by the CIA’s MKUltra programme, prove it would be complacent to assume they all lie in a remote past. A figure like Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist who branched out from diagnosing mania to espousing a neoconservative doctrine of “unipolar” US imperial hegemony, is hardly one to inspire confidence in more recent practitioners of the discipline. It was thus good to be reassured that there are those drawn to psychiatry for honourable and commendable motives, out of a genuine desire to ameliorate, in an enlightened fashion, what Herbert Marcuse called the “unhappy consciousness” of modern society. Dr Sgouros identified his late teenage years as the time he became seriously fascinated by the human mind, by the “chemistry of the brain and human emotions.” He remembers that he was the one to whom his friends in Greece would turn for advice on girlfriends and other matters of the heart. (To interject a note of levity, the fact that he was a fan in those years of progressive rock is verification in my eyes that he is on the side of the angels.) After graduating in medicine, and not being enthusiastic about general practice, Dr Sgouros had to decide between specializing in neurology or psychiatry. He opted for the latter because of its diversity, psychiatry being “medicine but not only medicine” inasmuch as it is imbricated with the whole spectrum of human behaviour and culture.

For the benefit of Al, an attendee of our sessions who has not experienced mental illness, we asked Dr Sgouros for a thumbnail definition of psychosis. The query is not a straightforward one. In 1987, the American Psychiatric Association was forced to admit: “Despite extensive field testing of the DSM-III [the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the closest thing to a canonical text in psychiatry] diagnostic criteria before their official adoption, experience with them since their publication has revealed, as expected, many instances in which the criteria were not entirely clear, were inconsistent across categories, or were even contradictory.” The inflation of categories in the two subsequent iterations of the Manual (2000 and 2013) can only have thickened the disjunctive fog. Dr Sgouros applied an Ockham’s razor to the problem by asserting that, essentially, psychosis involves beliefs split off from reality, these being clung onto in spite of being very unrealistic: as he phrased it, “the total process of thinking is distorted and disjointed.” Al observed that, when the phenomenon is defined in these broad parameters, it is one to which no one is immune. Dr Sgouros strongly agreed, and spoke of a “continuum of severity” from transient paranoid thoughts, where even among his fellow health workers he would suspect anyone claiming to be free of such thoughts of dissembling, to full-blown psychoses impervious to rational refutation.

A new member of our group, Frank, raised the question of a “paradigm shift” in attitudes to mental health, away from the biological model that is the dominant clinical approach. The biological orthodoxy, in which life experiences tend to be minimized to “triggers” of underlying organic disease, has overshadowed writers such as Gregory Bateson and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and after them assorted exponents of antipsychiatry, who explained psychosis in familial and societal terms, and who sought, in the words of Russell Jacoby, “to indict, not absolve, a maddening society.” In reply to Frank’s curiosity as to whether the pendulum is swinging back, Dr Sgouros said that there had been a slight shift since the 1990s toward a “psychosocial” model, with psychological interventions enhanced over the past five to seven years, citing as an example the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative, soon to be expanded to cover more severe illnesses like psychosis. He adjudged this a move in the right direction, stating that “we have all been influenced by our families” and not seeking to downplay the role of social factors. As a professional psychiatrist, he can’t dismiss the biological standpoint; while conceding the historical abuses against which the antipsychiatrists reacted, “terrible stuff” he witnessed first-hand when employed at a large mental hospital in Greece, he was guarded in his sympathy for a critique of biologism carried to an antipsychiatric extreme, remarking on the irony of R.D. Laing’s progeny having grown up to be anything but well-adjusted. When I brought up the name of Thomas Szasz, he confessed to unfamiliarity with the Szaszian arraignment of psychiatry as moralistic inquisitorial apparatus. (Not, I should add, that Pathways members are aligned with Szasz’s brand of individualist libertarianism, the shortcomings of which make it unsurprising he is championed by the Church of Scientology. We are no subscribers either to his travestying depiction of mental illness as manufactured myth, the acceptance of which would invalidate the existence of this site.) By way of mitigation, Dr Sgouros elaborated that he is suspicious of anything to which the prefix “anti” is attached. Unavoidably, this would encompass the Manichean dualism of an antipsychiatric enterprise echoing Szasz in its excoriation of biological psychiatry, or “psychiatrosis” as R.D. Laing mockingly pathologized it in a 1964 issue of New Left Review, as a fettering of dissent and nonconformism.

Frank was interested in the extent to which a conceptual shift of this sort might have created renewed space for the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung (related but not identical, the pair having come to doctrinal blows in 1912 over Jung’s Transformations and Symbols of the Libido). Frank Sulloway, in his 1979 book Freud: Biologist of the Mind, contended that psychoanalytic and biological perspectives are not fundamentally divergent, but a cursory comparison of Freud’s conjectures with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – notwithstanding the infamous Freudian statement that “biology is destiny” –  reveals the epistemological bases of the two to be distinct. Ludwig Wittgenstein advanced a plenary dismissal of Freudianism as mythology, while Theodor Adorno polemicized that “In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.” (Adorno was not above the odd exaggeration himself, writing in Minima Moralia that the “morbid scission” of psychosis arose from the permeation of human minds by the “radical objectification” of the capitalist division of labour.) Todd Dufresne’s vituperative Killing Freud pulls no punches in characterizing psychoanalysis as “a serious menace based on a top-heavy theoretical edifice, faulty premises, circular and self-validating arguments, methodological laxity, motivated self-deception, bad faith and lies piled upon lies for more than a century.” Dr Sgouros was far more measured in his assessment, declaring that Freud’s notions, of the unconscious, the ego and so on, had become so entrenched in our cultural belief system as to be beyond simple eschewal. He held that psychodynamic therapies derived from them, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, are helpful, while noting that the core principle of CBT was arrived at centuries before Freud by Zen Buddhism and the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. In Dr Sgouros’s judgement, psychoanalysis itself should be considered outdated as a treatment.

Freud’s celebrated case studies were of neuroses rather than psychoses, and his acquaintance with the latter was not extensive. He described psychosis as a disavowal of reality, an “active phase of remodelling” of the ego. It is unclear whether his adamantine pessimism, which interprets psychological disturbance as the price extracted by culture for a denial of instinctual drives – the argument of Civilization and Its Discontents, a 1930 tract of Spenglerian gloom – offers much hope for the banishment of psychotic conditions, as opposed to a less ambitious transmutation of neurosis into commonplace unhappiness. Freud believed schizophrenics, like sufferers of acute melancholia, to be incapable of forming the bridge of “transference” required of the analysand – or, to frame it in less dryly technical language, deemed them insufficiently deferential to the psychoanalytic maître a penser – lending weight to Michel Foucault’s charge that psychoanalysis “has not been able, will not be able, to hear the voices of unreason.” He admitted to fear and dislike of them, though holding out the possibility that refinement of the “talking cure” might remedy the situation. A two-week trial period of analysis was recommended to screen out seemingly neurotic patients who were actually psychotic. Freud’s contemporary, the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, took a comparable view, writing in 1913: “The most profound distinction in psychic life seems to be that between what is meaningful and allows empathy [i.e., neurosis] and what in its particular way is ununderstandable, mad in the literal sense [psychosis].” Subsequent analysts, such as Silvano Arieti, have adopted a more optimistic stance. They have also, thankfully, revised Freud’s bigoted contention that the disavowal of reality in psychosis relates to – in Freudian jargon, is a “paranoid projection” of – repressed homosexual urges, an idea developed out of a misreading of the memoirs of German judge Daniel Paul Schreber, a man Freud never met. Unfortunately, for those reliant on the NHS, the matter is more an economic than a disinterestedly scholastic one. “Free association” does not come free in the monetary sense, and depth psychology (which may be “interminable” in Freud’s 1937 formulation) will lose out at a time of “evidence-based” financial stringency to the quick fix of medication.

Dr Sgouros acknowledged an intellectual debt to Jung, disclosing he had a “personal liking” for Jungian approaches, albeit more from a philosophical than a therapeutic angle. I broached the issue of Jung’s right-wing politics, his faith in a revolution (“an outburst of a new spirit”) inaugurated by Hitler in 1933, less pusillanimous and careerist than Martin Heidegger’s adherence to National Socialism but a disastrous miscalculation by any reckoning. The fervour did not fully ebb until Kristallnacht in November 1938. Gerhard Wehr has him pegged as a “psychoanalyst foaming with fascism” in his 1970 Portrait of Jung. Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch had no hesitation in issuing a similar rebuke. Immanent, ahistorical “archetypes” of personality and an inherited “collective unconscious” – shockingly split by Jung into Aryan and Semitic wings – are disturbingly congruent with Nazi ideology, and Erich Fromm gibed that Jung was a “necrophilious” character enamoured of death, a trait suggestive of the viva la muerte morbidity of fascism. Remembering that prominent anarchist Herbert Read drew inspiration from Jung’s texts, and that Frantz Fanon, while censuring Jung’s racism, deployed Jungian concepts in Black Skin, White Masks, possibly I am painting too negative a picture. It could be that the Swiss Philemon, to borrow the name of one of the purported archetypes, is sufficiently protean – an “avant-garde conservative” in Jay Sherry’s conflation of opposites – to license diverse interpretations. Dr Sgouros clarified that he holds no brief for Jung politically, arguing that he should be seen in the context of his times, and valuing him in the way he values Richard Wagner, as someone in whom diagnostic wheat – or musical worth in Wagner’s case –  can be separated from ideological chaff.

Jung’s corpus is littered with what to the present writer are embarrassing divagations into alchemy, astrology and UFOs, with reliance on discredited concepts purloined from Lamarck (acquired characteristics) and Henri Bergson (a vitalist animating spark, or “ghost in the machine” in Jungian terminology, whence the connectivity between Jung and New Age mysticism). Much as one may bewail psychiatry’s biological pretensions, and Dr Sgouros’s imprimatur notwithstanding, a headlong flight into occultism and bogus science is no alternative. Frequently, Jung’s epigones take up the irrationalist baton of the master and run with it: a representative work of secondary literature is Sallie Nichols’s Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, a title lurid enough to have one scurrying back to the “godless materialism” of Freud regardless of the latter’s prejudice against psychotic illness. Admittedly, one can’t help warming a little toward someone who, in contradistinction to Freud’s exhaustive (and exhausting) labouring of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, possessed the laconic self-deprecation to quip “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” We should, furthermore, give Jung credit for taking issue, from his 1906 article ‘The Psychology of Dementia Praecox’ onwards, with a hidebound Kraepelinian conception of schizophrenia as an irremediable arc of declension; according to Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones, he aspired to be the first to achieve a cure solely through psychoanalytic methods. If we are to extract a useful approach to psychosis from Jungian mythopoeia, it might lie in seeing psychotic states as a “shadow” overwhelming the social façade of the “persona” as a prelude, in an optimal scenario, to better understanding of the self: in psychiatric parlance, “integrating” rather than “sealing over” the experience. Although the gnomic cast of his utterances makes it difficult to be sure, conceivably that is the import of Jung’s maxim that “Only what is really oneself has the power to heal.”

We touched on the wilder shores of psychoanalysis when I proposed Wilhelm Reich as a leftist corrective to Jung, and found Dr Sgouros to be surprisingly sympathetic to a figure who in mainstream psychiatric circles must appear as, to put it mildly, a heterodox thinker. He said that he’d been much influenced by Reich’s books in younger life. I second his approbation with regard to Reich’s work of the 1920s and 1930s, the period of the renegade psychiatrist’s association with Austrian social democracy and the German and Danish communist parties, which remains highly relevant in its dissection of the malice and authoritarianism of what Denis Healey, in an era of pithier politicians, dubbed the “sadomonetarist” mentality of the hard right. Unless one is a diehard Reichian, it’s hard to deny that in babbling about bions and cosmic orgone energy the inventor of the Cloudbuster later went completely bonkers, if I may be permitted to use such vulgar and insensitive language in this blog. By the stage we reach the preposterously named vegetotherapy, crankiness of theory and appellation are in perfect harmony, even if Reich’s psyche was not. In Freud or Reich?: Psychoanalysis and Illusion, a hostile evaluation of Freudo-Marxism from an orthodox psychoanalytic perspective, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel and Bela Grunberger predictably allege that Reich was already psychotic at the time Freud repudiated him, while Paul Federn, Sandor Rado and even Reich’s daughter Lore weighed in with similar accusations. Be that as it may, the earlier materialist writings have, in my opinion, penetrating things to say about the ways in which psychosis might be engendered by patriarchy, the bourgeois family and other structures of repression, and how in turn, to quote Reich’s own words, “the schizophrenic form of psychic illness is regularly accompanied by illuminating insight into the irrationalism of social and political mores.”

Viewing the aetiology of psychosis as biological has gone hand in hand with seeing the appropriate treatment for it as a medicalized one of neuroleptic medication. Sara Cooper enquired whether there are drugs in the pipeline that would entail fewer injurious side effects than current versions, a pressing question for members of our group undergoing the “maintenance therapy” of long-term use. However potent one considers antipsychotics to be in damping down “positive” symptoms of hallucinations and delusional thinking, iatrogenic consequences (ones brought about by the drugs themselves) weigh heavily on the minus side of the ledger. Tardive dyskinesia, for instance, has been described as “one of the worst medically-induced disasters in history” (by Peter Breggin, in his 1983 book Psychiatric Drugs: Hazards to the Brain). D.G. Cunningham Owens, in A Guide to the Extrapyramidal Side-effects of Antipsychotics, devotes over 300 disquieting pages to detailing the dystonia, Parkinsonism, akathisia and other disorders that can result from the drugs, and he is a writer who situates them in the “first division” of pharmacological efficacy. The latest generation of antipsychotics, the “atypical” ones introduced in the 1990s, has not lived up to corporate hyperbole – or brazen propaganda, not to put too fine a point on it – in eliminating the risks, and in fact has thrown up further perils such as agranulocytosis. Since patents are still operative on these newer drugs, and they are immensely profitable, there is little incentive for the “medico-pharmaceutical complex” (as David Healy refers to these agglomerated “darlings of Wall Street” in The Creation of Psychopharmacology) to improve on them. Dr Sgouros was not able to provide much comfort on this question. He confirmed that what he termed a “boom” in new drugs in the 1980s and 199os had slowed markedly, with research and development budgets reduced, and only a few new types (e.g., Asenapine) emerging since then. I know from the advice he’s given me that Dr Sgouros is no advocate of medication as magic cure – he can’t, one might say, be convicted of membership in the cult of psychotropic soteriology – and it may be that he looks on this situation with a greater degree of equanimity than more medication-oriented colleagues.

We asked Dr Sgouros what he made of Paul Hammersley’s suggestion of childhood abuse as a generator of psychotic illness. This has been put forward as a “traumagenic neurodevelopmental” explanation by psychologist John Read, editor of the journal Psychosis. It is traceable back to the “seduction theory” for the abandonment of which Freud has been taken to task by Jeffrey Masson, Freud in his work on hysteria with Joseph Breuer having spoken of “psychic traumas” that were “mnemic residues” of sexual abuse. Paul Hammersley is especially insistent on an association between such abuse and auditory hallucinations of a persecutory nature. On the last occasion Paul visited our group, he drew us a schema of psychosis as a form of dissociation analogous to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dr Sgouros, though he would add stress the influence of genetics to a greater extent than Paul, together with trauma in later life and additional factors such as substance abuse, agreed with him in saying that “trauma in early life plays a very important role.” In this as in other matters, we found Dr Sgouros to be open-minded about ideas of social causation that appear eminently commonsensical, if not blindingly obvious, but are overlooked by psychiatrists who cleave to a circumscribed medical framework.

In recent years it’s become apparent that hearing voices is not the sole preserve of psychiatric patients, but is widespread in the general population. Although impossible to quantify with precision, researchers such as Marius Romme and Richard Bentall suggest the ratio of diagnosed to non-diagnosed hallucinators may be in the region of one to ten. Research in the Netherlands showed that widowed persons often hear the voice of a dead partner, and that 6.2% of a sample of more than 7000 people had experienced hallucinations of a similarly benign hue. Dr Sgouros concurred that the phenomenon is not necessarily a symptom of psychopathology. Indeed, he was more charitable to those claiming to hear religious voices than an atheist like myself is inclined to be, rejecting a pathologization of what he called “spiritual experiences” and not discounting the possibility of communication with supernatural forces. He pointed out that a harsher judgement entails the medicalization of a large proportion of the human race, from Old Testament prophets onwards, and also a disdainful attitude – what relativists would deplore as “Eurocentric” condescension – to societies with different cultural traditions, such as South America with its shamans and spiritual healers. He saw the matter more as a pragmatic one of the way in which such experiences are integrated into a person’s life, whether to positive or negative effect. Rather than insisting on a dogmatic verdict, it may be best here to quote a line from George Bernard Shaw’s quizzical Saint Joan. In the play, when it’s put to her that the ostensibly divine voices she hears are fabrications of her own imagination, the character of Joan retorts: “Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.”

Dominic Orosun asked Dr Sgorous to elucidate the connections between psychosis and personality disorders. He replied that he does not particularly like the term personality disorder, an “artificial concept” he sees as describing behaviours rather than personalities as such. He told us he had firmly opposed the intention of the previous government to lock up people labelled as having a severe and untreatable antisocial personality disorder that potentially endangered others, going so far as to say he “freaked out” when he heard about the measure. He stated that those with personality disorders are “certainly more prone to psychotic disorders” due their inability to cope with stress, which leads them to the creation of their own realities, the hallmark of psychosis. “Schizotypal personality disorder” appears in the World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), but not in its US counterpart referred to above, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). (“Narcissistic personality disorder” and “borderline personality disorder” are by contrast in the DSM, but omitted from the ICD. In the context of North America, the fons et origo of the “culture of narcissism” deprecated by Christopher Lasch, one can discern a certain logic to the inclusion of the former.) As the name implies, schizotypal personality disorder has elements in common with schizophrenia, such as ideas of reference. An attempt on my part to become conversant with the teeming inventory of personality disorders via a standard reference work, Hughes’ Outline of Modern Psychiatry, has ended in defeat, with the reflection that the taxonomic mania on display seems scarcely less obsessive than that of the conditions it seeks to catalogue. In this area, one can’t help wondering whether there exists a dialectic of madness.

Much emphasis has been placed in this blog on the interaction between mental illness and retrograde developments in politics (neoliberalism and austerity). I consider myself on firm ground in making the connection, which has been well established empirically since a 1958 New Haven inquiry finding people in the lowest sociological class (“unskilled, manual”) to be three times more prone to mental illness than those higher up the social scale (“business, professional and managerial”). A Swedish investigation into two million children born between 1963 and 1983 similarly showed a three-fold higher risk of schizophrenia among poorer ones, while a study from 2001 in the British Journal of Psychiatry indicates that children raised in poverty are eight times likelier to develop schizophrenia than those in more comfortable circumstances, and four times likelier to develop other types of mental illness. Suicide rates have risen to tragic proportions (upwards of 70 per 100,000 people) in countries of the former Soviet bloc ravaged by neoliberal shock therapy. Textbooks deal blandly with the question; in its chapter on schizophrenia, Hughes’ Outline of Modern Psychiatry disposes of the “prosaic” issue of “life events” in precisely two sentences. It was pleasing to find Dr Sgouros is more flexible on the matter than many of his peers, whose insistence on biological determinants has gifted governments an alibi for neglecting the relationship between mental health and deprivation (or “social exclusion” as they prefer to euphemize it, being unwilling to call a spade a spade). He voiced his disapproval of regressive changes to benefit rules, and readily assented that we are “social beings” shaped by our environment. He maintained that it’s “not rocket science” to perceive the causal chain linking mental illness with unemployment, homelessness and other social ills, and reminded us that this is still more evident in Greece than the UK, not helped in the Greek case by the “catastrophic decline” in medical services stemming from fiscal retrenchment.

I contemplated entitling this article A Socratic Dialogue with Dr Xenofon Sgouros, but decided that to do so would be overly precious wordplay. It’s nonetheless to be hoped that a famous line of real Socratic dialogue, about the unexamined life not being worth living, can apply in a modest way to our meeting with him. We attempted to probe some of the thornier aspects of the life of the mind – its Gordian knots, to succumb to the impulse toward classical references – and succeeded in reaching consensus on a number of points. We all finally were in accord that the manner in which a society treats its mentally ill, and its vulnerable citizens in general, is a reliable index of its level of civilization. At the time of writing, in an irrefutable demonstration that the diagnosis “narcissistic personality disorder” is not without applicability, it has emerged that £250,000 has been spent since 1995 on commissioning portraits and sculptures of our noble parliamentary representatives, including £10,000 on an immortalization of a dedicated persecutor of the poor and disabled, Iain Duncan Smith. The sum is equivalent to the annual running costs of the Bennett Centre, the local mental health resource closed down in 2012 on grounds of unaffordability. The inescapable conclusion, which I believe Dr Sgouros would share, is that in significant respects this society is less civilized than it would like to imagine.

Mental Health and the NHS: Is Marketization Unstoppable?

Dishonourable members of a Westminster cabal intent on making a killing from administering economic shock therapy to the NHS

 

All the measures dictated to us by the economic situation are to be implemented as a matter of emergency. This is so that the rich can continue to get rich while paying fewer taxes… so that everything which is public can be privatized, and thereby ultimately contribute not to the public good (a particularly “anti-economic” category), but to the wealth of the rich and the maintenance (costly, alas) of the middle classes, who form the reserve army of the rich; so that schools, hospitals, housing, transport and communications – those five pillars of a satisfactory life for all – can initially be regionalized (that is a step forward), then exposed to competition (that is crucial), and finally handed over to the market (that is decisive), in order that the places and resources where and with which the rich and semi-rich are educated, treated, housed and transported cannot be confused with those where the poor and their like struggle to get by… so that the mentally ill can be imprisoned for life… Such is the invariant truth of “change”, the actuality of “reform”, the concrete dimension of “modernization”.

Alain Badiou, ‘The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings’

 

The primary culprit for the UK’s economic malaise can be pinpointed with ease: a cancerous tumour of financialization metastasizing in the body politic. The state allowed deregulated banks and a lawless City of London to run amok with credit default swaps, collaterized debt obligations and all the other derivative-based financial weapons of mass destruction whose “metaphysical subtleties” would require the acumen of a second Karl Marx to unravel, turning a blind eye as bankers and traders piled up mountains of fraudulent “assets” – fictitious capital in Marxist phraseology – on the back of which they awarded themselves bonuses of eyewatering magnitude. When the duplicitous house of cards ineluctably collapsed, the political class chose not to arraign the guilty parties for their criminal legerdemain, but rather, in a staggering display of socialism for the rich, to compel a blameless citizenry to bail them out, conjuring up ex nihilo billions of pounds in “quantitative easing” to hurl into this black hole of revenue absorption. Instead of apologizing to the populace that had been corralled into providing largesse to brigands whose gilded lifestyles they could never hope to emulate, the Tory-dominated coalition that usurped power in 2010 colluded adroitly with right-wing media shills to stigmatize the poor, unemployed and sick among them as authors of the crisis. Supposedly, it was not the unfairly maligned banker who had placed a grievous strain on the Exchequer, but these canailles with their esurient demands for the bare means of subsistence (or “handouts” in the vocabulary of Toryism), not to speak of their defrauding of a “dysfunctional” welfare system, which surely dwarfed in scope anything perpetrated by the denizens of the Square Mile. Thus, they had to be punished by austerity measures that would take away their services, housing and welfare benefits – our gracious monarch, in her jubilee year of 2012, assented to a vengeful Welfare Reform Act, earlier railroaded through Parliament via the seventeenth-century chicanery of financial privilege, that abolished any statutory rights to support even for the most destitute of her subjects – regardless of the fact that there has been no example in history of such measures accomplishing anything apart from the retardation of economic growth and the aggravation of wealth polarities.

Utilising the mechanism of austerity, neoliberals hope to bring to a victorious conclusion their jihad, signposted by US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker’s 1979 declaration that living standards must decline, against the progressive gains of the post-Second World War historic compromise between labour and capital. The most important legacy of that compromise in the UK is the National Health Service. Because of its pivotal role in the lives of the great majority of the population, it has been a tough nut for market fundamentalists to crack, less vulnerable to the divide-and-rule tactics that have been effective elsewhere in undermining the institutions of what we might call capitalism with a human face. Even Margaret Thatcher balked at the pitched battle with doctors and nurses urged on her by fanatical advocates of the “unthinkable” such as John Redwood and Oliver Letwin, though for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons. In the dislocation brought about by austerity, neoliberals have grasped their chance to expedite what had been a frustratingly slow dismantlement of the free, universal-access service that blocked the “investment opportunities” to which business lays claim as its inalienable right, with the aim of transforming it into what public health professor Allyson Pollock dubs “NHS plc” in a 2004 book of that title. As KPMG’s Mark Britnell chillingly put it at a private healthcare conference shortly after the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition entered office, “The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.” Naturally, for exoteric consumption the objective of corporate pillaging is not stated so honestly, if at all, but cloaked in the noncontentious language of choice, reform and efficiency.

Despite its functionality for capitalism in reproducing a labour force capable of undertaking the work required of it, the NHS has always stuck in the craw of reactionaries as an excrescence of socialism disfiguring their free-enterprise ideals, all the more so in the age of globalized neoliberalism – “a programme for destroying collective structures which may impede pure market logic” in the formulation of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu – when every last nook and cranny of life is subject to commodification in an insatiable search for profit. Worse still, the founding ethos of the NHS mandates an allocation of funds for treatment of the elderly, patients with chronic and terminal illnesses, and others with little or no prospect of crossing the economic apartheid barrier to validation as “active” members of society, or in other words of toiling to augment the wealth and dominance of the exploiting class. The NHS, in its original conception, recognized the intrinsic “use value” of good health; but capitalists have no interest in that, only in its “exchange value” insofar as they can parlay the superior labour power (or “productivity”) of healthy workers into higher profits. No matter that, before being saddled with the cash-devouring bureaucracy of the “internal market” promoted by Tony Blair, and the fateful embrace in 1992 of ruinous private finance initiative (PFI) contracts, the NHS was more efficient than any system of privatized health care, and spectacularly more so than the grossly profligate US model that Thatcherites and drug companies drool over: privatized it must be, for the lower orders have had it too good since 1948 and, amid ruling-class alarm about the cost of socialized medicine potentially placing a drag on capital accumulation, are to be returned to their rightful station, one of precarious wellbeing and a decently early death when their usefulness is exhausted. No matter either that, across the board from utility companies to railways, privatization has been uniformly calamitous, not to say fatal, for the general public – as David Bennett of health quango Monitor argues, it has at least exposed “monopolistic, monolithic markets” to the “economic regulation” of corporate profiteers, so there is no reason why the NHS should escape with its non-profit complexion intact.

Members of the Pathways group are agreed that we are living out this dismal scenario at the sharp end. Appointments with psychiatrists and other specialist NHS staff have become few and far between, absurdly so for a collective with experience of psychotic episodes, severe depression, self-harm and attempted suicide. On the rare occasions when appointments are granted, we have been told that we must give advance notice of inability to attend of not less than forty-eight hours, on pain of expulsion from the system. It would appear that, in the eyes of NHS bureaucrats, clairvoyance is a byproduct of mental illness. Such “downsizing” of services can only cause dismay and distress. At the time of writing, a local woman from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Brenda Moult, has resorted to the desperate step of discontinuing medication for her diabetes in protest at neglect of her mental health needs on the part of South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare Foundation Trust, whose Chief Executive Neil Carr roused himself from managerial torpor long enough to issue the mindbogglingly complacent statement that “we are dealing with this as appropriate, through our normal complaints procedure.”

An investigation by the Care Quality Commission has disclosed that Brenda Moult’s predicament is far from uncommon, with 46% of community care plans opaque to those for whom they were drawn up, and 23% out of date. At our meeting on 27 August, Dave Williams said that, in his observation, many people react by withdrawing into a “bubble” of optimistic passivity, adapting to diminishing services in the hope that the situation will not deteriorate further. As he added with unfortunate accuracy, since the government has gulled much of the population into acquiescence with its austerity agenda, it will not be inclined to call off the attack now. Dave additionally noted that the Tories’ strategy is not to allay but to fuel hysteria about undoubted NHS failings, and then peddle the non sequitur that these are beyond fixing under state auspices, so that services must be dissolved, farmed out to a “third sector” of charitable and voluntary organizations, or transferred to the private sector if they are to be “fit for purpose” (a mindlessly parroted mantra of bureaucratic cant). The latest ruse is to encumber struggling hospitals with “inspiring leaders” – doubtless those selected will epitomize the oxymoronic nature of the term – whose interference, given that the real solution resides in eliminating administrative parasitism altogether, will end in inevitable failure and land them on a fast track to oblivion or subjugation to corporate overseers.

In the NHS as a whole, a direction of travel is observable toward minimal, perfunctory facilities for “customers” unable to pay the fees – or, as a particularly ugly specimen of marketization jargon has it, engage in the “cost-sharing” – that will be demanded for a fuller array of treatments. This especially applies in England, as Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are more fortunate in possessing devolved assemblies that have legislated to place some brakes on market-orientated alteration of existing clinical practice. Section 75 of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act renders the goal explicit by signalling an abandonment of comprehensive provision in favour of health consortia determining how “appropriate” they consider the existence of individual services to be. In the perennially underfunded area of mental health services, it is difficult to see how much more minimalistic things can become, but no doubt apostles of the “small state” perceive ample latitude for contraction. Private medical insurance will be out of reach for most, increasingly so as wages continue to shrink and abusive zero-hours contracts proliferate, and in the euphemistic wording of a current Competition Commission report involves “consumer detriment” for those who can afford it – i.e., patients are ripped off to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds a year by the three dominant companies in the field, BMI, Spire and HCL, which effectively constitute a cartel. The sick therefore will be caught between the Scylla of cursory, bare-bones treatment and the Charybdis of hefty overcharging. It is a dilemma familiar since the 1980s to inhabitants of African and Latin American countries under the diktat of International Monetary Fund and World Bank-sponsored “structural adjustment” programmes; the callous sociopaths who designed those programmes are now poised to inflict their morbid dogma on First World states. In a lower-tier service catering to the indigent, thanks to the secrecy decreed by “commercial confidentiality” clauses, it will be impossible for victims of botched procedures to obtain restitution for the harm that “outsourcing” of treatment has visited on them. Nor will the results be pleasant for NHS staff funnelled by Taylorist management techniques down the path of reduced autonomy and greater “efficiency” – that is, more onerous workloads – in a low-status sector akin to the US Medicaid ghetto.

The Pathways group has a new recruit who, soon after joining us, brought along recordings he’d compiled of mental health-themed television documentaries that both resonate with his own experiences and reinforce the remarks made so far. An instalment in BBC Three’s It’s a Mad World season, ‘Failed by the NHS’ was oriented around Jonny Benjamin, a man aged twenty-six with a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. He related his anger at encountering, while in the depths of suicidal psychosis during his time at university, an NHS doctor with nothing more constructive to offer than a bottle of Valium tablets, and another who rationalized the lack of an inpatient bed by superciliously questioning his need for treatment. The programme, as well as drawing attention to the deficient training of GPs in mental health issues, a shortcoming that must worsen as GP surgeries are annexed by the likes of Atos Healthcare and ex-Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s private-equity benefactor Care UK, highlighted the inadequacy of accident and emergency departments for those presenting after having self-harmed. In an interview, Dr Nav Kapur, of Manchester University’s Centre for Suicide Prevention, maintained that guidelines are routinely violated in that half of suicidal attendees receive no psychiatric assessment at all, while those that do are frequently patched up and sent on their way under the distinct impression that they are a “burden” on the system.

One might flippantly venture to propose that the suicidal take their cue from disgruntled patients at Norwich University Hospital, and camp outside A&E departments in tents until they attract proper notice. A report by Paul Kenyon in the BBC’s current affairs strand Panorama, aired on 9 September 2013, clarified what is actually likely to happen to them. ‘Locked Up For Being Ill?’ revealed the widespread and habitual incarceration of suicidal people in police cells as agonizing hours pass – outrageously, the law permits an upper limit of seventy-two hours – in fruitless efforts to locate mental health teams and psychiatrists to assess them. In Hampshire, the focus of the report, at night just four psychiatrists are on call to serve the larger part of the county. Simon Hayes, Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner, stated that initial data indicates that 45% of those detained in custody are mentally ill, while nationwide it’s estimated that 20% of police time is spent dealing with people who have psychiatric conditions. The police powers invoked, section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983, specify that, apart from in exceptional circumstances, suicidal detainees must be held in a place of safety, but clearly there is nothing safe about an environment where one can bang one’s head to a bloody pulp against a metal door or force a plastic fork down one’s throat, and nothing exceptional about such incarcerations: over 9000 of them occurred in 2011-12, some involving adolescents no older than fourteen. The Inspector of Constabulary, Drusilla Sharpling, has deplored this criminalization of the mentally ill. On Panorama, Liberal Democrat Norman Lamb, Minister for Care and Support, earnestly lamented “a national scandal” but suggested that “joined-up” services, sans additional money or any restoration of the 17% of acute psychiatric beds axed over the past five years, would be sufficient to address the problem. Since the government he represents is fragmenting rather than integrating the NHS, his argument is disingenuous. Our group’s Sara Cooper judged as “very true” the woeful picture of negligence painted by Kenyon, and there was unanimity in our ranks that he in no way exaggerated the shocking reality of what in essence is imprisonment for ill health.

Our new member’s third recording dealt with a no less worrying state of affairs. ‘Diaries of a Broken Mind’ (again from the It’s a Mad World season) featured a number of young adults with conditions ranging from agoraphobia to anorexia nervosa and, of greatest relevance to us, bipolar affective disorder. Abby, in addition to demonstrating that a misconception of bipolar disorder as “split personality” can be shared even by one’s own mother, echoed a common theme of the inaccessibility of services, with remorselessly lengthening queues and the preponderant weight of support falling on family and friends. (Here, incidentally, lies the hard economic kernel of the otherwise inexplicable volte-face of David Cameron, a former associate of poisonous homophobes, on the question of the legalization of gay marriage: as the safety nets of execrated “welfarism” are pulled away, he intends that social unrest be headed off through partners and families, some of them grateful for having been granted at last the imprimatur of the state, stepping into the breach.) The regretful Norman Lamb, that soi-disant champion of the socially excluded in the curious guise of fiscal conservative, was on hand again to explain that his solution to the crisis is for the Health and Social Care Act to be interpreted as placing mental health on an equal footing with physical health, which sounds unexceptionable until one learns that this entails no increase in the overall NHS budget, but rather a decrease in funding of physical services in order to divert cash toward shoring up the crumbling edifice of mental health provision. A striking aspect of the programme was its young participants’ heavy reliance on psychiatric drugs, something which should be heartening only to the pharmaceutical companies that derive a significant proportion of their gargantuan profits from these chemical pacifiers.

Evidence collated by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett affirms that the yawning inequalities spawned by neoliberalism impact gravely on mental health. Consequently, even if the NHS were to continue in its traditional mode, it would be overtaxed in trying to contain a flood of psychiatric disorders. Tragically, it has been substantially weakened already by the incursion of avaricious private providers like Serco, ERS Medical and Tory-donating hedge fund Circle – on course to consume a fifth of the budget, and aptly characterized by Green Party leader Natalie Bennett as “corporate bloodsuckers” – and the retrenchment ostensibly necessitated by the exigency of deficit reduction. In Devon, for instance, Richard Branson’s Virgin Healthcare, boasting vomitously of its “outcome-driven” priorities, has control of mental health services for children. Hardly anything has been done to avert a second financial crash that would furnish the smokescreen for delivering the coup de grace to the Bevanite NHS that, as tight-lipped politicians looked on, was feted, or more accurately commemorated, in Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games. Indeed, after being handsomely rewarded for their culpability in one disaster, bankers have every incentive to marshal their deadly arsenal of derivatives and restage it on a vaster scale. George Osborne, having deployed a contemptible mortgage-subsidy scheme (“Help to Buy”) aimed at stoking a speculative housing bubble, seems hellbent on hurrying the replay along. The Tories, should Osborne’s gambit keep them in office after 2015, will command the wherewithal to dismember the welfare state entirely, in line with an interview David Cameron gave to The Spectator magazine in August 2007 in which he announced a desire to follow the lead of US ultraconservatives in doing exactly that. Banks may be too big to fail, with Cyprus-style seizure of deposits the probable next step in plutocratic welfare entitlement. Mere human beings, on the other hand, whatever idealistic guff a Liberal named William Beveridge may have believed about protecting them from cradle to grave, can readily be left to founder, to shuttle between food bank, park bench and homeless shelter, with entrapment in a secure psychiatric ward or the prison-industrial complex their ultimate destination. After all, when capital is mobile and able to scour the globe for cheap labour, millions of workers in sound health find themselves surplus to requirements, leaving those with psychological ailments utterly disposable. Since Beveridge’s day, moreover, as David Cameron’s underling Nick Clegg has been anxious to demonstrate, Liberalism has become flexible in its convictions.

Contrary to the prognostications of Francis Fukuyama, whose Hegelian musings on the “end of history” were all the rage in the 1990s, in the post-Communist epoch we are living not in peaceable liberal democracies, but in illiberal kleptocracies at war with enemies without and within, of whom the mentally ill, and anyone else daring to think unconventionally, are one. Precisely at the juncture when NHS services are in flux, the quest for scapegoats to deflect responsibility for economic fiasco away from financial elites and political oligarchies, a generalized phenomenon but honed to a fine art in the UK, threatens to undo decades of painstaking anti-stigma campaigning and relegate psychiatric patients, together with immigrants, Muslim “extremists” and the “scroungers” and “shirkers” of welfare demonology, to a category of the despised Other. Research published in the Lancet in 2012 showed that, over the period of a year, one in four of them will fall prey to physical assault, a stark statistic not likely to be mitigated by the deterioration in the effectiveness and moral culture of the NHS. Retail giants Asda and Tesco, as reported in the news this week, have felt no compunction in resuscitating the most regressive stereotypes about mentally ill people, placing on sale repellent Halloween costumes caricaturing them as homicidal, straitjacketed lunatics. In a highly disturbing development, children as young as seven are to be screened for symptoms of mental ill health, which in the present political climate implies not a benign attempt to help those with genuine problems, but the medicalization of incipient rebellion against the school-work-consumer treadmill under such preposterous rubrics as “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD), and the implementation of methods to induce more “compliant” – or, in Frankfurt School terminology, authoritarian – personalities.

In light of all that has been said above, it would be easy, and perhaps justified, to conclude in a melancholy key. No set of circumstances, however, is so forlorn as to merit despair: as German philosopher Walter Benjamin asserted in another dark period of history, “It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.” The NHS was the product of prolonged and bitter class struggle, a victory for the British working class after hundreds of thousands of them – and millions of workers globally – had sacrificed their lives to defeat capitalism in its terroristic Hitlerian form. The Labour Party fulfilled its historical mission in founding it and the other organs of the welfare state, and since then, the Bennite interregnum notwithstanding, has been a busted flush in protracted retreat from social democracy, a redundancy diagnosed as early as the Gaitskellite 1960s in Ralph Miliband’s withering Parliamentary Socialism, a text from which his sons apparently learnt nothing. No illusions should be harboured about the capacity of today’s Labour politicians, technocrats almost to the last man and woman, to preserve their own creation. In the opinion of the present author, Mark Conlon, it can be saved only through a resurgence of proletarian militancy, in solidarity with the resistance of NHS employees to the degradation of their profession, that would amend the balance of forces in a way favourable to labour analogous to that which obtained after 1945. I think it unduly pessimistic to assume that the neoliberal state is so hegemonic as to preclude that happening, and would easily quash here any of the mass mobilizations that are acclaimed, even if the interpretation is erroneous, as manifestations of the popular will when they occur in Libya or Syria, but in a British context are anathematized as “criminality pure and simple” (the words following the riots of 2011 of our august Prime Minister, whose antipathy to crime is, to say the least, selective). Capitalism in its neoliberal variant, in spite of its advanced stage of degeneracy, may not have met its gravediggers yet. At some point, nevertheless, it assuredly will. When, to quote Walter Benjamin again, “political action explodes the continuum of history,” mental patients will have a place alongside other oppressed and marginalized people in fighting for a better world, one that should have equality in health care as an unshakeable principle.

Musicians and Mental Ilness, Part One: Robert Calvert

 

My nerves are made of steel/And my eyes are eagle-sharp/And what would freak the average man/Does not affect my heart

Robert Calvert, ‘The Right Stuff’

 

It requires a lyricist of no little verve to weave references to Palestinian terrorist cell Black September and the medieval Islamic sect of Assassins into a popular song (albeit one in which Simon House’s violin, rather than an electric guitar, is the lead instrument), in the process rhyming “petrodollar” with “petrol d’Allah” to form an incongruously sprightly refrain. Robert Calvert was such a writer. The audacious wordplay of that song, and of its companions on the wryly named Quark, Strangeness and Charm LP, is characteristic of the remarkable lyrics he penned for Hawkwind between 1972 and 1979, a role that expanded to see him become the group’s primary singer and a theatrical focal point of its concerts. That he vied for the post with Michael Moorcock, winner of numerous literary prizes including the 1977 Guardian Fiction Award, is an indication of the singularity of his input. The present author, Mark Conlon, has been an admirer of Dave Brock’s ever-mutating crew of progressive rockers – or, as John Lydon among others would argue apropos the early Hawkwind, proto-punks – for more than three decades. Their discography, in the years since the band coalesced in 1969 in the hippie enclaves of Ladbroke Grove, has ramified almost beyond calculation, but I think a substantial proportion of listeners would agree with me that the Calvert-dominated period yielded the greatest dividend of astounding sounds and amazing music (to plagiarize the title of an album from that time). In addition to his tenure in Hawkwind, Calvert pursued a distinctive solo career that continued into the 1980s, notably with an album, Freq, centred on the heroism and sorrow of the British miners’ strike. He suffered a fatal heart attack on 14 August 1988 at the tragically early age of 43.

According to his own testimony, Robert Calvert was labelled as schizophrenic in his youth, but doctors subsequently rescinded the diagnosis. In 1972, he was assessed as having bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it was then more commonly known, and sectioned under the Mental Health Act. (As a consequence, he was prevented from rerecording a lacklustre vocal part for a forthcoming single, the lyrics of which, with their deadpan portrayal of a humble bicycle as cosmic time machine, he’d based loosely on Alfred Jarry’s pataphysical drolleries. ‘Silver Machine’ ended up being sung by Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister, Hawkwind’s bass guitarist, and its commercial success was the first rung on the ladder of stardom for the gravel-voiced hellraiser, who hails from the same Potteries town, Burslem, as our group’s David Sweetsur.) It has been postulated that Calvert’s psychological troubles stemmed from his inability, due to a defective eardrum, to fulfil his boyhood ambition of becoming a Royal Air Force pilot, a failure, as this analysis interprets it, that spurred him on to bursts of frenetic activity in diverse fields – he was a novelist, playwright and iambic pentameter-phobic poet as well as a musician – separated by interludes of lassitude and depression. More straightforwardly, whatever their longstanding origin, they may have been exacerbated by the demands placed on him by a heavy touring schedule, and by the psychic energy he invested in an array of bizarre stage characters. In December of 1972, for example, Hawkwind taped concerts in Brixton and Liverpool for a live album issued the next year as the double LP Space Ritual, with the recently liberated Calvert declaiming his poetry between the musical numbers: heavy amplification, a psychedelic light show and a general ambience claimed to constitute “88 minutes of brain damage” can scarcely have been in line with the recommendations of the poet’s psychiatrist.

Calvert’s mental state fluctuated throughout his time with Hawkwind. The group’s road manager Jeff Dexter, recalling a French tour of October 1977 in which one of Calvert’s personae was an anarchist bomber, a sort of acid-rock Ravachol, has said that the frontman became “totally convinced that the whole first row was full of the heads of the Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof and everybody. He got completely carried away with that fantasy.” This episode of florid paranoia eventuated in Calvert, still wearing his onstage paramilitary garb, causing a furore by pursuing a Mercedes limousine through the streets of Paris; having caught up with the vehicle, he singlehandedly tried to overturn it before the bewildered occupants managed to speed off. He recalled the incident as being reminiscent of a scene from a Woody Allen film or Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville – which, for those fond of arcane connections, is subtitled A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution – and unconvincingly ascribed it to high spirits. The tour had to be cancelled after three dates, and Calvert was again hospitalised on his return to England. Hawkwind’s saxophonist Nik Turner elaborates that, in “up” moods of this kind, Calvert “was completely manic, with ideas flying out nineteen to the dozen – and then going off on a twenty-mile route-march in all his military costume.” Rock scribe Nick Kent, an early supporter of Hawkwind, commented that Calvert during phases of mania was “an overwhelming person” with “a seemingly inexhaustible supply of natural adrenaline… capable of flashes of brilliance.” The problem, as Kent saw it, lay in a tendency for his ideas to become “further and further out” and escape feasibility, as in a proposal for a machine that would transcribe improvised poetry for distribution to concertgoers. ‘I Hear Voices’ is a frank confession from late in Calvert’s career of the aural hallucinations that transmitted these extraordinary notions, voices described in the song as “pirates of the brain waves” perpetually speaking “in stereo with heavy FX.”

A leitmotif of this blog is that psychotic illness is in no way an automatic inhibitor of mental keenness, and Robert Calvert is surely excellent proof of that. In 1977, a book by Jacques Attali was published entitled Noise: The Political Economy of Music. It made the following claim: “Music is prophecy: its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.” Calvert’s work lends credence to Attali’s thesis. His translation into music of the science-fiction eschatologies of J.G. Ballard, Norman Spinrad and Roger Zelazny was genuinely prescient, and in spite of his bipolarity, or perhaps as a result of it, he was able to perceive with lucidity the authoritarian contours of an emerging dystopia. Where “sane” people might have taken at face value what politicians told them, Calvert fixatedly sought out information on governmental and business skullduggery. His 1974 concept album Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters anticipated, in a blackly comic key, the West German Lockheed F-104G jet-fighter scandal that began to leak out to the public shortly thereafter, and was an inspiration to punk provocateur Jello Biafra. A sample of the humour: a pilot’s cockpit checklist differs from the norm in comprising such unorthodox items as Largactil and Haloperidol, neuroleptics that one surmises were prescribed to treat the songwriter’s psychosis. Calvert, unfortunately, did not live long enough to see Lockheed Martin place itself beyond satire by diversifying its sphere of operations to encompass the UK census alongside arms manufacture and provision of interrogators to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Instances of the perspicacity of Calvert’s prognoses can readily be multiplied. In a July 1977 interview with Sounds magazine, espying the omnipresent surveillance for which the “Free World” would become notorious, he asserted that Orwellian concepts of repression were outdated, stating “Big Brother is watching you is nothing to the subtle techniques that are already being used.” The booklet that accompanied 1978’s 25 Years On, essentially Calvert’s final studio disc with Hawkwind but released under the alias of Hawklords, cautioned against what later would be termed globalization through his invention of Pan Transcendental Industries, a crazed multinational entity engaged in “a wholesale megastructural rehabilitation of the globe” by means of a “policy of reduction of culture to commodity.” 1984’s Freq combines documentary recordings from picket lines with an invocation of Ned Ludd as a model for struggle against what Calvert rightly intuited as the worsening tyranny of capitalist automation and rationalization. The 1986 solo outing Test-Tube Conceived investigates issues that have become pressing in the twenty-first century, including, inter alia, technological invasion of privacy, genetic manipulation, and the implications of the then embryonic internet for diffusion of knowledge and contestation of corporate control. One is drawn to conclude that psychological abnormality, instead of distancing someone from political reality, may serve to facilitate an uncannily perceptive insight into it. Had he not died a quarter of a century ago, our bipolar seer might be tempted to declare, not without a certain grim satisfaction: welcome to the future.

Robert Calvert’s sensibility was shaped in a generational context where the espousal of “rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets” – to quote the indecorously militant slogan of leftists associated with Hawkwind, the White Panther Party – seemed for a brief moment to harbinger revolution. His first ventures of note were a Roundhouse exhibition of environmental poetry and the very Sixties-sounding Street Dada Nihilismus, he wrote for alternative publications such as Frendz and International Times, and his concerns with Reichian orgone accumulators and Angry Brigade-style urban guerrillas – the latter provocation predictably banned by the BBC – are of their time, even if, with his nonconformist suits and cropped hair, sartorially their author stood apart from it. Calvert himself provided a nostalgic elegy for the era: “We dropped out and tuned in/Spoke secret jargon/And we would not bargain/For what we had found/ In the days of the underground.” The milieu and its communitarian ethos seem impossibly remote when set against today’s sharp-elbowed corpocracy of manufactured and infinitely biddable popular musicians – a trend Calvert foresaw in his 1981 novel, Hype –  who are unlikely to follow in his footsteps by turning for subject matter to Ezra Pound and Italian Futurism, and almost all of whom are bereft of the tiniest spark of artistic madness, whether reefer-induced or otherwise. It was a soil in which the libertarian, nondiscriminatory tenets of antipsychiatry naturally took root, and it’s logical that, in a 1978 interview with New Musical Express, Calvert voiced a desire to collaborate with R.D. Laing. Concurrently in France, rock guitarist Richard Pinhas drew on the Laingian theories of Deleuze and Guattari in his science fiction-influenced band, Heldon, and I intend to make his work the topic of a future article on this blog.

To judge from the evidence of Calvert’s involvement, for its day this countercultural setting was a benign one for persons exhibiting the symptoms of mental illness. Despite his erratic conduct, which inevitably caused friction – not to speak of physical altercations – with his bandmates when it reached the extremes of brandishing swords and pistols, he was never forcibly ejected from Hawkwind. He quit when he considered the project to have run its creative course, little suspecting the venerable sonic assassins would still be plying their trade in 2013, many years after his departure for stellar regions unknown. Lemmy, on the other hand, was booted out in 1975, on the preposterous grounds that, while a member of an ensemble not exactly renowned for abstention from illicit narcotics, he had been arrested in Ontario for possession of cocaine, then set free without charge when it transpired that he’d been carrying nothing more potent than amphetamines (it proved a fortuitous sacking when he christened his new outfit Motorhead after the last song he’d written for the arbitrarily censorious space rockers). In fact, far from Calvert suffering marginalization on account of his mental instability, it would not be inaccurate to say that, in terms of personnel and musical direction, the Calvert-Brock axis came to steer the previously shambolic Hawkwind ship with a somewhat imperious hand. Dave Brock, who assumed more or less sole leadership after the breakup of the partnership, though acknowledging the challenges of coping with Calvert’s “freakouts” and insomniac hyperactivity, avers that “Bob was great to work with.” Jeff Dexter sums up the wayward genius thus: “Calvert was nuts, but he was a sweetheart.” Nor did the indefatigable polymath lack for help in making his solo records: guests ranged from Arthur Brown and Vivian Stanshall, themselves by no means unacquainted with eccentric behaviour, to Brian Eno and even Richard Wagner’s great-great grandson Adrian, who lent assistance on Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters.

The counterculture, for all its vitality, turned out not to be the nascent successor to a moribund bourgeois order prophesied by Theodore Roszak, but rather a movement whose members were easily neutralized by that which they sought to supplant. A few, like Jerry Rubin and David Horowitz, joined the ranks of the “straights” they once disparaged. Or, more precisely, this is the sad fate that befell a dismayingly large number of them. The unrepentant reprobates of Hawkwind have been more admirable than most in resisting “matured servility” – William Hazlitt’s epithet for an earlier strain of political apostasy – and in doggedly flying the flag of outsider radicalism long past the heyday of communes, free festivals and benefit gigs for the likes of Timothy Leary and the Stoke Newington Eight. At the time of writing, alas, ‘Master of the Universe’ has been tainted by its inclusion in advertising for a Ford motorcar, presumably with the sanction of the track’s composers, Dave Brock and Nik Turner. Not so much warriors on the edge of time, one fears, as men finally tempted by all too earthly rewards. It’s hard to envisage Robert Calvert assenting to such a Faustian pact with commerce – he likely would have preferred to upbraid the masters of the universe presiding over Barclays and Goldman Sachs. In this respect, I consider him typical of those with experience of psychosis, who in my view not infrequently display an ethical sensitivity surpassing that of their fellow citizens. In conclusion, I’d hazard a comparison with the Pathways group’s Sean, who not only shares a comparable psychiatric diagnosis, but is similarly blessed with both an abundant imagination and an acute sense of social justice (and, incidentally, is a musician harbouring a desire to put his keyboard skills to good use in making a progressive rock opus). Indeed, Sean owns a copy of X In Search of Space, the 1971 album featuring ‘Master of the Universe’ and a surreal literary mythologization of Hawkwind by “Captain RN Calvert” – Robert Calvert’s middle name was Newton – that was the first fruit of the poet’s contact with the band. Contrary to stubbornly extant prejudices about mental ill health, the world would be a better place if it contained, not fewer, but many more human beings of their ilk.

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A Black Friday for Mental Health in Stoke-on-Trent

The reception area of the Bennett Centre, photographed by Dominic Orosun on 19 December 2012, two days before the facility’s demise

 

The poor are the powers of the earth, they have the right to speak as masters to governments that neglect them.

Saint-Just, 1794

 

Today, 21 December 2012, a Stoke-on-Trent mental health facility, the Bennett Centre in Shelton, has closed, one more piece of collateral damage in the unrelenting “austerity” war conducted by Britain’s capitalist ruling elite. Its disappearance has nothing to do with its efficacy in allaying mental distress, in which capacity it has been outstanding, and everything to do with the fact that its work is far outweighed in the balance of political priorities by welfare for bankers and corporations. The Centre was formerly the venue for our group’s gatherings, and all Pathways members have relied heavily on its help. On this inauspicious date, and with the year drawing to an end, we are thus impelled to reflect on the state of mental health in the Potteries, and in the United Kingdom generally. Our experiences are a microcosm of the national situation, which is undoubtedly one of accelerating breakdown and crisis. David Sweetsur has written a poignant elegy on the loss of the Bennett Centre, and readers are directed to his blog,  A Day in the Life, for an account of a final public meeting that was held in the building on 29 November. Its termination is senseless and shocking, though it would be wrong to say that we were blindsided by the development; rather, for some time there has been a grim inevitability to it, even as sham consultations on closure were revealing vehement opposition to the move on the part of service users and their families. Cognizant that democracy and popular sentiment play a negligible role in the governance of Britain – an archetype of Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” if ever there was one – we are not surprised to find ourselves divested of material means of aid, but plentifully supplied with verbal bromides illogically assuring us that no untoward results will flow from a dismantling of NHS infrastructure.

It is jarring to contrast this desolate reality with the pious hopes expressed by our Panglossian political representatives. A House of Commons debate on the topic of mental health was held on 14 June of this year, and broadcast on the Parliament Channel. The present author, Mark Conlon, should stress that he is far from being a devoted viewer of this televisual conduit of what Leninist phraseology would impugn – not unfairly, in the case of the Westminster legislature – as parliamentary cretinism. However, given the interest of the subject under discussion, I watched the session with a degree of care. The debate had been requested by two Conservative backbenchers, Charles Walker and Nicky Morgan. In arguing for its desirability, Walker, a self-described “practising fruitcake” and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Mental Health, pointed out to schedulers that it would be only the second discussion of its type to have taken place in his seven-year tenure as an MP, in itself a telling indication of the value placed on mentally ill people by Westminster’s compassionate legislators. Morgan was a corporate lawyer before becoming the representative for Loughborough in 2010, and has a dismal parliamentary record which did nothing to inspire confidence in her ability to initiate an enlightened interrogation of the issue at hand: she has voted for increases in VAT and university tuition fees, supports repressive anti-terror laws, and favours the austerity-defying replacement of Trident missiles with a more lethal nuclear armoury. She gave an introductory talk, which was followed by contributions from Walker and other speakers.

Let us be scrupulously fair to the participants, and to the bare handful of parliamentarians able to find sufficient space in their demanding schedules to attend the debate, and acknowledge its good points. A number of MPs were frank in talking about their own psychiatric problems, even if their intention of thereby combating stigma meets the impediment that politicians are scarcely the kind of esteemed figures likely to encourage the public to reevaluate prejudicial attitudes. Kevan Jones, a former Labour defence minister, revealed a hitherto suppressed history of depression, Conservatives Sarah Wollaston and Andrea Leadsom spoke of their experiences of postnatal depression and anxiety, and Charles Walker discussed his ongoing struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder: in “coming out” about their respective mental health diagnoses, all of them can be commended for summoning more courage than is habitually displayed by British MPs. Pertinent, if hardly revelatory, observations were made about drastic shortfalls in mental health funding, an excessive reliance on drug therapies, the unreasonable burdens placed on carers, the punitive nature of work capability tests, and the scandalous sentencing of the mentally ill to terms in prison. Positive changes have emerged from the debate in the form of legislation lifting bans on those with a record of severe mental illness from serving as jurors, MPs or company directors. The repeal of these antiquated laws is welcome, though it should be said that the advance is directly attributable not to government initiative, but to a private member’s bill put forward by Liberal Democrat Paul Burstow.

So much for the praiseworthy aspects. On the negative side of the ledger, we may note a relaxed and collegial tone to proceedings incongruent with the desperation of people’s lives outside the cossetted environs of the Commons debating chamber. Lacunae and begged questions were glaring, and as a tour d’horizon of mental health in the UK, Nicky Morgan’s exposition was clearly inadequate. Her hope that employers will rethink discrimination is utterly fantastical at a time when capitalists, in tandem with government, are engaged in an all-out assault on workers’ rights and wages (and, by taking advantage of the forced labour gifted them by workfare, on the very concept of wages). The one employer guaranteed to cater to the requirements of mentally ill people, Remploy, is having its factories systematically shut down, with thirty-four out of fifty-four already gone through a callous withdrawal of support by the Department for Work and Pensions. With a wholesale top-down restructuring of the NHS imposed in mendacious violation of Tory election pledges, and the example of the Bennett Centre in mind, Morgan’s call for a greater say for service users is likewise pie in the sky. No evidence was adduced that progress can be made in these directions in the context of an ever more exploitative, hierarchical and secretive polity.

In a speech delivered by a Tory, unsurprisingly there was no mention by Morgan of the governmental campaign of vilification directed against welfare claimants. According to a recent poll carried out for the Daily Telegraph, this has diminished public backing for the benefit system to its lowest level for thirty years, an outcome with deplorable implications for those mentally ill persons compelled to rely on welfare payments. A previous crisis of capitalism, that of the 1930s, was triggered by untrammelled financial speculation and seized upon by hateful politicians as an opportunity to scapegoat and persecute the vulnerable. In their venomous contempt for the sick and disabled, many of Morgan’s colleagues are cut from the same social Darwinist cloth, and desirous of making destitution via Atos assessment a mere prelude to something more sinister, along the lines of historical precedents branded by Antonio Gramsci – a man with serious disabilities of the sort regularly “cured” by the thaumaturgy of Atos doctors – as “incredible acts of brutality which have cast the weak and the non-conforming into the limbo of the lumpen-classes or have eliminated them entirely.” Of the lessons to be learned from history, the slide in Nazi Germany toward Aktion T4 is one of the most vital. It commenced with caricatural demonization of the disabled in right-wing propaganda organs, such not-so-distant cousins of The Sun and Daily Mail as Neues Volk and Der Angriff, emphasizing the cost to the state of prolonging the Ballastexistenzen of useless human beings. Certain Tories, to their shame, regard this descent into the abyss more as exemplar than harrowing warning. Already the consequences have been fatal, with non-productive “stock” – investment banker and welfare “reform” minister Lord Freud’s vile characterization of those whose existences he controls – fraudulently stripped of entitlement to sickness benefits, then robbed through arbitrary “sanctions” of Jobseeker’s Allowance, and finally driven in despair to suicide.

Consistently, debators ignored the certainty that an increasingly inhumane and reactionary society will only exacerbate psychiatric distress. Several speakers adverted to the damaging effects of inferior accommodation on mental health, but in a vacuum where “bedroom taxes” and benefit caps went unremarked. Homelessness is hugely corrosive of mental well-being, yet no remedies were proposed for a predicament in which 200,000 households were at risk of eviction or repossession in the period from October 2011 to September 2012, and 75,ooo children will spend Christmas 2012 in temporary housing. Examples could be multiplied, but would not modify the pattern of willing a leap into utopia in the absence of the social conditions to enable it. Who would have guessed that the denizens of Westminster are so sympathetic to ultraleft voluntarism? From the perspective of our group, the most obvious elision in the debate concerned psychosis, to which only passing reference was made. In the further interest of fairness, it should be conceded that Charles Walker addressed this failing in a House of Commons session he oversaw on 10 December, a response to the publication in November of The Abandoned Illness, a Schizophrenia Commission report recently analyzed by Dave Sweetsur in his blog. Much like its predecessor of 14 June, however, it was full of noble intentions that will come to grief when confronted with an NHS withering under “austerity” cuts, and offering the likes of Capita and KPMG limited scope for harvesting of profits by privatization of the “cinderella” service of mental health provision. The NHS budget of £100 billion represents lucrative pickings for corporate raiders overall, but only morsels can be pilfered through usurping the jobs of those tending to an economically deprived stratum of patients. The upshot will be a proportion of such jobs vanishing, with the remainder in a sectoral backwater without the resources to dam the rising tide of mental suffering. Schizophrenic “customers” may be the recipients of Walker’s orotund speechifying on the floor of the House of Commons; they are unlikely to receive much in the way of professional care. The bad faith of Tories who pontificate about a brighter future for the mentally ill, while knowing very well that a bleak fate awaits them in a commodified NHS, is breathtaking.

Adjectives such as “historic” and “landmark” have been bandied about by commentators on this episode of parliamentary loquaciousness. That is surely hyperbole, as the speeches amount to little more than amateur marginalia to arguments about mental health. Meanwhile, the recommendations of experts in the field, together with the opinions of mentally ill people themselves, are routinely brushed to one side because they conflict with the dogmas prized by the political class. What Nicky Morgan’s approach essentially boils down to is this: let’s encourage those in positions of power to be a little nicer and more understanding, and things might improve for the mentally ill. Unfortunately, this wishful thinking founders when it runs up against the sort of society her party is shaping: one in which the powerful ride roughshod over the powerless in an unbridled pursuit of wealth and privilege. It would be the sheerest fantasy to expect the government to which she belongs to row back from widening the grotesque social divisions that contribute to mental ill health. With its abandonment of even the pretence of pursuing social democratic reformism, nothing better can be expected of the Labour Party should it regain office. Neither party has the least degree of sympathy with the contention of Saint-Just, quoted at the head of this article, that a country should be governed in accordance with the preferences of its poorest and most distressed citizens. In the eyes of Tories and Blairites, latter-day Burkeans contemptuous of those in “unwholesome and pestiferous occupations” – or, worse, no occupation at all – such ideas are to be anathematized as affronts to their divinely mandated authority to dictate the conduct of the lower orders. In a class-riven society managed by these parties, regardless of whether they are propped up by amoral Liberal Democrat careerists, the prospect for the amelioration of mental illness is dire. Rather than rely on the benevolence of zealous promoters of the neoliberal state that perpetuates their misery, mentally ill people would do better to join in solidarity with other oppressed groups seeking that state’s complete overthrow, and its replacement with one predicated not on the inhuman pursuit of profit, but geared instead to the fulfillment of human needs and happiness. After decades of massive wealth transfer from poor to rich, and with a cruel Welfare Reform Act reducing swathes of the poor to corporate helotry or absolute pauperization, not to speak of rendering many of them psychologically ill in the process, revolutionary change could not be more imperative.

I will conclude with some reflections of Pathways group members on the Bennett Centre and the people who worked there, gathered during a meeting at Hanley library and our subsequent Christmas meal at the China Garden carvery. Sean described its staff as “brilliant” at ensuring a safe environment for service users. Dave Williams echoed his view in speaking of the Centre as a lifeline and a safety net, staffed with people he could trust, singling out Anita Thomas for particular praise. He lamented what he termed “the destruction of a useful service.” Sara seconded Dave’s high opinion of Anita, and recalled how the Centre had come to her rescue when she had been homeless in 2008. She cherishes a vivid memory of Matt Aitken cooking a meal for her when the two of them were inpatients. Because of their untimely deaths, Matt and Cath Barker will be uppermost in my mind when I think back on the Bennett Centre, but I would also like to pay tribute to all the members of staff I’ve known, especially Sue Mellor, Janet Sigley, Colin Burgess and Nigel Faulkner. When I was an inpatient in 2002, Sue, having calibrated my political outlook with precision, lent me her own paperback copy of John Pilger’s Hidden Agendas. I was too unwell to read more than a small portion of the book, but those few pages contributed to reestablishing a tentative connection to the world outside the confines of my psychological anguish. It was such small gestures of kindness, repeated on a daily basis, that made the Bennett Centre so effective in its work, kindnesses which are beyond the comprehension of conservative ideologues and bureaucratic number crunchers. Working with people who were often at the limit of their endurance, in a culture whose ethos is harshly inimical to those who fall outside the psychological norm, its dedicated staff excelled in restoring to them dignity and self-belief. Above all, I have the Bennett Centre to thank for placing me in contact with the members, past and present, of the Pathways group, each of whom has demonstrated qualities of fortitude that make a nonsense of every negative stereotype about mental ill health.

A Post-Jubilee Update on the Bennett Centre

As NHS services crumble, here we see the Tories’ “preferred option” for dealing with the troubling problem of mental illness: incarceration in prison

 

It gives the present author, Mark Conlon, no satisfaction to say that his forebodings regarding the reactionary potential of Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee – or the Parasitical Jubilee, as we in the Pathways group prefer to label it – were amply borne out. Britain’s two major television broadcasters, ITV and the even more abject BBC, marched in lockstep in a debased campaign of monarchic adoration whose ardour could have taught the North Korean Stalinist regime a few lessons in the black arts of political propaganda. Viewed through this distorting lens, royalist enthusiasm was exaggerated; nonetheless there can be little doubt that the Jubilee was a colossal display of tragicomic false consciousness on the part of many sections of the population. At times such as these, the Pathways group feels like an oasis of the most scrupulous sanity.

In a previous piece (see the entry for 2 June), I noted the disparity between prodigal spending on Jubilee “celebrations” versus an absence of funds available to the Bennett Centre, the Stoke-on-Trent mental health resource which was the original base of the Pathways group, and the cruel perversion of priorities this laid bare. (I don’t wish to imply that there is any prioritization attached to celebrating the monarchy – the sole priority there consists in abolishing the mouldering cadaver that, zombie-like, continues to rule over the UK.) Our group’s Phil Leese has been working tirelessly to publicise the injustice closing the Centre would involve, pointing out that since the facility is owned by the local health trust, to sell it off to make a fast buck would be myopic folly of the first order. It is an argument of incontestable force in a period when private finance initiatives have inflated to exorbitant levels the long-term cost of new health facilities (PFI projects from the Blair-Brown years have saddled taxpayers with a debt to corporate sharks of £70 billion for NHS buildings whose real value is scarcely a sixth of that sum). Phil was interviewed on the subject by BBC Radio Stoke earlier this month. Staunchly holding his ground in the face of the scepticism of a not markedly sympathetic interviewer, he maintained that respite beds at the Centre already constituted the best sort of care in the community. Explaining that he made use of the Centre for appointments with his psychiatrist and care coordinator, and for blood tests, he said that journeying to a different location would mean patients like himself having to catch up to three buses – something especially irksome when even one bus ride can be a traumatic experience for a mentally ill person. He was succeeded on air by the chairman of North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare, Ken Jarrold – a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, no less – who, in advocating closure, regurgitated the sonorous platitudes (“stronger community teams” and “services not buildings” were two typically anodyne examples) one has come to expect from someone in his position.

A public consultation on the Bennett Centre’s fate took place on the afternoon of 14 June, and was attended by Phil, Dave Sweetsur, Dave Williams, Dominic Orosun and myself from our group. When we arrived at the Centre, we discovered that a presentation to staff was in progress (in closed session), and that patients and carers would be dealt with separately when this came to an end. It may be that staff were privy to more of the unvarnished truth, while the rest of us received the “spun” version. Not that the pill was excessively sugarcoated in deference to our sensibilities: on the contrary, from the outset we were subjected to a torturous barrage of management speak from the three grim-visaged NHS bureaucrats who were tasked with outlining the proposed changes to us. Mercifully, “front-ended” is the only one of an extensive repertoire of rebarbative neologisms that has lodged in my memory. The meeting took the form of a summary of the Bennett Centre’s predicament (in dreaded “PowerPoint” fashion), followed by questions from the audience.

In speaking to us – or, to put it more accurately, at us – the bureaucrats did not flinch from invoking the Nuremberg defence of “We’re just following orders, and if we don’t carry them out then others will.” Cuts had to be implemented, and they were resolved to be the ones with the iron will to see them through. The loss of inpatient beds at the Bennett Centre (together with those at similar centres in Longton, Tunstall, Leek and Cheadle) was presented as a fait accompli, with the only thing at issue being the question of whether the building would close altogether. As stated in a jargon-infested booklet distributed to attendees, closure is the “preferred option” (of the document’s authors, that is – few of its readers will be inclined to share their opinion). The booklet’s blithe assurances that this would entail no deterioration in standards of service are unpersuasive. Mention of the “extensive engagement” of the voluntary sector in future arrangements gives away the game that NHS resources on their own will no longer be sufficient to cope with the burden placed on them. And what, you may wonder, are the annual “efficiency savings” (to use the booklet’s chilling phrase) likely to result from all this infliction of misery? Answer: a meagre £2.5 million. Contrast that with the fact that, the day after the consultation, it was announced that a further £140 billion would be disbursed to UK banks to “encourage” them to be so generous as to lend the money at interest.

Reactions from service users and carers were incisive and impassioned, not to say vehement. A woman in her sixties said she had a son who benefited greatly from spells as an inpatient at the Bennett Centre (admissions which additionally granted her some relief from caring for him at home), but whose firm intention it was to commit suicide if he had to go to the Harplands hospital instead. (And any promptings in that sombre direction are the last thing needed at a time when, as Dave Williams has brought to my attention via data released through the Freedom of Information Act, an average of thirty-two sickness benefit claimants are dying every week after being found “fit to work” under draconian new legislation overseen by private company Atos Heathcare, which pockets the profits from a contract worth £100 million a year for its calamitous ineptitude.) A service user diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia conveyed his fear of the deleterious consequences that might ensue (such as physically harming his wife) if he no longer had the sanctuary of the Centre to which to turn. A man articulated his gratitude to staff at the Centre for the help they had given his wife, saying it had also enabled him to remain in work and thereby pay the taxes on which the NHS depends. In the course of giving his moving testimony, he became so upset that on its completion he had to leave the room. It was observed that, in an economically deprived area like Stoke-on-Trent, an emphasis on home treatment overlooks the reality that unsatisfactory homes often exacerbate psychiatric ailments; and that if the Harplands hospital becomes the sole refuge from such environments, it is one increasingly plagued by the same vices of drug and alcohol misuse from which people might be desperate to escape. None of this had any discernible impact on those to whom it was addressed and, after ninety minutes, the gathering was wound up in an atmosphere of sour despair and barely contained anger. We now await a final decision on the Bennett Centre to be reached by the end of July. To borrow the title of a novel Dave Sweetsur is currently reading, we are not yet at the terminus of this particular voyage au bout de la nuit – and when we do arrive there, we are exceedingly unlikely to emerge into a sunlit dawn of improved care.

At the Pathways meeting at Hanley library on 19 June, we shared our impressions of the events of the previous Thursday. Dominic Orosun doubted that the round of consultations on NHS services amounted to anything more than a cynical and perfunctory PR exercise. Sara Cooper echoed the views of participants who had expressed an overwhelming preference for the therapeutic ambiance of the Bennett Centre over what she called the “horrible” climate of the Harplands hospital. Overall, it was felt that the response to some of the questioners had been brusque to the point of condescending dismissal. Dave Williams, with his usual uncompromising directness, provided the most succinct assessment of the trio of bureaucrats: his perception, he said, was that they were “cold-hearted shits.” A blunt characterization, to be sure, but one with which it is hard to find fault – or to resist extending to all those responsible for the looming crisis in mental health provision.

*                              *                              *                              *

As a cheerful postscript to what so far has been a bulletin of unalloyed gloom, I can report that Steve, our physicist, has returned to the Pathways group on a regular basis. He tells us that he has recently been immersed in the writings of Immanuel Kant (his Critique of Pure Reason) and Noam Chomsky (particularly the great man’s works on linguistics). Though I am in danger of labouring the thesis on this site, I will take the opportunity to reemphasize that, as Steve’s example demonstrates, a diagnosis of psychotic illness by no means sounds the death-knell for a person’s intellectual capacities. If the members of our group are anything to go by, the very opposite may be the case!

A Not So Humble Jubilee Address

A royal anniversary deserving of celebration: the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649. “A subject and a sovereign are clean different things,” declared the deposed tyrant from the scaffold with characteristic monarchic arrogance – moments before his head and body became two separate things

 

If the essence of the state, as of religion, is mankind’s fear of itself, this fear reaches its highest pitch in constitutional, and particularly in the English, monarchy. The experience of three millennia has not made men wiser but on the contrary more confused and more prejudiced, it has made them mad…

Friedrich Engels, 1844

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Denis Diderot

 

Consider two of the unfolding episodes in the Britain of June 2012. On the one hand we have the obscene expense and fawning media attention – take an especially obeisant bow of shame, British Broadcasting Corporation – lavished on “celebrating” the survival of the cadaverous institution of royalty. On the other we have the proposed closing of the Bennett Centre in Stoke-on-Trent, a vital institution for the continued running of which no money can be found, and whose imminent demise provokes scant media coverage outside that contained in the local evening newspaper, The Sentinel.

The monarchy, in so far as it has a purpose apart from inculcating the deference necessary to prolong its own lucrative rule, props up the elective dictatorship of the semi-feudal British state and its rigid, snobbery-ridden class division. As the Crown-in-Parliament, it “legitimates” the Westminster pantomime that so grievously misrepresents the bulk of parliamentary constituents, receiving in return “humble” addresses and slavish oaths of loyalty for its services. It stands in the way of a written constitution that would give inalienable rights to dignified citizens, as opposed to privileges granted to prostrate subjects through the noblesse oblige of those above (privileges which, as the post-9/11 era has highlighted, can just as readily be taken away). It administers a corrupt and risibly archaic honours system. It whips up nationalist delirium, as the mass waving of Union Jacks during the Diamond Jubilee will make lamentably plain. It fosters religious credulity and superstition, and encourages an idolatrous and infantilizing worship of itself which is repugnant in a supposedly secular and enlightened age. Let us not descend into the tawdry mercantile realms of squabbling over whether the royal family brings in hordes of awestruck tourists to swell the depleted coffers of the Treasury, drums up overseas business for UK corporations, or other such trivia. We may even spare the Windsors a detailed examination of their personal political beliefs, which span a cramped range from the predictably reactionary to the frankly racist and fascistic. Ultimately, as Saint-Just argued long ago in his indictment of Louis XVI, the very existence of a monarchy constitutes a crime, quite regardless of whatever actions it undertakes: “No one can reign innocently.”

The Bennett Centre, by contrast, does its commendable best to shelter and support those diagnosed with mental illness – most of whom, not coincidentally, are drawn from the lower rungs of the ossified class structure presided over by their royal masters. Everyone in the Pathways group is agreed on its outstanding merit, for those who are moderately unwell, as a halfway house between the Harplands psychiatric hospital (which is oriented toward patients who are acutely ill) and being left largely to one’s own devices in the community (or, as a current weasel-worded circumlocution has it, “person-centred care”). Its atmosphere is notably calmer and more relaxed than that of the Harplands. As our group’s Phil Leese said of his experience of being treated at the Centre, in an interview with Sentinel journalist Dave Blackhurst published in April of this year: “The staff have been brilliant and it is these services which have stopped many people having to be admitted to Harplands.” Service users are mounting a vigorous campaign to defeat the squalid financial logic that dictates it must close, and a consultation on the Centre’s future is scheduled for 14 June, which one hopes will turn out to be more than a token gesture. Unfortunately, they are fighting an uphill battle against politicians to whom they, and their concerns, are well nigh invisible.

The British royal family, it scarcely requires saying, need have no fears that budgetary restraints will rein in their opulent lifestyles, let alone pose an existential threat to the integrity of their psychological and physical health. On the tricentary of the “modernized” monarchy introduced by the misnamed Glorious Revolution, Charter 88 founder Anthony Barnett protested that 300 years of their flagrant indulgence was enough. A rather generous judgement, some might suggest, given that three centuries of so-called constitutional monarchy – not to speak of the additional ones of absolutist royalty that went before – was already far too much. Another quarter of a century on, the monarchy, alas, still has not quit the stage to take up its deserved place in the trashcan of history. It continues to play out its theatre of the absurd, piling up abundant evidence of its greed, its venality and its philistinism. William Morris castigated the Victorian monarchy as an embodiment of “the densest form of stupidity,” and in assessing its contemporary successor there are no grounds for revising his verdict. To cite only one example of the affliction, the Prince of Wales, in blatant violation of his non-political remit, has sought to intervene in the NHS to promote the cause of “alternative” medicine. He has had some success, owing to the craven failure of regulatory body the MHRA to stand up to the lobbying of the princely purveyor of quackery. For those with mental illnesses, as for other patients, the effects on their well being will vary from zero (at best) to potentially catastrophic, while desperately needed funding will be siphoned off from scientifically credible treatments. Nor is this an eccentricity peculiar to the man who terrorizes modernist architects, converses with trees, and longs to be reincarnated as a tampon, as many of the Windsors have been gullible devotees of homeopathy since the 1920s.

The response of the royal family to mental illness in their own ranks sheds an illuminating light on precisely how “nice” its members are. Inbreeding has led to a high incidence of hereditary mental debility in the family. Five of the present queen’s cousins on her mother’s side, Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, Katherine Bowes-Lyon, Rosemary Fane, Idonea Fane and Ethelreda Fane, were confined to a psychiatric hospital and completely shunned thereafter by their royal relatives. Not a single one of them saw fit to attend Nerissa’s funeral in 1986, when she was buried without fanfare in a pauper’s grave in a council cemetery; only a plastic tag marked the spot. The Queen’s favourite corgis, meanwhile, were interred with solemn ceremony, their headstones bearing sentimental inscriptions, on her Sandringham estate. Monarchic compassion went so far as denying that the embarrassing cousins were still alive, with Nerissa and Katherine listed as deceased – those responsible for the deception did not balk at inventing precise dates for the fictitious deaths – from the 1963 edition of Burke’s Peerage onwards. Shameful neglect was compounded by revolting hypocrisy, since the Queen Mother was a patron of mental health charity Mencap. (One might recall that David Cameron is the fifth cousin, twice removed of Elizabeth II, which conceivably helps explain his noted propensity for “volatile” behaviour. It is a relationship which is also instructive about the tight-knit exclusivity of Britain’s ruling class.)

At the Pathways group’s meeting on 22 May, Dave Sweetsur informed us that polls indicate a large proportion (some 80%) of the population to be pro-monarchist. It would seem that the psychosis of public grovelling at the feet of what the late Christopher Hitchens decried as “Britain’s favourite fetish” has not run its course yet; and this in the land of Thomas Paine, where in 1649 revolutionary upheaval deprived a king of his head. Although degrees of approval will differ, from the grudgingly acquiescent to the irredeemably servile, its obstinate presence is dispiriting news for republicans, not least because acceptance of monarchy’s elevated status implies being resigned to one’s own correspondingly low station. Happily, royalist fervour was hard to detect in our group – proof, if it were needed, that experiencing mental illness doesn’t mean you take leave of all your senses. Dave Sweetsur reckoned the Windsors to be only slightly less odious than bankers, while Dave Williams seemed not averse to seeing Jacobin-style tumbrils set rolling in the direction of Buckingham Palace. Dominic Orosun has had the singular misfortune of visiting that monstrosity – an uglier “carbuncle” than anything ABK Architects could dream up – but was dismayed to find himself being asked to hand over the preposterous sum of £14 for a slice of cake. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha gateau, perhaps? I will allow readers to supply their own Marie Antoinette-themed jokes.

No doubt there are conservatives who would disagree with us by prattling on about the inestimable benefit of traditions passed down from time immemorial, lauding the role played by a venerable institution in bolstering political stability (political sclerosis would be a more truthful description), and reciting all the other wearying exculpations of the monarchic status quo we hear recycled ad nauseam. In doing so, they would betray their ignorance of the fact that the “traditions” of which they speak are often of recent vintage. The coronation oath, for instance, has been adjusted to suit the temper of the times, being made less offensively anti-Catholic for the 1911 investiture of George V – which is not to say that the oath sworn by Elizabeth II, like everything else to do with monarchy, did not remain a ludicrous anachronism. (We do not know what innovations, if any, attended that part of the 1953 coronation involving the Queen’s annointing by the Archbishop of Canterbury, because this particular charade was held to be too “sacred” for mere mortals to observe and was hidden from view beneath a canopy. One must conclude that our head of state, not content with lording it over the terrestrial social hierarchy, is deranged enough to believe herself only a notch down from God in the cosmic pecking order.) Extravagantly orchestrated Jubilee festivities, it may surprise some to learn, were devised in the later Victorian period as propaganda vehicles to boost the prestige of a reclusive sovereign: the pageantry that enraptures misty-eyed nostalgists is not a relic of an antiquated past, but a calculated product of industrial modernity. Those who are dazzled by “tradition” overlook, or wilfully ignore, a nobler and more authentic tradition of anti-monarchic struggle (the Peasants’ Revolt, the Levellers, Chartism), and make the unwarranted assumption that what is traditional must be automatically worthy of preservation. Slavery has its traditions too, and monarchy is one of them. We in the Pathways group are painfully aware of the customary discrimination and stigmatization directed at the mentally ill, but we have no desire to see those traditional evils perpetuated.

At the time of the 1977 Silver Jubilee, the Sex Pistols lambasted a UK hypnotized by false consciousness, in thrall to a stupefying ideology of the purported greatness and organic unity of the kingdom (England being the principal victim of the malady – for obvious historical reasons, royalist dementia is less pervasive in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). John Lydon’s declaration that Elizabeth II “ain’t no human being” is, of course, correct. Only an inhuman creature could parade herself as performing dutiful service to her country – and it really is, in a legal sense, hers – by inheriting a position which makes her rich and privileged beyond the dreams of avarice (her art collection alone has an estimated value of £10 billion). This, however, is only half the equation. The other half is that we are all denied the chance to become properly developed human beings – in Karl Marx’s terminology, to attain our full “species being” – while we are the supine “subjects” of a monarch who stands at the apex of a class society which frustrates that goal. I wrote in a previous article that it is not unreasonable to assume that an unfettered flourishing of human potential, of the kind Marxist thinkers foresee occurring in a post-capitalist world, would put paid to a good many psychological ailments. In addition to its numerous other sins, therefore, we may plausibly lay some of the blame for the persistence of mental illness at the door of British monarchy. On the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee, the present writer (Mark Conlon) accordingly finds it impossible to wish “Her Majesty” – or the rest of her loathsome clan – anything but the very worst.

A Visit from the Pharmacist

Pharmacopoeia: a cure for mental illness, or stopgap mitigation of an essentially political malaise?

 

Claire Ault visited our group in the course of its meeting on 24 April 2012. She is a pharmacist with seven years’ experience of working in the NHS (before that she was employed by Boots), and is now based at the local Harplands psychiatric hospital, dispensing mainly on Ward 1, the acute ward. She told us she finds the job an interesting one, and that she has more day-to-day interaction with patients than do the psychiatrists at the hospital. She came principally to answer our queries on the vexed topic of antipsychotic (or neuroleptic) drugs, though matters to do with other types of medication were also touched on.

We asked Claire about the cost of newer – and, one would logically hope, more effective – antipsychotics, as there was concern in the group about a preference for older drugs which might stem from economic rather than purely medical criteria. She conceded that the cost of new antipsychotic drugs, relative to the paltry cost of their manufacture, can seem outlandishly inflated, but entered the caveat that the research expenses of pharmaceutical companies need to be taken into account. She informed us that these high prices are maintained for ten years through patents, after which time much cheaper generic copies of a drug can be brought onto the market; drug manufacturers, however, may seek to extend the period of patent monopoly by introducing what is claimed to be an enhanced version of an existing drug, as with AstraZeneca’s “sustained-release” variant of Quetiapine.

In a capitalist system, commodities are manufactured not for their intrinsic usefulness, but rather for the profits that accrue from selling them. The social utility of a given commodity is strictly a secondary consideration. With sales of the aforementioned Quetiapine amounting to more than three billion dollars in the United States alone, profits from the armoury of antipsychotics can be staggeringly huge. The number of UK prescriptions for neuroleptics climbed to a record total of nearly two million a month by the end of 2011, so they can only grow more bloated still. The question is whether such drugs, despite their ignoble origins in the profit motive, and the dubious ways in which they are marketed, nonetheless serve a beneficial function in combatting illness, and do so at a tolerable human cost in terms of their malign side effects.

Claire gave us reason to doubt that testing of the drugs is sufficiently rigorous to enable one to arrive at a firm answer on the issue of side effects, pointing out that trial tests are generally confined to healthy male subjects, and that licensing of drugs can vary between countries, with the United States having laxer legislation (doubtless due to more intensive corporate lobbying) than Europe. To quote the instance she gave, Asenapine has been licensed by the US Food and Drug Administation for the treatment of a spectrum of schizophrenic and bipolar disorders, but is restricted to the treatment of mania by European governments. Moreover, unintended outcomes may emerge only after several years of use, meaning that one should be especially wary of drugs which have not been around long enough for all of their adverse potential to be listed in registers such as the UK’s Yellow Card Scheme.

When pressed for an example of an antipsychotic which can have notably injurious side effects, Claire singled out Clozapine, which in 1975 was actually withdrawn by its own manufacturer Sandoz as being too dangerous, but has since been reintroduced. She balanced this by telling us that those antipsychotics with the fewest side effects are often those least advantageous in fulfilling their intended purpose. She was able to give us some reassuring news by informing us that there is relatively little interaction between antipsychotic and other categories of medication, though she cautioned us against the use of antihistamines and, because they can diminish the efficacy of neuroleptics, said that we should definitely steer clear of anti-smoking remedies.

Members of the Pathways group are well aware of the deleterious consequences antipsychotic medication can have. These can range from the fairly innocuous, such as feeling sedated, to the seriously life-threatening (including a marked incidence of suicide). Physics graduate Steve – who has exited the group for the moment, though we are hopeful that he’ll return – has been the most dramatically affected of us, having developed tardive dyskinesia, a neurological complaint which is a worryingly frequent by-product of neuroleptics, particularly when they are administered in high doses and for extended periods of time. More common in our group has been weight gain, a burden which Dave Sweetsur has written about in his blog, chronicling his heroic success in shedding eight stones (so far) through a concerted regimen of healthy eating and daily exercise. Claire explained a couple of the reasons for this weight increase, saying neuroleptics can interfere with the appetite-regulating hormone leptin, causing people to overeat, and with insulin levels, leading to a craving for sugary foods. Changes in weight and insulin levels mean that diabetes is another problem that often develops concurrently with use of neuroleptics: the percentage of the general population who are diabetic may be approaching epidemic proportions (there have been dire warnings that treating it might soon swallow up almost a fifth of the entire NHS budget), but for such users its prevalence is considerably higher – according to some estimates, as much as 25% for those diagnosed with schizophrenia.

In light of all this, we asked Claire if she thought alternative medicine might be a viable replacement for conventional antipsychotic medication, but she expressed little enthusiasm for this option, referring to a blacklist against such remedies. On this point, as someone who tends to regard “alternative” medicine as deluded quackery, and at the risk of differing – not for the first time – with psychiatric nurse Janet Sigley, the present author (Mark Conlon) must strongly agree.

In conclusion, it can be said that if the members of our group, in spite of the dangers associated with them, continue to take neuroleptic drugs, it must be because we think that they work in putting a stop to (or at least reducing) unpleasant and distressing symptoms. No doubt a political revolution, ideally of the psychically liberating kind envisaged by Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, ushering in a less alienated and exploitative society than the one we presently endure, would provide the optimal solution to mental health disorders, even if we cannot suppose, in a naively utopian fashion, that it would eradicate them. To mangle a phrase of Rosa Luxemburg, given a choice between Risperidone or Revolution, the latter, by a long margin, would be preferable. Until that happy day, we are stuck with the flawed and makeshift chemical recourse offered by antipsychotics. We are grateful to Claire Ault for giving us her valuable insights into this type of medication.

Two Recent Music Appreciation Sessions

Music appreciation sessions are becoming regular fixtures in the schedule of our group. With the possible exception of those parts of a session when the selections of the present writer (Mark Conlon) are played, they are thoroughly enjoyed by all involved. In recent weeks there have been two of them – for the sake of clarity and simplicity, I will combine discussion of both in the present blog entry.

Dominic Orosun introduced us to ‘I Have Seen’ from electronic duo Zero 7’s 2001 debut album Simple Things. As Dom suggested, this marries a harmonious vocal melody with a propulsive bassline to agreeable effect. (It should be noted en passant that Dom is currently working with director Chris Stone on the production of a film called Legend of the Sword – the first instalment of which was premiered at the local Film Theatre, with Dom, Dave Sweetsur, Dave Williams and myself from the Pathways group in attendance – about which he may wish to write a future piece for this site.)

Dave Sweetsur chose the title track from Canadian band Arcade Fire’s acclaimed third album The Suburbs (2010). Sara Cooper perceived the song as reminiscent of the Eagles, and it did indeed have something of a country-rock flavour to it. (Sara forgot to bring any discs to the group, but says Finnish rock band Nightwish are one of her current favourites.) Dave, knowing my predilection – he might characterize it as a weakness – for progressive rock, said that the CD struck him as a concept album; not an entirely mischievous claim, as Arcade Fire have at times been bracketed as an art-rock group, albeit one more in the mould of Talking Heads – David Byrne is an admirer and collaborator – than Yes or ELP. Dave’s interest in soul music, meanwhile, was represented by Otis Redding’s cover of Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ from Redding’s classic 1965 Stax album Otis Blue.

Polly Jean Harvey’s Mercury Music Prize-winning album Let England Shake (2011) is described by Dave as an acidic love letter addressed by the Dorset-born musician to her home country. He picked out ‘All and Everywhere’ as one of the outstanding songs from the disc. Polly Harvey states that her lyrics are influenced by poets such as Eliot, Yeats and Ted Hughes, and it therefore makes sense that her work should appeal to Dave, who has had a volume of his own poetry published (with the Sergio Leone-referencing title The Bad, the Ugly and the Good – interested parties can purchase a copy from Amazon). For me, Harvey’s recent albums are, disappointingly, less intense and emotionally raw than her first two, Dry and (especially) the lacerating Rid of Me, though there is no doubt that she towers above most other popular music figures in the current age of mediocrity (and worse).

Dave’s final choice of music was Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, the jazz trumpeter’s celebrated 1959 session that has been enormously influential over the last half-century (critic Richard Williams has devoted a book, The Blue Moment, to tracing its implications for everything and everyone from American minimalism to James Brown and Brian Eno). Dave pointed out that this was made at a time when Miles was immersed in the French cultural scene of the day, having formed friendships with such luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre and Boris Vian, and composed the soundtrack for Louis Malle’s 1958 film Ascenseur pour l’echafaud. At my proposal, we played ‘Flamenco Sketches’ – the last and most abstract of the LP’s five pieces, and one of two jointly composed with pianist Bill Evans. Phil Leese, one of the new recruits to our group, confesses that, in general, he finds jazz unnecessarily profligate in its use of notes, but had to concede that the restrained modal improvisation on Kind of Blue is exemplary in its economy. Its reputation as the one jazz recording everyone will like notwithstanding, the album may not have convinced all who were present of the merits of the genre – Sara Cooper remains a sceptic – but it was certainly more hospitably received than the free-jazz explorations to which I exposed them last year (see the entry for 25 July 2011). They would, perhaps, have been startled had we compared John Coltrane’s melodic solo on ‘Flamenco Sketches’ with the very different solos on the saxophonist’s own major contribution to the free jazz movement, 1965’s tempestuous Ascension. Miles Davis himself, who denigrated as “psychotic” the pioneering free jazz of Ornette Coleman, must have been bemused by the transformation in Coltrane’s art. Dave, incidentally, also owns a copy of Miles’s 1970 jazz-rock landmark, Bitches Brew, which he considers a challenging but rewarding listen.

Phil Leese has been with the Pathways group for a few months. He is an expert on the work of Bob Dylan, whose concerts he has been attending since the 1970s, most recently Dylan’s appearance at London’s 02 Arena in 2010. Phil is also an accomplished musician, having sung and played guitar with his group Time Bandits – named after the 1981 film of the same name – before illness curtailed his activities. We listened to a Dylan collaboration with Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler from the 1983 album Infidels – Phil endorses the critical consensus that this, coming on the heels of Dylan’s disconcerting born-again phase, is one of Bob’s better latter-day efforts – and to a bootleg recording, performed in starker folk-protest style, of a university campus gig from the 1960s.

In making my own selections, my aim was to complement Dylan’s songs with politically oriented material from the fields of classical music and left-field rock. To this end, we heard an excerpt from American composer George Crumb’s Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land), written in 1970 at the height of US atrocities in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – in tempore belli, as Crumb’s inscription in the score puts it. Its scoring for amplified string quartet (plus percussion and vocal interjections) invites comparison with John Cale’s employment of an amplified viola in LaMonte Young’s ensemble and later in the Velvet Underground: the sounds produced, aided by extended techniques such as bowing on the underside of the strings or stopping them with thimble-sheathed fingers, are strident and unnerving – as psychiatric nurse Jane Lord can attest – and entirely apposite in evoking the napalm-soaked horror of the Vietnam War. Cale’s ‘Mercenaries (Ready for War)’ – the opening track on his turbulent 1979 LP Sabotage/Live, recorded in concert during his infamous chicken-beheading period – was my next choice. The song’s lyrics are prescient in sensing the emergence of an intensified phase in the Cold War (Ronald Reagan was to win the presidential election of the following year), and in pinpointing a development in the fighting of imperialist wars that culminated two decades later in the founding of Blackwater’s lawless mercenary army. All the more reason, then, to regret Cale’s acceptance of an OBE in 2010, even if it is astonishing that someone responsible for such confrontational music was ever offered one. After listening to the song, Phil commented that he was reminded of the work of Adrian Henri – not a connection that had previously occurred to me, but an interesting and relevant one in light of the anti-Bomb poetry Henri wrote during the era of the heyday of CND.

My third choice comprised songs by Peter Hammill from his 1978 LP The Future Now: ‘A Motorbike in Afrika’ is a fierce denunciation of the iniquities of apartheid that was covered by Dutch anarchists The Ex on their 1988 album Aural Guerrilla; while ‘Mediaevil’ (Hammill’s spelling) is a scathing critique, performed in mock-religious choral style, of a world of obdurate superstition and hypocrisy where “those who are strange are still locked in asylums/And a sterile Pope proscribes the Pill/And those who are rich are still getting richer/And those who are poor still foot the bill.” Plus ca change! Hammill’s songwriting, though it may not have immediately resonated with those in attendance (“interesting” was one noncommittal comment), demonstrates if nothing else that progressive rock is by no means, as its detractors would have you believe, a genre exclusively given over to escapist lyrical fantasy. The point could have been made more forcefully still by playing something from the mordant 1981 masterpiece The World As It Is Today by Marxist proggers Art Bears, but unfortunately there was insufficient time in the session for this.

In conclusion, I must apologize to the shade of Frank Zappa for neglecting, once more with the excuse of limited time, to play anything from a CD of works by legendary modernist composer Edgard Varese (conducted by the equally iconic – and also Zappa-connected – Pierre Boulez, who continues, at the age of eighty-seven, to live out Varese’s defiant declaration that modern composers refuse to die). As Hot Rats had been aired in one of our previous meetings (see, again, the entry for 25 July 2011), an opportunity for Zappaesque “conceptual continuity” was thereby missed. I look forward, however, to correcting this lapse in a future Pathways session – and there was in fact an obscure thread of such continuity in that Zappa, prior to Mark Knopfler being assigned the job, was one of those approached to serve as producer on Dylan’s Infidels LP.