Rant in Lee Majors

Its a common misconception that mental ill health is caused by some fantasy or other or an unwillingness to face the facts of life. In fact it is caused by TOXIC REALITIES that a person is unable to process or overcome alone in the context of a society where if we are not well supported by healthy family and friends we are precisely alone or worse trapped with toxic family and friends. Those realities can be inner or outer, genetic or social, economic or political, violent or unloving, but they are always very real to the person concerned. Thing is that to even begin to explore the nature of these realities and how one is wounded by them is to invite accusations of self pity and self indulgence, to write poetry about ones poverty and stigmatised life on benefits is to invite the accusation that one "is making a lifestyle choice," as if showing ones limb stump in public was something your careers advisor told you to do... To admit that your illness has driven you to tell the bosses partner to go fuck her self and walk off the job is to invite your GP to tell you that what you need to do is to reconcile oneself to becoming a cog in a machine like herself (the doctor) and be happy with it. A machine that has already told you many times that it has no use for broken cogs that clog up its workings. So one tries to become a garden ornament but are told that one has too many sharp edges and present a health and safety issue. Then the government that is closing down all the repair centres makes announcements about how 50% of cogs that claim to be broken are big fat rusty liars that need to be recycled, with extreme prejudice. Then they tell you that your allowance of WD40 is the moral equivalent of slavery and that they are in fact in the tradition of the abolitionists for making you crawl on your hands and knees through a ring of fire in front of drunk leering parish wives and landed gentry, while being spat on by a committee of tabloid readers and verbally abused by feral children in the hope of being awarded a quota limited shot at a couple of years of peace to lick ones wounds, wounds which may well never heal. All in the knowledge that even if you are successful you will have to go through the whole thing again in a years time... Don't mind me. I'm in a good mood really, just sometimes you've gotta speak truth.

Povey 2014