Pharmageddon – ironing out eccentricities.

by Anna Raccoon on June 26, 2009

Another one bites the dust. One less eccentric to thrill and appal the world in equal measures as he dances across its stage. Michael Jackson RIP.

Primitive societies knew what to do with their eccentrics, they lionised them as entertainment. Surely a better fate than our modern method of first delineating who has money and who not, and then alternately jailing or medicating those with no money or not old enough to decide for themselves.

If, as Michael Jackson did, you manage to fit yourself between the tramlines of ’standardised’ society long enough to acquire an obscene bundle of moolah, then you can afford to display your intrinsic eccentricity, and incarcerate yourself in a Disneyland sanatorium.

If you break your cover too early, then, as an estimated 10% of children have discovered, the pharmaceutical industry will claim you as one of theirs, and you will be ‘ritalin-ed’ into the industry ‘norm’ for behaviour. John Harris, the bioethics expert, was last heard promoting Ritalin for perfectly healthy adults, to ‘boost brainpower’.

I am not sure at what point we allocated responsibility for deciding what ‘normal behviour’ was to a commercial industry, but we do seem to have done so.

Today we learn that a Scottish scientist has high hopes of a ‘cure’ for autism. Autism is not a mental illness, it is a ‘different’ way of processing information. Who decided that we needed a ‘cure’ for this ability? Why would the world want to be free of people who process information differently? One of the ‘identifying factors’ of autism is repetitive behaviour and narrow, obsessive interests. That can have its good points and bad points. Iron out the bad points and you will also lose many of the army of people who, on our behalf, have poured over lines of terminally boring computer code to create the software we all enjoy today. Undeniably, many of the world’s greatest inventions and greatest works of art and culture owe a lot to the autistic traits in their progenitors.

The pharmaceutical industry have medicalised, dehumanised, disrespected, all manner of human traits, those aspects of human response that allow a ‘norm’ to exist between their poles. The menopause is now a ‘condition’ to be treated’, childbirth is treated as a medical emergency requiring hospitalisation. The entirely understandable depression at finding yourself jobless and with a mortgage and family to support is doped with Prozac, despite no evidence that is is any more efficient than a placebo. There was even, at one point, a valiant attempt to prove that homosexuality was a genetic malformation, holding out hope of a ‘cure’ to the rampant pharmaceutical industry.

Virtually any form of excessive behaviour can now be classified as mental illness, those who live their lives with great bursts of energy followed by a few weeks of stupor on the sofa to recover are classified as bi-polar, they are neither feted for their extraordinary output when ‘up’, nor allowed to sulk in peace when ‘down’, they have become objects to be chemically tinkered with in an attempt to standardise society.

The dotty old lady is no longer allowed to wander harmlessly in society, talking rubbish and frightening the children, she must be corralled into one of a row of plastic seats in front of the Jeremy Kyle show, with all the other dotty old ladies, doped to the eyeballs on ‘Aricept’ and worse. A personal tragedy that one, I have assiduously been following a pre-planned path to my goal of ‘dotty old lady’, I quite fancied long conversations with a parrot on my shoulder, but I can’t stand Jeremy Kyle, so I need a new career path for my dotage. Blogger perhaps.

The creation of the NHS, essentially a honeypot for the pharmaceutical industries to trough on to their hearts content, has simultaneously created a need for those industries to colonise new medical continents. Now they are encroaching not just on physical ailments but on emotions and eccentricities.

Fluoride in our water whether we want it or not, from the ‘Nazi Health Service’ , a discovery that beta blockers can make you ‘forget’ the pleasures of smoking – how long before we find beta blockers in our drinking water? How long before we find a similar drug to make us forget the ‘pleasures of voting BNP’?

How long before the potential ‘Old Holborn’s’ of the next generation are screened out at pre-school age, and genetically altered to conform with some pre-determined ‘norm’, no longer dancing before us on our screens, shocking and thrilling, creating mischief, inventing, improvising, excessing, and enlivening our lives?

Tagged as: Aricept, Autism, bi-polar, mental illness, Ritalin

{ 56 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Elvis Presley June 26, 2009 at 12:07 pm: can you do the Moonwalk?
2 Elvis Presley June 26, 2009 at 12:13 pm: it’s also a good day to bury bad news…..coffee….schucksssss
3 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 12:14 pm: I can walk on water – does that count?
4 penster June 26, 2009 at 12:28 pm: Fuck I’m bipolar. Better than being bi. At least there’s a dope for it.
5 penster June 26, 2009 at 12:30 pm: What about the ecological disaster pending if Farrah and Michael get buried in the same cemetery? And will Janet have a wardrobe malfunction at the funeral? Will Elizabeth Taylor and Bubbles be pallbearers?
6 Ivan June 26, 2009 at 12:34 pm: I remember seeing, back in the 50s a @Giles@ cartoon in the Express in which children of all shapes and sizes were going into a building labelled ‘State Education’ and leaving from the out door all exactly alike.

The country, the world, needs free thinkers. Take the space program, any space program of the moment – because the BBC have been showing programs about it. They started with exploding totem poles and have continued that way – the shuttle is only a very expensive way of getting back to ground. The only person that is attempting to buck the ‘established way’ is Richard Branson with his take on the Arthur C Clark ‘Prelude to Space’ fly it up there method, which was derived from an earlier flying boat design.

If I appear to be ranting, I have reason. As an engineer I fix problems created by the ‘don’t think’ if if breaks throw it away approach created by the socialist idea that all people are created equal – they’re not!!
7 janes June 26, 2009 at 12:40 pm: “One less eccentric to thrill and appal the world in equal measures ”

The vainglorious miscreant Martin Bashir appalled me. Spiteful, jealous and malicious stories about MJ apalled me. The twisted, distorted focus on his love of children apalled me. But he never never did.
8 Henry North London June 26, 2009 at 1:15 pm: I am not a robot
9 Elvera June 26, 2009 at 1:32 pm: yeah but……equilibrium whether chemically induced or not shouldn’t be sniffed at-
10 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 1:40 pm: There’s a dope for all of us Penster, some of us marry them…….
11 Elvis Presley June 26, 2009 at 1:42 pm: hey, steady, is this a dating site? didn’t have them in my day, rather not in the same way, but my room was always a site…
12 Lexander June 26, 2009 at 1:42 pm: Loads of sex and red wine have turned me into a…..very happy man able to cope with increasing madness. Must say the news of Jackson’s demise just makes the day seem much more successful. Pip toodle.
13 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 1:44 pm: Rant away Ivan,

I am convinced that eccentrics achieve more than standardised robots. They are not as easily controlled as robots, so the state has a vested interest in reforming them, by jail or dope, but it still needs them to flower first.
14 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 1:46 pm: Sex and red wine – self medicating depressive then, and very successful by the sound of it, Lexander.
15 Blink June 26, 2009 at 1:49 pm: Little late to the party today I’m afraid, not been myself …. still all the talk about Michael Jackson has obliterated any real news from the airwaves up till now – it must be Friday?

Not a big fan of the medical model for anything, social control, behavioural modification etc etc. Had a wonderful conversation with a medic recently, who was obviously medical model thoroughbred, I confess to unashamedly mouthing off to him in no uncertain terms about JB Skinner and the lot of them – don’t think he knew who I was talking about….!!!! NHS drones rule ko.
16 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 1:52 pm: You’ve got me there Blink – never heard of JB Skinner, would you like to complete my education for me and oblige?
17 Alan June 26, 2009 at 2:08 pm: “If you break your cover too early, then, as an estimated 10% of children have discovered, the pharmaceutical industry will claim you as one of theirs, and you will be ‘ritalin-ed’ into the industry ‘norm’ for behaviour. John Harris, the bioethics expert, was last heard promoting Ritalin for perfectly healthy adults, to ‘boost brainpower’.

I am not sure at what point we allocated responsibility for deciding what ‘normal behviour’ was to a commercial industry, but we do seem to have done so.”

Is some of this due to teachers perferring doped up troublemakers and parents wanting more benefits and a quiet home life?
18 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 2:12 pm: Alan,

When the question of whether the McCann’s had given their children Calpol to ensure that they slept soundly whilst they went out drinking was a hot topic, I was truly shocked by the number of media commentators who came out and said ‘oh, we’ve all done it, so what’………

Doping an elderly person or a young child so that you can pursue your own selfish delights is apparently perfectly acceptable nowadays.

Not to me it isn’t.
19 jailhouselawyer June 26, 2009 at 2:19 pm: Apparently, Michael Jackson is quoted as saying “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”.
20 Meejician June 26, 2009 at 2:21 pm: I think it’s BF Skinner that Blink’s talking about, but I may be wrong? The one who kept one of his babies in a box? Not as bad as Ivar Lovaas, though – and do check out Mathew Israel of the Judge Rotenberg Centre. Now that IS very very scary indeed. I’d rather overdose on Ritalin…………….
21 Meejician June 26, 2009 at 2:22 pm: Sorry, two teas in Matthew
22 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 2:24 pm: Allo, allo, Meej!
23 Meejician June 26, 2009 at 2:30 pm: Allo, Anna! You could do a good piece on the Judge Rotenberg Center!
It’s beyond belief……….
So why don’t they close it down? That’s the big question.
24 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 2:31 pm: I shall look into it, bit of research needed here I think.
25 Blink June 26, 2009 at 2:46 pm: Meejician June 26, 2009 at 2:21 pm

I think it’s BF Skinner

you are correct, I was thinking of the sports company JJBSportsIndoctrinationSociety but NEVER Get You’re Money Back Sales Dept. Not much different from Skinner actually….
26 Blink June 26, 2009 at 2:52 pm: Not a big fan of Wiki but link here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner

I remember a professional visit to a Secure Hospital near Northampton many years ago. Once the front door closed and was locked behind you, you got the sense of what it was all about….chilling is a useful description but didn’t cover the aspects of social denial, exclusion, total social control and pure anger that was felt
27 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 3:10 pm: I have made similar visits Blink – near Northampton too as it happens!

The sense of having entered another world, was, as you say, chilling. Every word recorded, every blink of an eye reacted to, at high speed.

On one occasion, the gentleman I was talking too reached down into his sock to produce the half cigarette had had secreted in case I objected to his smoking – two ‘man mountains’ were in that room and holding his arms before he had even raised them above knee height.

Obviously I appreciate the need for security, it could have been a knife he had managed to conceal, but it was spooky to realise just how closely watched we were being.

Very much on the Bentham model, all the ‘common’ rooms radiated from a toughened glass central tower where the guards sat immobile, watchful and deeply mistrustful. god knows how anybody ever got ‘better’ in there.
28 Valerie June 26, 2009 at 4:05 pm: Good Afternoon Mrs Raccoon,

A very good piece of writing again…Gosh, I feel bitter I can’t compete…

Nevertheless, I am not sure that the pharmaceutical industry is as powerful in UK as it is in France where they are more than happy to medicate you if you are perfectly healthy.

Here, where I leave in England, I have the feeling (I might be wrong here) that even close to collapsing, they would count the tablets left before giving you one. I never could get my precious “Lexothousand” to relieve my anxiety at night time… and had to beg… and promise Doctor I would only use sparingly a mini-box of mini-dosed sleeping tablets.

For my boy, when he was aged 2 and I had to take him on holiday on a plane to South of France, I had to threaten Doctor I would not bear his screams during flight time to legally obtain some dope so life would be bearable and no casualties.

Boy is now 12 and I do not trust French Companies nor French planes…I rather stay home !!!

I am also daring to disagree on this opinion “Doping an elderly person or a young child so that you can pursue your own selfish delights is apparently perfectly acceptable nowadays.”

First of all, I don’t think people find it acceptable these days anymore (they use to dope children with alcohol in milk bottles…and not such a long time ago !!! a possible reason for heavy alcoholism in certain areas of France) and secondly parents and carers are only human beings, not some kind of “deities”, and sometimes only need to catch up on their sleep deprivations. Please, bear a thought for carers of dementia patients. I would not do their job and I do not blame them at all, only praise.

As for childbirth, it is not an emergency in South England where you have to visit the hospital at the last minute and stay the minimum of time.

Have a nice and sunny week-end in France.
29 Valerie June 26, 2009 at 4:12 pm: Oh Gosh, I forgot another strong disagreement… as for me I am grateful for secure hospitals and very grateful also to the people who accept to work with these dangerous patients and contribute to a safer place at their own risks for a miserable salary and poor place in society. I think about these nurses knived to death in a secure unit in Pau (South West of France).

Valerie
30 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 4:15 pm: Valerie,

My remarks were with regard to the media commentators who happily admitted to doping their children in order to get some ‘me time’ – not sleep.

I still don’t think that doping is acceptable for sleep – traditionally that used to be the reason why women didn’t work – because they were busy feeding young babies and catching up on their sleep in between. Now young mums ‘have to’ work – do they, or do they ‘have to’ have the things they buy with the money from work? Those that are married may say that they pay the mortgage and therefore must work – what does their husband do with his money? There seems to be a different level of what is ‘necessary’ to own in life now, who under 60 has ever heard of starting life with the proverbial orange boxes?, it doesn’t exist any longer, therefore the young mums ‘have to work’ – and can’t cat nap during the day as they used to.

Hardly a good enough reason to infuse a young body with chemicals though is it?
31 Alice Cook June 26, 2009 at 7:34 pm: So this is why there has been an explosion in the prescription of anti-depressants in the UK.

Alice

http://ukhousebubble.blogspot.com
32 janes June 26, 2009 at 7:40 pm: Ah yes AR, I remember those orange boxes – and bricks used either as ashtrays or the bits that held the carefully detached orange box planks to form bookshelves. And I have a reminiscing smile on my face as I recall the two knives, forks, spoons and plates (inexplicably stamped London Fire Brigade) and the battered egg saucepan donated by my sister with which I furnished my first shared bedsit.
33 janes June 26, 2009 at 7:41 pm: PS I AM under 60!
34 Henry North London June 26, 2009 at 8:16 pm: I have worked in the forensic medium secure environment.

Its a crazy place to work
35 Valerie June 26, 2009 at 8:42 pm: Ms Raccoon,

Thanks again for this personal answer.

Obviously the media commentators are toeing the line (for whatever reasons I’d like to know) with the famous couple as they belong to the same class and are better to do so.

Plus, my point of view is the better social class you belong to, the less you are going to be “pestered with the brats” that are handed over (and down) to the less privileged to be cared by. It is like this in France, I don’t mix up with the “English toffs” so cannot comment…

As for the “stay at home Mums” versus the working ones, that is a long and boring debate I am not going to enter…as for me I made a choice …looking after mine all day…don’t know how I am still around !!!

By the way “Old mums” also had an urge to work…at least in France as I am the by-product of a working Mum in the Seventies whom I remember very, very well ‘had to’ “have the things they buy with the money from work”…so nothing new for me

As ” Those that are married may say that they pay the mortgage and therefore must work – what does their husband do with his money?” My strong point of view on that is that is allows them POWER (too much ???) in the marriage and CONTROL (too much ???) and being domineering (I secretly think so…but don’t tell anybody even if as a man I would not bear it) . Only analyzing that when Mum said she HAD to work to pay and let Father keep his money as pocket money for a while.

” There seems to be a different level of what is ‘necessary’ to own in life now” Oh Gosh on this one …Mum in the Seventies in France needed so much more material things than I do need now…and she seems appaled at my “modest life” today (my need for “decroissance”).

” who under 60 has ever heard of starting life with the proverbial orange boxes?, it doesn’t exist any longer” What the hell were these ? I am too young and too French to know what these orange boxes were ?

Very true “there is never a good enough reason to infuse a young body with chemicals” … but at some point, it can be seen as a fantastic idea for a couple of times rather than “beating the pulp out” of a recalcitrant child (mainly a boy)…sorry for my honesty…only did it once or twice with the boy for our common survival.

Thanks for reading me…and have a nice and relaxing week-end.

Always pleased to read you but find it hard to understand on the politics…too complicated for me.

Valerie
36 sam June 26, 2009 at 9:10 pm: this is all very well and good but how many of you actually live with adhd and autism ?
37 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 9:18 pm: Don’t presume Sam, you would be very surprised by the answer.
38 sam June 26, 2009 at 10:03 pm: anna, hi . why would i be ?
39 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 10:28 pm: Valerie,

Orange boxes were…..the boxes that oranges used to arrive in the UK in! I’m not being patronising, you couldn’t be expected to know what they were.

As janes pointed out, years ago when you set up home in a bed sit (a one room hovel that you rented from someone, with a cooker on the landing if you were lucky, or a single gas ring attached to the gas fire if you weren’t, and a shared bathroom halfway down the stairs), the traditional thing to do was to collect up empty orange boxes and use – say – two of them as a table, and then another one as a coffee table, and then a stack of them to keep your clothes in, and another stack to store the food in……none of us had enough money to actually buy furniture!

And as janes also reminds me – a house brick as an ashtray, we might have bought cigarettes, but we certainly didn’t splash the cash on anything as unnecessary as an ashtray!

Yes, by the seventies a lot of women were working in the UK – but some of us (ahem) go back a lot further than the seventies………

I still own a saucepan I bought 45 years ago – it was my first ever purchase for my home – and I’d been living there for at least two years by then!

Nowadays everyone just gets a complete houseful of furniture on credit!
40 sam June 26, 2009 at 11:21 pm: anna, i’m not presuming, it was a question, but i do make the assumption from some of what what i’ve read it’s not based on experience, that is true.
41 Anna Raccoon June 26, 2009 at 11:44 pm: I gathered that that was what you thought, and you were very wrong.
42 sam June 26, 2009 at 11:51 pm: anna, i think i come across as atagonistic when i’m not intentionally, it is just often what i read winds me up. what is your experience of adhd and autism ?
43 Châtelaine June 27, 2009 at 12:04 am: Tuning in late, as we had a classical hours-long French power cut during a thunder storm. Just want to say “Hi” to MEEJICIAN: it’s been ages since I last saw you !!

To Anna: yes, I remember the orange boxes. With a little paint and imagination it did make up for “real” furniture. And these basics of having “nothing”, but being content with it, helped me greatly through yet an evening today [“vous êtes en France, Madame”] without electricity and nothing works. We had candles and a match to lite a gas stove, omelettes, ham, cheese, fried bread and red wine. We played cards at candle light and are actually going to bed now with a very content feeling of appreciation of what is available…

Rant over
Good night Anna et all:-D
44 Anna Raccoon June 27, 2009 at 12:05 am: You need a camper van Chatelaine………..
45 Châtelaine June 27, 2009 at 12:06 am: Anna … !!!!
46 Anna Raccoon June 27, 2009 at 12:08 am: I’m not going to answer a personal question like that Sam, sorry.

I will just say that I would not fill my body with chemicals in order to make someone else’s life more comfortable, and I certainly wouldn’t expect anyone to do it for me.

I think drugs of any sort should be only for your own personal mediacl benefit, not to enable someone else to ‘manage’ you, nor to fulfil some idealogical belief, nor to allow them to slip over the road to go for a drink………
47 Anna Raccoon June 27, 2009 at 12:09 am: Still, glad to hear you got the power cut over and done with, things should go smoothly for a while now…..regards to Maman.
48 Châtelaine June 27, 2009 at 12:24 am: Without having everything read in detail …

ADHD and autism: I think many, many people – grownups by now – may be, have been ADHD – autists and are very successful at their age now. We are too quick nowadays to reject the extra-ordinary including the village fool. Medication is to be used only in situations, which can otherwise not be controlled.

We are also too ready to “condemn” the women whose natural desire is to have and raise children and not to pursue a career. Real liberation is CHOICE .Not to be superior – EQUALITY is the magic word.

Good night again
49 sam June 27, 2009 at 12:37 am: that’s okay anna but then you must accept the idea that i then presume you don’t have much experience with such without it being a fault that i think so –which the word presumption implies. i think maybe i am also being a bit argumentative here and it is misplaced.
my nightmare is actually myself being managed without me noticing because of my adhd and autism. and what bothers me a lot is the fact that adult adhd does not seem to exist in the u.k. and, also that adhd in general is downplayed as being merely a behavioural problem and as such is not managed properly. and, that parents who try to cope with it with the use of ritalin are seen as people who drug their children for their own comfort.
i have four children and only the last child of mine has had the benefit of a proper diagnosis and treatment including some use of ritalin and as such i’m a bit inbetween, having seen both sides, as to whether to use medication or not and which is better etc. and my experiences are

a) ritalin helps but it is not a cure all or an ersatz for stable parenting and a good home.
and,
b)that if a child ‘needs’ ritali nor similar to access a provision one should question the validity and neccessity of such a provision.

that’s my opinion.
50 Meejician June 27, 2009 at 1:35 am: “Just want to say “Hi” to MEEJICIAN: it’s been ages since I last saw you !!”

Hi Chatelaine.

Am still kind of here. But keeping a Secret Squirrel profile.

Lots of love!
51 Meejician June 27, 2009 at 2:24 am: sam, hi!

My very bestest mate is diagnosed adult AD/HD with Asperger traits. She is 50 and was diagnosed at 35. She has five children, all of them diagnosed on the autism spectrum. I am currently advising a mum of 14 children by two different husbands. 10 of these children have a spectrum diagnosis.

Ritalin/Concerta was the drug of choice for the children of my bezzie mate. It worked. While driving home from the clinic in which her eldest son (9) had been given a dose of Ritalin, he tied his shoelaces for the very first time, and Ritalin gave him a ‘window of opportunity’ so she won’t diss it. On the other hand it gave such serious side-effects that she also had to give him risperidone.

There are several ways to look at these issues, and to be honest they’re not antagonistic if dealt with correctly.

Do we want to offer medication which can ‘normalise’ the individual to accommodate a demanding environment? Or do we make costly modifications to the normalised environment to accommodate difference? Or do we say what the hell, go with the flow? Let it all hang out? People and environments sometimes can’t find a match?

It’s subtle and individual. Each of these options works at any one time, with any one of a number of disparate situations and people.

Every single person with ‘difference’ may have their own specific needs. It’s a biopsychosocial issue with temporal issues, too.

I am happy that my mother with dementia now has Aricept and an atypical anti-psychotic. It works for her, doesn’t dumb her down and allows her to function well within the society she now inhabits. She is sociable and comfortable. And a damn sight more human than she’s been for 20 years.

Horses (or horse) for courses. I don’t do drugs – except to keep my epilepsy in check – and that’s prescribed. But I won’t ever make Blanket statements. I’ll leave that to the late MJ.

Some medication is good as it enables operational functionality. Some is bad as it encourages and enables operational dysfunctionality. Some is OK when you need it, and bad when you want it. And can kill you.

Is that fair, Anna?
52 Anna Raccoon June 27, 2009 at 8:52 am: Absolutely fair Meej,

I just have a philosophical objection to statements of support for medication that start from the premise of the carer’s, or government’s, needs.

That is not to say that I am unaware of the carers needs, I have worked in that field too long not to be utterly sympathetic, but the solution to a mismatch between a carer’s needs and the individual ‘patient’ for want of a better term, is for ’society’, again for want of a better term, to provide more support, not to force the patient to conform to a norm.

I am well aware that that statement will bring howls of protest, -’ I’ve asked my local authority….I’ve battled for five years……..you don’t know what its like’……yes, I do know what its like! I know very well what it’s like. That is why I rail against an industry that has produced and is promoting a subtle silent solution to the problem that is cheap as chips when costed against the price of support, and a government that is promoting that solution as socially acceptable.

Medication for the individual’s benefit I have no problem with.

Autism has been around for centuries. Likewise Epilepsy. And child birth. We have survived, thrived, and evolved. It is only our western society, within our lifetime, that has decreed the level of medical intervention currently prevalent, and it has been done for capitalist motives, not humanist motives.

We have become a very selfish society, full of our own needs, our own rights. Capable of making statement like ‘I have used Calpol on my children so that I can have some me-time, who hasn’t’?

Ultimately we will all become ‘vulnerable people’, as is the case in Southampton, where the government are forcing fluoride on the population against their wishes. Do you honestly believe that the government is concerned that someone in Southampton might end up with toothache? No, it is the cost of treating toothache, and the ideology of a nanny state.

So why not put beta blockers in the water, and stop us all remembering the pleasures of smoking?

I had a client who had two strapping near adult sons, both so far along the autistic spectrum as to be, in the eyes of the authorities, unmanageable. Every day, she was forced to let them go to ’school’ by law, manacled to their wheelchairs by leather straps, during the day they sat in their own faeces and urine, for the staff were not allowed, for health and safety, reasons to release them. At night they returned to a household designed to accommodate them, and there they lived happily and gave immense pleasure to two parents who had adapted their own lives, from a position of informed choice, to their needs. One of the sons was an accomplished pianist. They chose to sleep during the ’school hours’, so that they could enjoy their sons talent for as long as they wished to display it at night. The dilemma they faced, and it tore them apart, was to dope their sons 24 hours a day, so that they were manageable for the day time necessity of ‘attending school’, or accept the manacles.

They came from a society that would have imposed neither version. That, of course, was how their sons came to acquire their ability. They’d never been doped into manageability.
53 sam June 27, 2009 at 9:03 am: hi meejician, good morning anna very good posts, i’ve nothing to add at the minute.
54 Ivan June 27, 2009 at 11:06 am: I wonder how many of the so called ADHD children are in actual fact either just naughty or bored out of their trolley because they are not being taught anything.

As well as being a qualified engineer I am also a qualified teacher – Cert Ed from the 50s. Several years ago now, friends of mine had their son diagnosed as having ADHD and asked me about it. My reaction was ‘what a load of garbage’, I knew the boy – in fact had taught him basic algebra the year before when he was 6. Their reaction was as expected, because he wouldn’t read the books he brought home from school everyone thought he couldn’t read – give him something to read like any SF novels or some of my engineering texts and he was away, even to asking the meaning of words he didn’t know.
When he and I managed to get this through to his parents, they found the LEA didn’t want to know – the local policy was to put such children on drugs. In the end I persuaded them to teach him at home. The first year I got lots of phone calls asking for help. He took his GCSE, or what ever they were called then, two years early – I advised him to consider them as a mental exercise just to show the ‘idiots’ what he could do – he passed with flying colours in all 13 subjects.

Now he is a consultant engineer travelling round the world. Not bad for someone the system wanted to put down.

The whole idea of ‘conformity’ is a socialist construct designed to produce a ‘non thinking’ class of workers that will obey the masters with out question – Orwell was a little out with the date but the present UK government appears to be using his book as a guide of how to do things and not hoe NOT to do them.
55 Valerie June 27, 2009 at 4:09 pm: Good Afternoon Ms Raccoon,

Thanks for this explanation about these orange boxes. I must ask Mum…as I think they used something similar in France after the War and in the Fifties.

Also the story of the bedsit makes me think of the stories my old Auntie used to tell me about her marriage just after the war and their difficulties of housing at the time…in France.

Your post is very interesting…shame your blog does not seem to be enough advertised…found it at random through anotherone full of tosh…I won’t name it but it is regarding some potentially guilty doctors !!!

“Yes, by the seventies a lot of women were working in the UK – but some of us (ahem) go back a lot further than the seventies………” Yes, but do you know that women have ALWAYS worked everywhere in the world and at ANYTIME…and surely in terrible conditions…worse than today and as far as I know had to put their babies with “nourrices” away from them for months, if not for years in terrible hygienic conditions where the said brats would survive or not…hence at this time the survival of the fittest (stories told by Mum as her Grandmother produced 6, “en nourrice” after as she was a headteacher (harsh one that is), maybe they were even more and were not even accounted for…). I don’t want to be carried on the subject as I could on for hours and hours…

I understand your beginnings in life were not as cosy at it seems to be now but we should bear a thought for all these young students covered in debts and who have to work, cannot find a home, etc… I don’t think at all they have it easy at all. The one who got it very easy in France where the babyboomers generation of 68, just born after the war, organizing the “French Revolution”, then they settled in high positions FOREVER, we will pay their retirement until well into their hundreds…sorry for this rant.

“Nowadays everyone just gets a complete houseful of furniture on credit!”… Non, non, non pas tout le monde…only the fools who can’t understand they will have at some point to repay…and it is not only the young who do use credits as you would be surprised…

Makes me thinks, do you watch “On n’est pas couches” sur France 2 very late and I am sorry for your English readers…very French… but next September if it still on there is Eric Zemmour, a very bright, soft spoken and assertive French Journalist on Le Figaro whose ideas are very opinionated and clever regarding “Les Idiots Utiles du Capitalisme” as to say we need these people who consume without thinking…

On this note, I will go and enjoy the bright British summer here with us.

Ah also I wanted to add ; No Yesterday was not better than today…Our human nature was the same as it is today…we (or them should I say) dealt with it in a different manner. Really, I prefer today !!!

Valerie
56 Henry North London June 27, 2009 at 4:32 pm: I have to agree with Ivan

By the age of 6 I was reading books that 11 year olds had difficulty with and could hold a decent conversation with adults about politics, Perhaps I need to go in to politics full time

The Anna Raccoon Archives

Anna Raccoon Archives

Pharmageddon – ironing out eccentricities.