On being different

I am a cheat. On Saturday night/Sunday morning I was speaking to some protestors who'd set up camp in Hyde Park overnight. I told them I campaigned in mental health. I was asked "so you have the mental health" by this lady. Yes. I have the mental health.

I explained to her it wasn't an illness. Its just being different. I was drunk and this was how I communicated my thinking to a person naive to the advanced concepts in mental health.

I cheated because she was a protestor. A liberal and a passionate one. Though not a conscious thought to achieve influence by aiming at something she'd understand from a personal perspective the result was it was powerful, I think, to see the alternative way of thinking about mental illness.

If I were a psyhiatrist i'd have been like a peadophile at a baby pageant. There was mental illness all around were I to see people who are different as being mentally ill. That is, after all, what psychiatry does. The schoolyard exclusion enforced with science.

Difference in this sense is as much of a construct as mental illness.