Sir, – Consultant psychiatrist Dr Dermot Walsh (October 15th) asks what "conclusions may we draw from a situation where the abnormal has become the norm?"
My own conclusion, for what it is worth after a half century plus scratching my vacuous cranial cavity over the hominid behaviour, like that of members of his own profession, from RD Laing to Thomas Szasz and our own esteemed Prof Ivor Browne, is that our society itself is not a particularly salubrious collective psychological construct; or as Krishnamurti famously expressed it, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
A large part of the problem being that it is far easier to detect individual aberrations from societal norms, and diagnose the symptoms as the disease, than it is to diagnose the diseased state of our collective delusional behaviours (phantom Tiger-worship?) driving the symptomatology of society’s most sensitive individual victims of these collective psychoses.
Nor will Tuesday’s econometric budgetary balancing act, at the expense of our young and most vulnerable, to maintain global resource-speculator stability in the obscene parasitic luxury to which they have dynastically accustomed themselves, rebalance these collective pathologies. But no doubt there will be second, if not seconding, opinions. – Yours, etc,
DAMIEN FLINTER,
Castleview Estate,
Headford, Co Galway.