Vasily Grossman (2010) The Road. Translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler.

I haven’t read Vasily Grossman’s best-known novel, Life and Fate. It took around twenty years after his death for Soviet authorities to sanction its publication in the 1980s. His stature as one of the Great Russian writers seemed confirmed. But he was born 12^th December 1905 in the village of Berdichev to a Jewish family, which is a Ukrainian town. His mother and family and the large Jewish population of over 41 000 of an aggregate population of around 54 000 were murdered by the Nazis outside their town. ‘Shoah with a gun’, Grossman termed it.

Ironically, Grossman would surely have followed the same fate by the Soviet authorities he served. Stalin’s Jewish purge after the so-called doctor’s plot was on its second wave, which would have swept him away if Stalin hadn’t died.

His article, The Hell of Treblinka, he termed ‘Shoah by gas’ was approved by Soviet authorities. He also wrote about the siege at Stalingrad being the turning point of The Great Patriotic War.  

His highly acclaimed short fiction, such as In the Town of Berdichev was admired by other Soviet writers such as Isaac Babel. And Babel appears in a later story, Mama. The latter was a kind of warning, not to get too close to those in power who are themselves purged as Babel was by the forerunners to the NKVD.

I was largely unmoved by Grossman’s fiction. I know I was meant to feel some kind of awe. The historical weight also added a kind of taken-for-granted consensus that this was great fiction. I get it that. I’m meant to like stories and plays like Anton Chekov’s The Lady and the Dog and The Cherry Orchard, but really they just bore me like something you had to revise for some exam I’ll never pass. Life is more than that as Grossman understood.

I prefer his essays and reports. The Hell of Treblinka, based on first-hand experience and second-hand reports to him from those that had been in Hell, was ahead of its time. It told how it is and how easily the world slipped into Fascism. For the moron’s moron Trump and his supporters, it sounds a familiar clarion call to hate and despise others based on eugenics and geography.

People became unpeopled. In the conveyor belt of Treblinka, they were robbed of citizenship, their home and their freedom. They were transported to a wilderness. Penned and squeezed into a station and robbed of their belongings, papers and photographs of loved ones. They were stripped naked and shaved. No one was sure what human hair was harvested for, but psychologically, it pushed them into compliance. Lined up in rows of five. Surrounded by barbed wire on ‘The Road of No Return’ with the black uniform of SS guards on one side and grey Wachmanner conscripts on the other. They were beaten with the butts of machine guns and rubber hoses. Alsatian dogs trained to attack the genitals were released. For the guards this was just another day. 20 000 to 60 000 unpeople were piling up and carriages shunted down the tracks were waiting to be brought for processing into the station. Schneller. Schneller.  

Grossman suggests that Stalingrad did not change the way—mostly—Jews were murdered, but how they processed the raw material, their bodies. Himmler himself visited Treblinka and had a look at the hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses covered over in pits. He ordered that they should be exhumed and burned. Germany and Germans who had participated in and committed these atrocities were no longer sure they would not be held to account. The un-people might be given a voice. Himmler’s strategy was to burn the evidence.

Some monsters were more monstrous than others. SS Sepp, for example, delighted in murdering small children.

‘Evidently endowed with unusual strength, it would suddenly snatch a child out of the crowd, swing him or her about like a cudgel and then either smash their head against the ground or simply tear them in half.’

Others carried sabres and whips and heavy gas piping. They would fling children still alive to roast on death pits.

‘We hear of women trying to hide little babies in heaps of blankets and trying to shield them with their own bodies.’

Ironically, as an atheist, who disavowed his Jewish heritage, Grossman finds consolation in the image of hope in humanity of The Sistine Madonna. He avows it shows, although tortured and crucified, ‘what is human in him continued to exist’.

I hope it continues to exist in us, but I get less sure. Amen. Read on.    

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Robert Kolker (2020) Hidden Family Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.

Robert Kolker (2020) Hidden Family Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.

I once asked my cousin, Wullie, how they managed at tea time. He said they ate in shifts. Big ones and wee ones.  Six and six. Another cousin, Paul, said when he was growing up (one of the youngest) he believed his mum, my Auntie Cathie, never slept. She was there when he got up and also there when he went to bed. Their dad died when they were young. Mum plugged the gap as typical Catholic working-class mothers did in the baby boom years after the Second World War.

Cheaper by the Dozen, a Twentieth Century Fox 1950 film offered a whimsical look at bringing up white, middle-class children in New Jersey. Based on the adaptation of a book published by the son and daughter of time-and-motion and therefore child-rearing experts, Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth, it seemed the template for patriarch and matriarch Don and Mimi Galvin in their pursuit of upward mobility and the American Dream.

The front and back cover of Hidden Valley Road, which was their address, a home built to their specifications, near the Air Force in Colorado—show this graphically in a photograph. Don stands at the top of the staircase in his officer’s uniform. Mimi stands in front of him, dressed to the nines. On each step, all the way down, stands a son in shirt and tie are the ten Galvin boys. Donald, the oldest of the bunch, is holding the latest baby boy, Peter. This means it is 1960. Because Donald was born in 1945. Mima delivered a son every year afterwards. Don joked that he wouldn’t stop until he had a hockey team. And that did happen. In one hockey match, on the airport base, the commentator intoned Galvin to Galvin to Galvin to Galvin. Mimi went against medical advice and had two more children. Two more girls. Twelve children.

The dark side of Cheaper by the Dozen was Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth were keen advocates of eugenics, as were the industrialists who employed them. Hitler didn’t invent the idea of the master race. Six of the ten Galvin boys that developed schizophrenia would be deemed in the taxonomy of white supremacy, a sub-category: ‘life unworthy of life’.

Kolker asks what the prognosis would be in the twenty-first century. Research and treatment has flat lined, but the ‘one-size fits all definition’ no longer sits comfortably with a changing awareness of mental health.

‘Each passing year brings more evidence that psychosis exists on a spectrum, with new genetic studies showing overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The most recent research suggests that a surprising number of us may be a little bit mentally ill. One meta-analysis, published in 2013, found that 7.2 percent of the general population had experienced hallucinations or delusions, another study in 2015 put the figure at 5.8 percent.’

The Galvin family with the Genain sisters—quadruplets born in the Hungry Thirties that experienced psychotic breaks one after the other in the girls’ twenties—were ideal families, currency, for those debating what schizophrenia was and by implication how it would be cured?   

Nature or Nurture?   A single illness or a syndrome? DNA samples. Genome testing.  Dementia praecox, which we now associate with older people, but in 1903 was renamed schizophrenia. Unlike senility, praecox had the Latin root, precious. Old people have nothing precious to say, but hints of insight and Richard Nash’s A Beautiful Mind spilled over from a different era and worldview.   

Mary, the youngest girl in the family (who changed her name to Lindsay) didn’t care about these things. She just wanted to fit in and be normal like everyone else. King Saul ate grass like a cow. Like Joan of Arc, he heard voices, he couldn’t resist acting on. Jung, Freud and Alder clashed not over soul murder but whether formative childhood experiences—‘psychogenic experiences—moulded the brain. Jung argument that not everything was to do with sex and libido, which was a break from his older mentor.

But Mary/Linday’s sexual molestation and rape by her brother Jim, who also molested and raped her other sister and her brother Peter, would suggest that sex and libido do play a large part in brain plasticity. Neither her sister, or herself, however, became schizophrenic. Peter did. Evidence too shows plasticity.

Donald, the oldest brother at the top of the staircase, and the first to exhibit symptoms. He too was sexually abused by a Catholic priest and family friend. Mimi later berated herself for being so naïve as to let Freudy, Father Robert Freudenstein access to her boys, and the pick of the cookie jar. But she was a Jewish convert to her husband’s faith and he, with his louche ways, seemed a fitting audience for their ascent to the top of society.   

She wanted everything and everyone to be perfect. Fitted snuggly as a glove into the Freudian theory of the psychogenic mum. Her ‘schizophrenogenic’ input poisoned family life. Later versions such as ‘refrigerator mom’ and ‘dragon mom’ still pop up today to explain autism or most other isms. ‘The double-bind theory’ (still with us) argued prim and proper wives were also taking on the husband’s role and easing them out of family life and leaving them redundant, with no place in society.

With brothers threatening to kill each other. Don, who tried to kill his wife, and never gave up trying to find and harass her, to own her. Brian, the fourth brother born and the best looking, was also a musical prodigy. He could have made it big in the sixties band scene. Instead, he was dead. After murdering his ex-girlfriend, he committed suicide. Freud had a lot to answer for but he didn’t put the trigger.

Mary, when she tied her older brother to a tree, wanted to set him on fire. But even as a girl that hadn’t yet reached puberty, she knew it was wrong. She knew she wouldn’t. She was unaware of the anti-psychiatric movement, including Thomas Szass and R.D. Laing’s book, The Divided Self. The counter-culture movement that those that were locked up in loony bins should be set free and those locking them up imprisoned instead, for their damage to the soul of the patients with their frontal lobotomies, insulin comas, shock treatment and mass medication using tranquillisers as documented in Ervin Goffman’s Asylums. Mary didn’t care about any of that. She just wanted a life away from the madness. But it was too much to ask.  

Hidden Valley Road is a battleground over ideas and what it means to be normal. What it means to be insane. How we in society deal with it. Not very well, as the sane ones among us know. The insane one among us quickly finds our default setting of stigma and isolation. It allows me to use that old joke: I’ve a letter from my psychiatrist saying I was to give this to you if you think I’m insane.    

Storyville, The Gene Revolution: Changing Human Nature, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, director Adam Bolt.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000dt7d/storyville-the-gene-revolution-changing-human-nature

In November 2018, reports suggested that scientist in China had altered the DNA of twin girls using CRISPR CAS 9 bio-technology. It would be the first time in history that humans edited the genetic code of future generations.

DNA is usually referred to as the building blocks of life. RNA is DNA’s close cousin. If DNA is god’s handwriting on the world, RNA is god’s signature. CRISPR CAS 9 is a counterfeit RNA of god’s signature.

A tweet from scientist Antonio Regalado 4^th March 2014 summed it up, ‘If you don’t like the DNA you have, just add a little CRISPR.’

The variegated coloured wings of a butterfly could be black or white or any colour scientists of genome engineers desired. Repainting butterflies wings doesn’t repurpose them, they still fly and feed and reproduce. But billions of years of evolution in which incremental life changes in which insects and other species adapt to local conditions in Darwinian survival have been excised and the DNA code overwritten. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane in the biosphere.    

The biology that underpins human genetics shows that underneath the skin we’re all the same. Homosapiens with a bit of Neanderthal. Imagine the moron moron’s President Trump’s paternal German grandparents and his Scottish born immigrant mother were white, but they wanted their grandson to be black to fit in better with crime-ridden dystopian American society where of the 42 million black African American only one chump can be Trump President. Obviously, boosting the moron’s moron’s intelligence is beyond the CRISPR script. No one can, for example, give a definitive account of what intelligence is. It does not have a singular DNA code, in the same way that Jewishism or Protestantism doesn’t. Skin colour, however, is easier to read in the melanocyte cells. Genetic bioengineers succeed in making the moron’s moron a black man and enlarging his tiny groping hands, but his penis remains tiny. But big enough to propagate the species with other black Trumpets. He has won the DNA race to be superman.

The downside, the bits that we can fix later, in the hi-tech world of move fast and break things are that interfering with the Trumpets melanocyte cells means the black President is prone to alopecia and all other aspects of aging—the very thing that CRISPR CAS 9 is trying to turn the clock back on—and more likely to result in early dementia. CRISPR would have made the moron’s moron much the same then, but with black skin. No purebred humans, no eugenic supermen—yet.

Deliverance or disaster?

Take the case of David Sanchez who suffers from sickle-cell syndrome. The HBB gene in his genome ‘reads’ A when it should read T.

Fix it?

Of course, he’s a young adolescent with his whole life in front of him. Tens of millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean die between the ages of four and eight because their bodies cannot process red-blood cells which oxygenate their shrunken bodies. Yet hundreds of millions also have sickle cells and display no symptoms. They suffer less from mosquito bites and malarial diseases because the mosquito prefers healthier blood. It had become part of their commonwealth germline.

CRISPR CAS 9 optimists see a Brave New World in which technology can eliminate malaria, bring back to life extinct coral reefs and herds of whatever you want to call them. We’re already growing meat cell by cell, but you can’t call it pig or cow or poultry or fish. Health Care will be wealthcare with most excluded and locked out. Our NHS will be run by Google or some other tech company that has merged with a biotech start-up that has grown quicker than what used to be called Facebook, which now runs our policing services. CRISPR CAS 9 does not change the superstructure of society it just exacerbates existing conditions.

Few believe CRISPR will create a more equal society. The head start in life the rich already possess will begin even earlier. To be well-born will be to be well-screened and well-to-do. The Darwinian natural order based on will be a constantly updated book of life. Winners and losers. I’m poor, by definition, a pessimist. If your superrich there’s nothing to be frightened of. The long struggle of Galton’s eugenic movement, based on the fear of the tyranny of the common man, is over. Rich people really are better. They can prove it. Read their Genome coding. If your children find themselves on the wrong page—god help them. Concentration camps will be simply were we store things. But they won’t be called that, of course. Replaceable parts, not worth keeping.     

Conspiracy Files: The Billionaire Global Mastermind? BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, directed by Mike Rudin.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0008c6g/conspiracy-files-the-billionaire-global-mastermind

George Soros is a billionaire. In 1992 British taxpayers handed Soros over $1 billion. Soros gambled that the British pound would continue to fall in value. He shorted the pound in the currency market and won his gamble. Britain’s financial loss was Soros’s gain. Soros also happens to be Jewish.

Remember the Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion. The Learned part is optional. It’s the kind of hokum that brings together ideology, literature and eugenics. Jews are subhuman monsters that want to take over the world. Stir in a bit of natural selection and Darwinian influence channelled by the Nazi Party in post-Wehrmacht Germany and you’ve pretty much got the modern version. George Soros is a Jew. George Soros therefore wants to take over the world.

I used to have this belief that all Americans were stupid, I’m not therefore immune to sweeping generalisations. Then they elected the moron’s moron as President. In August 2017 at Charlottesville neo-Nazi marchers were met by anti-fascist demonstrators. James Fields, a neo-Nazi, drove a speeding car at the demonstrators, killing one and injuring 28 people. Brennan Gilmore filmed the speeding car with his phone. If you go online you can read that he was a CIA/ State Department plant for the deep state. Here we have a couple of shock-jocks re-iterating this kind of lie.

LIAR > AMPLIFICATON ONLINE> FOX NEWS > AMERICAN PRESIDENT > LIAR > Amplification

Initially, the American President claimed both sides were to blame. We’ve become so inured to President Trump’s alternative view of the world it doesn’t really register. Now imagine that after the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, the 42^nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, when asked about it, argued both sides were to blame. That’s how far we’ve gone backwards.

There’s nothing new about creating a bogey man, or women. Witches used to fit the bill quite well. The other is not always Jewish. Often he or she is Muslim. Immigrants carrying contagion and wrong-headed beliefs. Terrorists and rapists. That’s the kind of arguments we here in, ironically, largely Muslim Turkey, Italy, Hungary, China, Russia, Britain and of course, bearer of the flag, America. Soros would fit the bogey man position better if he were Muslim and Jewish and, of course, if he arrived off the coast of Cornwall in a ship in the dead of night and turned into a bat. Dracula was a Hungarian Jew. Soros is Dracula.

Soros is Dracula? > Amplification> Fox News> Tweet by moron’s moron, ‘watch your children, Soros wants to suck your blood.’

• Don’t elect a moron.
• Follow the example of the Prime Minister of New Zealand, JACINDA ARDERN, after the mass killings in Christchurch and do not name the gunman. Do not give moron’s a platform to promote hate.
• Follow the example of our European Union leaders and call out and fine corporations such as Facebook and Google by no longer letting they get away with a legal technicality that they are not responsibility for content.

Brexit and fuck-you politics.

Ha-Joon Chang, The Little Blue Book:  ‘Economics is politics.’

Charles Darwin urged the ‘weak in mind and body’ to refrain from marriage. That’s why I never married. Contemporary disciples of Francis Galton’s scientific racism now favour that dismal science of pseudo-economics. Economic racism doesn’t discriminate against the rich. It is premised on it. The poor are feedstock for those that have accumulated land and wealth. A propaganda war, which we used to call ideology, or even Marxism, has been running against those without both for the last thirty years. It’s based on trickle-down economics. That means rich folk saying fuck you, I’m doing alright, whilst continuing to take an increasing share of the national income from the poor. Thomas Piketty, Capital shows with extensive research and an analysis of national figures the feebleness of this approach.  To paraphrase the US giant, General Motors.  What’s good for the economy is good for the rich, or so they keep telling us –ad nauseum.

The demonization of the poor is highly popular entertainment, cartoon demons that can be traced to the loss of the idea of social security. All being in it together. Remember that old David Cameron whopper, from our soon to be, Brexited, Prime Minister. Look at our glorious history. This was epitomised by the idea of homes fit for heroes after the First World War. After the Second World War, Britain led the way with the Beveridge Report and the welfare state and modern states followed our lead.  The American term welfare was exported back to us at great social cost, a  catch-all term and negative imagery carried by association. Prostitutes, junkies, alkies and council-house scum. (See for, example, ripostes from Owen Jones’ Chavs or Lynn Hanley, Estates.) Proof that welfare wasn’t working and dragging the nation down. Poor people,  whipping boys for the private sector and the top five-percent of  Eton educated and Oxbridge sponsored prevailing government ideology. Indeed, like Happy Gilmore with one golf club, they continued to beat all before them, slaughtering the poor, the public sector, and those on welfare while sweeping those before them in election after election with one idea. Rip up the social fabric. Trust us.  Give them less and us more. Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants. A Biography of the Welfare State joked about the Tories mimicking the George Bush, Texas model, and meeting in a closed room and allocating public resources to their chums to run as part of their personal fiefdom. Who’s laughing now? Look no further than the recent debacle of those rich citizens paid rent to build and maintain local-authority schools, and even though bits were falling off, structural damage some cynics may call it, but moving sideways, with a neat trick economists call vertical integration and running the schools they build. This wasn’t called profit, but economic rent. Getting what they were due.  A quick fix was the idea of calling local-authority schools, Academies. In any language this is called monopoly. For all its faults the European Economic Union wasn’t that keen on these ideas, hence their challenge of Google’s monopoly powers to shape choices on the internet. The European Economic Unions determination that companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Facebook that have hundreds of billions in revenue pay some tax. But, of course, London is the greatest money laundering system in the world.   In comparison, try counting on one hand the number of media posts and television programmes depicting the lives of those on benefits, receiving government money. The latest ruse was to show that some of them had the gall to live in houses with more than one bedroom. Smokers. Drinkers. Obese. Round up the usual suspects. If there was such a thing as the Anglo-Saxon English race they were losing was the subtext and war cry.

Enoch Powell’s ‘river of blood’ speech in the late sixties tapped into popular zeitgeist. If they’re black send them back. A group of white working-class men were shown chanting, ‘niggers go home’ on a recent More4 programme, ‘Born on the Same Day,’ which showed the experience of a Jamaican immigrant, Ewart, growing up in multicultural Great Britain.

Remember the signs on private-let housing:

No blacks

No Irish

No dogs.

Add to that list: No DSS. NO WELFARE. NO REFUGEES HERE.

Brexit  tapped into a popular state-sponsored hate campaign.  Racism has long roots. Rudyard Kipling summed it up. ‘All the people like us are, We, and everyone else is They.’ It’s no coincidence that Robert A Douglas in That Line of Darkness, The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War has consecutive chapters on ‘Fear and Loathing of the Underclass’ (the working class) followed by ‘Xenophobia, Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism’ (replace with anti-Muslim rhetoric). It’s worth quoting Douglas below on those nineteenth-century patterns when Britain had an Empire to fleece, patterns which are recognisable today, with spokesmen such as Nigel Farage echoing the same sentiments, playing on xenophobic fears of the other, and being taken up by the Conservative Party and possibly the next Prime Minister, Boris Johnson:

Several commentators worried about Britain’s capacity for assimilating such large numbers and potential economic difficulties; however the more virulent spokespersons fed on the fears of crime, disease and tribalism to lobby for immigration restrictions…

A Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath took Great Britain into the EEC. Another, David Cameron, has taken us out. Britain no longer has an Empire. It no longer has the protection of a market to which we export most of our goods and services. We currently import around seven percent more than we export. That’s one deficit we really should worry about. When trading blocs such as the US and China, and now the EEC, play hard ball with small nations that have little or no leverage who can blame them? For we’ve voted to become a third-world nation. Fear of the other has made us a pariah nation. But the biggest fear is other nations will follow. Then with most countries resorting to protectionism there will be no common market. No market at all. What brought the world wide and general depression of the 1930s to an end was the Second World War. What brought the ideology of xenophobia and the pseudoscience of eugenics to an end was the Nazi death camps. Little England has never looked or felt so small. Fuck you, I’m alright Jack the triumphant calling card. For opportunist politicians such as Boris Johnson (and Donald Trump) that’s the only invitation they need. Fear of the other. I fear these ghoul-like creatures we have voted for most of all.

 

 

The mad, the bad and the sad. Your number’s up.

Suzanne O’Sullivan (2015) It’s All in Your Head. True Stories of Imaginary Illness.

I like stories of imaginary illnesses. Dr Faraday in Sarah Waters The Little Stranger errs on the side of caution and attributes a collective form of psychosomatic illness to the aristocratic Ayre’s family staying at rundown Hundreds Hall, and the subconscious as place and time combine, the equivalent of old cartographers whom declared this be the end of the world, here be ghosts. The coroner at Caroline’s death was quite happy to accept that she died while her mind was unbalanced. I thought it was her body that toppled over the balcony, but there you go, it was her mind. The two are inextricably linked.

Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White has private asylums, doppelgangers and rich hypochondriac uncles that can’t bear loud noise, or indeed most everyday noise, as key parts of his plot.

Suzanne O’Sullivan touches on The Devils of Louden and it’s clear that she doesn’t think there was anything devilish about them. O’Sullivan calls for a compassionate response to those suffering from illness, whether mental or physical, because one impinges on the other. Fling in Abigail Williams from The Crucible. It takes more than one to cry witch, to be heard and collective responsibility must be taken seriously. One of my favourite stories wasn’t directly about the sad, the mad or the bad, but the gullibility of the rich for new fads.

I’m biased in that way. Those that could afford a nurse and private asylum in Collins’s time would be treated far better than those in Bethlem Royal Hospital that coined the term Bedlam.  Just before the start of the First World War a young Winston Churchill was calling for the creation of purpose-built asylums where feeble-minded men and women could be segregated from the general population. Sterilisation of women would be compulsory to ensure they did not reproduce. These measures were introduced in some American states. Eugenics is a rallying call against the poor. I like to listen to rallying calls against the rich. If you want to look at how the poor were treated during the First World War for shell shock Pat Barker’s Regeneration novels shows the dichotomy of how anthropologist, ethnologist, neurologist and psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers treated officers of the ruling class at Lockhart hospital, most notably Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, and how Rivers’s counterparts tortured working-class soldiers until they were reported fit for duty. Post-traumatic-stress disorder treated with electric shocks to make the blind see and the lame walk is nothing new. If you’ve got an imaginary friend you better get on the blower to him quick style.

Julian Barnes short story ‘Harmony’ tells the story of a young musical prodigy Maria, born 15^th May 175-. The child’s health was normal, until she woke up blind at the age of three and half. It was held to be the perfect case of amaurosis, there was no fault detectable in the organs of the eyes, but she was blind. Her condition was attributed to some fright the she received during the night. Her musical education continued and the blind infant prodigy was much sought after in royal courts throughout Europe. M—sought to cure her with magnetism, with some success, but Maria’s parents were not blind to society’s measuring rod and blind prodigy was a mere prodigy without her condition.

O’Sullivan notes that whilst psychosomatic disorders may be thought of an illness of perception, there’s no escaping the damning statistic that seventy percent of such disorders are suffered by women. She draws not just on local knowledge but a wide body of research. A 2011 German study, for example, showed that twenty-two percent of those attending the equivalent of our GPs had a somatising disorder. Somatising disorder means that although the illness the patient comes to get treated for is real enough for the patient those treating the patient can find no organic reason why he or she is presenting those symptoms. The World Health Organisation 1997 estimated that twenty percent of those attending their doctor had at least six ‘medically unexplained symptoms’.  More recent pilot studies in London confirms the WHO’s findings. They are the imaginary friend in the room with doctor and patient. Hollywood is good at this kind of thing. Think The Three Faces of Eve, but the patient has only brought two faces into the consulting room and is presenting with a bit of a cough. Some of the cases presented by O’Sullivan are highly symbolic and could be said to be straight forward. The woman that goes blind and is unable to keep her eyes open after her husband is taken to jail for abusing a neighbour’s child. Women that take pseudoseizures (or dissociative seizures) at work. The language is useful and how the patient describes their seizure has been modelled and analyses to differentiate between psuedoseizures and epileptic seizures. One behavioural, the other which can be accurately measured by EEG. With no increased electrical activity in the brain O’Sullivan asks and answers the question are they real? Yes and No.

O’Sullivan widens the scope to those outside her practice whom she has come into direct contact with. The estimated 250 000 reported cases classified as Myalgic Encephalomylitis (ME) and/or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). Two million CFS cases are documented in The United States.  The disease or syndrome is real enough for those suffering from it. Each new case is looking for a cure, another test, another diagnosis.

The neurologist Weir Mitchell rest cure was a response to Charcot’s definition of hysteria in women extreme fatigue, but geared towards rich men in Philadelphia. The crème de la crème who were thinking too much and suffering from neurasthenia. Patients were force fed fatty foods to build them up. Discouraged from standing. A bedpan was brought to them for their toilet needs. They could not read. Have conversations, or have any type of stimulation. Although this sounds much like my local pub, they were charged extraordinary amounts of money for their cure. If the cure didn’t work, apply more cure.

Our government’s response is  predictable, a wooly response, to place wellbeing at the centre of their strategy; delay of the publication of critical report,  A Five Year Forward View for Mental Health; promises of more money for NHS Mental Health services, a mooted figure of £1 billion to ‘plug gaps in service’; whilst as Daniel Boffey notes ‘incentivising’ the 250 000 with recognised psychiatric conditions to find work by cutting currently classified as disabled from £102.15 per week to 72.40 per week. Using the government’s template those with ME or CFS could be ‘incentivised’ to be cured by cutting disability payments to a more manageable figure of £0.00.

As O’Sullivan notes most ME/CFS sufferers have good reason to be defensive. Whether in or out of employment, they are regarded as the shirkers of the medical system, using up valuable resources that could be used better elsewhere. The government diagnosis of a personal defect poor people suffer from that can be instantly cured by them finding a job and the cynicism of medical staff that grow weary of test after test finding no organic reason for illness and an increasing readiness to find the failing in the patient is a potent mix. O’Sullivan calls for ‘an open mind’ but that door is already closed.

‘Neurasthenia, hysteria, melancholia, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis, yuppie flu, dissociative seizures, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures.’

Hippocrates 200 AD suggested hysteria was too much or too little of something: black bile, yellow bile, blood or phlegm. If any of the four humours were in conjunction the trouble may be the master organ of the wandering womb and the sympathetic responses travelling in spirit form induced in the patient. I quite liked the nineteen-century idea of such conditions being down to engorgement of the nasal membrane, but then again I do have a big nose.

‘So now I’m a psycho, am I?’ asks more than one of O’Sullivan’s patients.

‘This is boring now, I think you should get better,’ Jo Marchant’s father says to his daughter in an extract of her memoir Cure.

As O’Sullivan notes, ‘In the twenty-first century psychosomatic illness is a socially unacceptable disorder’. The media plays its part in carrying the symptoms that are spread throughout the general population. But on the bright side we no longer burn people as witches.  Of course the condition, syndrome, illness or whatever label you want it put on it is a matter of perception and the votes are in. Any right-thinking type would know who can be cured will be cured, the others are psychos. In the same way the First World War the Krauts or Bosche needed more cold steel right up them to be pushed back patients with ME/CFS are a small minority of shirkers that need to find work is finding increasing traction. She is a voice of reason, but she is drowned out by those with louder voices, big sticks and the ability to push their agenda through. When we are told it is not a question of money, we can be sure it is.  O’Sullivan tells us ‘laughter can be therapeutic’. Ha. Ha. That sounds like a cheap option, but more tests will be needed.