Garth Dutton

My Views Of Psychiatry

Psychiatrists believe mental illness is incurable, but controllable, so people diagnosed with it are put on medication for life.

The result of this attitude of theirs has been a bonanza of profits for pharmaceutical companies that it almost beyond comprehension.

I have a different view. “If the medicine doesn’t cure you, then it is not worth a cracker!!!”

Many more articles will follow over the next few weeks.

Tags: Mental disorder, Mental health, Psychiatrist, Psychiatry

Port Lincoln Bushfire

Port Lincoln Bushfire
© Garth Dutton, 2010

A few weeks ago 16 suburban houses were burnt is a bushfire at Port Lincoln. The town needs a strategy to stop something like that happening again. The fire swept from highly inflammable bushland into a suburb. Native street trees and native trees and shrubs in peoples gardens were simply an extension of the bushland in fire conditions.

I think a defensive barrier of fire-retardant trees needs to be planted around Port Lincoln. Many deciduous trees are fire-retardant, and many of the species of them which are used as street trees in Adelaide should do the job well as a barrier without the need for much watering. Cretan plane, Caucasian ash, Claret ash, oak and elm would be a start.

With such a fire-retardant barrier in place, people in the town would be able to enjoy their native gardens in safety. Port Lincoln could even have an autumn leaves festival.

Tags: bushfire, Environment, garth dutton, port lincoln, Rant, thoughts, Writing

A Problem With Australian English

Seeing that today is Australia Day I thought I’d put in this article about the use of converting adjectives to nouns in our Australian version of English.

A Problem With Australian English
© Garth Dutton 2009

I have been living in Australia for quite a long time, but Australian English I find to be ‘beyond me’. I have no hope of getting a complete mental picture of the language, because in it a range of adjectives have become nouns.

The only other time I know of this happening is in the field of vicious political and ethic propaganda.

I speak Portuguese English, and in it nationalities can only ever be adjectives. For example, she is Italian, he is Brazilian etc. But in Australian English the equivalent terms are nouns, she is an Italian and he is a Brazilian.

And there the problem lies… In a singular noun you can only ever have one mental picture, and there is no such thing as a single mental picture of someone Italian or Brazilian. Yet Australian people appear to have one.

For a single picture of someone Italian, who would they choose? Someone with black hair and olive skin from Sicily, or someone with blonde hair and blue eyes from Trieste? And who do they see as ‘a Brazilian’? Pele, who is of black Angolan descent, or Ayrton Da Silva Senna, who was of mixed Portuguese and American Indian Descent?

Try as I may, I can find no answer, but I still can’t believe Australians see all nationalities as stereotypes.

I can think of some historical examples where adjectives have become nouns. In the first half of ‘Mein Kampf’, Hitler calls Jewish people ‘Jewish’, which is an adjective. Then he changed his mind and used the term ‘a Jew’ instead. As he now had a noun with only a single mental picture to work with, he created the most vicious ethnic stereotype in the history of propaganda.

The result of the change from adjective to noun was six million dead.

The First World War would have been over at the Christmas Truce in 1914 if the soldiers in all the armies had had their way. Generals and politicians wanted the war to go on and chose propaganda as their weapon to make sure it was fought to its conclusion. So they used the term ‘ a Hun’ to describe the average German soldier in saturation propaganda.

The war went on till 1918 and only ended when the constant barrage of hate propaganda caused German Army morale to collapse.

In the late 1940’s in America, Senator Joseph McCarthy took the adjective ‘red’ and turned it into a noun ‘a Red’. He had one mental picture to work with, so he created a vicious political stereotype of a Communist.

It turned into a ‘witch-hunt’ and many thousands of innocent people were persecuted and imprisoned. But there is one used by Australians of nationalities as nouns that has become dangerous.

Zimbabwe is a multi ethnic nation like Malaysia. There are two quite different black ethnic groups who live there, Shona and Matabele, and a white ethnic group who have no choice but to call themselves ’Zimbabwean’, because Robert Mugabe took away the only other name they had for themselves when he changed the country’s  name from Rhodesia.

The country fought Britain over independence for 14 years, under the rule of white leader Ian Smith, and his black successor Bishop Muzorewa and Australian visitors still insist on calling white people there ’British settlers’. Sadly they have no choice…

They have the term ’a Zimbabwean’ in their vocab and so can have only a single picture, and that’s of someone black. And what do black people on the rest of the continent think of white Zimbabweans?

Ever since Ian Smith declared unilateral independence in 11 November 1965, successive generations of them have gone to work for some years in other African countries, doing essential skilled work for local wages.

Britain has an appalling image in Africa due to the rapacious practices and exploitation  there by British big business. There couldn’t be a more insulting term than to call white Zimbabweans, “British settlers”.

I believe this tragedy for Australian English came about, because of the ‘oath of allegiance’ all primary school children had to take in the 1950’s. They had to salute the flag, then say aloud “I am an Australian.”

At my school, not one immigrant child would say it, because to all of them “Australian’ was an adjective, not a noun. But for the Aussie kids, they went on to call other nationalities by nouns as well.

We don’t want to lose Australian English, because, as a vehicle for rhyming poetry it is in a class all of its own. The only course of action I see available is a major education campaign in newspapers and in schools. Let’s hope the political will is there to do it.

Tags: article, australia, australian, english, zimbabwe

The Blue Tongue Lizard Diet – Report One

The Blue Tongue Lizard Diet.
(Defeating Permanent Weight Gain Caused By Psychiatric Drugs.)
By Garth Dutton.

Report One.

I was first classified as suffering from a mental illness in mid-1995. The diagnosis was ‘garbage’. I had just released my first book of poems called “A Day In Melbourne”, and I showed it to a psychiatrist. Simple as that. In the previous November, I had managed to write 42 poems in one day, that was all it took.

I had reached Melbourne by overnight bus from Adelaide at 8.00 am, and I had all day to spare before I attended an ‘alternative economics’ conference in the evening at Melbourne University. So I decided to see some of the parts of Melbourne I hadn’t seen before. I also decided to try and write some poems called ‘A Day in Melbourne’ as it might sell well there if I wrote enough for a book of them.

So I went by train to Frankston and wrote a series of poems about what there was at various stations and occasionally what there was to see between stations. It was easy. All the poems were short and the first drafts came out perfectly.

I did snatches of Zen meditation now and again to keep a calm relaxed focus when I was observing, and then writing down. Whilst having morning tea in a café at Frankston, I decided to combine all the short poems written on the train into a long narrative poem that is ‘episodic’. I had a full hour and a half in Frankston so I had time to walk to the beach, where I wrote a few more poems.

I then caught the train back to Melbourne and set out on another journey to Belgrave at the south of the Dandenongs, then up and over that range by bus coming out at Lilydale on the northern line, and then back to Melbourne by train late in the afternoon.

As the number of poems written grew I decided to try to write 42, as I had just finished reading The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the week before. In that book 42 was the answer to ‘life, the universe and everything.’ Once I had set the goal I managed to achieve it without difficulty, as everything I had seen on my journeys was new and interesting, and the conference was very good indeed. So had plenty to write about.

No-one in Adelaide had any interest in a book about Melbourne, but it did do quite well there.

With the book I made one catastrophic mistake I am still paying for. I showed a copy of my newly published book to a psychiatrist I had to see once every six months to keep my Public Service pension going. I showed it to him because I was proud of it, and I explained in full about how I had written it.

To my horror, he didn’t believe a word I said. He flicked through the book without actually reading a single poem, then announced,

“It is inconceivable that anyone could write 42 poems in one day unless they were on a ‘manic high’. Bi-polar disorder. Mental illness!”

He put me into a psychiatric hospital, where I was forcibly put onto Lithium Carbonate. I had been 75 kgs for twenty years till then, but on that drug I went up to 106 kgs in 18 months. As of 30th April 2008 I still weighed 106 kgs, and the prospects of ever finding a partner for the rest of my life seemed zero.

All sorts of diets and even a ‘gutbusters’ course had failed.

I decided to use my own way of reducing the weight, based on the annual slow but steady weight loss of the blue tongue lizard, my totem animal in Australia. They semi-hibernate for some of the year in Adelaide’s climate. I decided to do the same.

The results so far have been very good. My G.P. Dr. Dianne Walker is supervising my diet and I got the following information on my weight loss from her on 4th November 2008.

30/4/08 – 106 kgs
6/6/08 – 103 kgs
16/7/08 – 100 kgs
13/8/08 – 99 kgs
10/10/08 – 95 kgs
4/11/08 – 93 kgs

Weight loss so far = 13 kgs in six months.

The diet works! Yippee! More reports will follow. I am now working on my first ‘diet book’. I have 18 kgs of weight loss to go to get back to 75 kgs. At the present rate I should make it in 8 or 9 months. Then I’ll publish my‘diet book’.

So many people are affected by permanent weight gain caused by psychiatric drugs that it should be a best seller.

Tags: Diet, garth dutton, melbourne, mental illness