Guest,

I am more than satisfied with your response and I agree that it is a crime that the Stigma attached to mental health issues and addiction means that they are politically ineffective issues uppon which to campaign or win favour from the public with.

In this regard, they come second to political trump cards like Law and order/paranoia.

There are more votes in telling the ignorant that you'll save them from druggies and schizo's than there are in telling them that you're going to invest more money in trying to succesfully rehabilitate addicts and the mentally Ill.

Consequently (here in the UK), when the health service needs to be savaged to free up more cash, the first target is mental health. Wards closed, staff sacked and initiatives undermined.

It makes me extremely angry when I think about it.


To Refresh my original idea in my mind, I find that the thought was inspired by the following phenomenon.

I had gone through a nightmare and whilst caught up in it I had found that I was becoming more and more susceptible to feelings of rage. A natural enough state of affairs you will no doubt agree.

That rage kind of became normality while my despicable situation continued. Again, a fairly predictable reality.

The weird bit was that after the situation ended, and the rage simmering in me began to subside, I began to feel a craving for it to come back and I would artificially induce that state of mind by focusing on a thought that affected me that way.

I felt a craving for a physical sensation that I expected the feeling of rage to induce.

I used to smoke cigarettes - about 30 a day for about 15 years, but gave up when my daughter was born two and a half years ago. I didn't cut down or phase them out, I simply didn't ever have one more cigarette. I never will now either, because I feel 1000% healthier in every possible way.

I felt the craving physically like a tingle in my scalp, especially when there were other smokers around, but like slag I was simply not interested in having any more.

Interestingly, giving cigarettes up never caused me to be irritable, in fact the first 6 months after giving up were about the greatest of my life as I was completely overcome with love for my daughter and every day with her was heaven (as is still the case today).

Anyway - so I am qualified to assert that I know how a physical/chemical addiction feels. I have also had minor skirmishes with various "recreational" drugs when I was younger and I am therefore also aware of the power that chemicals have, both psychologically and physically.

I can state with absolute honesty that I caught myself one day recently deliberately inducing an artificial sate of rage in myself so as to somehow satiate a physical craving. The thing that stopped me though was again the thought of my little one, for thought she has never had any form of rage directed at her, she must put up with me while I walk around with a cloud over my head, impatient to and intolerant of otherwise innocent behaviour on her part.

The other thing I noticed was that I was having to induce more intense feelings of rage to satiate the craving and that that process was giving me a bloody headache.

Reading this back, I'm actually laughing out loud at myself. I've caricatured myself in such a way that I'm now seeing me as some kind of dastardly dick character from the wacky races.

Anyway, I now enjoy not having a headache so much that, withh a smile in the direction of my litle girl, I consciously and calmly reject the invitation to rage that my brain gives me from time to time.

I feel free.

I have to say thugh iin all seriousness that the craving did feel chemical.

Probably comppletely unsupportable, but I felt worth a shot :')