Bedlam Revisited

"In the 18th century people used to go to Bedlam to stare at the lunatics. For a penny one could peer into their cells, view the freaks of the "show of Bethlehem" and laugh at their antics, generally of a sexual nature or violent fights. Entry was free on the first Tuesday of the month. Visitors were permitted to bring long sticks with which to poke and enrage the inmates. In 1814 alone, there were 96,000 such visits."

The use of the mentally ill for entertainment purposes has fallen out of favour in recent years due in part to competitive self-righteousness amongst the "caring" ranks in their empathy Olympics ("loves kittens, hates frightfulness"), improvements in psychiatric drug treatments, and razor-wire and other security measures to keep "us" from "them" (or "them" from "them", or "them" from "those" if the psychoses manifest in singing teapot form).

This seems a shame because the anecdotes that stem from this can be inspired. A friend of mine who's recently been diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, recounted how he believed that he was the subject of a reality tv show and how he "won" by guessing correctly what the audience had requested him do that week. He told how a map of Iraq on the wall seemed to metamorphose into his dad having anal sex with his object of desire at that time - not exactly something that inspires sweet dreams.

Increased drinking and isolation then led him to consider himself some sort of ubermensch or "Alpha" (the ranks all seemed to follow greek letters with some sort of class-based correllation) and this ultimately led to an ill-fated arson attempt on his flat (put out due to sudden pangs of consideration for his neighbours) and finding himself sectioned for the next three months, not before ringing 118 118 to explain the situation to the bewildered operative that told him he should maybe ring the fire brigade instead.

Whilst inside, he made friends with a fellow sufferer who believed he was God, and as my acquaintance was in his "Digital Jesus" phase at the time, they got on like a house on fire. There was a war in alterna-heaven over "divinity issues" though and they soon parted company. He's now recovering and writing to Richard Dawkins with his briefer efforts at disproving God, and has lost his paranoid fear of all politicians by now just considering them all to be in the positions they're in through possessing higher intellects and better leadership skills than the rest of the populace. I'm not convinced by this cure to be honest...

Now the thing is he actually volunteers this information to more or less anyone that so much as asks "so, what have you been up to lately?", often to people that he's just met up with. None of this "just between you and me doc" coyness - say it loud, he's mad and he's proud.

In comparison, the twatter-chatter of the drearily sane cannot compete. The motivations of most people for status, affirmation, sex, knowledge, company, or anything to distract them from the mundanity of their meat-machine existence are all too blindingly obvious and bear no great surprises. Indeed I often wonder whether the inanity of their prescence is what triggered this move to more exciting neural pastures rather than having to listen to their work colleague's weekly retelling of how drunk she got that weekend.

Having recently spotted another schizophrenic I knew chatting to galactic cops in pursuit of illegal space aliens living in a nearby apartment complex, I couldn't help but get the feeling that maybe he had actually made better life choices than myself - he has this vivid fantasy, and I have to listen to pretty much the same tales of pets and children and desperate attempts to fill quiet moments with forced conversation.

The scouser in the park that seemed to be making political speeches to invisible crowds and trying on people's hats without any concern for their permission, the man trying to start a fight with a bus-stop, the woman who stored 20p's in her cho-cha until she'd grin and release her jackpot - are these people not actually hypersane when set against the control group?

Whatever is going on in their heads, I'm convinced it's considerably more involved than the cavalcade of shit-drizzle that passes for entertainment these days.