The lunatics really ARE running the asylum!

On 23 September 2012, The Express told us that one of the biggest beasts in the New Labour firmament, Jack Straw, had been battling a ‘mental health crisis… for more than a decade!’

“In 1981, his previous buried history of trauma and distress ‘came to a head’ when he became deaf in one ear. It was at this point that he mentally collapsed.”

Straw, himself, admitted:

“As my hearing fell apart, so did my party and all the aspirations and dreams I’d had about the future. I was in a terrible state, worried about my health and my future. For all my apparent success, I had always been prone to ‘imposter syndrome’, the sense that I was not worthy and that everything I had achieved was bound to be taken away from me… 

No one would disagree with treating a broken leg; it is the same with the brain. It can go wrong… I don’t know a single family where no one has experienced mental illness.”

I do.

There weren’t any nuts in my family. In fact, when I was growing up, asocietal behaviour was thin on the ground down my way. There were a few first world war shell-shock victims still howling in the streets but you got used to them after a while. Then there was the occasional oddball who, instinctively, you steered clear of. However, for the most part, just about everyone seemed to function pretty well.

Well enough for the few whose default position was complaint to stand out anyway.

'Psychoanalysis worked for me,' said Straw.

Yeah. Worked so well that you got to be ‘Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Leader of the House of Commons and Lord Chancellor.’ From which lofty positions you, whose ‘childhood wasn’t normal,’ who, whilst you were a serving MP, experienced a ‘mental health crisis… for more than a decade,’ got to foist all those ‘dreams’ you ‘had about the future’ upon the rest of us.

The Express says:

"Straw fell into a deep depression coupled with ‘terrible nightmares’.”

We are also told that:

“The Labour MP has now overcome his mental illness with the help of a psychoanalyst whom he has seen intensively for eight years and still occasionally visits.”

Ever heard of the Freudian theory of ‘displacement?’

Here’s the way ‘psychology expert’ Kendra Cherry puts it:

“Have ever had a really bad day at work and then gone home and taken out your frustration on family and friends? Then you have experienced the ego defense mechanism of displacement. Displacement involves taking out our frustrations, feelings, and impulses on people or objects that are less threatening.

Displaced aggression is a common example of this defense mechanism. Rather than express our anger in ways that could lead to negative consequences (like arguing with our boss), we instead express our anger towards a person or object that poses no threat (such as our spouse, children, or pets).”

I wonder whether a mentally ill politician, suddenly elevated to great power over others, would feel inclined to take out his erstwhile ‘frustrations, feelings, and impulses on people or objects that are less threatening?’

Possible or entirely likely? Well, in Jack Straw’s case, he’s been itching to tell us ‘less threatening’ types how to be, think, do and act since his days as the President of the Students’ Union, so what he did to us in recent times should come as no surprise, nutcase or not.

“My childhood wasn’t normal,” says Straw.

Which should also surprise no one.

Straw is not alone in his mental frailty.

According to the ‘all-party parliamentary group on mental health,’ almost one-fifth of MPs have suffered mental health problems at some time.

Mind you, that was in July 2008, by February 2012, Alistair Campbell, no less, was saying that, regarding ‘direct experience of mental illness… our survey suggested that MPs could be even higher’ than ‘one-in-four!’

A year later, The Daily Mail was informing us that:

“A clinic is to be set up at Westminster to help MPs suffering from mental health problems. Doctors in the House of Commons have reported a growing number of MPs coming to them with depression and anxiety.”

Indeed, Charles Walker, Tory MP for Broxbourne, who has been afflicted with obsessive compulsive disorder for more than 30 years, admitted to being a ‘practising fruitcake,’ adding:

“I operate to the rule of four, so I have to do everything in evens. I have to wash my hands four times and I have to go in and out of a room four times.”

Ladies and gentlemen, if you ever scoffed at the notion that the lunatics might be running the asylum…

Don’t do so again, will you?

P.S. Amongst the reasons for admission to a lunatic asylum during the period 1864 to 1889, we have the following:

Gathering in the head, congestion of brain, brain fever, superstition, greediness, laziness, egotism, over-taxing mental powers, feebleness of intellect; political excitement, politics, opium habit, bad whiskey, bad company, bad habits, dissolute habits, vicious vices, immoral life, self abuse, excessive sexual abuse, sexual derangement, sexual abuse and stimulants, deranged masturbation, masturbation for 30 years.

Decide for yourself how many of the above the current crop of 'deranged' and merely greedy, lazy and egotistical politicians suffer from.

You will note that the document cited here also includes the symptom 'parents were cousins.' 

Which could explain a lot.

"The high level of marriage between blood relatives within the Pakistani community accounts for nearly a third of birth defects in babies of Pakistani origin... Cousins who marry run double the risk of birth defects in their children." 

The Guardian article above also said:

"The document was written as an attempt to investigate why complaints of misconduct and corruption against Asian officers are 10 times higher than against their white colleagues...

One Muslim officer with the Met said: 'It is like saying black officers are more likely to be muggers'."

I'd hazard a guess that, given the Muslim community's predilection for cousin marriage, they'd be more likely to be nuts as well.