Issue 119, Jan/Feb 2003
What did you get for Christmas? I'm starting 2003 with (among other things) two excellent T-shirts. One has "You're just jealous because all the little voices are talking to me" inscribed on the bosom, perhaps in honour of my radio play Other Voices [Sara's BBC Radio 4 play won the 2002 Mental Health Media Award for radio drama]. The other is bright red and has 'MENTAL' appliquéd across the front in those black letters like baseball stars have on their kit....
Both of these are branded (Fruit of the Loom and Moto respectively, if you want one). They're not custom made nor accessed through a specialist Mad Pride catalogue. They are being sold on the high street.
Even so, they are hardly as "mainstream" as a line of greetings cards from Carlton Cards (on sale in Clinton Cards shops, Asda et al.), which treat "mental distress" with blatant delight. I was sent a charming one: it has "Flippin' Mental" across the front, and a real poem - "Some people think you're cute 'n' sweet/soft and kind and gentle/My friend, I know you're round the bend/and marvellously mental!" When you open it up you get a recording of a tinny, manic laugh....
What is going on here? What are all these jokes about? I did ring Carlton and try to ask them where the Bubblegum concept came from or whether they had any clear "customer profile" but they didn't seem able (or willing?) to tell me, except that it had proved very successful. So I am left to speculate.
It is a little hard to think of Clinton Cards or Fruit of the Loom as heroic bastions of radical anti-psychiatry or even as leaders in cultural taboo-breaking. Perhaps it is more crudely commercial? Is the market for these products really a group of weekend ravers? Presumably, high street shops can't directly refer to recreational drugs so they take "mind-altering states" more broadly and use mental health language as a sort of modern code for "off your heads on illegal substances"....
An alternative is to see this as a particularly offensive form of stereotyping and abuse of the already stigmatised. (And it has to be said, some of the "poems" walk fairly close to the line: "You're really rather bonkers/A mad gal it's true/Watch out for the blokes in the white coats - they'll be coming after you."...)
Possibly we are witnessing a cultural sea change, or at least a pendulum swing, away from repression, shame and discrimination and back towards a more romantic view of mental illness as something poetic or liberated? The fact is that I don't feel exploited but intrigued. I don't feel mocked and scoffed by these gifts. I feel cheered up and affirmed. Laughed with rather than laughed at....
I also feel that this trend could create the edge of an opportunity for a bit of "reclaiming language". The gay pride movement was very successful with "gay" and "queer" - and won the age of consent debate. We cower behind political correctness and get the new Mental Health Act. Do we need to claim words back (some words anyway)? Take what has been an insult and make it a joke and a badge? "Mad" is not sharp enough and "psycho" is probably too sharp just now, but "mental" seems accessible and available: the more sensitive can treat it as short-hand for "mental distress". I rather like "lunatic", which is venerable and derives from the moon via "lunar changes". In the context of jokes, "hysterical" shows promise....