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Mental Illness, The “HOT NEW THING”!
Thanks to Britney Spears and People Magazine for proving my prediction of several months ago 100% completely accurate.
I posted this almost six months ago TO THE DAY!
I’d like to offer the formal prediction that within a short period of time (6 months to maybe 2 years max.) that “going crazy” will be the new fad as people becoming increasingly unable to distinguish (thanks to technology and general human psychological trends) between what’s real and what’s not, what’s inside you and what’s outside.
And the teaser from People’s website:
Britney Spears’s family “is terrified,” a family friend tells PEOPLE in its latest cover story, on newsstands Friday. With the singer continuing to shun longtime friends and relatives, “everyone has been worried for some time,” says the source. “Her world has been crumbling around her.”
As the drama rapidly unfolds, the questions seemed to be: How did the once-sparkling singer with the homespun charm and earnest enthusiasm fall so far, and so hard – and what can be done to help her?
Several sources say the events are the results of a long-gestating mental illness. “She’s suffered from a psychological disease for years,” says a source close to the singer. Two separate sources close to Spears believe she has been diagnosed as bipolar, while additional sources confirm she has been prescribed at least one antidepressant/anti-anxiety drug.
Yet “she does not think she has a problem,” says a source close to Spears. Dr. Mark Goulston, a Santa Monica-based psychiatrist who has not treated Spears, points out that “manic behavior is when you don’t have any sense of rules. There’s a grandiosity: ‘I play by my own rules.’ ”
I was looking around for good quotes about this over the weekend after I saw the cover at the grocery store. One article I found had a bunch of “related links” at the bottom, one of which said something like (I lost the actual URL), “How To Confront Loved Ones About Mental Illness” - which fucking creeps me out. Especially since years ago our nations favorite celebrity miscreant, George W. Bush began instituting truly Orwellian moves called the “New Freedom Mental Health Commission” which not only seeks to institute mandatory screening for mental health issues, but also mandatory treatment. Read: forced drugging and incarceration. It happened in the USSR, and it happens here all the time, but we just don’t call it that. In the USSR, they had something called “sluggishly progressing schizophrenia” which political radicals just couldn’t seem to stop coming down with…
January 15th, 2008 at 12:55 am
for many years it was common practice to have people institutionalised by loved ones for “thier own good” and be subjected to electric shock treatment, drugs and various forms of state sanctioned brainwashing……in this country.
the pendulum is merely swinging back that way again, and ms.spears is the poster girl for the movement.
many of the nations homeless are former guests of the government, and when the funding for the psychiatric hospital programs dried up all of the guests were asked to find alternative accomodation.
my feeling is that the money will suspiciously re-appear fairly shortly.
January 15th, 2008 at 1:15 am
I’m unhappy to say that I agree with your predictions.
See also the rise of Scientology, a corporatized religious psychology alternative for the super-elite
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/06/14/drugs-vs-scientology-a-set-up/
January 15th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Well, someone had to take Michael’s place.
January 15th, 2008 at 4:11 am
Cool. ‘I play by my own rules’ is very interesting territory.
January 15th, 2008 at 10:52 am
My parents knew three people who had this done to them after they were ‘Saved’, changed their lifestyle and began speaking in tounges.
January 15th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
when I look at electroshock, I feel like we’re barely out of the caves.
January 15th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Speedbird, I meant to glom onto that passage as well. Wild, isn’t it, that they have a psychiatrist giving opinions on Britney who has never acually treated her at all! Second of all, isn’t the whole POINT of celebrities that they play by their own rules?
Speaking of electroshock, there are some really good bits in that Dr. Bronner documentary about that. He calls the mental institution he was committed to (and later escaped from) a concentration camp, the people who run it communists, and talks about how its important to have these phrases and slogans he came up with saved in your frontal lobe or something so that they won’t be erased by electroshock.
January 16th, 2008 at 4:07 am
> isn’t the whole POINT of celebrities that they play by their own rules?
They have to /look/ like they play by their own rules.
January 16th, 2008 at 4:41 am
Please elaborate for our studio audience watching at home!
January 16th, 2008 at 6:20 am
What I reckon: Britney is showing us all how to Go Crazy™ in a nice predictable way. We will condemn her behaviour, demand she be Treated™, then when we feel under pressure from, say, remote-controlled taser drones and $100 for a loaf of bread, we will Go Crazy™ just like Britney, and expect to be Treated™ just like Britney.
Same as that Into the Wild dude showing us what happens when you try to go all lone wolf and live wild. These ‘episodes’ are tutorials for the potentially malcontent. Hope you’re all paying attention, there will be an examination.
People who play by their own rules:
A) Starve to death in a bus
B) Are publicly humiliated and lose custody of their kids
C) Crash their Mercedes in a tunnel in Paris
D) Are not you if you know what’s good for you
Ben Fairhall had a nice series on Britney’s woes last year. Totally worth a read, as is the rest of his site.
January 16th, 2008 at 7:17 am
Of course, the diagnosis of mental illness has always been inflected by wealth and status - the poor man’s ‘crazy’ is the rich man’s ‘mildly eccentric’. But when we start talking about feedback loops, the expression of latent genetic predipositions etc., it all becomes a bit more tricky. How do we distinguish between a ’sense of grandiosity’ (plain crazy version) and someone who feels that way because they are very rich and famous and they have had their every whim catered to for 10 years without anyone around them ever contradicting anything they say? See also: rate of celebrity divorces, where the one person in your life who might contradict you becomes intolerable for that very reason.
I think a similar thing (and cf. alpha dog post) happens with world leaders (sic) - when everyone around you starts sending subconscious signals / pheromones that you are top dog your genetic code actually responds, like an alpha wolf’s altered scent, or a silverback gorilla, or that crazy thing that happens to male Orang-Utans. Hence Presidents, Prime Ministers etc, seem to fill out physically when they come into power, and suddenly look weakened and fragile when they leave it (step forward, Bill Clinton. And now step back again). [Also some scientific studies on crowds at football games - those males have higher testosterone levels whose team has won, and lowered levels whose team lost.]
==
‘“How To Confront Loved Ones About Mental Illness” - which fucking creeps me out.’
I always got freaked by the whole (American?) idea of ‘the Intervention’ - I can think of nothing more likely to push me over the edge than the sudden realisation that all of my family and friends really have been conspiring against me behind my back.
January 16th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Abso-fucking-lutely! The whole thing reeks of some kind of communist concentration camp ethics too: confront the traitor, turn in the trouble-maker.