Funniest joke in the world

It may be surprising to learn that there's such a thing. Someone did a bit of research and managed not to win an IG Noble Prize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_funniest_joke

(There's more information in the Google search and on the official site.)

I'm sad to say the winning joke is not that funny. I think there may have been a lot of German participants (seriously - that's not just acceptable racism coming out).

"

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?". The operator says "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says "OK, now what?

"

And here's the funniest joke in the UK according to the same research. It's the sort of joke you might not laugh at because it's not cool to laugh at that sort of thing.

"

A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says: "That's the ugliest baby that I've ever seen. Ugh!" The woman goes to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her: "The driver just insulted me!" The man says: "You go right up there and tell him off – go ahead, I'll hold your monkey for you."

"

Here's the sort of joke that people don't laugh at because it's cruel yet there's a part of them that does want to laugh which makes it all the funnier. It is a brutal joke that's not funny for the humour, i.e. the unexpected punchline and the uneasiness it causes which is expressed with laughter. It's funny because it's brutal and sick though otherwise is as funny as What's brown and stick? A stick.

What's better than winning gold in the paraplegic Olympics? Walking.

It divides people's opinions more than I do and doesn't make me popular with the disablist fraternity/sorority. It's one of those jokes that can only be researched in the pub because people's attitudes in lab settings are totally different. I feel it is one that would show high levels of gender differences in the appreciation of the humour and these differences would be strongly biological as well as based on gender personality-type.

The important thing to remember is that different people have a different sense of humour.

http://www.bangedup.net/news/index.php wasn't the site I was looking for but it's relatively clean and I know there may be some faint hearted people reading this. That one's fairly clean but that's according to my disgusting standards.

www.bangedup.com was the site I was looking for to extend this ramble on humour into even darker territory. This is one of the sickest (and not sick in the good slang sense) sites I've ever seen, and I've been using the internet for over 15 years. I first came across it when it had just come out and I worked in a call centre. It very quickly viralled. Within weeks of it's release it was down and a notice up saying the site had too many hits so it was moved to another server. One day a few years later I was flicking through the list of the top 100 UK sites and there it was.

I haven't checked the site tonight and I don't particularly want to. If you know me and my sense of humour and cuntishness then consider that more of a warning than the "you have to be over 18 to view this". I remember being there at the call centre when people were laughing watching a video of a guy on a bike being hit by a car.

Of course I admit that I'm a sicko and I'm honest about what I find funny though have learned to repress my inner feelings that aren't acceptable to some people (who are, in general, of the female biological type). Perhaps you might want to see what kind of sicko you are by checking out www.bangedup.com.

One of my favourite online galleries

I found this ages ago and it's just gotten better and better. The domain is very easy to remember and this site must have been around for a very long time to get a two letter domain name.

http://1x.com/

There's even humourous photos for those in need of a laugh.

http://1x.com/photos/humour/34829/

Untreated depression seen through my self-harm scars

There's a really big scar from one of my self-harm attempts while I was going through hellish psychosis. It's a really big one that's described in an earlier blog post.

The scar is huge because it was untreated. I didn't know how to stitch it myself. I could have worked it out and done it but I'm not Rambo. I didn't think to take a needle and thread and DIY it.

There's an old study that shows that 85% of people recover from depression in a year without treatment. The study didn't really say enough about the actual outcomes.

Has my lack of treatment created a huge scar that will heal but leaves a big and permanent gash on my psyche and life? Yeah. Probably. C'est la vie.

Lived experience of life

From

http://www.psychminded.co.uk/news/news2009/march09/oliver-james-cbt003.htm

It's one of the comments at the bottom. I know it's just one person's experience but...well...in my opinion that counts for a lot.

This is not to be taken as something that means you shouldn't feel like you don't suffer. The complexity of pain and it's externalisation is something I've got a fair amount of experience with, enough to tell you never weigh up is my pain lesser or greater than the next man or woman.

(Sadly if you ever meet me and I'm campaigning for something I will totally sell out on that when there's a point to be made.).

"

Better off talking to dead grandmother

From: Mark Suckling, unemployed, England, UK

Date: May 8, 2009

I have just started cognitive therapy. And if I had to be honest it has made me more depressed. Being unemployed you begin to concentrate on the minutest detail of everything. For instance an item of food has gone up 30p. This has a knock-on effect all the way down the line as you are fixed to an income.

My therapist had no idea how much unemployment benefit was. She thought my wife and I were both receivng £94 a week. Instead of just £94 for both. I told her that I was concerned that I wasn't getting enough nourishment as I only could afford £20 a week for food. She then told me she spends £120 a week on her shopping. I have to walk everywhere because I can't afford bus fare. I have had problems with my knees for years. And after walking three miles to the session and three miles back. They hurt. And without missing a beat she suggested maybe jogging would help my depression.

Try as you may, empathy is no substitute for walking in another person's shoes. Only then can you truly understand depression.

I dread going back to these sessions. Basically the ethos is a buck-up and pull yourself together philosophy. I would have been better off talking to my dead grandmother. At least I respected her.

"

The difference between Employment Support Allowance (formerly Incapcity Benefit) and Job Seeker's Allowance is the difference between the poverty line and extreme poverty.

When I was on IB there would be some weeks when all I would spend on food was £10 a week. I spent the rest of my money on alcohol and cannabis (yeah, I'm a cunt. Get over it). I used to explain my shopping habits as "yellow sticker shopping". I never bought anything I wanted. I just got what was on offer. I still do but I go for nicer things. In those days the nice things would be the items of food that were so off that they'd be re-reduced in price. I calorie counted to make sure I got enough to eat and made a 1,000-1,500 calorie meal that was £1 or £2 (a 3-pack of value mince pies covered in value meatballs).

I survived on what are know as "inferior goods." I learned the term from a friend of mine who worked at Goldman Sachs. It's sadly the range of food that far too many people are forced to buy. My friend explained them to me as things you would only buy if you had no choice. They're the no frills, value or whatever - the cheapest products. They're the most mass produced and worst made.

They're the products that some people might feel embarassed bringing to the counter because they carry the stigmata of poverty and cheapness. They're also the products that have the highest number of chemicals, are the least healthy and the most likely to contribute to illness.

It's the lot of the poor: eat shit and die younger. There's huge reports that make that point more lucidly and with references to other big reports. Think of that the next time you see someone reaching for those products, especially if you're a shareholder in one of the supermarket oligopoly.

Or just find your own happiness in realising just how good non-inferior goods are.

Is it possible that a psychiatrist from over 50 years ago could do better than NICE recommendations for schizophrenia

Don't ask how I ended up reading about insulin-induced comas. I'd heard of them before because they're an example of the power of the randomised control trial which eventually proved how they should have never been used. Anyone reading that Wiki page could work that out though.

However, there's a useful snip from that page (this piece is a slight piss take btw).

"

When they were not in a coma, insulin coma patients were kept together in a group and given special treatment and attention; one handbook for psychiatric nurses, written by British psychiatrist Eric Cunningham Dax, instructs nurses to take their insulin patients out walking and occupy them with games and competitions, flower-picking and map-reading, etc.

"

The very least NICE could have done in their guidelines for the treatment of schizophrenia is a have a little recommendation like that.

The worst, most disabiling and dehabiliting mental illness had recommendations of CBTp (16 sessions of CBT for psychosis), arts therapy and family interventions in the psychological therapies and psychosocial interventions bit of the updated 2009 guidelines. But Sweet Fuck All (SFA) else. (sorry....inappropriate humour again...thank goodness...read on and you'll understand why I'm so thankful for this morning's inappropriate humour).

SFA is an accurate acronym. I can't remember their depression guidance and only briefly flicked through it but I'm fairly sure it would be unfair of me to use that acronym on those because, if I remember right, there were considerably more options. (my sarcastic mind wants to write, but then depression is so much worse than schizophrenia but really it's just more difficult to treat and society doesn't treat schizotypy whereas it does mild depression.)

I'm sure NICE might say that their recommendations were made on the highest evidence but I'm afraid the evidence is that talking with me is about as good as talking with a qualified CBTp therapist (which frankly is probably the most disturbing thing you've ever read). They also had no reason to disrecommend any of the other treatments, for example supportive psychotherapy or social skills training. They may also have recommended against counselling of all bloody things noting that if the client asked for it they could have it but my memory really is poor so it may not have been that well-established psychological therapy that was recommended against in favour of CBTp.

In the end SFA was all they recommended. I suspect that they wouldn't have recommended art therapies without a kick in the arse from one of the involvement 'tokens'.

I have the privilege of being a critic. I can sit from outside the process and read the end result, zoom in with my detail lens and pick out any little mistake without understanding the bigger picture. Sadly in the treatment of schizophrenia, guess work, non-therapeutic controls or...ugh.....perish the thought.....talking to me would be as good as talking to an experienced, trained CBTp therapist.

When will lack of financial capability become a mental illness

I noted that gamling appeared in one of the UK's big mental health surveys and there was talk of it's inclusion into DSM.

That's a form of recklessness or addiction perhaps that's only a mental illness when it goes wrong. Those who can take the risks and win aren't mentally ill just as those who manage psychosis or paranoia without hospitalisation aren't diagnosed with schizophrenia or other psychotics disorders such as bipolar (sorry ladies and gents and fans of Steven Fry. Bipolar's a psychotic illness).

Learning disabilities is the modern term for idiocy and the other old terms for people who lacked a degree of general intelligence (according to the consensus measures). Financial capability has been a observed to be a problem for some people with or without mental illnesses, for example the people who take out door step loans with daily interest in the tens of percent.

The modern finanical world is a set of tricks designed to make a person spend more. Those with high finanical capability, for example the sort of person who knows more than the sales person, might be able to sail through the multitude of offers designed to squeeze more out of a person's pocket.

Pay as you go mobile phone contracts are one of these areas where people are tricked by bargains. They're given offers that sound amazing to anyone who can't do the maths, for example buy £10 of credit and get £20 free sounds like an amazing bargain however they up the call charges to 30p a minute while their standard or previous tariff was £10 for £10 of calls at 10p/min. The old tariff would roll over the credit to the next month whereas the new tariff would only roll over any of the initial £10 (which is used up 3 times quicker) while the £20 'free' wouldn't roll over.

Of course in this example the best thing would be a contract-free deal rather than pay as you go however people who have bad credit ratings or are financially excluded through bankrupcy don't have that option.

There are other examples. I remember working with someone who had enough money to buy a car outright and planned to. She was persuaded by the salesman to buy it on credit, even though she had the money and was ready to spend it as a lump sum. She was persuaded that it's better to have the lump sump in her bank and pay over time though it was really a ruse to increase the salesperson's monthly bonus. I can't remember if they'd attempted to sell Payment Protection Insurance.

Financial capability is important because money is important and people who work selling financial products may knowingly or unknowingly mis-sell them (unknowingly because many are just handed call scripts from their managers). Clearly the reckless spending associated with hypermania is something that's recognised as part of the illness. People in clinically manic states are often ripe pickings for the nefarious and those that are simply mental health unaware.

I'm considering this more analogous to intellectual disabilities. The lack of financial capability is a problem created by a complex system and not a real thing. I think every person, even the bankers themselves, must get frustrated at some point with the illogical of financial systems and credit packages. Certainly from the stories I've heard from my friends who've worked in investment banks it seems a certain amount of exploitation of a lack of financial capability is not the exception but the rule in their industry. Examples are hard but it'd be like me swapping a phone for a bag of crisps which might have a prize of £10,000.

I imagine in a decade or two there might be research papers that start with, "In the story of Jack and the beanstalk there's a clear example of a man with a financial capability illness. 3 magic beans for a cow is like spending £173million just on improving access to CBT. But they did it ten or twenty years ago."

Anti-stigma and structural change is mental healthcare

I've said it before but more importantly people like RD Laing have said it.

At the moment mental healthcare is mainly about changing the individual and reducing their psychopathology. Million and billions are put into the effort to drug up the nation, consider life's problem as illness and 'treat' undesireable behaviours. That's called the NHS and modern mental healthcare.

A drop in the ocean in comparison is the pittance spent on antistigma. Time to Change is the most significant antistigma campaign and it's not government funded which has been one of the best things for it because it has given it the independence to be effective in my opinion.

£20million is fuck all to make the structural change, by which I mean the fundamental change in society, that is required for the mentally ill to be part of society. To rectify the error in the way buildings were made it was mandated that public buildings need ramps and lifts so the widest proportion of the human race could use them. People with 2 legs, 1 leg or no legs could all use modern buildings.

Isolation, poverty and other impacts on the individual caused by stigma exacerbate mental illness. In other words becoming poor because you're mad or becoming alone and excluded because you're mad makes people feel worse.

Employment structures need massive changes to be made ready for the widest number of people of different abilites and types. This extends to learning disabilities which are usually discounted as mental illnesses (but I'm going to consider as mental illnesses).

People may not realise that much of mental illness is a construct and that it was the change in society in the 19th century that produced the mental healthcare system. The need for automotons for the factories and dark satanic mills, automotons who were created through the mandatory schooling system, meant that it was these types who prospered. Non-automotons, nowadays called the mentally ill, were disadvantaged only through the difficulty with which they fitted into the Second Wave/Industrial Revolution workplaces.

Psychiatry was invented to cope with that. Third Wave/Information or Ideas Revolution workplaces which were partially seen in the New Media-type organisations that were borne after the dotcom boom-bust were an example of how alternative workplaces could look and these would be places where automotons and the mentally ill could co-exist and perhaps without the need to label them as different.

And yet this isn't the really important area for structural change and antistigma. It starts with schools. It's where the worst discrimination and the best acceptance takes places. Most of all, I think it's where people can learn most. I remember some teenagers taking the piss out of an autistic person while I was on the tube. I don't think any of the other passengers were bothered but I had to mention that they were making fun of someone's illness.

The fat kid, the kid with specs, the dumb kid, the kid that looks like a girl, the kid that isn't cool, the kid that is poor, the kid that isn't fashionable, the kid that doesn't fit it - they're the many that are prejudiced against at school. The kid that's going through psychosis? That's the kid that's never even seen in school (and don't even get me started on how that may be the root of the supposed brain shrinkage shown in fMRI studies and little to do with a brain illness per se).

The reach of the many antistigma campaigns that have happened in the UK have touched the surface but know the iceberg underneath. Does anyone else understand that£20million (or three years worth of bonuses for the top earning exotic derivatives trader in the UK to put into context just how little that money is when compared with other things) is like holding a paper fan to the iceberg?

5% shifts in stigma and discriminations are just pissing in the ocean but they've managed to make sea levels rise. The problem is that £250 million is still pissing in the ocean and Time to Change don't have Lord Layard's health economics talent on their side.

But, perhaps, spending that sort of money on making the UKs work places mental health safe and accessible would do more to help people stay in work and get people off the benefits trap and into suitable jobs a lot better than a single form of psychotherapy for common mental disorders.

But what does this loser, drunk, drug addicted freak know anyway?