Dialogue: Belt up about mental health

I had a bit of an altercation with a shrink the other day. Actually, it was quite a showdown. Shrinks, funnily enough, are rather prone to rising even to feeble bait.

Just occasionally, one wonders whether they take it all a bit too seriously. Certainly, one can get in an awful lot of trouble if one tries to make light of one's - or anyone else's - craziness while in session.

One will be lying there on the couch, laughing one's head off about some of the wilder aspects of human behaviour, with real enjoyment, and suddenly one will realise that nobody else in the room is joining in. Apart from one's own sobs of laughter, there is dead silence. It's a little humbling.

Anyway - our fight. The fight was about the modern trend towards honesty and openness about mental illness. The shrink, needless to say, felt that going public about mental illness was extremely important and one of the great leaps forward of our age.

"Talking about mental health problems demystifies them," he sputtered, fanning himself with another wannabe, middle-class nutter's sheaf of case-notes about middle-class wannabe nutters. (We will assume, although not happily, that demystify is a word.)

I, on the other hand, had my doubts about the "talking about mental health problems demystifies them" line of argument and made the horrible mistake of making these doubts public.

So we had a little fight.

And in the end, I shut up, because people (a little crowd had formed by this point) were looking quite affronted.

The thing is, though, that I do have my doubts about the "talking about mental health problems demystifies them" line of argument and the era that permits and encourages people to speak of their mental health troubles in public, and ad infinitum.

The problem with this era is that the wrong people have appropriated it. More to the point, the white middle class has appropriated it.

Even more to the point, the white middle class has bought into the notion that it is actually performing some sort of social service when it speaks about its troubles - that when it talks non-stop about its various mental troubles, it is involved in the important business of "desmystifying."

The upshot is that one often feels that one is surrounded by people who not only cannot stop talking about themselves, but believe that their talking is doing the world a favour (I realise that this may sound a bit rich coming from me, but we will press on in the face of that).

And I wonder whether it does do the world a favour. After all - talking and thinking about oneself for days on end is not, as far as I can see, likely to broaden humanity's horizons. There's not enough humility in such behaviour.

I was thinking about this not so long ago, after I had a number of run-ins with people (and they were all white and middle-class) who were all very keen to air the details of their various brushes with mental illness.

The depressives, laughing, listed their drug therapies (at points, they were almost competitive about it). The manic, completely unprompted, described his latest list of out-of-control behaviours.

Two points occurred to me, here. The first was that it is weird to live in a time and place where near-perfect strangers feel perfectly comfortable telling you their personal details right off. The second was that people almost seem to revel in those details. They did not, as a result, particularly look like people who were suffering.

The upshot here is that it becomes harder, not easier, to imagine that there are people who genuinely suffer from mental illness. Certainly, it's a while since I saw one who struck me as genuine. I have no doubt that this has to do with the circles I move in. We've become so self-indulgent.

Meanwhile, I suppose, the true sufferers of mental illness are off somewhere trying to cope and get well, rather than holding court about themselves and their problems at twee parties and drinks evenings. Interesting times.

To change the subject in a way: it is nice out here at Kerikeri, enjoying the long weekend. There is a pool, non-stop sunshine, and plenty to drink. There is also dead silence a lot of the time.

It's fun in the city, but I do like places where nobody talks at all.