Saturday 1 October 2011

Hypochondria on the Brain?

"So little food for thought my f**king brain feels anorexic,
 So many typo's when I write, oh I'll claim I'm dyslexic"
Introdiction - Scroobius Pip 


When the film 'Fight Club' was adapted from the book and released in the cinema, it's a little known fact that the recipe for a homemade bomb (Which in the book is an operable manual for the activity) was modified for the film version, scrapped and made up so that it was a realistic sounding facade. Why? Because due to a few laws that may or may not exist, combined with the moral reasoning of the director, they somehow didn't want to give millions of people the know-how to blow up a small building.

Good move David Fincher, you saved the day.

Now all you people, with your clever little minds and vast libraries of knowledge, might make the assumption here that I'm going to start waxing lyrical on the promotion of guerrilla warfare. Now despite the fact that I'm a rebellious yet lovable teenager and the fact that certain Cornish towns need a communist regime, I'm going to take this rant in a different direction.

You see, David Fincher, in directing Fight Club, might have stopped a lot of banking corporations from being blown up, but there was another bit of information that he may or may not have intended to let slip.

Due to some of the themes of Fight Club, the release of the film triggered an international awareness, not just of the everyday urges to beat the living s**t out of someone, but of schizophrenia, insomnia, depression, and other mental illnesses. A lot of people see this as a good thing, and it probably is, but there is one little thing that annoys the crap out of me.

Knowing the symptoms, or what to expect of a mental illness, is a pretty useful thing - after all, knowing what to expect of cancer kind of stops us from dropping like flies and getting very confused. However, when you give someone the recipe for a bomb - they get this strange temptation to blow something up, and it's the very same with the symptoms of an illness, mental disorders being the very same.

It's a bit like dyslexia - everyone has a basic understanding that it entails you being bad at spelling, that sort of thing. So it makes complete sense, doesn't it? I mean, you find spelling a bit hard, and no, you've never seen a doctor about it, because it's so obvious! You definitely have dyslexia!

Oh, and your mood swings? Yeah, turns out they have a word for that too! It's called bi-polar disorder! And yeah, you don't have manic episodes and start smashing things, so you must just have like, a smaller version!

See? We're all completely mental! We're all so diverse and different!

Oh, oh wait, I was being sarcastic again wasn't I.... damn schizophrenia!


There might be a reason for why I get annoyed about this, it might be the prescribed medicines I had for my 'brain problems' as a kid, it might be the voluntary work I did in a mental hospital, it might be the little hipster inside of me screaming for mental illness to be less mainstream than it is now.

People keep saying 'Yeah, you say that, but before they discovered dyslexia they thought people were just stupid' - and they're just missing the point. It's not that we're unaware about these things - I mean, it's not like you've ever read a medical journal and you're an expert on ADD. It's simply that when we're given the ingredients to do something, we want to do it. Even if that means putting yourself through the 'pain' and 'suffering' of mental illness.

I'm not pointing any fingers in this post, and I'm not asking any questions - in the words of the afore-quoted Scroobius Pip, I talk about the things that a lot of people won't mention. All I ask is that you keep your fingers pointed at the keyboard, and for you to ask the questions.

Now take a bloody paracetamol and go back to bed.


-Lewis... it is Lewis, right?

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