Category: Uncategorised

Ever bite off more than you could chew?

There’s something special about those first few movies you watch when you’re a little too young. When your mind is still blissfully unaware by the horrors of human nature, your eyes still able to close without the back of your eyelids instantly transforming into screens displaying your innermost fears. No matter the content of these films, and perhaps especially when you don’t yet possess the knowledge to fully comprehend them, they have a way of staying with you for a long time – maybe forever. More often than not, they become a handy source for icebreaking fun-facts. My go-to (and also a great way to find the best weirdos at a party):

Did you know that, if you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to choose between starving to death and eating one of your friends, you should start with the one with the strongest looking glutes?

Yeah, I was ten when Alive came out. It had Ethan Hawke in it – of course I had to watch it! Although I’m not sure how I can defend my obsession with the bloke in Bon Jovi’s Always music video, who also features in the film quite heavily, as that didn’t come out until the year after. Regardless, if you’re planning on getting stranded on a desert island with me, you’d better lay off the Booty Builder.

I am, of course, talking about cannibalism.

Cannibalism, the consumption of another of one’s own species, is not uncommon. A lot of animals and insects do this – in some cases, it’s even part of their mating ritual. Human cannibalism, however, is not so common (and rather frowned upon in most cultures). Even so, a few fictional anthropophagists have become rather popular on the silver screen, such as Hannibal Lecter, Baba Yaga, the Gingerbread Witch (of Brothers Grimm fame). Then there are those, such as the rugby team from the aforementioned 1993 based-on-a-true-story movie, that have been forced to become nutritional cannibals in order to survive. There are several types of human types of cannibalism, of course, like the necro kind, when you eat the already dead, and homicidal cannibalism, where a human kills another human for the beef (one would assume, the arse), i.e. culinary exploits. Regardless, this is not an episode of The Beef and Dairy Network, so I will leave any details for the experts.

There are also quite a few expeditions, such as the ill-fated Franklin expedition of 1845, where there’s evidence of the explorers having indulged in nutritional cannibalism. Whether or not the eaters waited for their meals to perish of natural causes remains a mystery, but there’s something about the whole thing that, to me, seems a little sinister.

Cannibalism has been known to be part of funeral rites in some cultures. In others, human sacrificed have been made and then eaten. I can sort of understand the cultural cannibalism. It seems practical. But to just sit down and decide to eat someone you’ve planned a trip with? That’s some different level stuff. Anyway, there’s an article on this on Britannica that does a nice deep-dive into this, so read it if you’re thinking yolo when it comes to your search history.

Why did I choose this particular subject, you ask? Well, I was re-watching the rather fantastic Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie the other day (gee whiz, what a cast, by the way!!!), and got to thinking about vampires. But in the buffyverse, vampires are not human – they are demons. And they don’t eat people, they only drain them of haemoglobin… but it still got me thinking that I might be able to find something new and intriguing in my research. Alas, the coolest fact I possess is still the arse one from Alive.

It is mega late, so I will leave you to it. There’s no antropophagy in my book, but there is an event or two that might make you want to put it in the freezer for a couple of days before you keep reading – you can buy it here.

See you next Tuesday, when I will tell you about my theory on why faking it ’til you make it can be especially difficult for those with ADHD. Until then, go watch the Buffy movie – it has Paul Reubens AND Rutger Hauer in it!

0

Scandi Christmas; from bloodletting to hygge in 7 minutes

Gather ’round your tablets and let me tell you the tale of how scaring a nation of Odin-worshipping farmers and warriors into believers of a bastard child saviour from faraway lands ended up tarting up the winter solstice celebrations, but first, yule probably want me to explain what the hell I am on about… Ha.

Firstly, massive thanks to those who replied to my desperate cry for inspirational input on the socials! It was a close call. However, faced with the choice between writing about cannibalism and yule and solstice, I opted for the latter. Cheers, Durand!

I might save cannibalism for next week, for those seeking alternatives to the traditional Christmas dinner – I bet the calorie density of a human arse is less than that of a serving of crimbo pudding alone. Not that I’d recommend eating either of those, of course.

Interestingly enough, the parents of the Icelandic Yule lads actually did eat human children (presumably fictional lads and children), but that’s neither here nor there, as I don’t know if we can safely assume that a troll is a humanoid creature and, as we all know, cannibalism refers to humans eating other humans.

Right, let’s dive into this.

The Norwegian, Swedish and Danish word for Christmas is ‘jul’. This we can all agree on. In Icelandic, it’s ‘jól’. Yule in ye olde English. It originally stems from the name of the heathen winter solstice celebration; jólablót. ‘Blot’ is the sacrificial spilling of blood of an animal or human. I didn’t really have to do much research on the etymology, as I grew up in the place that saw the last ‘blót’ with a human sacrifice in Norway – heads of the Norse gods they worshipped are to this day displayed inside the church that now sits in the place where they used to perform the blót, with human blood so ingrained in them that it is still visible if you study them up close. Gross. And weird. Like most organised religion, I suppose. I digress.

Anyway, you can read about Mære kyrkje in the Snorri saga Heimskringla, if this has tickled your fancy. Me, I had to translate Heimskringla from Old Norse to Norwegian about 20 years ago and have had my fill. Here’s an article about how king Olaf the Holy beat the heathen king Olve, in Norwegian. Now, if you’re in the market for a far more interesting person of the same name, you can check out the split album True Kings of Norway, by clicking anywhere on this sentence.

So, how did they go from blood sacrifice to carolling and decorating their homes with stars, paper hearts, deformed versions of Santa and his family members and bloody angels?!

Etymologically, jul/yule/jól is believed to be Proto-Germanic, whichever way you spell it. Perhaps we can blame the raping/pillaging vikings for this, perhaps not. Regardless, it is the name of a heathen winter festival that was held either on the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year, leading into longer days and brighter times), or over the course of three days surrounding midwinter night. It appears historians cannot agree on this. My take is that some historians take what’s written in the Snorri Sturlasson sagas as historical facts, whereas others do not. What they can agree on, however, is that it was a heathen festival that has somehow “merged” with Christianity during the Christianisation of Scandinavia between year 900 and 1200.

It also appears most online sources do not know the difference between paganism and heathenry, thus use the terms as if they are interchangeable, so let us just, once and for all, clear this up: They are not. Ha. You can Google this until your heart’s content, I’m not getting into it today. But what we do know is that the Scandinavian yule traditions predate Christianity and its celebration of the birth of Christ.

What sort of traditions are we talking about here? Well, like most other nations, the Scandinavian countries have as many different variations of traditions as there are families. Norway, Sweden and Finland are all fairly lengthy from the south to the north, and narrower in the middle – the climate varies vastly. This has always affected – and continues to affect – diet, fashion choices, political views, infrastructure… you name it. So, just food-wise, Bergen residents do not have the same jule-meal as people in, say, Lillehammer. I’m inclined to think this was the case in the olden days as well.

Anyway, back to yule. (To me, to yule). The celebration of the winter solstice was in many ways a ritual that marked the beginning of the end of the darker period of the year. A feast with the best produce stored from the last autumn harvest, along with cooking up an animal sacrifice made to the gods to secure a good spring, brought the community together. Seeing as it was likely freezing and the microwave was yet to be invented, you can imagine they had to set fire to some of the foodstuffs to avoid the need for a dentist (which, spoiler alert, didn’t exist yet either), which has carried over into the Christmas pudding booze volcano tradition. I do not know of any Scandinavians that are setting fire to their Christmas dinners these days, but judging by what they eat, perhaps they should.

Any gifts were for the gods. The incessant gift-giving came with the three “wise” men of Biblical fame. There might have been the odd wreath, handmade candles or a stray straw yule goat here or there, but the decorations we see today are far from traditional and not so much linked to superstition.

The aforementioned cannibalistic yule lads of Iceland do have some similarities with the Scandinavian nisse (not to be confused with the modern day ‘julenisse’, Saint Nick/Santa Claus); nefarious barn dwellers that were after livestock, punishing naughty children and play pranks on farmers who hadn’t managed to get their shit together before the solstice. Not too different from Krampus, but smaller in size, magical and with no coal for your stocking. An evil hobgoblin dressed in red, if you may.

The nefarious creatures and superstitious decorating likely stems from needing to protect their produce and cured foodstuffs from prying eyes (and mouths) before they were ready. No wonder they were made to look like horrible little trolls. Additionally, the often long and hard winters could take their toll on just about anyone. With no medical knowledge or ways to predict logical weather patterns, superstitions such as warding off evil spirits with a wreath or a goat helped people pull through the tough times. And for those who didn’t, it was fairly easy to blame it on not having completed the seasonal rituals in time.

To finalise, the winter solstice represented a positive turn – a way out of the darkness. This was marked by a feast, with an animal sacrifice and and rituals to celebrate the gifts received from the gods in the past year, something I believe was fairly widespread in pre-Christian times. The lack of reading and writing skills around the days where Christianity thrust itself onto most any unsuspecting nation might help explain why there are so many different versions of what might have actually happened and just how the traditions merged – I suspect most people just shrugged and said ‘ I guess we’re Christians now, eh’ and got back to the grind, not really caring if they mixed a little bloodletting in with their Sunday mass.

I might investigate this further, but if I continue now, I can feel myself getting into dangerous territory. Not today.

By the way, you might be interested to know some Satanist groups celebrate Yule around the same time as the Christian holiday is observed. Contrary to popular belief, though, with no worshipping of deities of any kind. Satanists are secular hedonists – not stupid.

So, to end this on an even happier, ding-dong-merrily-on-high, note, I wish you a pleasant rest of your day, now that you’re armed with some fun new facts to dazzle your co-workers with. If you find yourself surrounded by just too many £20 notes, you can always get yourself a copy of my book – hell, even FOUR of the E-book. See you next Tuesday!

0

Rumination, rebranding and other disasters

Tuesday is upon us, at long last. A home office workday has come to an end and the evening gig is but three hours away – just enough time for me to spew out some thoughts.

On the 27th of last month, I came to the realisation that something had to change. I needed to revamp my website, get an email address suitable for an adult female, start letting go of the things that no longer serve me (like the millions of threadbare band tees taking up space in my closet, so littered with holes they make the infamous emperor’s new clothes seem less revealing) – the time had come to fix my life. Yet, it’s taken me almost three weeks to justify shelling out the three bucks for a domain name I decided on back in 2014.

I should explain that this is not a unique event. These eureka moments occur at least thrice a year. BUT. The thing is, whenever I have thought something through, I always (almost without fail) end up overanalysing and ruminating until there’s very little left of the original idea and I’ve lost track of what was so great about it in the first place. Yet, spending hundreds of pounds in one transaction at Boots (or equivalent) doesn’t make me bat an eyelid. In fact, historically, my lack of impulse control in that department has been rather shocking.

So why – OH WHY?! – have I been unable to trust and listen to myself when I know in my gut exactly what I want and need to do (or, what I do NOT need or want, for that matter)? The need to meditate was hanging over me like a raincloud, so I ventured out on what was to become my fastest half marathon in three years, with only three Haribo Happy Cherries (my drug of choice) for sustenance and two hours worth of podcast episodes in my ears. The result? One very delighted and surprised middle-aged sweat-machine with a sore hip, fully determined to start cracking on that decade old to do list.

Incidentally, I think I cracked the code on that whole thing with the “ADHD super power”. When they mistakenly claim hyper focus, or their ability to make tough decisions when faced with potentially life-threatening scenarios, to be a super power, when in fact these symptoms are merely a conduit for the real super power; the masking of symptoms.

I got the idea from something someone said on a podcast about dyslexia and how some people would mask their difficulties by for instance learning a text by heart so that they could recite it in class, rather than reading it out. In much the same way, I taught myself to ‘take photos’ of pages in books that never spoke to me (trigonometry, anyone?), so that I could pull the images out whenever I had a test. As a defense mechanism, I effectively gave myself a photographic memory.

Perhaps I’ll write more on this next week. I haven’t decided yet. I might write about perimenopause. Either way, I’ve gone full gonzo. Gonzo With the Wind! Perhaps it is time to conclude this post.

Why menoPAUSE when you can menoFINISH, amirite? Ha. I jest. See you next Tuesday.

In the meantime, you can listen to the inimitable David Eugene Edwards and his Wovenhand on Bandcamp by clicking anywhere on this sentence.

0

Fear: From flight or fight to soft power sorcery

Last week, I said I would write a little something about fear in my next post. And I will. Now, my initial thought was to write about the fear of success. But after an intense re-watch of series one through five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and a traumatising reintroduction to the alien fear demon from space. Ick!), I thought to myself; why complicate things? I’ll just write about fear, full stop.

If you, like me, still remember the far too brief heyday of Crystal Pepsi, you may at some point during the early 90s have been glued to the TV set every time Are You Afraid of the Dark? was on. I loved it. Plenty of jump scares, but the stories were just far-fetched enough that you wouldn’t lose any sleep over having watched them. Around the same time, though, another show reared its ugly head; The X-Files. Also very much supernatural in character, but the show was so well written that you didn’t need too much persuasion before you believed the stories to be true – apart, perhaps, from the episode with the insects. The Smoking Man did it for me. This was the real deal – the aliens were coming to get us.

Anyway…

What really freaked me out with The X-Files was the fact that it had too many real aspects to it – the more episodes I watched, the more convinced I became that these scenarios could easily play out in real life. It was starting to instil a fear in me, that maybe the government wasn’t paying attention. Or maybe they were hiding the truth? It was all too much for my 11 year old brain. It was starting to affect my ability to think straight. Just when the hormones started to kick in as well. A recipe for disaster – good thing I was too young to vote at the time. Anyway. This sort of brings me to my point, but I’ll chuck in a definition of fear before I go any further.

In an article entitled The Psychology of Fear, Lisa Fritscher writes:

“Psychologists define fear as a protective, primal emotion that evokes a biochemical and emotional response. Fear alerts us to the presence of danger or the threat of harm, whether that danger is physical or psychological. Whereas the biochemical changes that fear produces are universal, emotional responses are highly individual.” (VeryWellMind.com, October 2025)

These biochemical changes equal the flight or fight response. For those of us partial to a good horror film, our emotional response might be equal to the feeling we get when we’re excited – a sort of ‘good’ irrational fear, if you may. We love the jump scares. An article on Inspire the Mind claims that “When we experience “recreational” or “staged” fear, our brain releases dopamine, a feel-good hormone associated with feelings of pleasure”. This view is supported by many other articles linking horror movies and enjoyment – there’s a particularly good one on everydayhealth.com.

Dopamine is like a drug – you’ll be wanting it again. I wonder if there’s any research on whether or not there’s a link between horror fans and ADHD, as the low dopamine levels in such individuals may be causing inattentiveness? I suppose the same would apply to adrenaline junkies. But I digress. And I’m no neurologist.

So, we know that fear activates the fight or flight response. What, then, when fear is planted as a seed and cultivated over time? Instead of a jump scare, that induces said response and goes away once the imminent “danger” is gone, it festers, breeds desperation and develops into something that changes our behaviour, our beliefs, our way of life. Real fear. Real fear affects our ability to think straight. Real fear is what makes us vote for the wrong political candidate.

Oops, another digression.

My point is this; what is instilled in us over time can be just as scary, but instead of shocking us into action, we get wee droplets of ‘proof’ that sustains the fear and makes us paranoid. In politics, this is called soft power tactics. Basically, it’s gaslighting. Fear mongering. Whatever you want to call it. The work of a sociopath.

It’s like the first movie in the Paranormal Activity franchise – the first 70 minutes is just build-up, where they play to your subconscious, making you go on high alert by using subtle noises and music – when that duvet is finally pulled from the bed by an unseen force (which isn’t that scary, if you think about it), you’re already terrified because you’ve been at the edge of your seat waiting for something to happen, because someone has told you that it will. You are no longer in control of your biochemical responses. I’d wager it’s not the scene itself that causes us to jump at it – and stay on alert for the duration of the movie – I think it was the shock coming from the fact that we’d gone waaaaaay past the point of no return for us to shut the stupid thing off.

Sustained fear. Can’t be good.

Ending on a serious note here, but… It’s almost midnight. To be continued, I suppose?

See you next Tuesday. Until then, watch yourself around the thinning of the veil or whatever. Don’t take candy from strangers. Eat you vegetables. Buy my book. And, remember what Betty Ann said:

“If you’re really into a story, you become part of it and you start to imagine what horrible thing might be sneaking around the corner, ready to pounce. It’s your imagination that gets you into a story, and unless you’re very careful, you might need your imagination to get you out.”

Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Season 3: The Tale of the Bookish Babysitter

0

Fighting for our rights, or simply screaming for vengeance?

Fist

I run the risk of making myself very unpopular here, particularly among those who won’t bother reading past the first paragraph, but I think it’s time we took a long, hard look at how feminism is perceived by those who call themselves feminists (i.e. neofeminists), having mistaken own-gender favouritism for ‘equality’.

First, let’s look at what feminism is really all about.

You can date feminist protests back to the 3rd century BCE. When the “first wave” of feminism first arose in the 1800s, it was from a need for constitutional and social equality, in a society where women were subjugated to men. This need for equality between the sexes, or fight against oppression, is still very much a key cause in modern day feminism.

The European Institute for Gender Equality defines feminism as follows:

“Political stance and commitment to change the political position of women and promote gender equality, based on the thesis that women are subjugated because of their gendered body, i.e. sex.” (EIGA, n.d.)

On the same page, there is additional information about the workings of modern day feminism:

“Contemporary feminisms’ main focus is either a re-evaluation and reconceptualisation of women, their positions and roles, or a deconstruction of covert forms of gender discrimination and exclusion.”

This is important stuff, people! So, why am I in such a huff?

Well, nowhere in any of the above quotes did we read that modern day males should be punished for the norms and legislations of a society they did not help build. Perpetuating these norms today in plain ignorance should of course be subject to both criticism and consequence, and I think that this can be read between the lines here, but simply being born with your genitalia on the outside of your physical body does not a criminal make.

Back to the misapprehension aspect of neofeminism. Which is different from new feminism, by the way. Look it up. Neofeminists tend to glorify the female aspect. Not very equally inclined, if you ask me.

Thus, in their attempt to ‘take down the patriarchy’ by trying to flip the coin and make persons of the male gender feel inferior, these neofeminists take the focus away from where the feminist movement is still sorely needed because women’s rights are not equal to those of their male peers.

I am talking about the places and societies where women still don’t have the right to vote (Eritrea and Vatican City), where they aren’t allowed out in the open without covering themselves up, where they are forced to remain silent until their husband, brother or other male family member allows them to speak, where they do not have the same educational opportunities as their male peers, where they cannot speak up about sexual harassment in the workplace in fear they will lose their job – where they are subject to very real oppression.

That is where we need political change.

And I am not talking about religious practices or beliefs here – to each their own – but behaviours and customs that become a breeding ground for hostility, fear, hate and megalomania.

To me, feminism represents working towards creating opportunities for those who wish to have a say in how they want to lead their lives, like having a career in a field where their gender is unrepresented and therefore overlooked – and not because they are unrepresented due to lack of real interest.

Gender quotas are bullshit. Especially when it comes to leadership in the workplace. Anyone who has studied leadership and better management styles will know that a true leader needs to have a real passion for their work in order to do their job properly. If something holds precedence over the leadership role, you should find something else to do. And the quality of being able to put your job first pertains to a certain type of person, regardless of gender. So, a leadership role shouldn’t go to a woman that applied just to see if she could get it, just because she’s among the underrepresented few, when there are highly qualified men just dying to do the job and make the required sacrifices to do so. Why apply for a job when you don’t absolutely want it?

And when we are on the subject of work, there’s the issue of equal pay. This new generation of patriarchy fighters seem to think that they are entitled to the same pay as their male colleagues, despite taking a week ‘off’ each month, where they demand to be left to their own devices so that they can deal with menstrual cramps, chocolate cravings and mood swings. If you’re not going to do your usual workload to a respectable standard for one week out of every month, how do you expect to get paid the same as someone who does do their job and manages to pick up the slack after you? And, don’t get me started on the type of women who apply for a job, only to accidentally get pregnant and go on maternity leave within 3 months of signing the contract.

In demanding this type of preferential treatment at work, how do you think that makes the rest of us look? Everyone will think we are equally weak, demanding and ignorant of others’ needs. Saying it should be your right as a woman to make such demands makes the whole equality aspect of feminism evaporate. In fact, it’s akin to taking a huge, bloody dump all over everything the feminism movement has accomplished to do and to this day works hard to fight for. It is the opposite of equality and has already had enough negative consequences to create a rift and perhaps make some people think that women should be put in their place.

So, when fairweather (now former) friends would ask me, in a rather accusatory tone, ‘and you call yourself a feminist?’, in response to my opinions or behaviour, my reply would be: ‘No, I don’t.’ And, I really don’t. Not because I disagree with the ideology, but because I don’t want to be associated with them or their misinformed view on something so important.

Whatever happened to fighting the power, together? Equality? Unity? Solidarity?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for equal rights and applaud the movement that secured our right to vote, not least to own a fucking credit card. But I’d rather not be associated with these self-proclaimed feminist that are under the impression that being a feminist means blaming and punishing men for everything that’s gone wrong in their own lives. You blame patriarchy for enforcing societal norms that aren’t suited to women, when in fact women are often the ones perpetuating (or enforcing) them. Mothers telling girls how to behave so that people will like them, teachers doing the same. Women treating men like they’ve done something wrong by simply existing. Women treating other women like dirt and playing games, just to cause confusion and fear. This type of behaviour is alienating, not community-building.

Then there’s linguistic trends, such as the emergence of the term ‘mansplaining’, for instance… There’s no one more guilty of explaining things in a way that makes the listener think they are cognitively bloody impaired, than a misinformed feminist. The fact that it’s been dubbed mansplaining and not overexplaining goes to show just how far some people have gone to put men in a derogatory light. This is opinion, of course, however educated it may be.

Anyway, that’s what irks me this week, and all the live long day.

If you’re going to fight for something, fight for equality, not for the glorification of one specific sex. We are all just parasites on this planet anyway, and before long, we will be but stardust in the solar wind.

See you next Tuesday (unless an asteroid wipes us out within the next few days)!

Also, you should listen to some nice tunes. Have some Lita Ford, some Blondie and some fucking Judas Priest (links below):

, , , , ,
0

Is system failure causing human rights violation?

I was listening to a podcast episode on psychodynamic understanding (link to the episode at the bottom of this post), where one of the problems with the Norwegian mental healthcare system is addressed by one of the speakers; the fact that you, as a patient, need to be awarded the ‘right to treatment’ (by some overworked soul at your local District psychiatric centre, who hardly looks at you when you’re filling out the many, often poorly translated, forms they need to be able to pigeonhole you, I might add).

Then, if they deem you deserving of treatment (i.e., if you’ve ticked enough boxes), you will be allowed 12 short, yet excruciating, weeks of treatment before you are either referred to the next level or chucked out on your arse with more questions than answers and expected to be all better so that they can award the next person in the queue some added trauma by giving them the same treatment. This 12 week period, I might add, will only be sufficient time for some diagnostics and very little actual treatment. Effectively, we are left activated yet untreated – worse off than when we came in.

And now we have to explain everything, again, to someone new.

Before I go on, I must state that I do recognise that there are exceptions within the mental health care system – there are some extraordinary mental health professionals out there, and they will do their absolute best to see to it that you get proper treatment and that it lasts as long as possible. They will look you in the eye, engage you in conversation and show some of their own personality in the process. The are not so interested in dehumanising themselves or the situation – they genuinely want to help and find their work both fascinating and rewarding. They show you that you have value.

The only problem is that you will rarely meet such an individual during the initial stages of your treatment, as they are often specialists. What’s more, they have to fight the system in order to succeed. Regardless, I applaud these people – GPs and specialists alike – and wish there were more of them, so that they wouldn’t have to work so hard to fix things that should have been handled by someone else at an earlier stage in the process.

Now, back to the rant.

For many of us, our trauma or emotional wounds are embedded in our unconscious and deeply rooted in something we experienced in childhood, and to treat that, you will need a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to create new neural pathways and change your perspective and life for the better. More often than not, you just need the opportunity to talk about your past and discuss your diagnosis and the way forward with an expert. Talk therapy isn’t even on the table in Norway – seemingly, they only want to make you fit into one of their perfect little boxes to see which prize you get in the diagnostics lottery and send you on your way whilst patting themselves on the back for a job well done. The fact that we, as patients, are traumatised and, for those of us with a neurological disorder, have been trying to fit in by masking our symptoms for our entire lives, are ignored by the people that are responsible for referring us to the next treatment facility (if they decide to do so).

We do not want to be ill, we are not used to asking for help, we are ashamed of ourselves and our inability to be normal, we don’t feel as if we are even worthy of help, yet you expect us to honestly and accurately score ourselves using a scale that ultimately shows us how useless we are and, indeed, how unworthy.

Additionally, we have already had enough people telling us that we are ‘too much’, and very often feel so bad for the therapist – knowing that they will have to carry with them the information you give them – that we simply hold back and try to act as if it’s not as bad as it might seem. When, in fact, it is almost always far worse.

A professional with a manageable workload would probably be able to see through such self-effacing behaviour, alas, this is not the case in public healthcare.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from being in the system since I was about 16, mental health issues need a hell of a lot more than a meagre 12 weeks of yourself filling out forms and never touching on the issues at hand to be worked out. What’s more, due to the heavy workload, there is a lot of illness in the public sector, so in a lot of cases there’s inconsistencies and halts in treatment, not to mention office hours and holiday closures. Weirdly enough, mental illness doesn’t operate after any office calendar, and the patient is left feeling that they made their therapist so ill that they needed a break from them or that they don’t matter enough to get the number to an emergency service or similar. You see, someone that’s entirely broken down mentally and emotionally, wouldn’t do themselves the favour of asking for said number.

To most patients with severe trauma, their illness is all-encompassing – it affects nearly every aspect of your life. To the individual, it is like a cancer of the brain that is shutting down your body bit by bit whilst hacking away at your will to live. So, whoever decided that we are expected to fix ourselves in 12 weeks time and not want to kill ourselves after – because now we feel more alone, dirty, useless and more of a burden than ever – can take a long walk off a short pier. In my humble opinion.

Furthermore, a lot of us patients have trust issues. Also, who do you know, that would happily just start talking about traumatic events they’ve experienced throughout their lifetime to a complete stranger, unless they’re a complete narcissist? Establishing trust takes time – the fact that you are a licensed professional means very little to the person sat across from you, that has yet to meet anyone who hasn’t betrayed their trust at some point. Why should you be any different? People break their confidentiality all the time.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) states the following: “Every human being has the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health“. Promoting “good health and well-being” is the third of the UN’s 17 sustainability goals. The very first article in the UN’s declaration of human rights states:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights (UN,n.d).

I would argue that failing to treat mental illness in the same way other chronic illness is treated is a violation of our human right to equality in dignity, because we certainly are not dignified enough as human beings to deserve anything other than pity from the Norwegian healthcare system. We hear you loud and clear. You mean to say that we are a pest and a burden and should therefore be treated as such, so that we will understand that our place in society is beneath everyone else.

Well, the joke is on you – we already felt that way anyway.

Now, one can also argue that mental health issues is a pandemic, yet unlike the corona virus, it they are not being treated as such, even though a mental health patient is much more likely to have an unwanted effect on those aroung them, or even society as a whole, (financially or worse) if left untreated, as opposed to someone that suffers from covid.

Take, for example, the children of a parent that suffers from an untreated mental illness, that might become victims of emotional incest or parentification. Their emotional wounds alone would need treatment, not to mention how the hereditary nature of most mental health illnesses could mean they are undiagnosed as well. With a parent that isn’t paying enough attention to them, they will likely not seek help themselves until it is far too late. It is a vicious cycle.

In fact, since mental health sufferers often don’t get the help they require, they are spreading the disease to those close to them due to its toxic nature. Surely, that’s something we want to avoid, yeah?

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I could write books on this topic, it is that close to my heart. Oh, wait, I have done just that! Well, one, anyway. If you’re interested in reading it, you can go to the Buy the Book section of this site and do just that. A follow-up is currently in the works.

See you next week for another reflection.

If you want to (and is a Norwegian speaker), you can listen to the Psykiateren-podcast episode by clicking on the Spotify icon below.

, , , ,
0

We’re live!

Hello! Just popping in to say hi on this day of the birth of this site… What can you expect from my content, other than information about my book?

Well, I will be posting about things related to mental health, maybe some music stuff, books I’ve read and loved and random things that occur in this journey called life.

We shall see – nothing is written in stone yet, so, stay tuned!

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑