In my defence, I plead not guilty to the apparent madness which some believe attends me.Good people, it behooves me to say that I'm not as mad as you think I am, and I'm able to embrace jokes about madness, too. Take the story about Ralph and Edna, sent to me by someone who has the greatest regard for me, the utmost consideration for my mental acuity, and who I believe loves me.
"Ralph and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital. One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool, Ralph suddenly jumped into the deep end. He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there. Edna promptly jumped in to save him. She swam to the bottom and pulled him out."When the head nurse became aware of Edna's heroic act she immediately ordered her to be discharged from the hospital, as she now considered her to be mentally stable.
"When she went to tell Edna the news she said, "Edna, I have good news and bad news. The good news is you're being discharged, since you were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of the person you love. I have concluded that your act displays sound-mindedness."The bad news is, Ralph hanged himself in the bathroom with his bathrobe belt right after you saved him. I am so sorry, but he's dead."
"Edna replied, "He didn't hang himself, I put him there to dry. How soon can I go home?'"Laughter is positive psychology and if anyone needs it, to my mind it would be someone who's depressed, sad, ill, or down.So yes, we who live with mental health issues laugh and we laugh at ourselves too, very loudly. Well, we laugh more at the demonstration of us as the butt of jokes that have entertained people for centuries. I even have a few I pull out whenever others dare to laugh, or caricature me.
One resource site, psychcentral.com, hosts a blog called mentalhealthhumor.com and while it's not always belly-busting funny, cartoonist Chato B Stewart uses humour for advocacy, drawing on personal experience as someone living with bipolar disorder.In 2012, MAD magazine celebrated, "60 years of humour, satire, stupidity and stupidity." The press release started out like this: "To celebrate MAD magazine's 60th anniversary, Time Home Entertainment Inc is foolishly teaming up with MAD magazine on Totally MAD, a new collection of the legendary humour magazine's high-quality idiocy that is so widely un-anticipated, this overblown press release is needed to call attention to it."
One calypso that lights me up–as it does everyone else, last time I checked–is David Rudder's Madness. My favourite lines are about the big French Creole called Pierre:
He wet he hotdog dong with somebody half a beer
Then he snatch up de pepper sauce mama, drinking dat
Start to cuss up the barman saying how de beer so flat
You should hear me sing this verse and chorus, belting out, "We mad, we mad, we mad, we mad, we mad, we mad, we more than mad." And, each time David sings it, I visualise Pierre acting out, and always laugh, not at all offended by the fact this calypso associates St Ann's with madness.We're talking laughter because someone suggested I do not have a sense of humour. There are many things I do not have, like a husband, a good roof, a fence to promote "good neighbouring," a charm to bring my two tomcats back home, disposable income, and more, but I have a great sense of humour.
When I was warded at the San Fernando General Hospital psychiatric ward, I roomed with two other teenagers. The first was on her third suicide attempt. She wanted to die because her brother raped her continually, she said, and no one believed her.The second to join us was her best friend, who drank a household bleach mixture and confessed to doing so in order to be admitted into the psych ward to be with the first one.In the privacy of our room–it really was confinement, since the doors were locked from outside and we called through a porthole when we needed to use the bathroom–I heard some confessions that sounded like madness to me, if you could catch the irony, and I'd laugh silently, because it proved to me that I wasn't mad.
And when my sister relates the incident about me crying at the doctor's office and becoming aggravated because he, the doctor, was my lawyer who had not done a good divorce case and had caused me to lose my two children to my husband, I'm always laughing harder than anyone else within earshot of the "joke."I was 16 and a secondary school student, she whispered to the confused doctor.
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