Mad, mad world

Mental Health Nursing,  Mar 1999  by Allen, Cris

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RD Laing came to mind recently while reflecting on all the crazy goings-on reported in the media.

There are football managers deviating, theologically, from their job descriptions, holidaymakers engaging in fisticuffs and gin-slinging at 3o,ooo feet, and politicians borrowing a big wedge from political chums in order to buy a house which many voters can only dream about. And, after we should all have learned a lesson about tinkering with what ends up on our plates, scientists mess about genetically with the humble spud and its vegetable chums.

Meanwhile, MPs are becoming ever more skilled at excusing their behaviours with odd language. Hence, a clandestine meeting, or a bag of dope or pornography in the luggage is described as 'a moment of madness', `an act of folly' or an error of judgement'.

Of course, none of this is seen as a consequence of a mental health problem. These people aren't seen as 'mad', they're just, well, mad. Those who have had an encounter with mental health services and commit some rather dotty act are a helpful scapegoat, about whom people can say: 'Well, of course, they really are mad, aren't they.'

This creeping crackpot-ism is also invading our own world of nursing. No change there you may argue, but witness the furore which has broken out around nurse education: bed pans in the red corner, honours degrees for all in the blue corner. There has also been the TV series on nursing, which may have done some good, but more likely reduced the profession to the level of all the other docusoaps that focus on everything from prostitutes to wheelclampers. Then along came a sequence of advertisements intended to woo people into nursing. Anyone so seduced must have contemplated whether they would be better off as a meat inspector rather than sign up to a profession that couldn't decide whether it had been given a beastly or a bountiful pay deal.

It might be time to be more considered about things and not allow the rest of society's weirdness to make us as bonkers as them, causing us to be too swift to take further pot-shots at our own professional feet. Ronnie Laing, who was probably was a little eccentric, to say the least, espoused the theory that the 'mad' are more sensitive to their environment than the 'sane'. Madness, according to this definition, becomes a more deeply and profoundly rational response to the 'lunacies of a crazy world'.'

Mental health nurses, in my experience, are a little 'mad' and therefore in a strong position to be more rational about the crazy world around them. especially when one considers they have an alliance with those really 'mad' people, mental health clients, who are, of course, more 'sane' and wise than all those 'normal' people we hear about.

Hence, anyone who shouts, 'Get it up the park, my son (of God)', drunkenly sings, 'Oh, we're going to Barbados', touches you for L35ok, or offer you one of those new starshaped, genetically modified carrot-ato thingies should be compulsorily detained and medicated at once.

I Barnes M, Berke J. Mary Barnes: two accounts of a journey through madness. London: Free Association Books, 1991.

Cris Allen is a nurse and project worker.

Copyright Community Psychiatric Nurses Association Mar 1999
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