Americans of my advanced age probably know Madness best from a crowd response to shout at the screen during a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (You yell, “What’s your favorite band, Riff?” right after he says, “Time is fleeting.” Try it. It’s fun!):

Anyway, Madness the band is still around and doning very well in the UK. When I was living in the UK, the lead singer, Suggs, got a hell of a lotta press. Although I didn’t have much access to the telly (as I was homeless), I did have access to newspapers and radio. This song , “Lovestruck”, came on the radio quite a lot:

Madness has seven band members, which has more or less stayed together for over twenty years (which is more like a century in pop music years). There was a little trial seperation in 1988, but that seperation didn’t work out and the band got back together in 1992. Because of their working class backgrounds, some people got the impression that they are a skinhead band, but that ain’t true. (Granted, the original skinheads of the UK were not racists, but quickly turned that way). Here’s yet another Madness tune to end March Madness with. Enjoy.

There are several adavantages to the second method, that of unrequited love. First of all, it’s free. Being an alcoholic takes a hell of a lot of money or learning how to shop lift and not get caught. And then you haveto drink like a fish for years in order to make conditions just right for the DTs. That takes way too much effort for those dedicated to the path of pereptual insanity.

With unrequited love, you don’t have anything to lose except your tiny little mind. Falling hopelessly in love happens instantaneously, so there are no skills to learn. It’s a lot like being hit by lightning, except an ambulance ride is usually not involved.

Unrequited love is loads of fun because your agony never ends. Your energy quietly drains just a little bit more every day. Oh, you can deny you have it and go dancing and romancing a whole bunch of other suitors, but you can never quite stop comparing them to yuor Beloved. Eventually, you find that living on your own and having a very rich fantasy life is much better than trying to cure yourself of unrequited love. Enjoy the madness.

Here is one of the best songs about unrequited love ever written — “Never Be Mine”, from the mysterious Kate Bush:

But I don’t buy that the psychiatric profession is merely one big conspiracy. Are there scammers out there? Of course there are. But you can find scammers in any profession. First off, I’ve been helped by Prozac and by therapy. Five years ago, I was homeless in the woods in England eating out of skips (dumpsters) and now I’m sole proprietor of my freelance writing business.

The psychiatric profession does often encourage mental health professionals to get therapy themselves as a sort of pressure valve from dealing with really tense, emotional situations. One of the problems good psychiatrists can go through is wondering whether they were able to truly help their patients. This is seen in Peter Schaeffer’s magnificent play, Equus.

But there will always be doubters. There has been such strides in the medical health profession that there has been an inevitable backlash. Anything made mainstream had better get used to being criticized. And the cost of care is another reason people who may need help will not go.

This is a little song and video I found on the subject by David Arv Bragi. Enjoy.

Conditions inside Bedlam were hopeless and despairing, very similar to a castle dungeon. The only medication you got was a thump on the back of the head and possibly a bucket of cold water. Although the original Bedlam was shut down before photographs, written letters from visitors still survive. They point out that if you weren’t mad by the time you enterred Bedlam, you definately were after a couple of days.

So, what was Bedlam like? Well, when we can;t find out from documentaries or history, we turn to the movies. Perhaps the most accurate is this scene from 1992’s Dracula, which was a very bizarre movie, but had a brilliant performance from singer Tom Waits. The guards wearing the cages had to wear those devices to protect their heads from inmate’s attacks.

Another place to mine information from is folk music. A traditional English ditty is called “Mad Tom o’ Bedlam”. There were so many poverty-stricken mentally ill in England that they all were eventually given the nickname “Tom o’ Bedlam” (no matter what the sex of the person). I know I heard that hurled at me when I was homeless in England. This is a live clip of Jolie Holland performing:

Trying to treat the insane is baffling today — but imagine what it must have been like hundreds of years ago. Thousands of years ago, the insane would have either perished at the mouths of sabre-toothed tigers or risen to become the undisputed leader of their tribe. But hundred of years ago began the notion that everyone deserves some sort of care and that everyone can be cured.

Unfortunately, what came up was arguably not much better than letting get a person tough it out in the woods. It’s because of Bedlam that anyone is terrified of being diagnosed as having a metal illness like depression because they were scared of getting tossed in a modern equivielent of Bedlam. But there’s a big difference between a person with major depression — who still has a grip on reality — and someone who thinks the neighbor’s dog is the Devil.

Bedlam opened up in London in 1247 and shut down in the late 1600’s. Part of the reason for the shut-down was from protests about the poor treatment of the inmates — some even from the inmantes, who had enough wits about them to petition Parliment for help in 1620. However, the facilities weren’t eliminated — just relocated a couple of times before eventually settling in Kent.

Here’s a short experimental film about Bedlam and what is on the original location. If you think about it, there’s not much of a difference between what was there then and what is there now.

I’ve never gone through this, but I used to live with a career alcoholic. The first time I was able to help him through the DTs until someone could slip him a tranquilizer. That was relatively begin. He babbled about God talking to him, being shown visions about the meaning of life and having the trees talk to him. The best that it got was when he saw and heard a concert pianist and a grand piano up in the top of an oak tree. The worst that it got was when he was convinced that we were being surrounded by vampires and zombies.

But he could not stay off the sauce. Eventually, he went off again and after a few days, the DTs returned. The second time was not so good. At the end of it, I was the one who went to the hospital.

Delirium tremens gets it name from the shakes you go through during alcohol withdrawal. I’ve been told that it feels as if a steel clamp has been placed on every muscle of your body. Sometimes, the shakes go into seizures, such as shown in this clip from an Asian hopsital:

It is an inhereted disease. Symptoms don’t set in until you are about 40. They come on gradullaym kind of like the gradual set in for multiple schlerosis. You start dropping things, maybe keep bumping into furniture more often. Now, there is a genetic test to see if you have the gene. If you do — please don’t have kids, or they will have a 50-50 chance becoming like the victims in this CBS news report:

Here’s a short clip of a person with Huntingdon’s, which shows some of the usual symptoms. In her case, she cannot control many parts of her body.

Perhaps the most famous person every to have Huntingdon’s disease was singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, who died in 1967. This was mentioned in a brief painful recreated scene in Alice’s Restaraunt (1969), where son Arlo Guthrie visits his father in an asylum. It is unknown whether Guthrie was able to recognize anyone around the time of his death.

I couldn’t find that scene on YouTube, but I did find this slideshow from “algeva” of Woody Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.” I thought it was appropriate.

Hypomania is a symptom of mental illness but it doesn’t mean that ther person is dangerous or needs to be committed to an asylum. Hypomania often happens to people suffering with bipolar disorder. However, hypomania can be really disruptive in a person’s life. Even though many people with hypomania report feeling euphoric, they still may not be able to make decisions, may not remember to keep commitmits and can really tick off family and friends. Many people with hypomania can manage their condition with medications and with practices like keeping a journal or entering therapy.

Symptoms of hypomania include really rapid speech, delusions of granduer, sudden bursts of creativity, a need for no sleep and an inability to sit still. But there are all kinds of shades and variations in hypomania, because every person who has it has their own unique set of symptoms. Here is an Irishman, GuyInterrupted, vividly describing what it’s like to live with hypomania:

So, hypomania is a mixed blessing that a lot of people would rather prefer to do without. However, when in the grip of a hypomanic episode, you feel GREAT. Not only that, but you feel as if you are God. You know the answers to everything and you want to get right at solving all of the world’s problems.

The following video was made by a bipolar patient who, I’m going to guess, was in the grip of a hypomanic or manic episode. Take this info with a very large grain of salt:

This is because they can have several problems in communicating with others or that they have the mental capacity of an infant. Once you get to know a person with autism, there tends to be a kind of logic in the things that they do that at first seem crazy, such as flapping their arms, walking in tight circles or rocking constantly. (Actually, rocking constantly can get very soothing, no matter if you’re autistic or not.)

If you don’t know anyone with autism, it can be really hard to understand what they are going through so you can communicate with them. I’d be lying if I said I knew. Here’s a little film about why some austic people react the way they do — because of stress. Appropriately, the background soundtrack is Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure”:

Autism is generally diagnosed by the time a child is 5. But some children show signs of being autistic when they are a year old. Here’s a little film about some of the usual signs of autism in very young children. Try to ignore the tinkling piano in the back:

Sometimes, autism seems to be a strange form of blessing rather than an affliction. Some autistic children and adults have been able to perform complex mathematical calculation in their heads, been able to do incredible drawings or have grown up to be Bill Gates. In this film, an autistic adult shows a photographic memory:

Growing up in America, I’d assumed that hares were just large rabbits. Nope. There are quite a few differences.

Hares have longer legs, longer ears and nastier attitudes. Although rabbits have been successfully domesticated, hares are still wild and free. Rabbit babies are born naked and helpless, while hares hit the ground running (so to speak). There are various species of hares, including the jackrabbit of America, the European Hare (which look like small deer with big ears) that I got to know in England and the Arctic Hare in — well, in the Arctic.

In Europe, hare mating season is in full swing in March (although when I was in England, they’d be at it by February). One second, a group of hares are quietly grazing on a patch of open grass and then next they’re on their hind legs boxing each other and then they’d mate. This is a silent film of Arctic hares doing the same behavior, posted by Canada Nature Museum:

The following is another short film about Arctic hares. That curly-cue thing you will see is the hare’s penis. Whoa!