Content warning: This piece explores issues around mental health, depression and suicide, which some readers might find upsetting.
Dear Dad,
The day you ended your life I remember you telling mom all you wanted was to get better. Years of therapy, rehab, increasing dosages of various medications, and you still felt like a lost cause, like there was absolutely no way you could ever get better for us. I remember overhearing this conversation on the phone, and, honestly, I wished you would get better too. I was tired of the fights, having to call the cops when you got too mad, wondering if I’d ever see you again when you stormed out of the house. But I think I was most tired of seeing how tired you were. I didn’t want you to feel hopeless anymore; I just wanted you to be normal.
Normal. What I used to intensely desire for you to be, now aggressively repulses me. I’ve learned to appreciate the parts of ourselves that deviate from normal. Normal is the enemy of happiness and the destroyer of contentment. To strive for normalcy is to strive for a subjective, arbitrary societal standard that is simply impossible to attain. However, I wished for you to obtain this, and for that I am sorry.
However, I am not sorry about wishing you got better– although I think my idea of what constitutes better is different now. I hate everyone that fed into the idea that your mental illnesses were burdensome, scary, and unmanageable. Sh*t, I hate myself for doing that. I think my old idea of “better” closely parallels society&#8217;s idea of perfection, this idea that we need to be motivated, accomplished and contagiously happy 99% of the time. But f*ck perfect. If I knew what I know now, I would tell you how beautifully imperfect you were. The most imperfect people do the most brilliant things, have the most unique perspectives, and undoubtedly are the strongest fighters. Striving for this unachievable perfection is what kills people. It killed you, and I hate that it took me 20 years and one disability course to figure that out.

Do you remember my obsession with shooting stars? You and mom told me you had wished upon a shooting star for a baby girl and then you had me. After that, I think I tricked myself into believing every plane flying through the night sky was one of these magical stars, because I so desperately wanted to make a wish. I remember carefully contemplating what I would wish for. It had to be something magnificent, because I only got one chance to wish for something that could completely alter my life. (So, of course, I wished to be best friends with Taylor Swift).
I see shooting stars less often now, possibly because I am now able to differentiate between a falling meteor and a flashing plane light. But when I do see them, I still wish. Except now, all I wish for is you: Not a “healthy” or “normal” you, just you and everything that made you, you. Because you were magnificent.
One of the things I know you did love about this world was learning- I assume that’s why you stayed in school for 12 years and became a doctor. And Dad, I’ve learned a hell of a lot. Specifically, I’ve learned a lot about disability injustice, and through this I think I’ve learned a lot more about you. No one ever told you that your illnesses were a piece of yourself meant to be appreciated. Yes, sometimes life can feel unmanageable because of your disabilities, but that doesn’t require you to remove yourself from the world, that requires the world to remove those things that are making life feel unmanageable.
I realise now, the world might be a relatively ok place for the few people it was created for: the nondisabled- the people that are physically and mentally capable of doing everything with ease and without any accommodations; as well as those whose identities escape bias and oppression. I don&#8217;t think anyone ever told you that these people are few and far between, but that society assumes they are everywhere.

In reality, so many more people deviate from this norm. Society has forced us to think we should hide the parts of ourselves that are messy, when the truth is, everybody and everything is messy. Author Kai Cheng Thom once wrote that, “beneath all health lies sickness”, and I think that’s beautiful. I think this truth is the foundation of our communities. Our differences, our battles, our messy deviations from “normalcy” are what make us the same.
Dad, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being angry at you for leaving me. I’m sorry for lying to my friends about how you passed. I’m sorry for not understanding. But mostly I’m sorry that you felt you had to be sorry for your disabilities. You so deeply wanted to prove that you were more than your bipolar disorder and depression, rather than being unapologetically yourself: A person disabled by society and all the challenges the world gave him.
The day you ended your life I remember you telling mom all you wanted was to get better. Dad, I wish I told you that you were already the best. You were my best everything- my best friend, best dance and singing partner, best fishing buddy, best supporter, and best dad.
You used to always call me your little angel, but now you’re my little angel. And I know you’ll be watching over me for the rest of my years on this earth. And throughout those years, I hope I can prove to you and the rest of the world that disabilities are not burdens, that “different” is not bad, and that life is worth living. I love you to the moon and back.
With love forever and always,
Kennedy
Afterword
When I remember my dad, I like to remember the good. I like to remember him taking me to get a milkshake when I experienced my first heartbreak. I like to remember belting out “I Knew You Were Trouble” by Taylor Swift outside our favourite restaurant. I like to remember every time he made heavy things feel a bit lighter by telling a remarkably cheesy joke.
It’s human nature to illuminate the good, the happy, the “normal” in our lives, but if this letter teaches you anything, I hope it teaches you that everything that doesn’t fit into those categories is equally as important. I hope it teaches you that you and everything about you is worth loving, worth caring for, worth living for.
For further readings on dismantling this idea of normal, as well as promoting disability justice in general, I recommend Mimi Khúc’s Open in Emergency, a compilation of relevant mental health pieces, as well as Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection.
Helplines
If you have been affected by any of the issues this letter touches on, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (US) or the following UK-based organisations:
Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM): 0800 58 58 58
Samaritans: 116 123
Mind UK: 0300 123 3393
Photo Credit: Alex Ivashenko on Unsplash

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What your death taught me about disability, mental health and striving for perfection in an imperfect world.

A Letter to my Father

One sunny morning in 2012, I was at my GP for the third time in a week, sobbing and begging to be referred for urgent neurological tests. “I’m losing my memory,” I explained. I couldn&#8217;t remember what “Argonaut” or what “obstreperous” meant, so that was it for remembering anything at all. I&#8217;d Googled “memory loss” and learned that at 27, I was too young for Alzheimer&#8217;s. So it must be vCJD, the horrifying “mad cow disease” that had hit the headlines in the 1990s. I was headed for an agonising death.
I decided that if I could learn five new words a day and remember everything I&#8217;d eaten, then I could prove that I wasn’t ill. That&#8217;s how I spent the next six months; reading the dictionary and endlessly going over last week&#8217;s meals. I&#8217;d repeat my new words, check that every meal was accounted for, and feel reassured. But only for minutes, seconds, then the horrors would come back. Was it one egg or two last Wednesday? What does “disingenuous” mean? You&#8217;re going to die. You’re going to die. The cycle started over and went on for half a year. This wasn’t the first time I’d suffered from debilitating levels of stress. I’d also had episodes of anxiety and had had strange obsessions in my late teens and early twenties. I just assumed everyone was like that, but with the apparent memory loss, it felt more severe, less normal.
What I didn&#8217;t know at that time was that I have obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. In many people&#8217;s eyes, OCD is a personality quirk: it’s a lining up of shoes, an intolerance to wonky picture frames, antibacterial hand wash. But OCD is much worse than that. For the 740,000 sufferers in the UK alone, it can be utterly dreadful. The World Health Organisation lists OCD among the ten most debilitating health conditions. But it&#8217;s not just the general public who often don’t understand; there&#8217;s a surprising lack of awareness among medical professionals too.
OCD is two things: obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are intrusive thoughts like my “I&#8217;m dying of vCJD”. Other typical OCD thoughts include contamination fears (“I&#8217;m going to get infected”), violent harm (“I&#8217;m going to stab my husband while making dinner”), inappropriate sexual thoughts (“I want to have sex with my sister”), religious fears (“I might accidentally say 666 and the Devil will appear”), and so on. The thoughts are terrifying and unwelcome. Compulsions are what an OCD sufferer does to escape or neutralise the anxiety that comes with the thoughts. A man with contamination fears might scrub his hands, again and again and again. He might then stay indoors all day, scrubbing, using bleach, his hands skinless and raw. Isolation and depression follow. People with OCD are ten times likely to kill themselves than non-sufferers.
Of course, most people have random thoughts about illness, sex or violence from time to time, but can easily shrug them off. The OCD sufferer can&#8217;t. Imagine every alarm and sprinkler in an office block going off at once just because somebody on the sixth floor boiled a kettle. The problem isn&#8217;t the content of the thoughts – it’s the extreme anxiety experienced in reaction to them.
So what&#8217;s the answer? Evidence shows that the most effective treatment is anti-depressant medication combined with a specific type of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) called ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention). (See <a href="https://iocdf.org/about-ocd/treatment/erp/">this article</a> by the International OCD Foundation for more information). In conventional CBT, a patient might challenge their thinking by finding evidence that contradicts their fears. Other approaches might encourage patients to seek the root causes of their fears, developed by Freud. ERP is different – it largely disregards the content of obsessions and aims to reduce the suffering that they cause. ERP, for example, would help a patient face his fears about infection, and encourage him to not wash his hands until his anxiety subsided. A lady terrified that she might murder her husband might be given a knife and told to hang on to it until “habituation” occurred. I read somewhere that ERP is the only therapy that involves giving weapons to the mentally ill. Saying this, I must stress that people with OCD are no more likely to act on their intrusive thoughts than anybody else.
Worryingly, there are countless stories of people with OCD being misdiagnosed and spending years chasing their thoughts down rabbit holes, getting heavily medicated or sedated. People can take ten years or more to be correctly diagnosed and get the right treatment. I suffer from a type of OCD nicknamed “pure-O” because it lacks obvious behavioural compulsions. My rituals and reassurance-seeking take place mostly in my head, in the form of checking, counting, analysing and ruminating. I was once diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder because, in the psychiatrist&#8217;s words, I looked “too normal to have OCD”. Steven, an OCD sufferer from Australia, told an online support group that he spent months in psychoanalysis to get to the root of his violent thoughts which led him to develop severe depression, eventually being admitted into hospital. He says, “the psychoanalysis encouraged a kind of thinking which is highly obsessional in nature – relentless doubt and rumination, a constant probing of thoughts.” As <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/aug/31/pure-ocd-the-naked-truth">Rose Bretécher points out</a> in her ground-breaking 2013 Guardian article about the pure-O type of OCD, psychoanalysis only makes obsessive thoughts more deeply entrenched. Years later, Steven is back at work and using ERP techniques to manage his anxiety.
It seems to me that OCD is over-diagnosed in the lay population and under-diagnosed in the medical. That being said, the portrayal of OCD in the media is improving. Bretécher’s brilliant autobiography Pure is being made into a <a href="http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/channel-4-commissions-brand-new-6-part-comedy-drama-pure">Channel 4 series</a>, and Lily Bailey, another OCD sufferer who has “come out” on social media, has published her own harrowing memoir, <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/because-we-are-bad/lily-bailey/9780993040740">Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought</a>. Let&#8217;s hope that awareness increases, not only in the medical profession, but everywhere else. Meanwhile, if you haven&#8217;t got OCD, be glad, and be grateful. Gently reprimand anyone who says “I&#8217;m a bit OCD” because they like their kitchen tidy. If you think that you or a loved one might have OCD, make sure you&#8217;re getting the right help, educate yourself, and don&#8217;t spend months or years in misery with the wrong treatment when freedom and wellness could be much closer at hand.
<pre>Photo Credit: Jasmine Halki via Flickr</pre>

When The Alarms Go Off_Katy Yelland_19_11_19_LA

OCD is among the ten most debilitating health conditions yet patients are often misdiagnosed

When the Alarms Go Off: Understanding OCD

The final film instalment of The Hunger Games blurs the boundaries between ally and enemy and brings us closer to a world we recognise 
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WARNING: Contains Mild Spoilers 
In a video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TkKm2eEV1A">recently released online</a>, former Israeli soldier Ido Gal Razon faces a silent, expressionless parliamentary committee in a brightly lit court room. Dressed in a dark green V-neck, with his hair pulled back into an undercut ponytail, his voice is shrill with the tormenting agony of his testimony. “You say, ‘Terrorists with blood on their hands?’ I killed more than 40 people for you!” he screams, pointing and hammering his hand on the table at intervals. “I pee at night from post trauma. He comes to me and says: ‘Why did you kill me? Why did you kill me?’” 
Razon served in ‘Operation Clear as Wine’ eight years ago in Gaza, which may well be one of the most accurate out of the many deeply ironic <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/name-your-military-operation-a-guide.premium-1.480130">names of Israel’s military campaigns</a>, judging by its bitter, clouded legacy. The former soldier does not – or cannot – question the narrative of his infallible government fighting the terrorists, but, instead, fiercely criticises the authorities who neglected him upon his return and denied him medical treatment, lamenting his new state of dependency. We, the hungry viewers, watch him just as he appears to slip over the edge of sanity. 
When seeing this disturbing footage, it&#8217;s hard not to recall the image of the incensed, deranged Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) at the end of Mockingjay &#8211; Part 1 of The Hunger Games. We left him in this film sprawled across a hospital bed within the white walls of the recovery unit in District 13. Physically and mentally diminished, Peeta had been severely indoctrinated by the Capitol, his original memories forcefully enshrouded in hate and betrayal leading him to attempt to suffocate Katniss (<a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2014/10/29/the-seven-deadly-films/">Jennifer Lawrence</a>) in the dramatic final scene. Of course, for Peeta, the medical treatment to un-do his “hijacking” is of utmost priority to the opposition rebels, but the question of loyalty – as with all cases of war – cuts through this story with a piercing poignancy. 
The fourth film and the final instalment of the trilogy, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=145&amp;v=n-7K_OjsDCQ">The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part Two</a>, directed by Francis Lawrence, opens with Katniss coming to consciousness and feeling her bruised neck following Peeta’s attack. The bruise, of course, runs deeper in her knowledge of Peeta’s illness. Worn out by the arena of war, both during the Capitol’s initial staged tournaments and its later escalation to full-scale destruction of the districts, her eyes are weary, her face is bare and unpainted in this film, and she sets out with firm but cold resolve to take revenge on the dictator, President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland). 
Crushed by her own form of <a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/11/hunger-games-ptsd-analysis/">post-traumatic stress disorder</a>, Katniss is at first swayed by the self-proclaimed leader of the resistance movement, President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), whose strikingly straight grey hair and sharp jawbones set us on edge immediately. Doomed to be a tool of this war, Katniss is cubby-holed into the role of countering the Capitol’s propaganda machine, just as when she was plucked from the ruins of District 13 to become the symbolic poster-girl of the revolution – the dark Mockingjay – of the last film. Even before this, in Catching Fire, the Capitol’s President Snow <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=832exPEX8pc">threatened to ruin her hometown</a> of District 12 should she resist. But her designated – dictated – purpose is far from where her heart lies. She is ready to be the first to take down the Capitol. 
With this purpose in mind, Katniss insists on being sent to the frontlines and sets off under the guidance of Boggs (Mahershala Ali) with her military unit. President Coin, unsurprisingly, alarms the team when she asks them to simply focus on filming and marketing their victories en route to the centre of the Capitol. They press on, perpetually beneath the camera lens of the totalitarian state, dodging the “pods” or concealed traps that have been put in place. Eventually detaching herself from Coin’s orders, Katniss takes over from Boggs, navigating the Capitol’s underground sewers to reach Snow’s mansion – not without significant losses. We watch Coin with growing suspicion, seeing her calmly contain her agitation with Katniss and use increasingly authoritarian nuances in her language. Meanwhile, Coin and Snow battle on to reach the hearts and minds of the nation of Panem by taking charge of the television broadcasts and power flits between the two of them. 
&#8220;The enemy is not like us. They do not share our values. They have never known our comforts and our sophistication and they despise us for it. They are coming to destroy our way of life,&#8221; declares Snow, his words perfectly conveying the white supremacist framework, and echoing the eerily familiar superiority complex of the western, developed world – most recently articulated in <a href="http://globalnews.ca/news/2338751/read-the-full-text-of-french-president-francois-hollandes-response-to-paris-attacks/">responses to the Paris attacks</a> and in the fear-mongering statements of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jaz1J0s-cL4">US presidential candidate Donald Trump</a>. 
Upon hearing that the rebels have entered District 1, Snow declares his mansion an open refuge for the wealthy inhabitants of the region, giving an opportunity for Katniss’ team to disguise themselves among the crowds and get closer to him. It is amid this race for safety that the biggest disaster of the film takes place, when bombs are dropped from silver parachutes in two deadly rounds becoming the cause for mass civilian death. It is crucial to note, here, that it is initially unclear who the perpetrators are, demonstrating the blurred lines of conflict – the conflation of a sense of purpose and worthlessness. As the story comes to a conclusion, the moment Katniss has been waiting for emerges. She fires the final arrow with unabated conviction towards an enemy who stands high above the huge gathering – a moment that is so tense and in a space that is so sterile that the spilling of blood comes as both a shock and a relief. 
While the commotion around the adaptations of The Hunger Games trilogy appears to have died down, Mockingjay – Part Two has performed consistently yet <a href="http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Quietly-Hunger-Games-Mockingjay-Part-2-Has-Become-Massive-Hit-101957.html">quietly at the box office</a> since its UK release last month. The film’s emotive moments do not compete with scenes such as the death of Rue (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1KJRRSB_XA">Amandla Stenberg</a>) in the first instalment or Jennifer Lawrence’s chilling rendition of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Oi43EsQNU">‘The Hanging Tree’</a> in Mockingjay – Part One. In addition, strong characters such as Commander Lyme – a democratic <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2015/08/24/policing-black-women-capitalisms-violent-assault-on-hip-hop-and-civil-society/">black female leader</a> no less – are starkly underdeveloped. The film’s adolescent theme and lack of grittiness have also held back some cinema-goers, and, indeed, the love triangle is unconvincing and falls flat, just as it does in Suzanne Collins’ original novel. 
However, it is this lack of passion which pervades the finale that is most interesting. The indifferent, fatigued expressions and downtrodden spirits reflect the anti-climax of revolution and the murky aftermath of war, where democracy is of little relevance. The fiction could not have been more timely in this respect. We are the generation which has witnessed the Arab Spring in all its stages; we saw regimes fall, dictators imprisoned, new coups arise and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/hosni-mubarak-could-be-released-from-detention-following-egypt-high-court-order-9974355.html">the same despots released into freedom</a> as in the case of Egypt; we felt the thrill of a people rising against their inherited tyrant, quashed, then splintered into hundreds of rebel groups and dispersed as refugees, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/05/hundreds-of-3-year-old-toddlers-have-died-as-a-result-of-the-syrian-war/">arriving dead on our shores</a>, as in the case of Syria. The definitions of truth and falsehood emerge convoluted at the close of The Hunger Games and roles are reversed with a painful blatancy, and, therefore, Peeta’s question of “real or not real?” underpins all power struggles in Panem and our very own daily predicament. 
The Capitol, quite clearly, stands in parallel with our modern, developed world, a world in which <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2014/08/21/police-brutality-must-be-defended/">“Peacekeepers” kill indiscriminately</a> in an attempt to control society. Truth is caught between the propaganda wars of the state and of the people, where an apparatus like a mobile device at once serves to empower individuals and becomes the source of increased state surveillance. The film perfectly echoes how the material glitz of our capitalist world can blind us to the privacy laws being passed at our expense, where, just recently, Congress quietly slipped in a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/16/congress-budget-omnibus-cisa-surveillance-cybersecurity">“cybersecurity” surveillance bill</a> into the budget in the US, while we were too busy talking about Miss Universe to notice. The film also reportedly inspired protestors to spray-paint a <a href="http://www.bustle.com/articles/51077-near-ferguson-did-someone-spray-paint-a-mockingjay-quote-on-an-archway-report">landmark in Ferguson</a> last year with the Mockingjay quote, “If we burn, you burn with us.” It even caused <a href="http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/126395/is-the-hunger-games-inadvertently-mocking-israel">some commentators</a> to express concern over the possibility that countries like Israel may be implicated amid District 12’s rubble. 
Grappling to understand the truth and to define the moral boundaries of power is maddening enough – as it was for Israeli soldier, Ido Gal Razon. While Katniss’ future is bathed in the surreal sunset and she has achieved the “life of a victor” as instructed, she is plagued by the trauma of what she has witnessed. She smiles blankly. There is a void. Her world is void of victory – void of reality.
<pre>Image from: http://mashable.com/2015/06/09/first-the-hunger-games-mockingjay-part-2-trailer-is-here/#2YXvXdFeDkqy</pre>

The Hunger Games: Understanding Your Enemy

The Gaza on Gaza exhibition at the P21 Gallery in London connects audiences to a new era of struggle 
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Not a single home has been rebuilt in the Gaza Strip since the crudely named <a href="http://imeu.org/article/50-days-of-death-destruction-israels-operation-protective-edge">Operation Protective Edge</a> of 2014, in which the Israeli government rained destruction on the densely populated urban community causing huge casualties and widespread damage. The lack of infrastructural progression is staggering. Yet, in the context of this blockaded coastal territory it should hardly be surprising. Israel <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-07-23/next-gaza-disaster-after-war-with-israel-no-cement-for-rebuilding">severely restricts</a> the import of concrete into Gaza citing concern about the material’s <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/9/8/gaza-cease-fire-strugglestohold.html">“dual purpose”</a>, so whatever has made it inside has been utilised in repairs, and the flattened homes of 500,000 people remain in ruins. 
From the ashes of this deplorable and ongoing reality emerges the work of artist Majdal Nateel at the new Gaza on Gaza exhibition. Her candlelit appearance over an unstable Skype connection for the press evening is testament to the suffocating conditions she and most Gazans face. (Of course, none of the featured artists were able to travel for the show. Only a British television icon like <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/palestinian-artists-work-to-go-on-display-in-london-after-channel-4s-jon-snow-smuggles-it-out-of-gaza-10431553.html">Channel 4’s Jon Snow</a> could get away with transporting Majdal’s pieces across the border and all the way to our capital city.) Her installation entitled “If I Wasn’t There” is comprised of her own colourful childlike doodles and drawings on brown paper – symbolically, the paper comes from the original packaging of the limited concrete supplies that did make it through – and on it she envisages the unfulfilled dreams of Palestinian children who died in the onslaught last year. Dreams like smiling. Brushing mum’s hair. Holding a heart-shaped balloon. Playing with a flower. Preparing for a game of “hide and seek”. Feeding a pet turtle. 
While the layers of trauma culminate quietly beneath the surface of Majdal’s work, they ring loud and fierce in the “Through Young Eyes” series, which highlights the work of young Palestinians aged 15 to 17. The enlarged black and white sketches brim with impassioned faces, often with two characters in the foreground, presumably siblings, holding onto one another. Where one character is in hopeless distress, the other is clearly restraining tears, trying hard to remain resilient. And where there were no faces, there were firm hands. In a spectacular piece by Madeeha Al Majayda the viewer sees a man clutching a rose behind his back, hidden from the soldier who faces him, instead, with gun in position. 
The select photographs on display by Mahmoud J Alkurd and award-winning photographer <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/gallery/2015/mar/25/heidi-levine-gaza-pictures">Heidi Levine</a>, among others, are carefully edited to juxtapose the seemingly endless colours both of nature and of childhood with the dusty rubble of a recent war and the dark shadow of looming conflict. Within the rigid confines of the frame, there is no escape. 
The gallery additionally hosts short videos, made in Gaza, which raise awareness on living conditions in the region and the problem with Israel’s <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2012/06/israel-injustice-and-secrecy-surrounding-administrative-detention/">administrative detention</a> laws. 
With the passage of time and the dissipating of this brutal military war from our consciousness, we may have become oblivious to the fact that Palestinian survivors are suffering from a period of psychological war and turmoil. The Gaza on Gaza exhibition reconnects international audiences and activists with Gazans through a visual message of pain, told most eloquently by the young artists who have lived through it. Protective edges collapse and psychotherapeutic reconstruction begins. 
The Gaza on Gaza exhibition runs until 22nd August at the <a href="http://www.p21.org.uk/GazaOnGaza.aspx">P21 Gallery</a>, 21 Chalton Street, London NW1 1JD. Nearest stations are Euston and King’s Cross St. Pancras. Admission is free and opening hours are Tuesday to Friday 12-6pm, Saturday 12-4pm and Wednesday until 8pm.
<pre>Photo Credits: Nasreen Raja at the Gaza on Gaza exhibition</pre>

Dancing Through the Rubble in Gaza

The Skeleton Twins navigates the issues of depression and mental illness with an accessible combination of humour and sincerity 
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After ten years apart, estranged twins Maggie (Kristin Wiig) and Milo (Bill Hader) find themselves brought together by an unlikely common goal: suicide. The film opens with Maggie on the brink of an overdose, interrupted by a call from Los Angeles telling her that Milo has attempted to slash his wrists. Hilarious, eh? Admittedly not. But Craig Johnson’s darkly comedic take on some pretty hefty subject matter proves a hit, opening up the world of depression and mental illness in a way that is immediately accessible. 
The events take place in the siblings’ hometown in New York state. Following his hospitalisation, Milo travels from L.A. to spend time recuperating with Maggie, only to find himself embroiled in the drama of her deeply unstable marriage. At the heart of it, both siblings are struggling with what Maggie describes as “feeling constantly disappointed with life”. Milo believes he “peaked in high school”, while Maggie finds herself stalling plans to start a family, turning instead to a string of affairs with French cooking connoisseurs and scuba-diving instructors. While her perpetually optimistic husband, Lance (Luke Wilson), remains completely oblivious to the plight of their marriage, Maggie finds solace in Milo and the two begin to regain the closeness of their childhood. Re-establishing a long lost sibling bond could have been a painfully formulaic watch, but the mutual understanding of each other’s flaws and instabilities provide the pair with a sincerity that transcends clichés. 
The real strength of this film lies in the casting. Wiig and Hader’s chemistry is undeniable, supplying their on&#8211;screen relationship with the kind of brother-sister inside humour that they have established over years of collaborative work. But there’s an edge to their characters’ closeness too, and however hard they try to help each other up, it’s ultimately their shared insecurities that bring them right back down. 
Luke Wilson’s portrayal of the endlessly good-natured Lance is also hard not to love. After all, who can resist a man who clears vast quantities of woodland with his bare hands and scales climbing walls in tight, functional trousers? But it’s his wholesome, big-hearted nature that makes him so wrong for Maggie, and this conflicting element runs quietly throughout. Even Billy (Boyd Hoybrook) is brilliantly cast as Maggie’s scuba instructor lover, excellently treading the line between the mysterious erotic stranger and a creepy outcast with the tendency to caress oxygen tubing. 
Taking a comedic approach to mental health issues could have been a disaster, but here, Johnson really makes it work. The laughably dysfunctional relationships between the key characters and their strained attempts to restore order are far from neatly packaged, but, rather, they are left exposed and unresolved. Far from trivialising the issues, the use of comic actors in the main roles resists sentimentalising their problems, instead providing us with an everyday picture of what living with depression can mean. Some days are funny, and some are brutally sad. The climax of this tension arguably comes in Hader and Wiig’s expertly choreographed lip-synch of Starship’s hit ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’. Aside from the stark truth that this is one of the greatest power ballads ever written, this is also an undeniably uplifting scene: things have almost certainly hit rock bottom but there’s still laughs in there somewhere. 
Leaving the key questions unanswered is what gives The Skeleton Twins its edge. The concluding scenes are slightly disappointing and display a predictability that is absent from the rest of the film, yet the major dilemmas facing the characters are still left largely unresolved. The result is a story that asks questions without offering any real answers, that allows us an insight into depression without trivialising or reducing it. At the heart of it, this film is about life not going quite the way you expected; where it will go from here, that is for us to conclude.
<pre>Image from:http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2014/09/25/movie-review-the-skeleton-twins/</pre>

The Skeleton Twins: Laughing From Rock Bottom

The loss of Robin Williams has been a grim gain for depression as renewed interest ignites on the disease   
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We used to talk much about the &#8216;Big C&#8217;. Vast amounts of charitable action and billions of pounds and dollars have been thrown at the issue, and at research for treatment. On the other hand, the &#8216;Big D&#8217; – Depression – has remained a taboo topic in public debate and is the Cinderella of medical matters. It suffers from under-diagnosis, misdiagnosis, misunderstanding, confusion, shame and even contempt. It is usually accompanied by a shrug of annoyance and ’encouragement’ to ’pull yourself together,’ even though it is a disease. 
This Victorian approach to the problem only compounds the disastrous effects of depression on our society. The stereotypical depiction of someone with depression is of a listless mother (single for preference) with long, lank, lustreless hair; an expressionless face, dependent on a cocktail of “our” hard-earned, tax-paid-for drugs and welfare benefits. This is an egregious, unfair and shocking situation. I would suggest that it is up there with racism and bigotry, and therefore socially stigmatising. So it turns out our loss of Robin Williams is a grim gain for depression as the media turns its attention to the problem. 
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/13/two-thirds-britons-not-treated-depression">The Guardian</a> ran a report on depression by their health editor, Sarah Bosely, in which she points out: ‘Less than a third of people with common mental health problems get any treatment at all &#8211; a situation the nation would not tolerate at all if they had cancer.’ She cites Simon Wessely, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who remarks: ‘people are still routinely waiting for &#8211; well, we don&#8217;t really know, but certainly 18 weeks, possibly up to two years &#8211; for their treatment that is routine in some parts of the country.’ ‘Imagine,’ he told her, ‘the reaction if I gave a talk that began: &#8220;so, we have a problem in cancer service at the moment. Only 30% of people with cancer are getting any treatment, so 70% of them don&#8217;t get any treatment at all and it&#8217;s not even recognised.&#8221; You would be appalled and you would be screaming from the rooftops.&#8217;  Quite. 
While England&#8217;s NHS Chief Executive, Simon Stevens, sympathised with Wessley&#8217;s horror at these statistics, he informed him that the issue would involve a ‘much longer dialogue with the public.’ His comment scantly conceals the real problem: the government&#8217;s insistence on austerity as £12 billion additional cut-backs are due to come on stream. While the chancellor has no choice but to match pound-for-pound money raised in the voluntary sector for cancer because it is such an obvious, multiple cause of death, the government and, to a certain extent, society remain indifferent to or intolerant to the problem of depression. 
Depression, however, is largely a hidden condition with a less obvious connection to death. It is on a spectrum ranging from occasionally ’feeling blue’, recurring instances of what Churchill described as his ’Black Dog days’, up to a clinical condition needing life-long chemical solutions. In extreme cases, depression can lead to schizophrenia and, exceptionally, suicide. From symptoms occasioned by bullying through circumstantial set-backs, anxiety,  panic attacks and beyond, the causes are various and often multiple. 
Of those burdened with depression, 90% of sufferers remain untreated inside the NHS target of 18 weeks, while many remain undiagnosed or misdiagnosed as doctors are divided about depression and uncertain about the variety of symptoms presented, as well as the appropriate prognosis. Ms Bosely writes: ‘A larger proportion of people with psychosis, who have severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, are on treatment but even that figure is still only 65% according to Wessely, who added: &#8220;For most mental disorders it is still the exception not the rule to be recognised, detected and treated.&#8221;’ 
Wessley further argues that ‘the concern over pills for depression, anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could be misplaced’. He suggests that much of the criticism assumes that GPs are putting more people on pills because of an absence of talking therapies. However, the number of therapists being trained to provide Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has substantially risen thanks to a government programme called Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT). ‘If you say they [pills] are more effective,’ he concludes, ‘I don&#8217;t really think that&#8217;s true. I think they are cheaper and easier. CBT is certainly more popular with some, but others don&#8217;t like it. The truth is most people don&#8217;t get either.’  My advice on CBT is this: don&#8217;t be  shy, polite or ashamed. As the old BT ad used to say: ‘It&#8217;s good to talk!’ 
Unfortunately, to governments, disease is unprofitable and has a negative effect on the bottom line. So we cannot expect any more help from the Austerity State. Disease exposes our frailty. It challenges our infallibility and expectations of immortality. The government can always find the cash to bankroll rebels in Syria or resistance in Iraq. It can finance arming the entire military industrial complex that is Israel and its brutal Israeli Defence Force (IDF). State-sponsored murder has always been a profitable business; medical care, however, is too costly and time-consuming. 
The Victorians abandoned sufferers of depression and dementia in asylums. It is high time we provided them with asylum – literally, &#8220;shelter&#8221; – and the care, comfort, humane medical or psychological assistance we can. Above all, it is our acceptance, understanding, love and compassion that are what we really have to offer &#8211; and offer it we must.
<pre>Image from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-rottenberg/seeing-depression-in-the-wrong-light_b_4945290.html</pre>

The Big D-Word

It&#8217;s time for an honest discussion about depression and suicide beyond media hype and cultural valourisation 
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In the summer of 2007, at the end of a long, rainy week incidentally filled with free cocaine, I made a serious attempt to take my own life. 
I am alive. In fact I live an incredibly happy life. But the memory of depression remains vivid, and my depression will return. On depression and suicide, I feel qualified to speak up. 
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/11/robin-williams-dead-dies_n_5670050.html">Robin Williams, that wonderful man, completes suicide</a>, and suddenly everyone has an opinion. “Genie – you’re free”, some said. No, he isn’t. He’s dead. He is exactly the opposite of free. 
I’m a ditzy, garrulous English grad who likes cats and goes to lots of festivals. Relatively normal, you might say. Yet I was only 12 when I learnt to really hate myself. At 15 – when I was still getting gold stars at school for writing stories – I gave away my best CDs just before half term, planning to use the timeout of teachers’ and parents’ attention to get away with suicide. 
I finally did it aged almost 20, because an inviolable realisation came upon me that nothing would ever change. I would always be this person, and that meant I would always feel this way. The only sensible thing I could do was end my life. It certainly felt like a rational choice. I thought it would free me. At the time I was Christian, and I was pathetically eager to ‘go home’, to God, where I would be loved and there was no more pain. 
The problem with depression is that it robs you of perspective. It creeps up on you: you are gradually engulfed by a huge tarpaulin of self-disgust, and it all seems perfectly objective and normal. Nobody suddenly wakes up one day thinking of themselves in totally different terms, thinking that killing yourself might be a legitimate option, and often, eventually, the only option. 
But one day you do wake up and there it is, and the next day too, as far into the future as your myopic mind’s eye can see. Usually, at some point, most likely with treatment, it then lifts just as gradually as it came. 
“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” 
Albert Camus’ famous question, “should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”, will be familiar to anyone with severe depression. I am certain this question would have been familiar to Robin Williams. Is this really a choice?! Only someone with a seriously skewed perspective, in which literal life-and-death decisions and inconsequential options assume equal significance, could even entertain such a question. 
But ‘suicide is a choice’ is a myth which refuses to go away. It continues to be discussed as if the options – coffee or death? – were in any way equal, or the question legitimate. 
I lost two of my friends to suicide last year and I do not believe, as a third (also suicidally depressed) friend said, that it was “a choice they’ll never have to live to regret”. Only the myth of an “<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/126/40.html">easeful death</a>”, and a culture which cannot cope with conceptualising the loss of personal agency – of actual choice – could create a space where this logic survives and flourishes. My friends did not choose; they died from treatable illnesses, because their illness had temporarily removed their capacity to sense the worth in living. And part of our response as a culture is to discuss the ‘choice’ they made? Well-intentioned as it may be, I find it obscene. 
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s gorgeous line “<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/126/40.html">I have been half in love with easeful death</a>” tells you everything you need to know about the seductiveness of suicidal ideation. This romanticisation of suicide as the ‘other option’, the alternative to the ignobility of human suffering, is preserved in the literature, art and myths of every people throughout history. 
The fact that depressed people, searching for an alternative to their present suffering, find themselves thinking more easily of death than of change, is at least partly a result of our cultural attitudes to suicide, which we invoke and perpetuate every time we murmur ‘they’re in a better place now’. 
Suicide is not a way out, but the opposite 
In truth, if your interior life feels like total irreconcilable shit, or even just grey, pointless awfulness, death still offers no real alternative. You need to look for a balance of treatments or strategies which can assuage or cure those feelings, or you need to hold on, until it passes. Those are your alternatives. Suicide is not a way out of mental illness, but the opposite: it cuts off any route to recovery. 
We’ve got to start facing the horror of death. It is usually horrible and is almost certainly final. And if we found unnatural death as abhorrent as we ought to, we all might work a damn sight harder to stop killing each other. 
If we did – if the government and the press did – what then? My friends, who deserve to keep and enjoy their lives, would not be dying because there are ‘no beds’ in psychiatric hospitals; keeping people alive would be valued above not annoying millionaires with extra taxes; we would not act like confused vultures picking through an emotional carcass every time we lose someone; and perhaps ISIS or the occupation of Palestine would never have come into being. 
Robin Williams’ life should have been his own. Depression ensured it was not, not fully. Voyeuristic empathising and speculation in the press and elsewhere only serve to rob him once more of full ownership of his life. Let him keep the darkest feelings of his own mind; they died with him. He is dead. He was a wonderful man.
Depression is a treatable illness
But we who are left, how do we survive? Thanks to campaigning in recent years, we have a new understanding of mental illness; we are more aware that it can happen to anyone. 
Consequently it becomes even scarier: when it was something that happened only to freaks, victims, or ‘the weak’, you (not me, I’ve been there and got the T-shirt) could still imagine you were safe. 
Well, has my experience ‘made me stronger’, at least? Was there a silver lining to my suicide attempt? Was it at least, as the Independent suggests, a cry for help which DID come in time? 
For a long time, no. Nothing was gained, only lost: time, a boyfriend. A perfectly good tent. 
Trying to kill myself did lead me to a kind of freedom, but not freedom from life, or suffering: those notions are not real. 
My freedom was the realisation that, if I have decided to die, if I have even semi-seriously considered killing myself, then from that point on my life is my own. 
&#8220;Why shouldn’t I go through another day?&#8221; 
I can unhook myself from the societal sausage machine and pursue health, wealth and happiness on my own terms, because what’s the worst that can happen? It can’t be worse than death. Suddenly no shame, no stigma, no pressure, no comparison with others, no humiliation, no failure, exists. Why shouldn’t I take antidepressants? Why shouldn’t I go through another day? 
The problem is that this freedom is only accessible if you corporeally survive. 
So, don’t kill yourself! Things may be shit, and you will definitely think you’re being totally objective about it, but you aren’t, trust me. And whatever our mythology has led you to believe, you’ve got nothing to gain by ending it now. Do something else instead. If you don’t like coffee, have tea. Hey look, it’s not even you asking that question – coffee or death? – it’s depression. And when’s he ever made you happy? 
Different things help different people. These are the things that helped me: mirtazapine, cycling, lovers, pets, a great GP and a great CPN (community psychiatric nurse). A quiet home but a good party now and then. Forgiving myself. Allowing bad, better, and okay days, without panic about their implications. (Though to be honest, it was mostly the mirtazapine for me – that’s right, Daily Mail, I’m ‘hooked on antidepressants’ and you’ll never get them off me!) 
My depression is going to come back; it’s the nature of my brain. And when it does I may not see the upside for quite a while – that’s the nature of depression. But don’t believe the hype. In my experience, life with a mental illness gets better, not worse, as you get older. Life gets better. 
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<pre>Image from: http://www.listal.com/viewimage6087027</pre>

Where Mental Illness Is Concerned, ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ Is Not a Legitimate Question

To avoid further incidents of misery and tragedy, parents of autistic children must learn to understand and respond to the neurological conditions of their children with sensitivity 
  
Dear ‘<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/I-am-adam-lanzas-mother-mental-illness-conversation_n_2311009.html">I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother</a>’, 
Thank you for opening the dialogue on mental illness – not enough people want to talk about this. You’re right, this is a conversation that needs to be had, and I had to respond to your letter. 
You said in your letter that your 13-year-old son is a genius, with IQ scores off the charts. I am an adult of 25 now, but as a child I was also exceptionally gifted, and as a teenager I was also what the adults in my life would have described as “troubled”. I self-harmed throughout my teens. I had few friends. I scared the s**t out of my parents. I shouted at them. I told them I hated them. On many occasions I expressed a desire to kill myself, and I really wanted to, I was so angry and unhappy. I was medicated on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olanzapine">Zyprexa</a>, the same brand of medication you said your son was prescribed, as well as numerous other types of anti-psychotics for a number of years, all for their mood-stabilising effects, just like your son was. I was misdiagnosed as mentally ill, and like your 13-year-old son, I was hospitalised. All of these things did me more harm than good. I am still trying to get over the trauma of my “treatment”. 
When I read your account of your son’s behaviour, I feel like my heart is falling out, for you and for him. I feel for you because, like my parents, I can see that you’re baffled by his outbursts, afraid of his rage, and feel backed into a corner by communications that you can’t help but see as manipulative threats – to harm himself, or to harm you or your family. 
I am now a successful writer, in a loving relationship with the only person I’ve ever known to fully understand and believe in me, and correctly diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder, which is not a mental illness. It is a neurological condition, a fundamental way your mind works. None of the other conditions which you mentioned in your letter as possible diagnoses for your son are mental illnesses either. Please realise that your son’s behaviour is not a symptom; it is a reaction to the way he is experiencing the world. 
I would do anything to prevent and heal the kind of resentment, anger and profound loneliness that I was doomed to feel throughout my young life, because of the failure of those who should have tried harder to understand me when I was too young to fully understand myself. There is no greater danger than exercising power without understanding, and when you try to raise a child who is different in a way you don’t understand, that’s what you do to them. So please listen to me while I try and speak for all the ‘Almost Adam Lanzas’ out there. All the autistic kids, the different kids, the “loners”, who are never going to be murderers, but will all suffer from a lack of understanding. 
I’m sure as his mother you can’t have missed his suffering. But maybe you don’t understand some of the reasons why he is suffering, and why so much. 
So your kid is a genius. I am too. Sensory hypersensitivity? Me too. And just an educated guess &#8211; a powerful need to control his routine, his environment and the things around him? Me too. It’s the only way we can feel comfortable enough to function, instead of experiencing extreme and distracting mental anguish at any slight skewed-ness that you can’t even see. 
I promise you, please listen. Your son was not being melodramatic or manipulative when you took off to the mental hospital and he said you were “taking him to hell”. Quite simply, for the very very smart, and the very very sensory hypersensitive, like your son and myself, mental hospitals are institutions of torture and panic. 
I’m sure your own research into the diagnoses that have been suggested for your son have explained social anxiety in autism. If ordinary people in daily life seem frighteningly unpredictable to us, because we can’t intuitively understand the unspoken rules by which they operate, imagine how much more terrifying the other patients in a mental hospital are.  It feels less like a phobia and more like an allergy – a painful physical response to the presence of unpredictable behaviour. Now take that allergy and spend a night in a room with no means of escape, listening to the other patients screaming, crying, drifting around like zombies, touching things, talking, all without any apparent logic or pattern. 
You are not allowed to be alone in your room in the daytime; you must be with all these other people. And every half an hour at night, another stranger comes into your room to check up on you. For us, this isn’t comforting, this is intrusive. This makes us feel like an animal in a cage, being watched, being studied, being desperate but unable to escape. 
No person with the sensitivities you mention your son has in your letter would ever want to go back. If you had them, wouldn’t you “throw a fit”, as you say he did in your letter? Biting and scratching seems crazy, but it sounds like he was terrified, like a trapped animal wanting to get away. I feel exactly the same about those places. 
You said your son has a brilliant mind, and it sounds as if beautiful ideas are an inestimable and sole joy in his life, from the way you say he talks about his intellectual interests and his ability to grasp complex ideas. It has been mine. So, please understand, how much worse the medication is, where all control over your own mind is taken from you. It is a truly horrifying thing to do to the flighted, gifted mind. It is like smashing a bird’s wings because it keeps flying into power lines. Ask him if he’d rather be strapped to a desk with unlimited access to books, or taking that medication, and I think you could be surprised at the answer. 
It’s okay – it’s not your fault. You didn’t know this. I don’t know your son. I don’t know if he has a psychotic illness that would warrant this medication. And I know you are desperate to find something that lets you to get along without being scared. But I firmly believe this medication is not appropriate for behavioural problems – because while it may control the behaviours that are causing other people’s difficulties, it utterly destroys a person’s interior life. And it is torturous. It is a horrible half-alive life. 
I know you are well-meaning and feel desperate, like so many parents with different children – like my parents were. You are following medical advice. You are doing your best with the received wisdom that you have about how to control a child. But at the moment, he is smart enough to feel manipulated. And when he is grown up, he is the one that will feel abused. 
You mention your son loves Harry Potter. You said it in the same beautiful way that any loving parent would see it – as a normal childish thing, a childhood book that reminds you he’s a kid, despite the aspects of him that frighten you. But my belief is that this isn’t the reason why he loves Harry Potter. He, like all of us &#8216;different&#8217; kids, loves Harry Potter because Harry Potter is a different kind of person, with abilities and problems that nobody in the ordinary, &#8216;muggle&#8217; world even knows to exist, let alone knows just how big and earth-destroying they are. In that ordinary ‘muggle’ world, Harry is out of place, misunderstood, and even abused for his difference, and nobody knows the real him. 
Unlike most autistic or neurologically diverse people with problems communicating their emotions, I’ve stumbled on the ability to express some of this. So on behalf of all of us, here are two suggestions. 
Firstly, remember that your son has an interior life. Maybe he’s not ill or out of his head. He may be 13, but he’s thinking and intelligent. He is not enjoying his life at the moment, and not being able to apply that intelligence to fixing some of the problems he has with processing his life and some of the problems in your relationship. I’d like to suggest avoiding talking face to face, because if he is autistic, that’s freaky and intense, but try talking over the internet by typing, using an instant messenger like Skype. It might be easier for him to tell you what he needs, if he can trust you to use the information to make his life easier, not control him. And the more control he has over his own life, the less frustrated he will be, and the easier your life will be with him. 
Secondly, please be on his side. At the moment, he is very alone. It must seem like a great injustice to someone that smart (it did to me at his age) to have to be controlled and micromanaged on things that, logic insists to us, don’t matter at all. 
Let’s be honest, compared to the Newtonian Physics you mentioned your son is studying, the billions of stars in the universe, and the length and complexity of the mental road that ends up in a person slaughtering 27 other people and then himself, doesn’t insisting on following the school dress code seem laughably trivial? If you were a child genius, who clearly knows exactly how smart you are, wouldn’t you find that degrading and extremely frustrating? Isn’t that a choice that a child genius has a right to make? 
Taking away your son’s electronics and video games is like removing a German Shepherd’s daily walk – it’s not a toy to your son, it’s a necessity! He has a brilliant, brilliant mind, and he cannot bear the boredom of inactivity. 
As for me, and as for Adam Lanza, a lot of us are very smart, a lot of us are loners, and a lot of us are misunderstood.  Ultimately, everyone has to take what they have, and make a choice: to be constructive or to be destructive. Whatever the reason, and whatever his problem, Adam Lanza chose to be destructive. I chose constructive, and while the well-meaning injustices of neuro-typicals, as people with normal minds are sometimes called, still strike and injure my over-tender brain daily, I’m trying to receive your strikes softly and reflect it back, so you can know better what you do to us, and know what we go through when you put us in hospital and drug us and take away our games and escapes and comforts, and keep us overwhelmed with people and never alone for a minute. 
You say you are Adam Lanza’s mother, Dylan Klebold’s mother, Eric Harris’s mother. 
I am your son and daughter – fiercely intelligent, fragile, frightened. Dreaming of a world where no autistic or otherwise neurologically different person will be forced to do things that cause them discomfort and pain, or take terrifying, mind-paralysing, anti-psychotic drugs ever again. 
I am your son as he could be in 12 years: gentle, loving, giving, forgiving, fiercely intelligent, and righteously and legitimately angry at the beautiful-mind brutalising treatment I was forced to receive because of poor understanding, bad communication between neuro-typicals and the neuro-diverse, and the heavy-handed, escalatory treatment of one by the other. 
Or in seven years, your son could be Adam Lanza; nobody ever listened to what really made him angry. And now we’ll never know. 
We do need to talk about mental illness, you’re right. But after reading your letter, and hearing your son’s voice coming through your lines, I don’t think he’s mentally ill. I think he’s mentally different, and he’s immensely frustrated. 
As for Adam Lanza, the mass murderer who is at least encouraging people to talk about this &#8211; we’re never going to know what brought him to that terrible mental place of violence and slaughter. Maybe he was simply mentally ill. Maybe he was rejected, desperately unhappy, and saw it as payback. 
But I think we need to stop assuming mental illness as a blanket motive for acts of violence and expressions of pain that we can’t understand. It is too easy to use it lazily, as a way of avoiding a real, labour-intensive attempt to truly understand legitimate sources of frustration, alienation and anger, in our ‘different’ young people. Please, everyone, for the sake of the whole world and everyone in it, stop  talking about mental illness and start  asking about it. Are we so unhappy because we have an illness or because we have a real reason to be? 
As you said, God help us both. At the very least until He does, please afford your unusual, gifted, difficult son the dignity of not likening him to a mass murderer. You both still have choices to make. 
Yours sincerely, 
‘I Could Have Been Adam Lanza, If I Were To Believe You About Us’
<pre>Image from: http://bit.ly/UNKItO</pre>

An Open Letter in Response to ‘I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother’

With the US 2012 election campaigns in full swing, the psychological impact of prevalent political hypocrisy is a cause for concern  
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As America gets closer to the 2012 election, the issues discussed in the media are generally focused on what politicians say and believe in, based upon their histories and track records. Politician A says one thing, and then the news focuses on Politician B&#8217;s response. 
It&#8217;s an acceptable method of journalism in that it reveals two sides to an issue. What it doesn’t do, however, is discuss the hypocrisy of that issue. Let&#8217;s look at three egregious examples. These are all from the Republican Party, although certainly the Democratic Party is guilty of many of their own hypocritical actions as well: 
At the Republican National Convention (RNC), the Republicans were taking stances to create nationwide constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage and abortions. Republicanism espouses the belief that national government should not intrude on people&#8217;s lives and social and taxation issues should be left to individual state governments. No Republican, then, should be supporting any change to the national constitution that takes power away from the state’s rights to control their own preferences. 
Also at the convention, the Republicans were touting small business owners that &#8220;made their own way&#8221; as a response to a statement by President Obama that the government helps make small businesses possible. Not only was this quote taken out of context, the vast majority of small business owners they used as examples had in fact received millions of dollars in government grants. 
Republican Congressman, Todd Akin, sits on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. He thinks that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/us/politics/todd-akin-provokes-ire-with-legitimate-rape-comment.html">women can reject sperm</a> when they&#8217;re raped, going against what is widely known in science. This is yet another indication of the way that their side of the government is being run – where someone that doesn&#8217;t actually believe in science or know science is allowed to make decisions related to scientific exploration. 
This is not meant to be a political argument and, despite highlighting one side, both sides clearly have their own issues in saying things that are consistent with their party’s disposition. 
No, the issue to explore here is: what are the effects of this hypocrisy when it comes to the future of America – or any country – where hypocrisy is not met with any media challenge? 
It&#8217;s something that is likely to have several long term consequences, particularly in the way that future generations start to understand and recognize the importance of politics. The three most likely outcomes are as follows: 
The first is anxiety. Hypocrisy often causes confusion, and confusion is going to cause anxiety. When you don&#8217;t know who is doing what or where, you find yourself confused and unable to get a grasp on the events taking place in the country and the world. Who is to be believed? What evidence does someone have when hypocritical stances are what is defining the future? 
Indifference is another likely outcome and is perhaps even more problematic than anxiety. Youth voters and citizens essentially give up caring, and yet everyone – even those that call themselves apolitical – have political stances on issues like taxation, abortion, gay marriage etc. Indifference gets nothing done and puts all power in the hands of those that are passionate, including those that may want what is not best for the country or any individual person. 
Anger is the final possible outcome. Anger is a great motivating tool, and more likely to get people to the polls. But it also has its downsides. Spreading incorrect or hypocritical beliefs has a tendency to affect those that are prone to anger, which can lead to some dangerous consequences as some of the recent shootings in the US reflect. Anger can be somewhat beneficial for making changes to the country, but only if it is placed on the right people and situations and doesn&#8217;t get out of hand. 
These reactions are all a result of not only the actions of US politicians. They&#8217;re also the result of the hypocrisy – the ability to say and do anything because they want to, even if it completely differs with their official stances, actions, beliefs etc. Hypocrisy is a serious problem and one that could have some fairly devastating consequences for the future. 
Image from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/27/us-elections-battle-soul-america?newsfeed=true

Will Hypocrisy in Politics Cause Long-Term Consequences?

It is time for the officers involved in the death of Sean Rigg to be held to question 
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The mealy-mouthed phrase ‘lessons will be learned’ seems to be  the last refuge of all senior police officers when caught out with no one else to blame and no other way to explain away a public scandal. We heard it again on Newsnight (BBC2) on 1 August as Assistant Commissioner Simon Byrne, the second most senior officer at Scotland Yard, squirmed in his seat and comprehensively failed to convince anyone that his force had behaved ethically or honourably in relation to the squalid and eminently preventable death of Sean Rigg at Brixton Police Station in August 2008. 
At the inquest into Sean’s death earlier this month, damning evidence of police disregard for their own procedures and downright incompetence was presented to the court and, significantly, not challenged by those representing the Metropolitan Police. What was shown beyond doubt was that Sean was a very sick young man. Clinically diagnosed with psychosis, he had been failing to take his medication while living in a hostel and had suffered a classic relapse which manifested itself in bizarre and irrational behaviour. In recordings played at the inquest it was shown that the police were told, not once, but in five increasingly frantic calls, from those who were concerned for his welfare, that he needed help. The place for Sean was the A&amp;E department of his local hospital.  What happened was very different. 
Four police constables identified and then chased after Sean, and two young inexperienced trainees, PC’s  Mark Harratt and Matthew Forward, caught him and wrestled him to the ground. Sean, who was acutely psychotic and stressed, struck out at the officers before being manhandled face down and handcuffed. 
The officers gave contradictory accounts about what happened, particularly in relation to how long Sean spent on the ground with an officer leaning on his back – something that is drummed into all officers during their training as a technique which is potentially fatal, especially for people suffering from violent episodes of mental disorder. The officers said that they dealt with him in this way for no more than 90 seconds, but photographic evidence from a female witness proved that Sean was subjected to this restraint for at least eight minutes. It was on this basis that the jury found that &#8220;unsuitable&#8221; force for &#8220;unnecessarily&#8221; long, more than minimally contributed to his death. 
The officers swore on oath that Sean was then ‘escorted’ to a police van and placed on a seat in a cage in the back, but then claimed that he ‘slumped down into the foot well’. The jury were taken to Brixton Police Station and saw an identical van and it became obvious that the account given by the officers could not possibly be true &#8211; the foot well is too short and narrow for Sean to have fallen into it in the way the officers described. He must thus have been in extreme discomfort during his journey to Brixton. The officers all denied seeing any physical injuries on Sean’s body, yet photographs showed several fresh cuts and bruises on his face and a large bruise on his right shoulder blade area, consistent with someone kneeling on his back. Even more significant was the fact that written notes made by the officers, only revealed during evidence, listed Sean’s facial injuries in detail despite them denying any knowledge of them. 
On any objective assessment, the evidence given by the arresting officers appeared to be a tissue of lies. However, worse was to come. 
The Custody Officer, Sergeant Paul White, spent an entire morning at the inquest giving evidence on oath explaining in detail how he had performed an  ‘initial risk assessment’ of Sean in the police van. He explained to the court how he had found him sitting upright in the van, that he was responsive, that he had actually looked him in the eyes and, as a result, was not in the least worried about his welfare. However when CCTV footage was shown to the court, it became abundantly clear that Sergeant White had never been anywhere near the van, nor, evidence seemed to indicate, had he spoken to Sean or conducted a risk assessment. Even more damning was his voice on the CCTV tape when he can be heard telling the police doctor that Sean was &#8220;feigning unconsciousness&#8221; effectively misleading the doctor about Sean’s medical situation. 
Without prompt treatment and effective care by those who had a duty to look after him, Sean died curled up in the foetal position on the concrete floor of a cage at the police station – a tragic and unnecessary end for a young, albeit troubled, man. 
Over the years I have seen far too many such cases, but none so clear-cut as the death of Sean Rigg. It is an outrage that Assistant Commissioner Byrne can appear on television and whine that he ‘sincerely regrets’ what happened, while at the same time confirming that in the four years since Sean’s death not one officer has faced discipline proceedings, let alone criminal charges. There is overwhelming proof, at the very least, that Sergeant White committed perjury at the inquest; there is compelling evidence that at least two of the constables may have done likewise. Beyond this, there are clear indications of individual and organisational failure that justify criminal proceedings. 
Mr Byrne needs to start earning his salary and set up a searching inquiry to discover who is liable for the death of Sean Rigg.
<pre>Image from: http://uffc-campaigncentral.net/category/breaking-news/</pre>