Aggressive Behaviour

Mentally ill patients don't always have the best of manners.  It's no good being a chaplain in this world if you can't cope with being told to eff off.   You respond, if at all, with something like "I'm sorry you're feeling so upset".  Staff might tell the patient off; which might or might not have any effect.  It might not even be you they think they're shouting at, but some phantom presence conjured up by their psychosis.  Alternatively they know exactly who you are and they really do want you to go away.  Perhaps because you represent the Church and that has bad associations for them; you might remind them of the vicar who conducted Mum's funeral, or the priest who messed around with you as a child.  Or you're another authority figure who is helping to keep them locked up on this bloody ward.  Or maybe it really is something you said.

On a dementia ward there may be no accounting for it.  Vince started swearing at me today, but apparently he was that way out and had been swearing at everybody.  Next time I see him he'll have reverted to his customary civility.  Was he feeling the frustration of being cooped up in a strange place against his will and aware that the words that come out of his mouth don't make much sense even to him, let alone anyone else?  Then there was Nigel, still with the bearing of the foreman he used to be, still wanting to clap his hands and get everyone organised, but there's no context now, and we can't even pretend to comply because his language is vague and disjointed.  Come on, bring it over here and let's have no more of that.  It's all you need to fix get get cracking because you don't see I've warned you ... Nigel is easily distracted but you sense from the gleam in his eye that he'd deck you for whatever misdemeanour you're supposed to have committed if he could stay focussed for long enough.

People like Nigel need to be locked up, in a healthcare environment of course, for their own safety.  Meanwhile Colonel Gadaffy is displaying a different magnitude of aggressive behaviour as he tries to quell the revolution.  Let's see if we're still talking about that in six months' time.  He's delusional, of course, and has been known to be so for a good while; which has not stopped our country and others from supplying him with the very weapons he is now using against his own people. 

There's nothing delusional about our policies: if you supply arms to oppressive regimes they will get used, so they'll need some more.  Or at least further stocks of ammunition.  We've created a market for our own industry, and the fact that it's an industry dedicated to destoying things and killing people is incidental.  Cameron would not put it like this, but he's a PR man concerned only about presentation.  He'd talk about defence and security: for which, in a Libyan context, read torture, censorship and secret police.  

Having lived through Thatcher, Blair, Brown and now Cameron I've become convinced that an essential qualification for high office is a cavalier disregard for the truth.  Politicians lie so frequently they barely realise they're doing it, and if they do tell the truth it will only be for strategic reasons.  For me it all goes back to the Bomb, which doen't deter, doesn't defend, can't be used this side of Doomsday and is therefore a criminal waste of money and human resource.  Politicians have had to learn how to lie about that, and the habit has spread to other areas, to the point where it's as well to assume you are being lied to unless there is clear evidence to the contrary.

Meanwhile, back among those who are supposed to have mental health problems ....