The Mentally Ill Strike Again.

When Loana Lewis was attacked I waited for the news that it was a man with mental health problems, wot did it. When Silvio Berlesconi was attacked I waited for the news that a mentally man done it. Initially I groaned in despair in both cases. Loana Lewis does represent a program I hate and Berlesconi needed bringing down a peg or two. He is a nightmare leaders, who has far too much power and is constantly in the news for court cases and womanising. He is the worst possible role model for Italy, as he seems to be a walking talking stereotype of the Italian male. But these mentally ill men attacking famous people are also walking, talking stereotypes. It's heart breaking for someone like me who wants to be taken seriously, but I know that I will and do miss out of all kinds of things, from every aspect of life because these guys just keen reinforcing stereotypes. Please will someone, somewhere come forward who is a positive role model for schizophrenia or mentally illness more generally?

Adolf and Stink!

I have just launched my Christmas line of his and hers perfumes; Adolf and Stink. Brewed in the foothills of the Pennines in Burnley and watered by the Thames estuary, these are the perfumes that define the era. I hope you enjoy them, and light up a room when you enter. All eyes will be on you. Smell defines so much of the attractiveness of a person, and these perfumes will certainly get you the attention you crave so badly.

I Love My New Ruler.

You might think this is about leadership, perhaps Obama or Cameron. No, it is about my new ruler. I had a plastic one I've had since school (18 years ago - many moons have passed since then). But I broke it scratching my back. I then went into town to WHSmiths and bought another plastic ruler. But when I got home it was a bendy ruler - a ruler with a bend in the middle. This was not what I wanted. So I rescued the receipt from the recycling bin (yes I recycle - one large bag of paper per fortnight and one large bag of cans, cardboard and glass jars per fortnight). Then I went back into town (this is the following day) and exchanged it for a metal ruler. The reason I didn't buy a metal one in the first place was that I was trying to be cheap. The metal one was £3.99 and the plastic one was £1.70. I then paid the difference (that'll please WHSmith managers) and came home with my shiny new ruler. It is also better for back scratching and good for running craft knives along when cutting paper or card.

Christmas isn't for Everyone

Christmas has arrived again. Every year we have to put up with this damn festival. I respect those that love it. I would have loved it if i hadn't had such a difficult and painful life. People with kids like it and I understand that. But Christmas isn't for the lonely, the jobless, the elderly, alone in their houses, the mentally ill who are forced into happiness because that's what is expected of you. It isn't for the men and women at Chorus steel who were made redundant this month - on the first day of Christmas. It isn't for people who cannot conceive. For those stuck at work because its their turn. It is for stuffing your face and getting pissed out of your skull and out of a job because you insulted your boss at the Christmas party. It's for disgusting Christmas dinners, mince pies, weight gain, heart attacks, domestics, spousal murders, suicides, drunken car crashes and gordy Christmas decorations reminding you wherever you go that this nasty, boorish, commercialised festival cannot be avoided or ignored. It is for massive debts, nagging children demanding expensive, well marketed products, that will be broken, lost, stolen or sold for cannabis by January. It is for being really lonely on New Years Eve, cos' you've got no friends. It is for the lull between Boxing Day and New Years when there's nothing happening and sales at the shops where you buy stuff you don't need and can't afford because you've been sucked into the lies of multi-national companies, who've convinced you that you need an IPod, and a new bag and some new jeans and a sofa. Because without these things you can't feel good about yourself. You're a nobody without buying power - reinforced at no other time, at no other level of intensity than at Christmas. Christmas is the height of folly, the peak of consumerism that is killing the planet beneath our feet; our life support machine, without which we will all perish. So don't be merry at Christmas, without sparing a thought for all these things, - would you could call a counter-Christmas polemic, where we discuss why Christmas has more downsides than upsides and think about the possibility, that we don't need it anymore. Go to Church and celebrate the birth of Christ if that's your thing. But everything else, is surplus to requirements, unnecessary shite that only really symbolises the slow painful death of humanity in a heady haze of a Christmas frenzy.

Film Adaptation

I love The Vast and Gruesome Clutch of Our Law so much I have decided to adapt it into a film. Let's just see if the film business is an easier business than publishing, because the publishing industry has to be the toughest there is. I mean any discussion with any member is likely to result in being told to go away. Take Jonathan Cape, a company owned by Random House (http://www.randomhouse.co.uk). I was trying to find out whether books sales increase when a book is adapted into a film. I rang Jonathan Cape to ask them about The Boy in the Striped Pajama's. I got through to the voice mail of a very frosty sounding press officer called Fiona Murphy. She didn't sound very happy. Any hoo, I managed to get her email address and asked her about film adaptations and the effect on sales. We exchanged several emails, but the long and short of it was that she wasn't prepared to tell anything. Nothing. Not even a hint of an answer. Wow! Maybe she's just having a bad day, who knows? But it is so common in the industry to be cagey, rude and generally unco-operative, that I guess she just reverted to type. It is a cultural thing. Having said that I asked the marketing department of a book called Tyrant by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, originally published by Macmillan, (http://www.panmacmillan.com) a few years ago, how they decide how much to spend on marketing for a book. She was really nice. She told me they tend to spent 10% of the printing budget (on top), for any given book. So if they spend £10k on printing they'll spend 1k on marketing (you get the idea). Never mind eh?

Andy Burnham Response

My ongoing complaints about the Peter Bryan case continues with a response from Andy Burnham MP at the Department of Health (or at least one of his people). The response has now arrived, via email. He begins by saying that 'I can assure you that the Government agrees that stigma and discrimination are major social problems facing those with mental illness'. First of all the only reason that this government are tackling this issue at all is because of the enormous amount of sufferers who are not working and claiming sickness benefits. The government want more mentally ill people back in work. The problem is that employers don't want them, largely due to stigma and discrimination.

Secondly there are some well funded programs looking into discrimination against mentally ill people. Shift is the government one (http://www.shift.org.uk) and Time to Change is funded by the charity sector including the National Lottery to the tune of £18 million (http://www.time-to-change.org.uk).

Lastly the BBC and the Department of Health both believe that adding a statement about how statistically the mentally ill aren't more violent than the general public and taking a quote from a mentally ill person, balances out the reporting of extreme violence when it occurs. I don't agree that this approach is valid. What tends to happen is that these statements come right at the end of the story. Not many people will get down to the end of a story. Once you've read the basic and important sections of the story you move on. Also, like I said in a previous entry on this blog people don't remember the good stories; they only remember the bad ones. Those are the ones that stick in peoples minds. So instead why not just stop releasing details of horrific murders when they are carried out as a direct result of severe mental ill health?

My complaint was dealt with by Christopher Bird, Customer Service Centre, Department of Health.

The Beeb Replies to Me

No-one can argue that the BBC doesn't take complaints seriously. They've been very jittery lately about whether they can hold on to the licence fee, with James Murdoch saying they are destroying democracy or some crap like that. Personally I love the BBC and would miss it if it was pulled. I want it in its current form though. I hate paying the licence fee, and I wish it was a little lower. Some of the stuff the Beeb does is unnecessary. Like 606 for instance. They're all so obsessed with sport I think they'd cover a window opening competition, if there was a ball involved. Five Live (http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/) are as equally obsessed with sport to the point where I could strangle them . But listening to Five Live is still one of my favourite pastimes, in between very lengthy sports bulletins that is.

But to the point. I complained to the BBC that their coverage of the Peter Bryan case was unnecessary and that details of cannibalism don't actually serve the public interest. The reply from Stefan Curran of the complaints department, reckons that because they report other things like the stats on murders carried out by people suffering from schizophrenia as compared to murders committed by non-mentally ill people, they've covered their bases. But my argument has always been that people don't remember those facts. They don't remember the interview that Curran alluded to of a man who had recovered from schizophrenia. They remember the human brain eating, stabby lunatic. But there you are. I think a few ill considered emails shot off in the middle of the night by me is not going to change the way the media report murders by sufferers of schizophrenia.