A Day in the Life

"In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames  of reference are ambiguous and equivocal. A man who prefers to be dead rather than Red is normal. A man who says he has lost his soul is mad. A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon. A man who says that Negroes are an inferior race may be widely respected. A man who says his whiteness is a form of cancer is certifiable... ... our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities... many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities." R. D. Laing , The Divided Self, Preface to the Pelican Edition.   On 16th March it was reported in the press that a man in Telford had committed suicide by jumping from the top of a multi-storey car park. Apparently a ...

Not so long ago, I wrote a blog post entitled "The Latest Victim", which relayed the plight of Mark Wood, a man who had had his sickness benefits withdrawn despite, by all accounts, being incapable of work. The final upshot of this was that Mark very sadly passed away. Whoever, or whatever, was ultimately responsible for this cannot, I suppose, be precisely calculated, although doctors said that the traits of his mental illness became worse along with the strain of having his money withdrawn. In a recent edition of "Dispatches" on Channel 4, it was revealed that 49 such deaths have been recorded by the DWP. All, it seems, in some way connected to the changes being wrought in the benefits system. The programme highlighted the plight of another man, severely physically disabled, who had had his Employment and Support Allowance sanctioned and who also had to pay the so-called "bedroom tax", and was therefore living on virtually zero income. What finally happ...