that post about not being allowed to stay over for dinner at other people's houses going around has the entirety of western europe in the notes both defending it and saying "we don't do that here idk what some of you are on about" so i think the conclusion that can be drawn from all this is that some of your friends' families were just rude cunts lmao

Just a Casual Writing PSA

NOTES: Hey there, it’s your friendly neighborhood Ro with some writing advice in regard to international travel. International travel is fun and exciting and can make a story really interesting, however, if you’re writing about international travel and you’ve never done so yourself, you may over look a few things when you’re writing. Here’s just a list of things to consider coming from my own experience as an international traveler who has done more transatlantic flights than she can count and has been to twenty-five different countries (and counting.)

TIMEZONES

* Timezones matter and they matter a lot, especially when you’re crossing oceans or even crossing the United States for that matter, considering the country has FOUR different times. The difference between EST and GMT is five hours. This matters.

* Think about the time zone you’re traveling to, most airlines are reasonable and land during reasonable travel hours (5am-11pm), so if you’re going to London from New York, it’s unlikely for you to have a direct flight in the afternoon since you would be landing at 1am-3am in the morning. If you want someone to leave in the afternoon, it’s not impossible, but if you’re doing that, there is a 90% chance that there’s a layover involved somewhere. You’ll probably have a layover in Philadelphia, Boston, Reykjavik and Dublin. Think about that.

* Exception to this rule, of course, is Ryanair and budget airlines. I’m speaking from experience here. I once took a flight from London to Athens and got to Greece at 3am and it was the fucking worst. Only Ryanair is ballsy enough to pull this bullshit, but Delta or American Airlines wouldn’t.

JET LAG

* It’s real and it’s horrible and you feel like death. Your brain is literally mush. I’m not normally a coherent person after doing a seven hour flight and dealing with people when I should be in bed

* Jet lag can be somewhat combatted with sleeping on your flight, but it isn’t fool proof. Also, people with high anxiety might not be able to sleep on planes due to the motion of the plane. Some people can sleep after taking medication, but there are some people medication does not work on. This is me. Hi, I’m an anxious flyer and it sucks.

* It takes some people time to acclimate, the bigger the time difference, the longer it takes. Jet lag can linger for more than a day. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not functional, but you’re definitely not your best.

* A common practice if you’re traveling to a different time is to force yourself to stay awake until it’s appropriate to fall asleep (roughly around 8-9pm), so travelers might find themselves awake for more than 24 hours and it’s exhausting

CUSTOMS/BOARDER PATROL

* They’re annoying and time-consuming, especially if you’re traveling to countries where you need a visa or if you’re going to the United States or United Kingdom with or without a visa. Customs takes an annoying amount of time, especially if you have to fill out customs forms, which you definitely do if you’re traveling to the US, the UK and sometimes even Canada.

* If you’re non-EU or UK, it’s going to take you roughly 40 minutes to get through British customs. Sadly enough, it’s the same way on the way back into the United States IF you’re a citizen. Note, however, if you’re dealing with a citizen and they’re returning to a country, some countries (the UK and most European countries) have what is called E-Gates, which is why you scan your passport without seeing a boarder agent. It’s fucking cool.

* When you have to deal with a customs officer, they generally ask you questions about where you’re coming from, how long you’re in the country and where you’re staying. Some countries will request a finger print, which is something that will be on file if you have a long-term visa.

* Oh! If you’re using Eurostar to get to around Europe, your passport will be checked and stamped BEFORE you get on the train. This is not always the case in some instances, but it is especially true when traveling to and from the United Kingdom via train.

TRANSPORT FROM AIRPORT

* From personal experience, most airports I’ve encountered are on the outskirts or a good trek away from the city center. An average transit time I’ve found to be almost universal from airport to city center is generally from 30 minutes to 1 hour.

* If you’re writing about coming and going from New York - JFK and LaGuardia are in Queens, which seems not too far from Manhattan but if you’re traveling from Queens to Manhattan, it’s exhausting and annoyingly longer than it should. It can take you a good 40 minutes to an hour regardless of car, train or bus. Don’t let Google Maps fool you. Your ass will sit in traffic. It’s going to be at least 40 minutes. That’s if you’re lucky.

* With London, London has six airports. The most popular are Heathrow and Gatwick. If you’re traveling from either one to Zone 1 (the heart of the city), it’s going to take you at least 40 minutes whether by train (Tube or Eastern Rail). However, if memory serves correctly, it takes about 20 minutes for the Heathrow Express to go to and from Paddington Station, but I wouldn’t say that’s close to the city center (I’m talking King’s Cross, Liverpool Station and London Bridge here)

Anyway, I hoped this helped. Happy writing!

Bibi and Rotem

Thanks to Rotem Sela, an Israeli actress, model, and TV personality, we can learn a lesson about Zionism, nationalism, racism, and the Israeli and American Jewish Left.

Here is what happened: Miri Regev, Likud loyalist and Minister of Culture and Sport, noted that if Netanyahu’s main opponent, Benny Gantz, were to form a government, he would have to include anti-Zionist Arab parties in his coalition. Sela, on her Instagram page (because that is how actresses, models, and TV personalities communicate), said, in part (Hebrew link, my translation):

My God, there are also Arab citizens in this country! When the hell will someone in this government broadcast to the public that Israel is a state of all of its citizens? Every person was born equal. Even Arabs, God save us, are people.

PM Netanyahu responded as follows (also my translation):

Rotem my dear, an important correction: Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people – and only them. As you wrote, there is no problem with Arab citizens of Israel – they have equal rights with everyone…

In Israel, the reaction to Sela’s comment was predictable – anger on the Right and agreement on the Left (and yes, Gal Gadot expressed her support for her friend Sela in a relatively non-political way).

The usual suspects in America, J Street, If Not Now, the New Israel Fund, the Israel Policy Forum, and others, were on it like one of those Israeli hopping spiders on a cockroach. “Racist,” “undemocratic,” “cynical,” “morally repugnant,” and on and on. If Not Now referred to “racism” not once but twice in their statement.

I wouldn’t have called Sela “my dear,” but Netanyahu’s response was otherwise entirely correct. Even without the Nation-State Law, Israel has never been a “state of all its citizens” as Sela, who is supposed to be well-educated, asserted. Like Japan and numerous other countries, but unlike the US, Israel is a nation-state, a state in which – or by which – a particular people or culture expresses its right of self-determination.

The USA was defined by its founding fathers to be a state of all its citizens (although it took some time before it was ready to accept all of its legal inhabitants as citizens with full rights). Israel, on the other hand, was created to be “the state of the Jewish people,” while at the same time it endeavored to provide equal rights to all of its citizens. One way to understand this is to say that there are “civil rights” – the right to vote and hold office, education and employment, and so on, and “national rights,” which include the symbols, languages, and religions of the state, and – particularly important in the case of Israel – the objectives of encouraging immigration from the national diaspora and maintaining a national majority.

The nation-state law explicitly affirms the intention of the founders that national rights in the State of Israel belong to the Jewish people, and to nobody else. It does not limit the civil rights of national minorities. Rotem Sela doesn’t seem to understand this distinction. Netanyahu does, which may be one of the reasons he is PM and she is a fashion model.

This is nothing new, and it is neither racist, undemocratic, fascist, or morally repugnant. Nationalism and nation-states are out of fashion today, particularly in Europe, whose European Union is a (failing) attempt to replace those things with a universal government, and among the American Left, which is in the grip of the pathological ideology of “intersectionalism” (this will require a dedicated post).

There is a reason that Israel’s founding fathers defined it as the nation-state of the Jewish people and not something else, and that is the Zionist understanding that only in a majority Jewish state with Jewish symbols, culture, institutions, government, police, military, and so on can Jews be guaranteed a normal life and freedom from oppression without giving up their Jewishness.

This was the conclusion drawn by the early Zionists, from on the historical experiences of their people. It was further confirmed by the Holocaust, and the mass expulsions of Jews from Muslim countries following 1948. Today it is being confirmed yet again by the worldwide resurgence of antisemitism, even in places like the US and the UK where it had been thought to be dead. And it should also be clear that even without anti-Jewish violence, in places where Jews are a minority, they will be silently swallowed up by assimilation.

The definition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people has both symbolic and highly practical consequences. It justifies the use of Jewish symbolism in the flag, the national anthem, the symbol of the state, and so forth. It justifies the decision to observe Jewish holidays as national holidays, and to use the Hebrew language. But most important, the Law of Return for Jews (and no one else) is grounded in the understanding that Israel is the state of the Jewish people. It is the most concrete expression of national rights possible.

This isn’t “racism” (although by current American standards, who knows what that means?). It is nationalism, in particular Jewish nationalism, or in short, Zionism.

If Israel were to be redefined as a state of all its citizens, as the extreme Left and many Arab citizens want (and Rotem Sela appears to believe has already happened), what would be the justification for a Law of Return for Jews? Why shouldn’t there be one for Arabs? Why should Israel act as a place of refuge for persecuted Jews such as the Jews of Ethiopia, or even European Jews fleeing antisemitism? Why would it be important to have our capital in Jerusalem?

Israeli critics of the Nation-State Law (including Benny Gantz) have said that they would like to add a statement to it guaranteeing “equality” to all citizens of Israel. This is a bad idea. Equal civil rights for all are guaranteed by other basic laws. The Nation-State Law is the only one that specifically deals with national rights, and adding a statement about equality to it could be interpreted as diluting its force. It would be like the recent action of the American Congress, which diluted-to-death a resolution about antisemitism by making it a catch-all statement against every kind of bigotry. Even the antisemites were then able to vote for it.

The reactions of J Street, et al., illustrate that they are not only critical of Israel’s actions, but that they are critical of the most basic foundation of the Jewish state, the Zionist idea itself.

Thank you for helping clarify that, Rotem.

Abu Yehuda

Birth Name: Yulia Antonovna Vorobieva [traditional russian naming conventions have been followed for this name, given, patronymic, surname–not tom mention the gender rules have also been followed, which is rare in this fandom. points to the mun for this.]

Current Name: Julia Null Mayfair [wtf kind of middle name is null? as in she HAS none? or…? okay special snowflake, dial back the linkin park] Callsign: Phoenix [speaking of special snowflake…. in my experience, the best fucking callsigns are literally the ones where you looked at a random object and went “that”… like “coffin” or “stiletto”.] Rank: Agent Specialty: Intel Allegiance:  Captain Price [price has like 3 friends…. soap, macmillan and sandman–but then I’ll bet you’re in the 141 (which evidently has a cast of thousands), so I guess that counts. sort of.]                      Yuri Alkaev                       Task Force 141 [do I get bonus points?]                       MI-5                      Gary ‘Roach’ Sanderson [yeah. you and the rest of the fucking fandom. wtf is y’alls fixation with a pair of arms????]                      Alkaev crime family Past allegiances: MI-5 Section H Date of Birth: January 13th, 1981 Age: 34 (Variant) [this is a reasonable age for SF. good on you] Place of Birth: Leningrad, Russia (Now St. Petersburg) [clearly, the mun gives a shit about their character’s country of origin] Face Claim: Jennifer Connelly [normally, we don’t judge good or bad on FC’s or art, but DAMN GET IT GURL] Height: 5’9”/175 cm [thank you for not being a midget like the rest of the female OC’s I deal with Weight: 130 lb/59 kg [ur dying. eat something. not skinny shaming here, just trying to save a 5′9″ woman’s like because christ, she’s like skin and bones] Hair: Black, falls to waist Eye: Pale blue [join the club. are they shimmery like crystals or chilly like ice?] Ethnicity: Caucasian Sexuality: Demisexual

Character Profile-

History - 

Born in St. Petersburg to an apparently single mother, Yulia Vorobieva’s earliest years were reportedly average. Her mother, Dominika, took care of Yulia to the best of her abilities, supporting herself and her daughter through her work as an artist. The child was raised in a home that was by all accounts happy, until her mother’s sudden death in an automobile wreck in 1986. After this, Yulia fell off the radar for nearly ten years once taken in by her father. More is known about her father’s actions during this time than Julia’s own. [tragic backstory time–though so far this one’s pretty tame… we shall see.] Vorobiev, a former Spetsnaz operative [of course], tuned to mercenary work upon his dishonorable discharge early in his military career. Apparently unsatisfied with the direction his life was taking, the young soldier turned to political activism in his spare time, becoming a noted supporter of anarchy. Known to have had a hand in several riots and violent demonstrations, he spent much of his late twenties in jail, and eventually separated from his wife. Upon Dominika’s death several years later, Vorobiev took custody through abducting his daughter before returning to a stronghold in a largely uninhabited section of the Ural mountain range, near Usva village. [ngl, kinda intrigued and also wondering why an anarchist activist living in the mountains would want his daughter at all–what a fucking pain] The reclusive man, now a leader in the Eastern European anarchist movement, led a private war against the governments of several countries, funded through illegal activities that included drug trade, human trafficking, and extortion. For nine years, the anarchist leader was unable to be found, untouchable by the west and his own countrymen. [I’ll bet he also abused her. wanna take that bet?] In early 1997, Yulia was once more sighted, after nearly a decade missing.  Soldiers from a specialized task force were sent to neutralize the threat posed by Vorobiev, and were successful in their assassination. The only reported survivor of the massacre in the Anarchist leader’s stronghold was a young girl, later to be identified as Vorobiev’s own teenaged daughter. [because those dudes wouldn’t have shot a child by accident in all the gunfire or on purpose because they may or may not have been fucking psychos to assault a bunch of Russians in a fucking mountain base] When brought in for questioning by the Russian government, the girl was said to have been skittish and dis-associative, traits that would later lead to a PTSD diagnosis. [join the club, they have jackets (and husbandos like Soap)] Showing signs of severe abuse, [THERE it is! I knew it. her father only wanted her so he could abuse her and give her to his men, probably. I’m actually surprised the bio doesn’t go into that, ‘cause they usually do. thanks for sparing us] Yulia was questioned, but refused to speak. With Americans and the British clamoring for the information that the girl might have, and distrusting the only recently post-Soviet Russian government, both offered to hear the girl out. [because the CIA and MI6 are so willing to wait for information–they often make offers to teenage girls. my eyes are rolling into the back of my head. Yulia accepted the offer presented by the English, on her own terms. She woulbe given asylum, UK citizenship, and be given the name of a soldier involved in the raid on her father’s base. [here comes princess sparklebeans, the super soldier] Yulia shared what she knew, had most of her terms met, and was eventually turned loose to a series of group homes to try and rehabilitate the nearly feral child back into normal society. [but she was able to comprehend such a deal from the british government, despite being Mowgli] After several years being passed between foster homes, struggling with society and her education, Julia finally aged out of the system and entered college, studying to one day join MI-5. From the day her father died, the girl seemed to have made it a goal to find and help the man that had, in her own words, freed her. Once out of school, Yulia, having renamed herself Julia Mayfair, filled a small opening in MI-5. The team she joined were mainly desk jockeys, tasked with making sure no Ultranationalist threats entered the UK, and any that did slip through were dealt with. [How’re a bunch of pencil-pushers gunna accomplish that, I wonder?]

Julia found herself satisfied with her work, if lacking in some areas. Her various neuroses and social anxiety made for poor field work, at least where getting close to others was concerned, but her skill for manipulation showed through in interrogations and problem-solving. Quick-thinking and sharp-tongued, Agent Mayfair soon proved herself a valuable asset whilst in the Grid, and proved eager to please her superiors. Most were, however, concerned by Mayfair’s apparent lack of a personal life, something that was scrutinized greatly in her time with the secret service.

Joining the 141 - [Haven’t we discussed ladies in the 141? Seems like I’m always harping on this.] After more than a decade of successful work for MI-5, Julia’s career was pushed into an exciting new direction: Looming unemployment and lawsuits. [You have my attention.] After having gotten violent with a particularly physical young soldier outside of a club, an event that ended with the man maimed, Julia was facing several charges, including assault. Awaiting charges, General Shepherd approached the interrogation wunderkid and offered to make her legal struggles vanish if she would just work for the 141. Knowing the man who saved her life had moved on from the SAS to the 141, she accepted willingly, desperate to see the man that meant so much to her. [wait, this’s Price, right? Also how the fuck-shit-stack did she know ANYONE on the roster of the 141–unless Shep used it as leverage? But why would he do that, or care? fuck, man…. just… fuck]

In the 141 / Thread Interactions - At first, the woman seemed an odd fit for the elite task force [what with being a… WOMAN an’ all], with no formal military training [ lemme guess, she’s bad with guns and only uses knives and–okay I’ll stop] and national origins that made her an easy target. While her skill was in no way doubted at first, her social capabilities once again caused no small amount of issues in her daily life on base [but I thought she had no formal military training–that’d be where I’d start doubting]. Her victim-like bearing attracted much trouble, including an incident where Julia was assaulted by a particularly ill-tempered soldier for speaking against him. After a spectacularly botched mission in Romania, Julia was kept away from action for the foreseeable future. With more time on base, Julia realized she would have to find a place to belong. [in Price’s bed, I’m guessing] Befriending a local civilian [idk if they let these psychos “offbase” on their “downtime”… I fucking wouldn’t] by name of Yuri Alkaev, Julia slowly started to adapt to her new life. The tipping point between the timid woman who entered the 141 and the more capable person she has become came one night in a drunken fit. Julia rather harshly called out the soldier who assaulted her for her wrongdoings upon discovering she was not the only woman who had faced his wrath. Despite backlash for her actions, Julia felt herself justified, and walked with a bit more confidence having been able to face her enemy. Having made several friends out of coworkers, Julia seems to have truly settled into the 141, no longer being an FNG or a total outsider. Still, the taste of being able to have power over someone left an impact on Julia, who found herself wanting more respect in the months since her calling out of the sergeant. Having stood by the 141 loyally, Julia has proved a capable worker and asset to the 141 intelligence department, giving her all to help her coworkers to win the fight against militant Ultranationalists. Her true allegiance is not, however, to the 141 itself. With a devotion to Captain Price [OH FUCK here it is.] that most would call unsettling, there is no doubt where the woman’s loyalties lie. Her strong relationship with her career tends to highlight her lack of a personal life, of which some rumor is made among fellow intel operatives, but little is ever brought up to Julia directly.[Lemme guess, because she’s so scary.]  Regardless of Julia’s devotion for the older captain, her loyalty to Yuri has proven nigh-unbreakable, especially after he supported her growing want for power. Yuri’s recently being revealed as working for Vladimir Makarov, before defecting from the Inner Circle and agreeing to work against his former employer, has prompted frightful changes in the woman. Her adoration of Yuri, no matter how pure, has set her down a path that no one could account for, where she plays a bit closer to the Devil than the 141 would ever allow. If anyone in the 141 was made aware, there is no doubt she would be branded a traitor, perhaps even executed for associating with public enemy number one. [Lemme guess, bich gon’ sleep with him]

Julia’s work with Makarov is a closely guarded secret, and the only ones aware are the two involved and Yuri. Even Julia cannot say for sure if her dealings with the Ultranationalist leader are a play for power, or building towards revenge for the man she considers brother. Survival has, as ever, been an important goal for Julia, and her communications with Makarov could be a way of ensuring no matter who wins the coming war, she has the connections to survive and gain power. Love for Yuri, however, makes her eager to tear Makarov apart, and it is just as likely her dealings with the man are simply a diversion until such a time as she can avenge the horrors her brother suffered. [How the fuck do these girls get close to this fuckin’ dude?!] As it is, Julia stays several steps ahead of both members of the conflict, entertaining her own ideals and goals for the present.

After noticing several discrepancies in pre-existing files, Julia was brought to the brink of questioning her mental state. Had she disassociated and misread the files the first time? Had she uncovered some sort of plot? Upon bringing her concerns to General Shepherd, her career savior seemed less concerned than she would have preferred, but he seemed to have taken note of her anxieties worsening. Deciding that the woman was dealing with some sort of cabin fever brought on by her desk job, the General pushed her towards more work in her field. [Does that… happen? “Ur getting bored behind ur desk so go shoot some bitches”]

It was through cooperation with her old allies in MI-5 that Julia began her work to expand the 141’s sphere of influence. By making professional alliances with a noted Secret Service agent that had once outranked her, as well as cultivating a friendship with a certain MI-6 operative of some infamy, Julia has made herself a well-connected woman of growing influence.

Now tied up in a web of her own devising, Julia believes herself to have the connections and means with which to survive no matter the outcome of the gathering storm. The greatest threat to her security now is the possibility of her schemes being uncovered, her life now hinging on if she is unveiled as a traitor or not. Many have said the games she plays have made her her father’s daughter, comparable to the monster that destroyed her, but Julia is above such ‘mindless prattle.’

She does what she must to survive, just as she always has. You can be brutal without being cruel, she has decided, and that is the shade of difference between Vorobiev and his daughter.

Repeating such a thought helps her sleep more easily, when she has the time for it.

Characterization-

Personality: When it comes to Julia, the first thing thing to come to mind will be either hard-working or frightening. After a long stint being too afraid to speak up or be seen, Julia has finally begun to shake some of her timid nature while working for the 141, mainly through anger. Once she was too nervous to speak to others, and can now find it in her to order others around. While far from being over the trauma that caused her previous behavior, she is at least able to work around her shy nature now, if only in anger. Julia puts her all into working, and will be the first one into the office and the last one out. She enjoys the distraction from her thoughts that her work offers, and in addition has a real passion for her chosen field. The work is fun, at least to her, and she enjoys pouring over documents and trying to decipher the enemy’s next move. Despite Julia’s growing sense of self-importance, she has a kind heart to those she deems worthy, and will gladly help others if she is capable. She looks out for her own, and would do anything for those who earn her trust. Showing herself to be reserved, professional, and helpful, Julia is considered a great asset to her department. Despite Julia’s virtues, she can also show a sharp tongue and a lack of mercy to those that wrong her. Unforgiving and obsessive, Julia can make a terrible enemy, and has put her skill as an interrogator to use tearing down those who have hurt her. Deeply haunted by her nightmarish childhood, she clings desperately to those that show her respect and affection, and her loyalty runs deep to a fault. She does not give up on her views of others, and is set in her ways. A habitual liar, it is unlikely anyone really knows the woman beneath the snowy exterior, and Julia wears her lies so comfortably that it is unlikely anyone will unless she allows it. She is known to smother her own issues and carry on as best she can without sharing her problems, until she inevitably breaks down. Even as Julia grows into her voice and her view of herself, she still shows remnants of her previous nature, including anxiety that she cannot shake no matter how she tries. This anxiety is often leveled at those men who approach her, and crowds in general. Single-minded to a fault, Julia’s hardworking nature easily turns to a workaholic nature, and she can and will run herself ragged over work that needs doing. [Okay, fairly well-plotted and in-depth tbh] Skills and abilities: Shepherd tapped Julia for the 141 mainly due to her astounding skill at interrogation. [Maybe I missed how she went from desk work to “interrogation” and what happened to being savage without being cruel?] The woman has a talent for dressing people down to their bare bones, and can talk the unprepared into anything from confessing their crimes to even suicide. She can play any number of roles to ensure cooperation from her targets, and can have even the worst men eating out of her hand with a little time and effort. She also has a sharp mind, which is infinitely useful for her career. She is meant to decipher possible Ultranationalist movements and motivations, and is a good logical thinker. Her critical thinking and problem solving are impeccable. Julia is a more than capable hunter, patient and good with a knife. [I almost gave this my OH GREAT ANOTHER KNIFE SPECIALIST treatment… except this is just extra, so I’ll let it pass.]A childhood spent hunting in the wilds of the Ural Mountains have honed her skill to a fine, knife-like edge, though this skill is hardly necessary in her new life. Habits:   Julia has picked up a habit of smoking when stressed, though only in extreme situations. She has a habit of fidgeting and picking at her clothes or toying with her hair and fingers when nervous. She tends to flub English turns of phrase regularly. Strengths:  Julia is very good at manipulating people, which is invaluable in her line of work. Personally, she proves incredibly resilient to trauma and the darker aspects that the world has to offer her. [Well, at least she’s admitted she’s manipulative; extra points for using it consciously…] Flaws:   Julia’s obsessive nature is a double edged sword both personally and professionally. She holds those she cares for too tightly, and refuses to let go of work when given it, no matter the cost for either.

History -

Education: College graduate, Newcastle University alumni Previous employment: MI-5 Section H (Anti-Ultranationalist Unit) Prior stations: Thames House Service record: Operative and Intel Analyst for MI-5 Conduct record: Assault (wiped clean upon joining 141) Parents: Anton Vorobiev, terrorist/anarchist leader/ex-Spetsnaz, deceased                  Dominika Reznova, [Wait... like Reznov? Viktor Reznov? STOP] artist, deceased

Health-

General health: Good constitution, though lacking in stamina; Healthy. Physical build: Thin, fragile [And thus Shepherd said “yes, I want this waif on my team of burly badasses…. or not] Physical illnesses: Anemia [Same applies.] Mental illnesses: PTSD, Social Anxiety Disorder, Insomnia, Nightmare Disorder [join the club, ya special snowflake] Scars: Long, ugly scar running deep from under her right armpit to the bottom of her ribs, gained as a result of falling out of a tree as a girl; Small circular burn scar on neck from being careless with a curling iron in college. Health record: Admitted for a near overdose on prescription medication in 2002.  Medications: Prazosin, Zoloft. [Not in SF, darlin’. That ain’t gunna fly. Hell, I don’t think you can be on that shit in the regular military, either… much less a highly-selective, super-elite, semi-para-military outfit like the 141] Possible handicaps in the field: Low stamina, weak. Possible handicaps in daily life: Anxiety; Haphephobia (Fear of touch); Erotophobia (Fear of sex) Dietary restrictions: None Allergies: Penicillin [good, this a believable, common allergy]

JK Rowling, Paul Kalanithi, John Grisham, David Baldacci, Bill O’Reilly. These people have a few things in common: they are the authors of Amazon’s five best-selling books of 2016; they all made millions of dollars for their publishers; and they are all from English-speaking countries. As English becomes ever more predominant as the world’s lingua franca, works written in English increase their stranglehold on the global literary scene.

It is acutely difficult for a ‘foreign’ author to break into the English-language market, where only 3% of the published works are translations from other languages. Even the world’s fourth most populous nation is struggling to have its voices heard: despite Indonesia being Southeast Asia’s most prolific literary nation, producing tens of thousands of books per year, its most renowned authors remain relatively unknown to the wider world.

Yet before Indonesians can even contemplate access to the vast English-speaking market their books need to be translated – and that is often where the problems begin.

“I think there’s a critical mass of very good writers [in Indonesia] who deserve much greater exposure, but they are only going to get that exposure if their work is translated well,” says Gill Westaway, a freelance translator and editor who lives on Lombok island, Indonesia.

Most Indonesian authors realise that the financial rewards of being translated and ‘making it’ in the English-speaking world are limited – the vast majority of Western authors also struggle to make a living solely through writing books – but the benefits of the increased status for authors and the country’s literary scene in general are incalculable.

“I think it’s very important [to get translated] because there aren’t many potential Indonesian readers compared to those who read in English,” says Ratih Kumala, an Indonesian author who has written six works of fiction, including a novel that was translated into English as Cigarette Girl. “Indonesia is a small country in the world, and nobody knows the Indonesian language unless you have lived here for a long time.”

Leila S. Chudori, an experienced journalist and author who has written several anthologies of short stories and last year had her novel Pulang translated into English and titled Home, also advocates for reaching more people but cautions against writing for the wrong reasons.

“If you think you want to write because you want to be read in America or Australia and want to be translated into 20 languages and want to win the Booker Prize… I’m afraid it will be contrived.”

Perhaps the greatest showcase to date for Indonesian authors came in October 2015, when the country was the guest of honour at the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair, which attracts more than 7,000 exhibitors from 100 countries and up to 10,000 journalists from around the world. First and foremost, this stimulated Indonesian publishers, who realised they might be able to sell rights abroad, and it also resulted in hundreds of translations into English and German.

Yet business has reverted to something like normal. There are hundreds of publishers operating in Indonesia, most of them tiny, and it is increasingly difficult for them to survive in a market where a large print run is 3,000 copies of a book and profit from sales barely offsets production, promotion, distribution and marketing costs.

According to many Indonesian writers at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (UWRF), there are numerous paths to achieving the status of ‘published author’. Some had been picked up directly by a publisher, others had self-published, and many had been approached by Indonesian-speaking Westerners interested in translating their work. Meanwhile, online publishing on-demand is also becoming a key avenue for Indonesian authors, who send manuscripts directly to such a company, which then prints copies to order – whether one or 1,000.

The two publishers that stand out, particularly for authors looking to break into the English-language market, are Gramedia and Lontar. “Gramedia go for the media with a mass commercial appeal, because that is going to bring in the money – even though there is not a lot of money in it. Whereas Lontar go for a more literary bent – not necessarily trying to capture the big market. Depending on your raison d’etre, there are different criteria for which books get chosen,” says Pam Allen, associate dean at the University of Tasmania and a widely published Indonesian-to-English translator who works with Lontar.

Gemi Mohawk, an Indonesian poet who ghosts around the UWRF wearing his trademark all-black clothing and hat, had his second collection of poems published as a book titled Indonesianus by an individual benefactor who simply loved his work. Prior to this serendipitous meeting of minds, however, Mohawk had received short shrift from the local publishing industry.

“When I tried to publish my book through this major publisher, it was rejected because I hadn’t published any books before, and because I am not a famous person. But how could I publish a book if I cannot publish my first book?” says Mohawk.

According to John H. McGlynn, the American co-founder of Lontar and someone described at the festival as the “godfather” of literary publishing in Indonesia, similar problems persist for authors who wish to step onto the international stage. “Almost no foreign publisher will publish, without financial subsidies, translations of anything other than best-selling or award-winning novels,” he explains.

Nevertheless, there have been breakout stars. The current international poster boy for Indonesian literature is Eka Kurniawan, whose first novel, called Beauty is a Wound in English, has been translated into 28 languages. His second book, Man Tiger in English, was named on the 13-book longlist for the Man Booker International Prize.

Yet even Kurniawan’s route to the pinnacle of contemporary Indonesian literature was a fateful combination of many factors, including undoubted talent, perfect timing and first-rate translation – while an endorsement from legendary Southeast Asia scholar Benedict Anderson, and the presence of a noted literary agent, Pontas, did no harm either.

“Indonesian literature is kind of obscure in, say, a global literary scene, so it’s not easy,” he says, pointing out that his first two books, which have received glowing reviews in the West since being released there in 2015, were actually written 14 and 12 years ago respectively. “It took a very long time until finally there was one publisher from the UK who wanted to publish [my work].”

Jennifer Lindsay, a translator for the weekly Indonesian magazine Tempo and former lecturer in Southeast Asian literature at the National University of Singapore, says the clamour for marketable works is not only counting out certain novelists, it is creating an environment in which the very best Indonesian writers are being ignored completely.

“The novel as a form is such a European fixation, and it’s not necessarily where the best writing is. It skews what kinds of things are translated, it skews people’s view of the variety of writing in other languages,” she says. “I would say that a lot of Indonesia’s best writing, really good writing, is in short forms and also in plays… not necessarily the forms that are going to get them the big attention in the Western world.

“To turn the whole thing around, if English wasn’t the dominant language, who the hell would have translated James Joyce or any of those experimental writers? They wouldn’t. They’d think: ‘Who the hell is going to read this stuff?’”

Even for authors whose work does eventually find a home with a Western publisher, often the struggle has just begun. Any work of literature that is translated, in any language, is doomed to lose something of its original essence or meaning. However, most authors at the festival, from international success stories such as Eka Kurniawan to localised talents like Gemi Mohawk, seemed to agree – some more begrudgingly than others – that it is a price worth paying for a potentially larger audience.

Ratih Kumala remembers the deep anguish she felt over the translation of her book Gadis Kretek, which became Cigarette Girl in English. The problem, for her, lay in the treatment of the word kretek, a particular type of cigarette flavoured with cloves and intrinsically associated with Indonesia.

“I was a little bit disappointed actually,” she says. “I wanted to keep the name kretek, or clove cigarette, because this is a very special type of cigarette in Indonesia. But my editor and my translator wanted it just to be titled Cigarette Girl. Deep down in my heart, it was just – it’s not the same! It’s not the same. But in the end I had to let go.”

Perhaps the largest problem faced by Indonesian authors seeking exposure beyond their own shores, however, is that the general standard of literary translation in the country remains very low.

“A high level in the quality of translation is and will always be the single most important factor in Indonesia’s success as a source of international-quality literature,” says McGlynn. “Unfortunately, not only are translators dreadfully underpaid; by and large, their skill is rarely recognised.”

Indeed, the art of translation is massively undervalued in most cultures, and it is rarely acknowledged that a good translator needs to have literary flair of their own. Add the fact that Indonesian is far from a commonly learned language in the Western world and, suddenly, finding someone who combines the requisite literary flair in their native tongue with fluency in Indonesian – and is willing to undertake a huge task for relatively little remuneration – becomes rather difficult.

Even Gramedia, the country’s largest publisher, is struggling. One translator at the UWRF, who asked to be quoted anonymously, described the majority of Gramedia’s translations as “appalling”.

There is, however, only so much that Indonesia’s private publishers can do without concerted support from the government. Recognition of the importance of the creative industries is undoubtedly lacking in Indonesia – and even more so across the majority of its Southeast Asian neighbours.

“It needs the country’s hands there. It needs the involvement of the government, because this is serious… First, governments should think that literature is important. If you don’t think that literature is important, nothing will be done. Second, writers are important, and third, translators are important,” says Kadek Sonia Piscayanti, an Indonesian author who started her own independent publishing company. “So, if these three sit together, I believe that there are so many talented writers… [but] you cannot do it yourself; you have to be helped by a systematic structure.”

According to McGlynn, the government can take two tangible steps to promote Indonesian literature: set up a committed and long-term programme to fund translation, and ensure Indonesia is represented at overseas literary festivals and book fairs – an exercise that is prohibitively expensive for most Indonesian publishers and authors.

Until something changes, it seems that even the country’s most successful contemporary author, Eka Kurniawan, is destined to see overseas success as something of a surprise, and not readily attainable, even for a country with such rich storytelling traditions.

“I think it’s more like a bonus for me,” he says. “Of course, there are many, many readers outside Indonesia, but I still write stories, first and foremost, for Indonesians… It’s not easy to translate literary work, but I think that just because it’s not easy we cannot give up on this. It’s very important.”

Free, ready for the adventure but alone.

In my late teenage years I had an irrational fear of being alone, a fear that slowly engulfed my entire being, rendering me unable to comfortably walk home alone from university, go to a party before at least one other person that I knew had arrived or to just be with myself for more than thirty minutes. The only time I found solidarity to be some form of a pleasure was during an overnight shift at work, where there were other people working throughout the same building or while sleeping but only if there was someone else in the house or apartment. Actually, the only time within my day that I was completely alone and somewhat comfortable with being alone was when I was driving. Driving allowed a calming affect to fill my anxious mind letting me relax until some dickhead did something to piss me off.

My fear became so overwhelming that I found myself sub-consciously planning my days activities with who I could go with and if I were to venture alone, then the rest of the time preparing myself for the task at hand. I didn’t and still don’t understand the fear nor did I realise I was even suffering from it until later in my life. I only remember that I had this all over nervousness feeling and I was always overthinking that people or things were around me but not actually there or even true.

I do not and have never suffered from being nervous for the usual reasons that someone might find themselves affected; I was a confident public speaker, I loved performing off and on the stage, I was a strong competitor in many different sports some at an international level and I was never afraid of my opinion being heard. But put me in a room alone with just me, myself and my overthinking mind and you would open the door to find me just as a child that was scared of the boogieman under his bed would have been, scared, unable to sleep and a blubbering mess.

I am really unsure whether other people caught onto my fear or if it was even obvious that I was struggling with it.

At the end of my university studies, I was one of the lucky fifteen to be selected to represent the school in a performance to open the biggest circus competition in Paris, France. As a graduating student that was eager to perform in Europe with my art, I decided that after the performance instead of going back to Australia with the rest of the troupe, I would remain in Paris to experience the European way of life, see the architecture and art establishments and finally make a comprehensive decision to, if I were to enjoy it, find work and stay here to start my life.

My family were supportive of the decision, even though they didn’t really have a say in the matter; it was in my mind that I was going, was something that I wanted and I was going to do it, supported or not. They were understandably nervous for me; but I didn’t feel nervous or scared. Maybe it was the excitement of finally seeing Europe, maybe the chance to perform in Paris or the opportunities that it may have created. Maybe the unknown of what lay ahead blocked all the feelings of the enormity of the task I had set myself. The date of departure crept closer and closer and looking back at the situation I was confident and stupid, which is a dangerous mix.

    Side note: to anyone looking to travel and maybe stay in their country of choice to work or live, make sure you do all your research into the correct visas to stay and work within the country. Don’t do what I did and just wing it!

Departure day and I said my goodbyes to my family and friends for a unknown amount of time, boarded the flight with the rest of the crew but was not seated next to them them as a close friend had organised special treatment for me, putting my seat closer to the front of the plane. Before take off, I was introduced to the captain, head of the cabin crew and Stephanie, my cabin crew assistant that was there if there was anything I needed during my flight.

I made my final call to my friend thanking him for the strings he had pulled and then to my mother, who was already crying and just before I started to cry I was asked to turn off all electronic devices. It is funny how a long-haul flight of 32 hours can at moments feel extremely short. The first four hours were like five minutes, with the excitement of leaving, the wonder of what it was going to be like and a bottle of champagne, you are a little drunk, eat something and finally pass out. When you wake up dying for some water, you look at your inflight map to see that you have finally left Australia. I remember looking around the cabin and almost everyone was sleeping as it was around 3am in Melbourne and that is when the letter my mother had given me just before walking through security telling me to “read it on the plane” passes through my thoughts.

When on a plane I find it to be a very individual experience, even though you might be with friends or a lover, you’re in a way alone. You have your own chair with t-v screen just for you and that only you can listen too. This creates a “personal space” that if you’re luck will remain your own personal space. You eat alone, sleep alone and are in a way alone, even though your neighbour can be only 10cm away from you in the next seat.

I totally make a “personal space” bubble when on a plane and only break it to go talk with the stewards when I cannot sleep (this always puts you in their good books). Once aboard I find my seat, keep what I need for the flight at my feet and stow my other carry-on, greet my neighbour which is normally quite short as with long-haul flights as they are wanting to sleep or if they are like me binge watch as many movies or series as possible before the flight ends.

But for now my mind was fixated on the letter. Opening the seal was like opening Pandora’s box; not knowing what dangers lurked within. My heart was pounding and I was already on the verge of tears, adding to the time it took to break the seal. Finally, I ripped the envelope open just as you should rip a Band-Aid plaster off, quick and painless.

It was a hand written letter, a couple of pages long and made me cry before I was even a quarter of the way through. With the conclusion of the last “I love you and already miss you” smudged by a tearstain, I was a mess and ugly crying.

Ugly crying is when you’re not just shedding a tear that rolls down your face but when an event leaves you coughing, spluttering and sniffing. You are short of breath unable to breathe like you have been hit in a chest or are winded. There are certain places that it is ok to ugly cry. A funeral, the emergency room at a hospital and in your living room after the scene in Armageddon, when Liv Taylor has to say goodbye to Bruce Willis, her father, so that he can save the world from a giant asteroid that is on a crash course with the Earth. But to ugly cry on a plane…

My pitiful display was broken by the light touch of Stephanie’s hand, she embraced me briefly before saying that “she would be back”, returning with another bottle of champagne. Four movies, two meals and a swap of planes later saw us less than an hour from our destination, Paris.

Once in Paris there was so many new experiences that I don’t even have words to describe how amazing they were. The Louvre, Eiffel Tower and Arc De Triomphe are all breath taking. But it was the little things that really made me fall in love with Paris. It's bakeries especially the baguettes and croissants, the ease and accessibility of its public transport, the city’s architecture, the rudeness of the locals and when I was there it had and continued to snow.

There is something wonderful about snow in a city, it is wonderfully beautiful, it’s so white and pure. When we first arrived we had left 40 degrees in Australia and arrived in Paris with -6, for people that have never experienced this before it is like walking into the freezer or cool room at your local supermarket but you are outside and you can only escape it by retreating inside.

For the week we were in Paris as a team, we rehearsed all together and when we had any amount of free time we explored the Parisian tourist destinations. The performance went superbly, 4000+ spectators, watching 15 Australian circus artists open one of the biggest circus competitions of the world.

Before I could think of what had occurred in the past week, it was time to say goodbye to my colleagues and for the first time in my life I was completely alone, seventeen thousand kilometres from home, my family and friends and my mother tongue language. I stood in my little Parisian apartment and I had never felt more free, scared and motivated. There is something about being completely alone in a foreign city that liberates you. You can decide to do what your heart desires. You can sit and watch the world pass you with your espresso and croissant. You can decide to visit a museum and spend endless hours watching and re-watching the masterpieces, the same masterpieces that a few days ago you had to miss, as others wanted to be somewhere else. You have you and only you to worry about. No need to consider what other people wanted within the group, no need to wait in places you didn’t want to be, do the things that the group wanted to do but you were not fond of. There was no need to creep around your apartment in the night or worry that someone could hear you having sex. I was free, ready for my adventure and alone.

It has been almost four years since my first departure date. I have travelled on countless flights, visited most of Europe and have been to countries that I would have never dreamed of visiting. I have had three different visas for three different countries to try and remain in Europe, numerous immigration interviews and a denial into the UK as they thought I was looking to stay illegally. I have lived in the most expensive hotels and with not a Euro or Dollar to my name. I have been part of a company and was used in five different performances taking me to all parts of Europe, the same company that used me almost kaput and owes me €10,000. I have been in charge of a group that performed from Israel through Europe and the USA. I created a company and a show together with some close friends; we have produced, sold and performed it throughout Europe. I went back home to Australia to organise my Italian citizenship, so that I can remain in Europe. The continent I wanted to and have created my life in. I have travelled the world with my art and will continue to do so. I have left everything I knew including all my family and friends back home to pursue my dream. It was the hardest task I have ever set myself, a task I had no idea the outcome of or the difficulty it incurred to achieve it. But with everything, the good and the bad, I am a better person. I have learnt from my mistakes, grown from experience, met some amazing friends and people I consider my European family. For the most part of my adventure, I had to overcome my fear and accept that I was going to do this alone. I spent a lot of time alone, something I now treasure instead of cower away from.

A dream, goal or ambition is something you aspire too, something that seems impossible. To make the impossible possible, you must go through life’s twisted journey that will give you the highest of highs. And then when the lowest of lows arrive and you’re broken and ready to give up, you and only you have to find the reason why you began all of this. Remember the hard work you have put in, the supporters you have and your ambition. But the biggest motivation I had was the realisation of how far you have come. To achieve a dream, ambition or goal will take everything you have within you, but that’s the best part, it is within you.

Privileged lives matter: the British opponents of cancel culture and their very debatable motives

I agree with Sarah https://t.co/NmY6jKBcyi

— Adam Boulton (@adamboultonSKY) July 9, 2020

Fox host's writer quits after racist and sexist online comments revealed https://t.co/wkxaXbJRAQ

— Guardian news (@guardiannews) July 11, 2020

Isn’t it a disgrace that you can’t express all your half-baked saloon bar prejudices without someone wanting to make a deal out of it? This is not the way that the self-declared opponents of cancel culture put their case of course, but then, they are being pretty incoherent.

Let me help Sarah Vine and Adam Boulton, though both of them really should know better, being eminent political journalists and all that. A libertarian approach to this question would run as follows. Anyone could say whatever they liked. Any employer could sack any employee for whatever reason it chose, including whatever he or she might have said in the past. And anyone else could either lobby the employer to sack the employee or boycott the employer for having sacked the employee.

This is pretty much the system that operates in the USA. It has much to commend it as a system, but it has to be accepted that it has led to some ferocious culture wars. Off the back of a similar imagined threat, Toby Young has set up something that he grandly calls the Free Speech Union, supposedly offering to protect the livelihoods of those who come under similar attacks here.

There are Indian street hawkers who buy tattered banknotes for a discount off the naive who don’t realise that they retain their full face value. The Free Speech Union appears to be pulling a similar stunt.

Because this is not America. The employment relationship in the UK is highly regulated and the UK is separately subject to human rights legislation (though since the shrillest opponents of what they deem to be cancel culture are all on the reactionary right, it’s no surprise that they don’t advertise the way in which this helps them). Employers can’t just channel the spirit of Ayn Rand and dismiss employees. The employment tribunal awaits such cavalier employers. It would not deal with them kindly.

Dismissed employees can claim unfair dismissal in relation to either the process or the substantive reason for their sacking. The list of fair reasons is finite and short, and the only one that could normally apply is “some other substantial reason”.

Following a case in the European Court of Human Rights in 2012, the ECHR made it clear that a proper balancing act would need to be carried out that fully weighed the right to freedom of speech. It’s worth noting that the case, Redfearn v UK, was a pretty unattractive case. Mr Redfearn was a bus driver for SERCO. He was also a member of the BNP. 70-80 percent of SERCO’s customer base and 35 percent of its workforce were of Asian origin. Mr Redfearn was elected as a local councillor for the BNP, following which SERCO summarily dismissed him.  

The ECHR by a majority held that the British government had, by limiting claims of unfair dismissal to those who had served a qualifying period of employment, failed to protect Mr Redfearn’s right to freedom of association in its employment law protections (It did not need to decide whether his right to freedom of speech had similarly been breached, but it seems apparent that its logic would have been identical if it had). Its starting point was “there is also a positive obligation on the authorities to provide protection against dismissal by private employers where the dismissal is motivated solely by the fact that an employee belongs to a particular political party”. The essential part of its decision was as follows:

“Even if the Court were to acknowledge the legitimacy of Serco’s interest in dismissing the applicant from its workforce having regard to the nature of his political beliefs, the policies pursued by the BNP and his public identification with those policies through his election as a councillor, the fact remains that Article 11 is applicable not only to persons or associations whose views are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also those whose views offend, shock or disturb… For the Court, what is decisive in such cases is that the domestic courts or tribunals be allowed to pronounce on whether or not, in the circumstances of a particular case, the interests of the employer should prevail over the Article 11 rights asserted by the employee, regardless of the length of the latter’s period of employment.”

In other words, it will be unfair dismissal unless the employer has such a substantial reason that the desirability of protecting the employee’s human right to free expression is overridden. That is a pretty high bar.  

In reality, most employers are not going to be interested anyway. If you’re otherwise adequate at your job and you haven’t got the company’s three main clients on the phone screaming blue murder, why would they care? I mean, really? Most of you can carry on tweeting to your 803 followers, secure that you aren’t going to bring the temple down on your own head.

The Free Speech Union has been going for quite long enough for its founders to be fully aware of all this. So why are they screeching ever louder? Sherlock Holmes would deduce that this bell-pull was a rope. It certainly doesn’t seem to be for its stated aim. 

The most public sacking for political views in the last few months was of a Labour mayor who expressed the (extremely tasteless) view that Boris Johnson deserved to get coronavirus. The Free Speech Union was apparently mute when her employer dispensed with her services. Only some free speech matters, it seems.

Entry level cynics would assume that it was merely a star vehicle for Toby Young. That seems too guileless to me. There is a much bigger play going on here. What’s really concerning this army of eminent journalists, who are in absolutely no danger of losing their jobs, is that to date they have formed part of an elite that determines the range of acceptable views. For the first time, they’re being bypassed. Worse, they and some of their chums in the public eye are being directly challenged.

They don’t like that. They’ve become accustomed to being opinion-formers.  They’re not ready to become opinion-takers. So, in a cowardy-custard last stand, they’re affecting concern for the little people at supposed risk when expressing their views.

It won’t wash. First, the little people who are actually losing their jobs for expressing their views are conspicuously few in number and that number is not obviously growing. Secondly, it’s hardly a new problem (but these commentators were apparently entirely unconcerned when it was ethical vegans, loony lefties, CND-supporters and gay rights activists whose employment was threatened in previous generations). And thirdly, as a matter of simple observation, the ability of little people to express their views and to communicate them to a wider world, no matter how crazed, outré or offensive those views might be, has never been greater.

So the commentariat need to stop using the general public as human shields to avoid accountability. This whole fake row is simply a sign that the great and the good of the fourth estate feel the hot breath of an articulate and newly-empowered public on their necks.  Good.

Alastair Meeks

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from politicalbetting.com https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/07/19/privileged-lives-matter-the-british-opponents-of-cancel-culture-and-their-very-debatable-motives/ https://dangky.ric.win/

Music and Politics Rant

This is a long one. If you're looking for the TL;DR version, sorry oh denizens of Short Attention Span Theatre, there isn't one. This is cross-posted from my other blog. My oldest (Thing 1) and I recently had a debate over the relative musical merits of Kate Bush: I think she has merit, Thing 1 thinks she does not. It was one of those debates and ultimate disagreements that reasonable, educated people have that, far from being destructive, add the sort of spice to life to keep it from being an unrelieved death march. I'm not a fanboy for anyone, including Kate Bush. I long ago started thinking of her as the Charles Ives of pop music: a pile of interesting ideas that often deliver something significant but at least as often get in each other's way. Like Ives, people tend to either love her or hate her and have legitimate reasons for both positions, but tend to simply entrench for "reasons." And this sort of "debating" got me thinking (a dangerous prospect). The whole discussion with Thing 1 started when I watched a 2014 BBC documentary on Kate Bush. I thought it was pretty well done. It showed a number of intelligent, talented people who find merit in Bush's work. It interviewed Lindsay Kemp, who still had four years left in the tank at that point, and showed his influence on art rock at the time (basically everybody from Bowie on) (It also showed a couple of other things, perhaps without meaning to. It showed through Kemp's gestures the extent of mime vocabulary's influence on what might be characterized as "gay mannerisms", Kemp being a dancer and choreographer with heavy mime influence, having studied with Marcel Marceau. It also shows the difference between European artists and intellectuals and US pseudos. In the interviews, several people casually remark on having seen Kemp's "Flowers", based on Jean Genet's "Notre Dame des Fleurs". You would be hard-pressed to find any in the US to this day, outside of core LGBTQ+ culture, who have heard of Kemp, "Flowers", or even Jean Genet other than by reference.). And then toward the end it shows why rock critics as a group are ignorant, vicious little parasites. More on that below the fold, wherever the Hell that might be. Once upon a time I was in newspapers, and one of the things I did was write music reviews. It was a paycheck, and as I’ve noted elsewhere, I’ve always been closely involved with music. I wrote by two rules: 1) Be consistent, and 2) make it about the music on its own terms. On the first point, it doesn’t matter if the readers agree with you; they just need to know what to expect from you. If they know you don’t like a particular artist or a particular type of music, they can read you through the appropriate filter. The second point breaks in two. First, it’s about the music, not the people. I did not savage Van Halen because they were pricks who brutalized the little people who had to service their every whim. I went after Eddie Van Halen (who let’s face it was the real core of the band) who went shredding up and down the fretboard at random with no regard for chordal or modal structures (In fairness to Mr. Van Halen, he no longer plays like that and is a far superior musician than when every blockhead with a K-Mart electric six-string thought Eddie was God and gave us a generation of speed monkeys with zero musicianship.) (The speed monkey syndrome unfortunately spread to other instruments. It was the overwhelming norm among the Celtic fiddlers who followed Bonnie Rideout to Ann Arbor and insisted on playing faster than their talents, compensating by dropping notes out at random, and then blaming all the rest of us for all the ensemble issues. To all of you, I give an eternal, “Fuck you and the banshee of an instrument you tuck under your hiply stubbled chins and rape with your bows.”). Second, you have to put it in the music’s own frame of reference. It makes no sense to pan a Metropolitan Opera performance of Cosi fan Tutte because it isn’t a Black Sabbath concert. I realized early on that almost no rock music critics could grasp either of my rules (From this point on, you may assume that “Robert Christgau is a wanker” is flashing subliminally in the background.). From the beginning of such things, Rolling Stone has been the center of rock criticism (I just damned near wrote “crock recidivism”. I’m not a nice person.). It has also been the center of what is wrong with rock criticism for just as long. These guys were groupies. They were wannabes who couldn’t cut it, so they hung out with the guys who could, basking in the limelight. The reviews weren’t reviews, they were hagiographies. “The music must be great because I party with these guys.” “They must be significant because I party with these guys.” Everything was on a chummy, first-name-only basis (“Mick and Keith were really rockin’ it Thursday night.”) that became the norm for roughly forever (Cam Crowe slipped a screamingly funny joke about The Rocket’s review style in his movie Singles.). As tastes changed and their substance-abuse buddies died, faded away, or became arena bands (and now nostalgia bands playing the Peppermill in Wendover), Rolling Stone found itself unsuccessfully playing catch-up, jumping on every bandwagon that rolled down the street in a desperate attempt to get in front of The Next Big Thing and failing miserably. If it weren’t for Matt Taibbi, that rag would have no reason to exist. In the 70s other rags stepped into the breach, but they took the Stone’s style sheet and were all clones of one another. They couldn’t comprehend my rules, either. I remember one of these rags (probably Circus, but who honestly gives a shit at this point, they were fungible) going after every Harry Chapin recording because it “wasn’t rock.” Well no shit, Sherlock. Chapin wasn’t a rocker, he was a folkie, self-proclaimed, and condemning him for not being what he wasn’t was…well…not even wrong. Congratulations, rock critics, you just earned Stephen Frys’s second-greatest insult, right after “I almost care.” There was one exception to the Clone Wars: Creem. But that didn’t make it good, just different. Admittedly, Creem was covering a lot of things no one else was, including the early days of punk and all that was happening over at CBGB. But my gods the pretension. Memo to Lester Bangs: Just because you covered something doesn’t mean you invented it. Just because you came up with the label “punk rock” doesn’t mean you created punk rock. Punk rock was created by garage bands (US) and pub bands (UK) (I always envied the UK guys because no matter how, frankly, BAD you were, there was someone willing to book you. Here in the US? Not so much. Although you could always get homecoming and prom gigs if you were just another shitty cover band.) (Punk was spawned by my half-generation, the Late Boomers. The reason was simple: We were fucking sick and tired of the hypocrisy of the Early Boomers, our big brothers and sisters. They were the 60s Children, the Flower People, and they were still peddling that bullshit even though the wheels had fallen off the wagon and there was a global recession. They accused us of being self-centered for not “working for change” like them while they busily leveraged the huge advantage of having sucked up everything before we ever got on the scene. They took their 60s, corporatized, commoditized, packaged, and slapped a smiley face on them, and expected us to swallow it all without question. The problem was that we just didn’t believe hard enough in the dream. Meanwhile we were saying, “The fuck? Our dreams hit the wall at 110 per in Fall ’73! The wreckage is everywhere, but you dicks and everybody else is just stepping over it like it isn’t there!” We wanted to wave our private parts at them, so we did. Which is a long way of telling you Millennials that, if you lump the Early and Late Boomers together, your ignorance is showing. Yeah, there are plenty of Late Boomers who sold out [You hear me, Barry Obama? You sold us all out, but history will always remember you fondly because you landed between the Texas Turd Tornado and Hitler 2.0.], but we were the first ones to face the New Normal you folks are now dealing with. You need old wise men and women for your villages? Trust me, we’re available in hordes.) As yet another aside, there were garage bands, and there were garage bands. None of us were very good, but most of us wanted to improve to something resembling competency. The early punkers simply didn’t care (Hell, a lot of them, such as the New York Dolls, were so bad they made The Kingsmen sound like conservatory virtuosos. And the Noo Yuck critics, apparently on permanent bad acid trips from frequent visits to Andy Whore-wall’s Fucktory, kept rubbing out one after another for them all. “Daringly campy!” “A raw, animal sound!” Shit-shoveling by rapidly deteriorating white guys desperate to continue being perceived as bleeding edge.). Fortunately, this only lasted a few years before a lot of the punkers decided it maybe would not be so inauthentic if they actually learned how to play their instruments. I don’t care what John Lydon continues to blow out his ass, Black Flag was never boring. But I really can’t leave the topic of pretension without a mention of The Village Voice, the self-proclaimed font of all things cool and hip for over six decades and running. In reality The Village has been overrun with gentrifying yuppie scum straight off the set of Thirtynothing since before Rudy Giuliani parked his malignancy in the Mayor’s Office, and The Voice has followed suit. And Robert Christgau was at the center of it all. It has never ceased to amaze me how someone so admittedly ignorant could be such an expert on everything. He admits he is “not at all well-schooled” (understatement) in 50s and 60s jazz, yet he has reviewed jazz artists such as Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and Sonny Rollins without any of that context and has declared Frank Sinatra the greatest singer of the 20th Century (A meaningless statement. How can you compare Sinatra and, say, Pavarotti? You can’t, and anyone with a lick of humility and two brain cells to rub together doesn’t even try.) while apparently ignorant of Nelson Riddle’s role in creating Sinatra’s best albums. He was an early promoter of punk, right through all the “authentic vs. poseur” wars, blissfully unaware that this was not a rebellion unique to punk but rather was a recurring fight in music, most recently before that in the “this is jazz/this is not jazz” that started with the rise of bebop after the Second World War, that caused a butt-ton of damage to the genre, and that Miles Davis was a pivotal player in until he finally got over it and put on that shiny red leather suit and released Bitches Brew, which Christgau unironically nominated to Jazz & Pop as jazz album of the year in 1970. He considers the New York Dolls one of the five greatest artists of all time. Please. The Dolls were influential, true, and for two reasons: 1) Their show was cheap and entertaining and so readily copiable and copied, and 2) their musicianship was so crude a half-trained baboon could cover it. Not exactly reasons to put them in GOAT contention. Finally, Christgau doesn’t like and is nearly completely ignorant of classical music. This tells me so many things, but two bubble immediately to the surface: 1) He has neither the music history nor the music theory to hold 90% (at least) of the opinions he’s been paid for over the last half-century, and 2) he’s a shallow little shit who needs to sit in a corner and STFU. And believe it or not, all that was just a warm-up to get around to John Harris. Toward the end of the Kate Bush documentary is a roundtable discussion of her latest album (Aerial) by several UK rock critics, including Harris. Harris makes the remark that the music sounds like something you’d hear in a department store and that it’s obvious Bush hadn’t been in a studio for 12 years. I’ll start with the statements themselves and then turn to their wider ramifications. Department store music? I’d like to know where Harris hangs out that this is the ambient Muzak. Let’s chalk this one up to hyperbole and move on to the “12 years” remark. He doesn’t really elaborate on this (not entirely his fault, given the roundtable format) so we can only speculate on his actual point. Do her pipes sound rusty? Not really. Does the technology sound dated? No (And trust me, I keep up. It’s not like I sit around listening to Sergeant Pepper’s going, “Oh wow, they played those tapes backwards!”), and even if it did, that would be one to lay on the producer and the engineer. Is the music dated? An ambiguous word, “dated”, but I’m afraid we’ve finally reached what Harris was driving at. By “dated” do we mean it doesn’t sound like other music being produced now? First, when has Kate Bush ever sounded like anyone else, and second when did sounding like everyone else become a standard of musical quality? It hasn’t and it shouldn’t, but I’m afraid this is the point Harris is trying to make. Perhaps, though, he meant this sounds like her old material. Saying that an artist is repeating themself is a helpful criticism, especially if you explain why you think so. Frankly that’s a point I can agree with; I find a certain sameness in her work since Hounds of Love. But that isn’t even remotely what Harris says. He says she sounds old-fashioned, which is never a useful comment, merely a pejorative one, and worse, a pejorative aimed not just at the artist but at the listener. You are listening to old-fashioned music. You are old-fashioned. You are outdated. Catch up! Under the best of circumstances, this is unmitigated bullshit. Coming from Harris, it is unmitigated bullshit that is part of a career full of it. Harris’s cred as a “serious person” essentially rests on his 2003 book The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock (repackaged in 2004 as Britpop: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock) and the follow-up BBC Four 2005 documentary The Britpop Story. His thesis is that 90s Britpop was the last great shining moment for UK pop. No, really. At this point, let facts be placed before a candid world. The UK has been a popular music powerhouse for quite awhile, and by “powerhouse” I mean a global influence. Let’s start arbitrarily with Gilbert & Sullivan, pass the baton to Ivor Novello, and then to Noel Coward. The Second World War made hash of it all, and the post-war generation found that the US had stolen the baton, but rather than going gentle into that not-so-good night, both the rockers and the mods invaded the US and stole much of the thunder back. This continued into the 70s, whether you’re talking about arena bands, metal, prog rock, or punk, and on into the 80s, again whether you’re talking about power pop, synthpop, or New Wave. Big influences that can still be heard around the world. Compare Britpop. The whole point of Britpop was to be a calculated foil for Grunge and as safe and marketable as possible, the perfect theme music for the Tony Blair years. It has so little edge it couldn’t leave a mark on a piece of talc. Its influence has been negligible except as a template for profitable pap. In 1997 the whole sham came unraveled as Oasis released the bloated disappointment Be Here Now and Blur abandoned the field to join the US “lo-fi” movement. Their lasting influence is Coldplay, and let’s be honest, if Coldplay is your gold standard, I’m afraid you actually have a pyrite mine. But Harris thinks Britpop was the shining end of UK rock. There are a number of holes in this assertion; two are glaring. First, there are still plenty of new bands in the UK churning out good stuff (That Harris seems blissfully ignorant of these bands makes me wonder just who is out-dated and needs to catch up.). Look them up yourselves; I’m not falling into the trap of naming a few here. Suffice it to say they’re diverse, and you’re likely to hit on several you consider acceptable regardless of your musical tastes. They’ve even been having an influence in the EU, but we’ll see what Brexit brings (Influence in the US? Not so much since we have reached a level of insularity here that rules out anything beyond our borders having merit, in spite of having access to it all on The Interwebz.). And these bands have a Hell of a lot more to offer than the Britpop slag did. Which brings us to glaring hole two. As noted previously, Britpop didn’t really have an impact. None outside of the UK, and damned little in the UK on any time scale longer than the life of a mayfly. Britpop was a nothingburger with a side of flies and a So? Duh! Harris, though, raises this localized, ephemeral phenomenon and turns it into the last scion of the UK pop tradition. This should just be considered a bad case of the sillies, except that Harris’s new schtick is political commentary, especially for The Grauniad. In keeping with The Graun’s policies, his position is “Support Remain but maintain that ‘both sides have merit’.” Which raises his Britpop position from silly to ironic, because Harris’s thinking on Britpop (“It was important in the UK, ergo it was IMPORTANT!”) is just the sort of insular, UK=World mentality that made Brexit possible. Brexit happened, for the most part, because of a bunch of people who believed that, whatever the puzzle was, the UK was the only piece that mattered. Harris’s elevation of Britpop on so high a pedestal rests on the same belief, even though he’s a Remainer. So it’s unintentionally ironic. It’s symptomatic of a malignant mindset. And it’s still silly. And so I give you Christgau and Harris, Exhibits 1 and 2 in my case for the beyond-uselessness of rock critics. And the former is still being allowed to write revisionist histories of the music of the last half-century while the latter is still being allowed to…well…write. What a world.

R. E. Kendell, The distinction between personality disorder and illness, 180 British J Psychiatry 110 (2002)

Abstract

Background

Proposals by the UK Government for preventive detention of people with ‘dangerous severe personality disorders' highlight the unresolved issue of whether personality disorders should be regarded as mental illnesses.

Aims

To clarify the issue by examining the concepts of psychopathy and personality disorder, the attitudes of contemporary British psychiatrists to personality disorders, and the meaning of the terms ‘mental illness' and ‘mental disorder’.

Method

The literature on personality disorder is assessed in the context of four contrasting concepts of illness or disease.

Results

Whichever of the four concepts or definitions is chosen, it is impossible to conclude with confidence that personality disorders are, or are not, mental illnesses; there are ambiguities in the definitions and basic information about personality disorders is lacking.

Conclusions

The historical reasons for regarding personality disorders as fundamentally different from mental illnesses are being undermined by both clinical and genetic evidence. Effective treatments for personality disorders would probably have a decisive influence on psychiatrists' attitudes.

Background

The legislative background

Psychiatrists, and perhaps British psychiatrists more than most, are ambivalent about whether to regard personality disorders as mental illnesses. Until recently, there was no compelling reason for attempting to resolve the issue, but the situation was transformed in 1999 when the UK Government made it clear that it intended to introduce legislation in England and Wales for the compulsory and potentially indefinite detention of people with what it called ‘dangerous severe personality disorder’, whether or not they had been convicted of a serious criminal offence (Home Office & Department of Health, 1999). It is likely that some of these people, almost all of them men, will be detained in prisons and others in high-security hospitals. However, the European Convention on Human Rights, which was incorporated into UK legislation by the Human Rights Act 1998, prohibits the detention of anyone who has not been convicted by a competent court unless they are ‘of unsound mind, alcoholics or drug addicts or vagrants’ or their detention is ‘for the prevention of the spreading of infectious diseases’. This means that, to prevent a successful judicial challenge, the Government will have to argue that the potentially dangerous men it wishes to incarcerate are ‘of unsound mind’, and this means maintaining that they have personality disorders, and that personality disorders are mental disorders.

At present English mental health legislation, which dates from 1983 but had its origins in the recommendations of a Royal Commission in the 1950s, distinguishes between mental illness and psychopathic disorder, but the Government intends to abandon the concept of psychopathic disorder and introduce a new ‘broad definition of mental disorder covering any disability or disorder of mind or brain’ which will cover personality disorders as well as mental illnesses (Department of Health & Home Office, 2000).

Implications of the term ‘personality disorder’

The term ‘psychopathic’ was coined by the German psychiatrist Koch in 1891, and he said firmly that ‘even in the bad cases the irregularities do not amount to mental disorder’ (Lewis, 1974). What Koch meant by mental disorder, however, was largely restricted to insanity and idiocy, and his concept of ‘psychopathic inferiorities’ embraced most non-psychotic mental illness as well as what we now call personality disorder or psychopathy. Even so, Kurt Schneider subsequently argued that personality disorders are simply ‘abnormal varieties of sane psychic life’ (Schneider, 1950), and therefore of little concern to psychiatrists, a view that is still influential in Germany today.

Many — perhaps most — contemporary British psychiatrists seem not to regard personality disorders as illnesses. Certainly, it is commonplace for a diagnosis of personality disorder to be used to justify a decision not to admit someone to a psychiatric ward, or even to accept them for treatment — a practice that understandably puzzles and irritates the staff of accident and emergency departments, general practitioners and probation officers, who find themselves left to cope as best they can with extremely difficult, frustrating people without any psychiatric assistance. The reasons for this attitude were explored by Lewis & Appleby (1988). Using ratings of case vignettes by 240 experienced psychiatrists, they showed that suicide attempts and other behaviours by patients previously diagnosed as having personality disorders were commonly regarded as manipulative and under voluntary control rather than the result of illness, and that the patients themselves were generally regarded as irritating, attention-seeking, difficult to manage and unlikely to comply with advice or treatment.

Personality disorders are described in the International Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders (ICD-10) as ‘deeply ingrained and enduring behaviour patterns, manifesting themselves as inflexible responses to a broad range of personal and social situations’; they represent ‘either extreme or significant deviations from the way the average individual in a given culture perceives, thinks, feels, and particularly relates to others’ and are ‘developmental conditions, which appear in childhood or adolescence and continue into adulthood’ (World Health Organization, 1992a ). They are distinguished from mental illness by their enduring, potentially lifelong nature and by the assumption that they represent extremes of normal variation rather than a morbid process of some kind. Whether or not these assumptions are justified, there is broad agreement that personality disorders are important to psychiatrists because they impinge on clinical practice in so many different ways. People with personality disorders are at increased risk of several different mental disorders, including depressions and anxiety disorders, suicide and parasuicide, and misuse of and dependence on alcohol and other drugs. In addition, people with schizotypal personalities are at increased risk of schizophrenia and those with anancastic personalities are at increased risk of obsessive—compulsive disorders. The presence of a personality disorder also complicates the treatment of most other mental disorders, most obviously because the individuals concerned do not easily form stable relationships with their therapists or take prescribed medication regularly. Indeed, in group settings they often disrupt the treatment of other patients as well. Finally, with or without treatment, the prognosis of most mental disorders is worsened by coexistent personality disorder. Because of these important, complex relationships, it is taken for granted that psychiatrists need to be alert to the presence of personality disorder, even if, as is often the case, the disorder does not correspond to any of the distinct types described in textbooks and listed in glossaries. The contentious issues are whether personality disorders are amenable to treatment, and whether people displaying these habitual abnormalities of behaviour deserve to be accorded the privileges of the ‘invalid role’.

If personality disorders are not to be regarded as mental illnesses despite their undisputed relevance to psychiatric practice, the obvious alternative is to regard them as risk factors and complicating factors for a wide range of mental disorders, in much the same way that obesity is a risk factor for diabetes, myocardial infarction, breast cancer, gallstones and osteoarthritis, and complicates the management of an even wider range of conditions. Like personality disorder, obesity is listed as a disease in the ICD-10: it is coded E66 as an endocrine, nutritional or metabolic disease (World Health Organization, 1992b ). Even so, most doctors, whether they be general practitioners, physicians or surgeons, are reluctant to attempt to treat obesity, either because they regard the condition as the result of self-indulgence rather than metabolic abnormality, or simply because they have no effective treatment to offer (Baxter, 2000).

Against the background of the UK Government's legislative proposals it is clearly important for British psychiatrists, legislators and jurists to decide whether personality disorder, or any subset of it, is a mental illness or mental disorder. Unfortunately, there is no agreed medical definition of either term. The World Health Organization has always avoided defining ‘disease’, ‘illness’ or ‘disorder’, and in its current (ICD-10) classification of mental and behavioural disorders (which includes personality disorders) it simply states that ‘the term disorder is used throughout the classification, so as to avoid even greater problems inherent in the use of terms such as disease and illness. Disorder is not an exact term, but it is used here to imply the existence of a clinically recognisable set of symptoms or behaviour associated in most cases with distress and with interference with personal functions’ (World Health Organization, 1992a ). The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association, which likewise includes personality disorders, does contain a detailed definition of the term ‘mental disorder’, but although this runs to 146 words it is not cast in a way that allows it to be used as a criterion for deciding what is and is not mental disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). It is important to note, though, that DSM-IV does stipulate that ‘neither deviant behavior nor conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict is a symptom of a dysfunction in the individual’, and that there is a similar unambiguous statement in ICD-10.

There is no fundamental difference between so-called mental illnesses or disorders and physical illnesses or disorders; both are simply subsets of illness or disorder in general (Kendell, 1993; American Psychiatric Association, 1994). This implies that the basic issue is the meaning of the terms ‘illness’ or ‘disorder’ in general. Even in this wider context, however, there is no agreement, and until recently surprisingly little discussion.

Definitions of Illness or Disorder

The most contentious issue is whether disease, illness or disorder (like the World Health Organization, I regard these terms as roughly synonymous) are scientific or biomedical terms, or whether they aresocio-political terms which necessarily involve a value judgement. Physicians have generally maintained, or simply assumed, that they are biomedical terms, while philosophers and social scientists have generally argued that they are inherently socio-political, but this is not invariable. The American physician Lester King asserted long ago that ‘biological science does not try to distinguish between health and disease… health or disease are value judgements’ (King, 1954). Conversely, the philosopher Bourse has argued that ‘disease, the theoretical concept… applies indifferently to organisms of all species. That is because… it is to be analysed in biological rather than ethical terms’ (Bourse, 1975). I myself once argued that disease ought to be a biomedical concept (Kendell, 1975), but subsequently became convinced that value judgements were probably inescapable (Kendell, 1986). The issue has attracted much attention in the USA in the past decade, mainly in response to the publication of a closely argued analysis of the concept of mental disorder by Wakefield (1992).

Status of Personality Disorders

The question of whether personality disorders are mental disorders cannot usefully be discussed until agreement has been reached on the implications of the term ‘mental disorder’, and at present there are at least four quite different, rival concepts of disease or disorder, which are summarised below.

Socio-political

Although it has been suggested in the past that disease is simply what doctors treat (e.g. Kräupl Taylor, 1971), there are no contemporary advocates for such a simplistic view. The simplest plausible socio-political definition is that a condition is regarded as a disease if it is agreed to be undesirable (an explicit value judgement) and if it seems on balance that physicians (or health professionals in general) and their technologies are more likely to be able to deal with it effectively than any of the potential alternatives, such as the criminal justice system (treating it as crime), the church (treating it as sin) or social work (treating it as a social problem).

There is general agreement that the personality traits and behaviours characteristic of personality disorders are undesirable, certainly from society's viewpoint and probably from that of most of the individuals concerned as well. It is unclear, though, whether psychiatry or clinical psychology yet possesses effective treatments for most types of personality disorder. There is evidence that borderline personalities can be helped either by dialectical behaviour therapy (Linehanet al, 1991) or by an analytically oriented day hospital regimen (Bateman & Fonagy, 1999), but little evidence that this is so for any of the other types. Attempts to change the enduring attitudes and behaviours of personality disorders are not often made; when they are, the treatment is often given up prematurely; and few random allocation trials with adequate long-term follow-up of any form of treatment for any type of personality disorder, other than the borderline type, have been conducted. Moreover, in the case of antisocial personality disorders, the most contentious group, it is undoubtedly the case that, worldwide, the majority are ‘managed’ most of the time by the criminal justice system rather than by health services.

Biomedical

The most plausible purely biomedical criterion of disease is thebiological disadvantage proposed by Scadding (1967). Scadding, a chest physician, defined a disease as ‘the sum of the abnormal phenomena displayed by a group of living organisms in association with a specified common characteristic or set of characteristics by which they differ from the norm for the species in such a way as to place them at a biological disadvantage’. He never explained what he meant by biological disadvantage, but Kendell (1975) and Bourse (1975) both argued that it must at least encompass reduced fertility and life expectancy.

Little is known about the fertility of people with personality disorders, but there is good evidence that their life expectancy is reduced. Martinet al (1985) studied the mortality over 6-12 years of 500 former psychiatric out-patients in St Louis and found that antisocial personality disorder was associated with a greatly increased mortality (standardised mortality ratio 8.57,P=0.01), mainly from suicide, homicide and accidents. Others have investigated the mortality associated with personality disorder as a whole and found it to be raised in both men and women (Harris & Barraclough, 1998).

Biomedical and socio-political

Wakefield, who is a philosopher with a background in social work, argues that mental disorders are biological dysfunctions that are also harmful. This implies that the concept of mental disorder inevitably involves both a scientific or biomedical criterion (dysfunction) and an explicit value judgement or socio-political criterion — what Wakefield (1992, 1999) calls harm and the World Health Organization (1980) defines as handicap — and is attractive because it reconciles the socio-political and biomedical camps. It also seems to reflect the often intuitive ways in which physicians make disease attributions and does not obviously have unacceptable implications.

Wakefield originally proposed that dysfunction should imply the failure of a biological mechanism to perform a natural function for which it had been designed by evolution, but Lilienfeld & Marino (1995) subsequently pointed out that this evolutionary perspective raises many problems. Too little is known about the evolution of most of the higher cerebral functions whose malfunctioning presumably underlies most mental disorders; mood states such as anxiety and depression may have evolved as biologically adaptive responses to danger or loss rather than being failures of evolutionarily designed functions; and several important cognitive abilities, such as reading and calculating, have been acquired too recently to be plausibly regarded as natural functions designed by evolution. It is, of course, perfectly possible in principle to define dysfunction without reference to either evolution or biological disadvantage, and the DSM-IV definition of mental disorder states that ‘it must currently be considered a manifestation of a behavioral, psychological or biological dysfunction’. The problem is that current understanding of the cerebral mechanisms underlying basic psychological functions such as perception, abstract reasoning and memory is too limited for it to be possible in most cases to do more than infer the probable presence of a biological dysfunction; and rejecting both the evolutionary (Wakefield) and biological disadvantage (Scadding) criteria could open the way to regarding a wide range of purely social disabilities (such as aggressive, uncooperative behaviour or an inability to resist lighting fires or stealing) as mental disorders.

The evidence that personality disorders are harmful is quite strong and not restricted to clinic populations. Drake & Vaillant (1985), for example, compared 86 middle-aged men who met DSM—III criteria for personality disorder with 283 men who did not. Both groups had originally been members of a cohort of mainly working-class, non-delinquent adolescent boys previously studied as a control population in Boston by the Gluecks, so extensive background information was available for all 369. Compared with the 283 men without personality disorders, the 86 personality-disordered men (only six of whom had disorders of antisocial type) had poor mental health (79% v. 14%), poor occupational performance and job satisfaction, and poor social competence (58% v. 10%), and although alcohol dependence or misuse was partly responsible for their poor occupational performance, it made little contribution to their poor mental health and social competence.

It is much harder to establish that personality disorder involves dysfunction, in the sense of ‘failure of a mental mechanism to perform a natural function for which it was designed by evolution’ (Wakefield, 1992). Indeed, it has been argued that several of the characteristic features of antisocial personality disorder, such as manipulation, aggression and deception, were originally successful predatory strategies that evolved in a prehistoric social environment (Lilienfeld & Marino, 1995). Fundamentally, there are two sources of difficulty. The behaviours and attitudes that define personality disorders are probably graded traits present to a lesser degree in many other people, and also quite different in different types of personality disorder; and as yet little is known of the underlying mechanisms of which they are a manifestation. It could be argued, for example, that the impulsiveness and liability to become dependent on drugs or alcohol — which are such prominent, and frequently lethal, features of antisocial disorders — are prima facie evidence of an underlying dysfunction, but in the absence of any understanding of the cerebral mechanisms involved the argument remains inconclusive.

Ostensive

Lilienfeld & Marino (1995) maintain that mental disorder is an ostensive or Roschian concept, implying that the term can only be understood by considering the prototypes of mental disorder. If this argument is accepted — and it is not easily dismissed — it is impossible even in principle to determine whether personality disorders are mental disorders, because mental disorder is inherently indefinable. The only criterion is whether personality disorders are sufficiently similar to the prototypes of mental disorder (schizophrenia and major depression, perhaps), and similarity is obviously open to a range of interpretations. It is important to note, though, that both the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association include personality disorders in their classifications of mental disorders, without explanation or apology, and have always done so, which implies that both bodies do regard them as sufficiently similar to warrant inclusion. The fact that some forensic psychiatrists see close similarities between personality disorders and schizophrenia, both in the extent of the disturbance of personality involved and in their need for treatment (Blackburn et al, 1993), is also relevant.

Discussion

It seems clear from this analysis that it is impossible at present to decide whether personality disorders are mental disorders or not, and that this will remain so until there is an agreed definition of mental disorder. It is also apparent that personality disorders are conceptually heterogeneous, that information about them is limited, and that existing knowledge is largely derived from unrepresentative clinical populations. The clinical literature on personality disorders — indeed, the basic concept of personality disorder — has few points of contact with the psychological literature on personality structure and development, and little is known of the cerebral mechanisms underlying personality traits. There is also a glaring need for a better classification of personality disorders and for more long-term follow-up studies of representative samples, derived from community rather than clinical populations, to answer basic questions about the extent, nature and time course of the handicaps associated with different types of personality disorder.

Epistemologic arguments

It could be argued that personality disorders are mental disorders on the grounds that their high mortality clearly constitutes a biological disadvantage, the key criterion of Scadding's concept of disease. However, there is little support for this definition, and (apart from antisocial personalities) the reduction in life expectancy is fairly modest. If Wakefield's definition, giving a central role to dysfunction, comes to be adopted as a general definition of mental disorder the issue may remain unresolved for some time, because it may not be possible to decide whether there is a dysfunction of some natural mechanism until much more is known of the cerebral mechanisms underlying key personality characteristics such as empathy, impulse control and emotional stability. (There is, though, already evidence that low central serotonergic activity may underlie impulsive, aggressive behaviour in a wide range of settings: see Coccaro & Kavoussi, 1997.)

Although it is difficult to provide irrefutable arguments that personality disorders are mental disorders, it is equally difficult to argue with conviction that they are not. The fact that they have been included in the two most influential and widely used classifications of mental disorders (the ICD and the DSM) for the past half-century is difficult to disregard, whether or not one accepts the view that mental disorder is an ostensive concept. It could be argued, though, that the crucial issue is not whether personality disorder is embraced by any particular definition or concept of mental illness, but what kinds of considerations lead doctors to change their minds about assignations of illness, and in this context two issues loom large.

Assumptions about aetiology and time course

The first is the validity of the assumptions about aetiology and time course which originally underpinned the distinction between personality disorder and mental illness. The former was assumed to be part of the normal spectrum of personality variation and to be stable throughout adult life; the latter to be the result of a morbid process of some kind and to have a recognisable onset and time course. These assumptions both appear increasingly questionable, and as a result the distinction between illness and personality disorder is starting to break down. Some schizophrenic illnesses have the same time course as a personality disorder: they develop during adolescence and persist relatively unchanged throughout adult life. More significantly, it is becoming increasingly clear that the genetic bases of affective personality disorders and mood disorders, and of schizotypal personality disorder and schizophrenia, have much in common. As a result, the affective personality disorder of ICD-9 has been replaced in ICD-10 by two new mood disorders, cyclothymia and dysthymia, ‘because of evidence from family studies that they are genetically related to the mood disorders, and because they are sometimes amenable to the same treatments’. For similar reasons, schizotypal disorder — which is listed as a personality disorder in DSM—IV — is classified with schizophrenia and delusional disorders (F20-29) in ICD-10 despite the fact that ‘its evolution and course are usually those of a personality disorder’ (World Health Organization, 1992a ). Most disconcertingly of all, avoidant personality disorder has so much in common with the mental illness known as generalised social phobia that it is suspected that ‘they may be alternative conceptualisations of the same or similar conditions’ (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Unsurprisingly, such problems are leading many American psychiatrists to question the value of the distinction between Axis I and Axis II disorders in DSM—IV, despite the statement in its manual that ‘the coding of personality disorders on axis II should not be taken to imply that their pathogenesis or range of appropriate treatment is fundamentally different from that for the disorders coded on axis I’ (American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

The influence of effective therapies

The second issue is the influence on medical attitudes of the acquisition of an apparently effective therapy. For nearly 150 years, claims that alcoholism was a disease, from Thomas Trotter in 1804 to Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s and 1940s, cut little ice with the medical profession. It was only in the late 1940s and 1950s, when disulfiram became available, that doctors changed their minds. Now, of course, it is evident that disulfiram is not generally an effective therapy, but in its early years enthusiastic reports of cures were published in many different countries, and it was against this background that the World Health Organization decided to include alcoholism itself, as distinct from alcoholic psychoses and acute alcohol poisoning, in the ICD, and medical organisations throughout the world issued formal statements to the effect that alcoholism was a disease after all. The reasoning involved suggests an acceptance of the socio-political definition described above, although this has rarely commended itself to the medical profession. It does seem, none the less, that possession of an apparently effective treatment can produce a decisive change in medical opinion, and Campbell et al (1979) showed that an established medical role in diagnosis or treatment has more influence on doctors' concepts of disease than on those of the public. At present, neither personality disorder nor obesity is accepted as a genuine illness by most British doctors; but as effective drugs for treating obesity come into widespread use over the next decade it is likely that obesity will come to be accepted as a genuine metabolic disorder, and the same may happen to personality disorders. Indeed, it is already happening to the ‘borderline’ disorders as evidence accumulates that the disruptive and self-destructive behaviours that characterise the disorder are amenable to forms of psychotherapy (Linehan et al, 1991; Bateman & Fonagy, 1999). There is also some evidence that fluoxetine reduces irritability and aggression in people with a variety of personality disorders (Coccaro & Kavoussi, 1997). If, therefore, the psychiatrists and politicians who maintain that ‘antisocial personality disorder’ has as good a claim to being accepted as a mental disorder as schizophrenia can demonstrate that it responds to some form of treatment that is not simply a disciplined environment, it is likely that the opposition will melt away, and the same will be true for other types of personality disorder.

Economic and cultural influences

Finally, it is necessary to acknowledge the influence of the setting in which psychiatric care is delivered. For the past 50 years the constraints of the National Health Service have ensured that the time and energy of most British psychiatrists have been fully occupied treating patients with severe mental illnesses. As a result, National Health Service psychiatrists have generally been reluctant to add to their workload by also accepting responsibility for people with deeply ingrained maladaptive behaviours for which there were no proven therapies. In North America the situation has been different. The prevailing systems of health care have facilitated the development of both private office practice and various forms of psychotherapy, and the psychoanalytic concept of ‘borderline personality disorder’ has provided a rationale for treating, as personality disorders, large numbers of patients who in Britain would mostly be regarded as suffering from recurrent depression. These economic and cultural differences have probably contributed to the comparative reluctance of British psychiatrists to accept personality disorders as mental disorders.

Clinical Implications and Limitations

Clinical Implications

Because the term mental illness has no agreed meaning it is impossible to decide with confidence whether or not personality disorders are mental illnesses.

The historical reasons for regarding personality disorders as fundamentally different from illnesses are being undermined by both clinical and genetic evidence.

The introduction of effective treatments would probably have a decisive influence on psychiatrists' attitudes.

Limitations

No comprehensive literature review was carried out.

The literature on personality disorders is not extensive and consists mainly of clinical rather than population-based studies.

Psychiatrists' attitudes are influenced by the setting in which health care is provided.

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Mohamed “Mo” Salah, who plays soccer for Liverpool, England, as well as for Egypt, has just come off a season in which he established himself as one of the most exciting players in the world. A Muslim of North African heritage, he plays, excels, and is adored in Britain, a country in which anti-Muslim sentiment is increasingly part of mainstream political and cultural discourse.

And he should be one of the stars of the upcoming 2018 World Cup later this month — if, that is, he makes it to the tournament at all. Due to a recent injury, that’s now in question.

Salah started playing organized soccer as a teenager on an Egyptian team called the Arab Contractors. He joined Egypt’s national team in 2011 at age 19 and moved to Europe the following year. His first years were promising but patchy, and to say this has been a breakout season for Salah is a massive understatement.

The 25-year-old had never scored more than 19 goals in a single season. This year, he scored 44 goals, with an eye-opening 32 in the Premier League. The only player with better stats in Europe was Barcelona’s Lionel Messi, widely considered to be one of the two best players in the world.

But his stardom doesn’t just come from what he does on the soccer pitch; it also comes from who and what he is off it. His brilliance combined with his charming personality and his faith have made him a hero in Egypt, where his face adorns Ramadan lanterns.

He is arguably the Arab world’s finest homegrown soccer player and most prominent sports star, and hundreds of millions of fans follow his every move.

Here’s what you need to know about Salah: why he’s so popular, and why some are hopeful that his enormous popularity in Britain may help combat the Islamophobic attitudes all too prevalent in the UK and beyond.

The first thing you notice about Salah as he moves around the soccer field is his speed. He’s quick. Very quick. Sizzlingly quick.

He was brought to European football by FC Basel, of Switzerland, after a scouting process that included an exhibition match against Egypt’s under-23 international team. It was supposed to be a warmup game ahead of the Olympics, but as their president, Bernhard Heusler, later confessed to Sky Sports:

The only reason we wanted this match was because of the chance to see Mohamed Salah play live. I will never forget what I saw that day on that pitch. … I had never seen a player with so much speed in my entire life.

Of course, speed means nothing in soccer if you can’t use the ball — this is why Usain Bolt’s dream of playing for Manchester United may never come to pass.

That’s what makes the second thing you notice about Salah so important: His speed doesn’t seem to cost him anything. The ball sticks obligingly to his feet, leaving his eyes free to dart around, searching for the right pass or putting himself in the best position to try to score.

Which leads to third thing you notice: Salah’s wonderful finishing ability. There is a calm and quiet precision about his shooting — a precision that looks, in the moment, an awful lot like inevitability.

Salah scores them all. He’ll roll the ball gently into an empty net if the situation demands it. But when the only route to goal is through the spectacular, then he’s more than capable.

Here’s a video of Salah in action:

[embedded content]

Put all of that together and the result is one of the most exciting soccer players in the world.

But while it’s his skill on the pitch that has made him a hero in Liverpool and Egypt, it’s his emergence in Europe at a time when anti-Muslim bigotry is becoming increasingly normalized across the continent that has made him a figure of intense interest.

It has even led people to wonder if his athletic excellence might play some part in combating intolerance.

There is a calm and quiet precision about his shooting — a precision that looks, in the moment, an awful lot like inevitability

Liverpool’s legendary manager Bill Shankly once said, “If you are first, you are first. If you are second, you are nothing.” But the club Shankly once led hasn’t been English champions since 1990, and it’s been a long and at times agonizing period of nothing.

This is a club looking for a hero. A club that has seen other heroes — Steven Gerrard, Luis Suarez — pass through without bringing that elusive Premier League title. Salah hasn’t brought a title yet either, but he carries the promise: Next year will be Liverpool’s year.

You can see this in Salah’s songs and Salah’s T-shirts, and in the rhapsodic smiles Salah provokes on Liverpool faces. There would be a certain entertaining irony if they were led back to the promised land by a man nicknamed the “Egyptian King.”

As Sports Illustrated notes, Liverpool fans even coined a song for Salah sung to the tune of the 1990s pop hit “Good Enough.” The lyrics are, well, not the usual thing you hear in a sports arena:

Mo Sa-la-la-la-lah, Mo Sa-la-la-la-lah!

If he’s good enough for you, he’s good enough for me. If he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim too.

If he’s good enough for you, he’s good enough for me. Sitting in the mosque, that’s where I wanna be!

Mo Sa-la-la-la-lah, Mo Sa-la-la-la-lah!

Salah is the leading star of Egypt’s national team, the Pharaohs, and his popularity in his home country even exceeds his standing in Liverpool.

More than a million people submitted write-in votes for Salah in Egypt’s 2018 presidential election, and while the eventual result — Salah pushed the actual opposition candidate into third place — says little for the plurality of Egyptian democracy, it says plenty for Salah’s popularity.

After Salah’s shoulder was dislocated — accidentally? carelessly? deliberately? — by Real Madrid’s Sergio Ramos in Champions League final on May 26, the outcry across social media was remarkable. One Twitter user joked, “Qataris, Saudis, Emiratis, Kuwaitis, Egyptians, Omanis all cursing Sergio Ramos. Thank you Ramos. You united the whole Arab world.”

Islamophobia isn’t new, and certainly isn’t limited to Britain. But Matthew Feldman of Teesside University in the UK says the country, at this moment, has an “acceptance of anti-Muslim discourse that we would find absolutely noxious if it was about someone from an ethnic minority or other religious background” — a claim that will ring true to anybody familiar with Britain’s public conversation.

Even the Times, revered as the national newspaper of record, recently had to apologize for the “enormous offense” caused when it distorted a story regarding Muslim foster families. Meanwhile the governing Conservative Party is facing calls for an inquiry into the “more than weekly” incidents of Islamophobia within in its membership.

Regardless of the views of bigots, it is perhaps Salah’s significance to other Muslims that is the most heartening consequence of his rise to superstardom

How, then, does a much-loved and widely feted Muslim soccer player fit into this?

Salah is not the only Muslim in the Premier League, or even in Liverpool’s squad, but he is certainly the most high-profile, and, to put it bluntly, he appears the most Muslim to a nation reared on stereotypes. His is a public faith, openly expressed.

Indeed, it’s telling that this conversation is only happening now; British football culture has generally preferred to ignore the Muslims on the pitch.

A recent article in the New York Times quoted Miqdaad Versi, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain:

He is someone who embodies Islam’s values and wears his faith on his sleeve. He has a likability. He is the hero of the team. Liverpool, in particular, has rallied around him in a really positive way. He is not the solution to Islamophobia, but he can play a major role.

Not everybody shares this view, though.

Asked by the New Yorker about Salah, Joseph Massad, a historian and modern Arab studies professor at Columbia University, noted that former France captain Zinedine Zidane “received much adulation” within France, “but his fame has not mitigated the ongoing Islamophobia of mainstream French culture, and I strongly doubt that Salah’s fame will in any way decrease the mainstream Islamophobia in British culture.”

As Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant, a book of essays by people of color reflecting on their positions in British society, puts it:

The biggest burden facing people of colour in [Britain] is that society deems us bad immigrants — job-stealers, benefit-scroungers, girlfriend-thieves, refugees — until we cross over in their consciousness [by] winning races, baking good cakes…

Or scoring goals.

Islamophobia, then, ends not with the valorization of exceptional Muslims — who are, by definition, exceptions — but in the acceptance of ordinary Muslims. Whether there is a path to the latter through the former remains to be seen.

And as Asif Sujid has noted at the Conversation, the chant described above “is conditional. The chant makes clear that it is only ‘if’ Salah continues to score goals that his displays of Muslimness will be accepted.”

But regardless of the views of bigots, it is perhaps Salah’s significance to other Muslims that is the most heartening consequence of his rise to superstardom. As the New Yorker’s Yasmine Al-Sayyad puts it:

What stands out to me most about Salah, who is far more conspicuously Arab and Muslim than I am, is that he doesn’t seem concerned with trying to blend into anything. He is simply himself. That, more than anything else he has done on the field, is what I admire most.

So will this brilliant more-than-a-footballer make it to Russia? As mentioned above, Salah left the Champions League final early due to injury and was later diagnosed with a dislocated shoulder. That was on May 26, and the Egyptian Football Association estimated that he’ll be fit again in three weeks.

Egypt’s first World Cup match is against Uruguay on June 15. Salah could very well miss that game. Egypt is being optimistic, but since it’s not favorites to win that game anyway, it might hold him back. But he should be back for Egypt’s second game, against Russia, on June 19.

The fear, in truth, isn’t that Salah will miss the tournament. This is the man who scored the penalty that took Egypt to its first World Cup since 1990 and he’d have to be bedridden not to make it out there in some capacity.

Instead, Egyptian fans worry that Salah simply won’t be himself. By the time he returns, he’ll have missed all of Egypt’s warmup games, and going straight from weeks off to matches against some of the world’s most skilled soccer players will be a monstrously difficult task.

Another comparison with Zidane may be unfortunately apt: France’s inspirational captain was rushed back from injury to appear at the 2002 tournament, yet only played one game, was visibly underpowered, and contributed little as France slumped out of the competition without scoring a single goal.

Let’s assume for a moment that Salah returns and is at, or close to, his best. How far could Egypt go in the World Cup?

The Pharaohs play a cautious brand of soccer. Their priority is to maintain a strong defensive unit, reinforced by the midfield. Salah’s speed therefore becomes a counterattacking weapon: If Egypt’s opponents stray too far forward in their attempts to break down the Egyptian defense, they may leave space behind for Salah to exploit.

The World Cup begins with a group stage, in which four teams play each other once in a round-robin format, with the best two progressing to the next stage. Egypt is in Group A along with host-nation Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Uruguay. The South American team is the favorite to win the group, thanks mostly to their attack, which is led by Barcelona’s Luis Suarez and Paris Saint-Germain’s Edinson Cavani.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is the weakest team in the competition, according to FIFA’s rankings, and should finish in last place.

Much depends, then, on Egypt’s game against Russia. Typically, tournament hosts benefit from the atmosphere and the fact that they are on familiar turf, as well as perhaps the odd lenient refereeing decision or two.

But Russia is an unsettled team and hasn’t won a game since October 7, 2017. Egypt certainly won’t be feeling intimidated.

Should the Pharaohs make it past the hosts, things will get really tricky. The two qualifiers from Group A will face the qualifiers from Group B, expected to be the 2010 winner, Spain, one of the favorites for the tournament; and the Euro 2016 winner, Portugal. As such, reaching the last 16 would represent a good tournament for Egypt. Anything beyond that will be dreamland.

But that’s the true value of Salah. When he’s playing for a team you support, you can’t help but dream.

Original Source -> Soccer star Mo Salah’s massive popularity is changing perceptions of Muslims in the UK

via The Conservative Brief

The Semi-Definitive Guide To Transfer Window Cliches

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

Just as it has its own economy, a swirling maelstrom of expenditure, wage offers, contracts and agents fees, so too does the transfer window have its own language. With rolling coverage over the summer and a massive media operation in tow, the vocabulary used to describe the business of football clubs has morphed into a distinct dialect with a select range of cliches. One day, in a future without football, linguists will study the arcane and mysterious language of the transfer window, with its 'swoops', its 'raids' and its sacrosanct 'come-and-get-me plea'. Until that day, however, the human race will have to make do with this semi-definitive guide to all the bullshit that supporters have to hear every year.

SWOOPS

Prithee, look to the skies, ye football fans! Florentino Perez doth arrive on a winged griffin, come to 'swoop' down upon Kylian Mbappe, snatch him up in the beast's wicked talons and carry him off over the foaming seas. Putting our medieval stylings aside for a moment, the transfer swoop is one of the most ubiquitous cliches of the summer window, conjuring up a nightmarish dreamscape where players are stolen off in the night by gargantuan hawks trained by Ed Woodward, or some other such executive type, to do the evil bidding of their football club. Don't even get us started on the 'double swoop', which is like a normal swoop but twice as audacious. Lo, then, and beware swooping football clubs, lest thee lose thy star striker in a fluttering of deathly wings.

VIKING IMAGERY

When a club's representatives aren't swooping from the heavens to steal away some unsuspecting footballer, they must sail over the oceans in their transfer longships, urged on by the ominous beating of drums. As well as snatching off each other's players in the night time, clubs can also launch a transfer 'raid' against their foes, 'plundering' smaller and less illustrious teams like marauding vikings dicking on a dark-age monastery somewhere. Should the raiding club decide to stump up for the transfer as opposed to just ransacking their rivals' stadium in a brutal show of force, they can open the infamous transfer 'war chest' and pour forth the treasure of its golden bowels. That's unless the raiding club is Arsenal, of course, in which case the mere suggestion of a transfer 'war chest' means that they have finished 5th and – intending only to make a couple of underwhelming signings on the penultimate day of the window – need a way of distracting angry fans.

BODILY FUNCTIONS

Should the selling club prove to be tenacious negotiators, it is possible that the buying club will be forced to 'cough up' a fee far larger than they first expected. This brings to mind the disturbing image of a suited CEO hacking up phlegm-streaked £50 notes, choking on great wodges of cash in a literal representation of modern football's excess. It's possible that, having taken some sort of financial laxative, said CEO might actually be able to 'splash' out on a player, though we'll leave this toilet metaphor underdeveloped in the name of common decency. The club hierarchy also have to hope that they don't have a 'hiccup' at the last minute, with an ancient law of the transfer window dictating that an involuntary spasm of the diaphragm legally voids a sale.

PRICE TAGS, KITTIES AND CHEQUEBOOKS

Though a selling club may not want to admit it, every footballer has a 'price tag'. Look at any picture of Ross Barkley and there, on his ankle, is a little note that reads: "Young, English, one year left on his contract – reduced to £45million". In order to meet the price advertised, a manager must tip out his 'transfer kitty', a cliche which makes it sound as if clubs prefer to pay each other massive fees in low denominational coins. Should a club be looking to go on a 'splurge' or a 'spree' at the upper end of the market, it might be best for the manager to 'reach for the chequebook', despite the fact that cheques are basically obsolete at this point and he would probably be better off paying in bitcoin.

Ah! Someone has swooped for Kylian Mbappe!

WANTAWAY PLAYERS

Google the word 'wantaway', and the definition reads thus: "Adjective – British – informal – denoting a soccer player who wants to move to another club." In other words, as far as the world's only omnipresent search engine is concerned, the term 'wantaway' was invented specifically as a transfer window cliche and has no other practical applications whatsoever. Most likely dreamt up sometime between the Bosman ruling and Pierre Van Hooijdonk going on strike at Nottingham Forest, 'wantaway' has absolutely no meaning outside of the world of football, and hence is the purest form of cliche, the truest platitude known to man. When a manager puts a wantaway footballer on his transfer 'wish list', then the selling club is in serious shite.

TRANSFER BARNACLES

Some transfers are especially difficult to finalise, and require the application of enormous pressure to 'test the resolve' of the club being targeted. Certain clubs cling on to their players for grim death, holding them close in a contractually certified embrace. In these circumstances, the player becomes something like a barnacle on the bottom of a ship, and must be 'prised away' from the club by means of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring, a sustained media campaign or an improved financial offer. Failing that, a senior director from the buying club must arrive at the selling club's training ground with a crowbar, and literally lever the player out of his Range Rover and into the back of an unmarked van.

FIGURATIVE KIDNAPPING

Just as the term 'swoop' makes a move between clubs seem entirely involuntary on the part of the player, so too does the idea of 'hijacking' a transfer. With football clubs analogous to kidnappers in this case, it's hard not to picture prospective signings being whisked off by a gang of board members in balaclavas, then imprisoned in some sort of makeshift dungeon until they agree personal terms. When Manchester City 'nabbed' Robinho from Chelsea, or when the transfer of Roy Keane in 1993 saw Manchester United 'snap up' a future star at the expense of Blackburn Rovers, we can presume the players were driving towards their intended destination before being forced off the road and swiftly chloroformed. Football is a ruthless game, see, and its deal brokers will do whatever it takes to 'get their man'.

MEGABUS METAPHORS

Much like the morning megabus to an away day, clubs have to 'get the wheels in motion' before a transfer can be finalised. Roaring to life, clanking into action, the behemoths of European football tear towards their targets like maniacal motorway coaches, ready to plough through anyone who gets in their way. Depending on their desire to 'get the paperwork done', clubs can either 'put the brakes' on a deal or receive a 'boost' in their bid to sign a player. God forbid the driver has had a few pints before setting off, lest the transfer be boosted without due consideration and a club end up signing Moussa Sissoko for £30million.

TRIGGERING

Much like a libcuck who has left their safe space (amirite, VICE Facebook commenters?) release clauses in football are often 'triggered'. Just as clubs might 'baulk' at high asking prices and find themselves 'rebuffed' when their offers fall short, 'triggered' is a technical term which can only be applied to one aspect of the transfer window, namely the initiation of the buyout process. The 'triggering' of the clause makes it seem as if someone has pressed a comically oversized red button, setting off a warning siren and sending club officials scrambling for battle stations on a diving submarine, ready to whisk the player off and hide them away in the inky depths. Should the player be 'unsettled' by the attempts to keep him, however, chances are said submarine will be hit with a contractual depth charge before it can 'torpedo' his efforts to escape.

COME-AND-GET-ME PLEA

So here we are, then. We have come across the Holy Grail of transfer cliches, and we hold it to our lips so we may drink from the source of everlasting life. Following other footballers on Twitter; uploading an enigmatic Instagram post; claiming that a spouse has grown tired of the regional climate; investing in property overseas; taking lessons in a foreign language; posing in another club's home kit while on holiday; all of these things can be interpreted as a 'come-and-get-me plea'. The most sacred of commonplaces during the transfer window, the 'come-and-get-me plea' must be treated with the utmost reverence, for overuse can diminish its powers. Use it wisely, however, and the transfer window opens in a whole new direction, revealing the garden of inner enlightenment, or at least getting a lesser-known striker a move from the Portuguese league to West Ham.

@W_F_Magee

The Semi-Definitive Guide To Transfer Window Cliches published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

Living Colour - Is Scottish football too wrapped up in the cult of personality?

Ian Cathro, in a rare moment where any Scottish writer will give him his due, hit the nail on the head in his pre-match comments last week - enough to deserve reproduction as they are the basis of this piece:

“The media scrutiny is probably similar [in Scotland compared to Portugal]. But, in Portugal, you have three daily newspapers which are solely about football. They talk more about actual football. Everyone’s tactics and teams are placed under more scrutiny than here and talked about in more detail”

Cathro is, of course, right. Scottish football, much like the media in the UK as a whole, has an obsession with the human element of sport as opposed to the drier discussion that naturally occurs when one talks about tactics, strategy and team selections. That Cathro comment was brought to my attention through the twitter timeline of BT Sport commentator Derek Rae - a man who may be the lead for Scottish football, but whose bible is not the sports section of Scotland’s newspapers, but the twice weekly German publication Kicker. Obviously, given his work on the Bundesliga, Kicker is a fairly obvious thing for him to read but find an interview with Rae where it isn’t mentioned.

BT, as everyone reading this will know, provide the superior coverage of Scottish football but even they get criticised for missing out the tactical elements, etc in favour of promoting the fine art of trolling as practiced by Chris Sutton. That is because, unlike some channels who have the co-commentator as an analyst, BT have Sutton more as a colour commentator - there for an entertainment perspective whereas Rae does play-by-play both describing and explaining the action.

I will freely admit that this site gets wrapped up in the personality style of coverage from time to time - it is the nature of what most media feed us and, as a result, the nature of what most consumers want. While there is a definite niche for tactical outlooks and statistical outlooks, it isn’t my speciality and that is my own fault. There is a market for people wanting to read about things like xG and Shot Assists and all that jazz and I lack the ability (and also the wish to learn the ability) to write about it. I can happily talk about tactics, but it is still less rewarding than coming up with a pithy remark about a manager.

Ultimately, that could be seen as lazy. But it is also because I know my demographic. I know from the videoclips that I make from Eastern European football what generates views - the top three are one bizarre penalty incident, one miss from one yard out and a dodgy panenka. The bits of actual good play and spectacular goals are secondary to You’ve Been Framed in the Anglophone world even if, for my perspective, researching players and teams and putting out articles about things that aren’t normally covered in this language (even in the annals of the magazine World Soccer) is often more interesting than simply going “Celtic did this, Aberdeen did that”.

That is secondary to the main point of this piece but illustrates the issue well - there is little incentive for a mass media outlet to actually put out something as niche as an in-depth look at the creativity statistics of wingers in the SPFL that has graphs and figures because it will get skipped. It is a niche interest of people who would tend not to go to those mass media outlets in the first place.

Some will say this is already being remedied with, for example, Nutmeg Magazine. That, however, is quarterly and, even though the content itself is good, the sort of chatter that Cathro mentions re: tactics, etc is still only two to four pages of 150. The very nature of a periodical such as Nutmeg prevents it from discussing current events as current events are ancient history before the publication is ever released.

This still leaves the Scottish media sorely lacking and it is not unfair to say that a generation of writers raised on the mantra that sensationalism sells is hardly about to rip itself away from the teat of udder controversy. Nor is it unfair to say that if the sort of publication Cathro mentions in his quote were to actually magically exist it would swiftly find itself in financial trouble due to the economics of having to create, print and distribute. It would require substantial capital and effort to actually start - not to mention that to be economical, it would need to be picked up by around 1/8th of the entire football-going population to be at a reasonable price. Can it then be distributed - is it going in every paper shop across the land or is it just a glorified fanzine being given out at grounds?

As much as I would read such a publication were it to exist, those sorts of questions are not just difficult to answer, they are near impossible to confront. Kicker, for example, to be sold twice a week, sells over 200,000 copies per edition. Is a Scottish equivalent (which, by the way, would be far more likely to work than the sort of daily Cathro notes in his quote) going to be able to sell 5% of that figure in a country right off the bat with around 6% the population of Germany and under a third the amount of senior league clubs but without the authoritative nature and fame that Kicker has?

That is difficult to answer but with circulation across most papers dropping, the market for throwing a new paper out there, not to mention a specialist one, is challenging. One saving grace may be that the Racing Post (with far better football analysis from a preview perspective as necessitated by it’s gambling connections - gambling connections any such publication would have to rely on for funding) and the Non-League Paper both have circulations around the 35,000 mark showing that national specialist newspapers can actually work. What is certain is that, even with crowdfunding, it would be a very difficult endeavour logistically (never mind getting enough content).

We all know that Scottish football is wrapped up in press coverage that is sensationalist and often baffling - no man is better placed to judge that than Ian Cathro having undergone several character assassinations upon taking the job at Hearts. But any move away from that on a large scale is unlikely until the natural attrition of journalists leaving the profession changes what gets written. Even with that in mind, it is unlikely that direction from the top will ever slide away from what “works” now - we are forced into a conversation about the words out of Pedro Caixinha’s mouth rather than faced with an analysis of how he sets his team out or what Rangers fans should expect. Match reports are merely bullet points of actions followed by quotes rather than drilling down into what happened and why it happened.

That appears to be what people want and, as someone who is a writer as a hobbyist (albeit a fairly prolific one) not a professional, it is hardly my place to say that that is wrong. It is simply disappointing. And there is always a place for personality pieces - sometimes they can be genuinely insightful. But they need to be part of a greater whole, rather than being the whole in and of themselves.

Football needs personality to add colour to it, but coverage does not need to be a rainbow - statistics, strategy, tactical analysis may be very beige compared to professional antagonisers masquerading as analysts, but there is a place for beige in the world that is not being accommodated now. It can’t exist on it’s own, but it can be incorporated into current coverage and, as a result, make coverage as a whole better.

And, while we will never get perfection, better is still an achievement.

R. E. Kendell, The distinction between personality disorder and mental illness, 180 Brit J Psych 110 (2002)

Abstract

Background: Proposals by the UK Government for preventive detention of people with ‘dangerous severe personality disorders’ highlight the unresolved issue of whether personality disorders should be regarded as mental illnesses.

Aims: To clarify the issue by examining the concepts of psychopathy and personality disorder, the attitudes of contemporary British psychiatrists to personality disorders, and the meaning of the terms ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental disorder’.

Method: The literature on personality disorder is assessed in the context of four contrasting concepts of illness or disease.

Results: Whichever of the four concepts or definitions is chosen, it is impossible to conclude with confidence that personality disorders are, or are not, mental illnesses; there are ambiguities in the definitions and basic information about personality disorders is lacking.

Conclusions: The historical reasons for regarding personality disorders as fundamentally different from mental illnesses are being undermined by both clinical and genetic evidence. Effective treatments for personality disorders would probably have a decisive influence on psychiatrists' attitudes.

Background

The legislative background

Psychiatrists, and perhaps British psychiatrists more than most, are ambivalent about whether to regard personality disorders as mental illnesses. Until recently, there was no compelling reason for attempting to resolve the issue, but the situation was transformed in 1999 when the UK Government made it clear that it intended to introduce legislation in England and Wales for the compulsory and potentially indefinite detention of people with what it called ‘dangerous severe personality disorder’, whether or not they had been convicted of a serious criminal offence (Home Office & Department of Health, 1999). It is likely that some of these people, almost all of them men, will be detained in prisons and others in high-security hospitals. However, the European Convention on Human Rights, which was incorporated into UK legislation by the Human Rights Act 1998, prohibits the detention of anyone who has not been convicted by a competent court unless they are ‘of unsound mind, alcoholics or drug addicts or vagrants’ or their detention is ‘for the prevention of the spreading of infectious diseases’. This means that, to prevent a successful judicial challenge, the Government will have to argue that the potentially dangerous men it wishes to incarcerate are ‘of unsound mind’, and this means maintaining that they have personality disorders, and that personality disorders are mental disorders.

At present English mental health legislation, which dates from 1983 but had its origins in the recommendations of a Royal Commission in the 1950s, distinguishes between mental illness and psychopathic disorder, but the Government intends to abandon the concept of psychopathic disorder and introduce a new ‘broad definition of mental disorder covering any disability or disorder of mind or brain’ which will cover personality disorders as well as mental illnesses (Department of Health & Home Office, 2000).

Implications of the term ‘personality disorder’

The term ‘psychopathic’ was coined by the German psychiatrist Koch in 1891, and he said firmly that ‘even in the bad cases the irregularities do not amount to mental disorder’ (Lewis, 1974). What Koch meant by mental disorder, however, was largely restricted to insanity and idiocy, and his concept of ‘psychopathic inferiorities’ embraced most non-psychotic mental illness as well as what we now call personality disorder or psychopathy. Even so, Kurt Schneider subsequently argued that personality disorders are simply ‘abnormal varieties of sane psychic life’ (Schneider, 1950), and therefore of little concern to psychiatrists, a view that is still influential in Germany today.

Many — perhaps most — contemporary British psychiatrists seem not to regard personality disorders as illnesses. Certainly, it is commonplace for a diagnosis of personality disorder to be used to justify a decision not to admit someone to a psychiatric ward, or even to accept them for treatment — a practice that understandably puzzles and irritates the staff of accident and emergency departments, general practitioners and probation officers, who find themselves left to cope as best they can with extremely difficult, frustrating people without any psychiatric assistance. The reasons for this attitude were explored by Lewis & Appleby (1988). Using ratings of case vignettes by 240 experienced psychiatrists, they showed that suicide attempts and other behaviours by patients previously diagnosed as having personality disorders were commonly regarded as manipulative and under voluntary control rather than the result of illness, and that the patients themselves were generally regarded as irritating, attention-seeking, difficult to manage and unlikely to comply with advice or treatment.

Personality disorders are described in the International Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders (ICD-10) as ‘deeply ingrained and enduring behaviour patterns, manifesting themselves as inflexible responses to a broad range of personal and social situations’; they represent ‘either extreme or significant deviations from the way the average individual in a given culture perceives, thinks, feels, and particularly relates to others’ and are ‘developmental conditions, which appear in childhood or adolescence and continue into adulthood’ (World Health Organization, 1992a). They are distinguished from mental illness by their enduring, potentially lifelong nature and by the assumption that they represent extremes of normal variation rather than a morbid process of some kind. Whether or not these assumptions are justified, there is broad agreement that personality disorders are important to psychiatrists because they impinge on clinical practice in so many different ways. People with personality disorders are at increased risk of several different mental disorders, including depressions and anxiety disorders, suicide and parasuicide, and misuse of and dependence on alcohol and other drugs. In addition, people with schizotypal personalities are at increased risk of schizophrenia and those with anancastic personalities are at increased risk of obsessive—compulsive disorders. The presence of a personality disorder also complicates the treatment of most other mental disorders, most obviously because the individuals concerned do not easily form stable relationships with their therapists or take prescribed medication regularly. Indeed, in group settings they often disrupt the treatment of other patients as well. Finally, with or without treatment, the prognosis of most mental disorders is worsened by coexistent personality disorder. Because of these important, complex relationships, it is taken for granted that psychiatrists need to be alert to the presence of personality disorder, even if, as is often the case, the disorder does not correspond to any of the distinct types described in textbooks and listed in glossaries. The contentious issues are whether personality disorders are amenable to treatment, and whether people displaying these habitual abnormalities of behaviour deserve to be accorded the privileges of the ‘invalid role’.

If personality disorders are not to be regarded as mental illnesses despite their undisputed relevance to psychiatric practice, the obvious alternative is to regard them as risk factors and complicating factors for a wide range of mental disorders, in much the same way that obesity is a risk factor for diabetes, myocardial infarction, breast cancer, gallstones and osteoarthritis, and complicates the management of an even wider range of conditions. Like personality disorder, obesity is listed as a disease in the ICD-10: it is coded E66 as an endocrine, nutritional or metabolic disease (World Health Organization, 1992b). Even so, most doctors, whether they be general practitioners, physicians or surgeons, are reluctant to attempt to treat obesity, either because they regard the condition as the result of self-indulgence rather than metabolic abnormality, or simply because they have no effective treatment to offer (Baxter, 2000).

Against the background of the UK Government's legislative proposals it is clearly important for British psychiatrists, legislators and jurists to decide whether personality disorder, or any subset of it, is a mental illness or mental disorder. Unfortunately, there is no agreed medical definition of either term. The World Health Organization has always avoided defining ‘ disease’, ‘illness’ or ‘disorder’, and in its current (ICD-10) classification of mental and behavioural disorders (which includes personality disorders) it simply states that ‘the term disorder is used throughout the classification, so as to avoid even greater problems inherent in the use of terms such as disease and illness. Disorder is not an exact term, but it is used here to imply the existence of a clinically recognisable set of symptoms or behaviour associated in most cases with distress and with interference with personal functions’ (World Health Organization, 1992a). The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) of the American Psychiatric Association, which likewise includes personality disorders, does contain a detailed definition of the term ‘mental disorder’, but although this runs to 146 words it is not cast in a way that allows it to be used as a criterion for deciding what is and is not mental disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). It is important to note, though, that DSM-IV does stipulate that ‘neither deviant behavior nor conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict is a symptom of a dysfunction in the individual’, and that there is a similar unambiguous statement in ICD-10.

There is no fundamental difference between so-called mental illnesses or disorders and physical illnesses or disorders; both are simply subsets of illness or disorder in general (Kendell, 1993; American Psychiatric Association, 1994). This implies that the basic issue is the meaning of the terms ‘illness’ or ‘disorder’ in general. Even in this wider context, however, there is no agreement, and until recently surprisingly little discussion.

Definitions of Illness or Disorder

The most contentious issue is whether disease, illness or disorder (like the World Health Organization, I regard these terms as roughly synonymous) are scientific or biomedical terms, or whether they are socio-political terms which necessarily involve a value judgement. Physicians have generally maintained, or simply assumed, that they are biomedical terms, while philosophers and social scientists have generally argued that they are inherently socio-political, but this is not invariable. The American physician Lester King asserted long ago that ‘biological science does not try to distinguish between health and disease... health or disease are value judgements’ (King, 1954). Conversely, the philosopher Bourse has argued that ‘ disease, the theoretical concept... applies indifferently to organisms of all species. That is because... it is to be analysed in biological rather than ethical terms’ (Bourse, 1975). I myself once argued that disease ought to be a biomedical concept (Kendell, 1975), but subsequently became convinced that value judgements were probably inescapable (Kendell, 1986). The issue has attracted much attention in the USA in the past decade, mainly in response to the publication of a closely argued analysis of the concept of mental disorder by Wakefield (1992).

Status of Personality Disorders

The question of whether personality disorders are mental disorders cannot usefully be discussed until agreement has been reached on the implications of the term ‘mental disorder’, and at present there are at least four quite different, rival concepts of disease or disorder, which are summarised below.

Socio-political

Although it has been suggested in the past that disease is simply what doctors treat (e.g. Kräupl Taylor, 1971), there are no contemporary advocates for such a simplistic view. The simplest plausible socio-political definition is that a condition is regarded as a disease if it is agreed to be undesirable (an explicit value judgement) and if it seems on balance that physicians (or health professionals in general) and their technologies are more likely to be able to deal with it effectively than any of the potential alternatives, such as the criminal justice system (treating it as crime), the church (treating it as sin) or social work (treating it as a social problem).

There is general agreement that the personality traits and behaviours characteristic of personality disorders are undesirable, certainly from society's viewpoint and probably from that of most of the individuals concerned as well. It is unclear, though, whether psychiatry or clinical psychology yet possesses effective treatments for most types of personality disorder. There is evidence that borderline personalities can be helped either by dialectical behaviour therapy (Linehan et al, 1991) or by an analytically oriented day hospital regimen (Bateman & Fonagy, 1999), but little evidence that this is so for any of the other types. Attempts to change the enduring attitudes and behaviours of personality disorders are not often made; when they are, the treatment is often given up prematurely; and few random allocation trials with adequate long-term follow-up of any form of treatment for any type of personality disorder, other than the borderline type, have been conducted. Moreover, in the case of antisocial personality disorders, the most contentious group, it is undoubtedly the case that, worldwide, the majority are ‘managed’ most of the time by the criminal justice system rather than by health services.

Biomedical

The most plausible purely biomedical criterion of disease is the biological disadvantage proposed by Scadding (1967). Scadding, a chest physician, defined a disease as ‘the sum of the abnormal phenomena displayed by a group of living organisms in association with a specified common characteristic or set of characteristics by which they differ from the norm for the species in such a way as to place them at a biological disadvantage’. He never explained what he meant by biological disadvantage, but Kendell (1975) and Bourse (1975) both argued that it must at least encompass reduced fertility and life expectancy.

Little is known about the fertility of people with personality disorders, but there is good evidence that their life expectancy is reduced. Martin et al (1985) studied the mortality over 6-12 years of 500 former psychiatric out-patients in St Louis and found that antisocial personality disorder was associated with a greatly increased mortality (standardised mortality ratio 8.57, P=0.01), mainly from suicide, homicide and accidents. Others have investigated the mortality associated with personality disorder as a whole and found it to be raised in both men and women (Harris & Barraclough, 1998).

Biomedical and socio-political

Wakefield, who is a philosopher with a background in social work, argues that mental disorders are biological dysfunctions that are also harmful. This implies that the concept of mental disorder inevitably involves both a scientific or biomedical criterion (dysfunction) and an explicit value judgement or socio-political criterion — what Wakefield (1992, 1999) calls harm and the World Health Organization (1980) defines as handicap — and is attractive because it reconciles the socio-political and biomedical camps. It also seems to reflect the often intuitive ways in which physicians make disease attributions and does not obviously have unacceptable implications.

Wakefield originally proposed that dysfunction should imply the failure of a biological mechanism to perform a natural function for which it had been designed by evolution, but Lilienfeld & Marino (1995) subsequently pointed out that this evolutionary perspective raises many problems. Too little is known about the evolution of most of the higher cerebral functions whose malfunctioning presumably underlies most mental disorders; mood states such as anxiety and depression may have evolved as biologically adaptive responses to danger or loss rather than being failures of evolutionarily designed functions; and several important cognitive abilities, such as reading and calculating, have been acquired too recently to be plausibly regarded as natural functions designed by evolution. It is, of course, perfectly possible in principle to define dysfunction without reference to either evolution or biological disadvantage, and the DSM-IV definition of mental disorder states that ‘it must currently be considered a manifestation of a behavioral, psychological or biological dysfunction’. The problem is that current understanding of the cerebral mechanisms underlying basic psychological functions such as perception, abstract reasoning and memory is too limited for it to be possible in most cases to do more than infer the probable presence of a biological dysfunction; and rejecting both the evolutionary (Wakefield) and biological disadvantage (Scadding) criteria could open the way to regarding a wide range of purely social disabilities (such as aggressive, uncooperative behaviour or an inability to resist lighting fires or stealing) as mental disorders.

The evidence that personality disorders are harmful is quite strong and not restricted to clinic populations. Drake & Vaillant (1985), for example, compared 86 middle-aged men who met DSM—III criteria for personality disorder with 283 men who did not. Both groups had originally been members of a cohort of mainly working-class, non-delinquent adolescent boys previously studied as a control population in Boston by the Gluecks, so extensive background information was available for all 369. Compared with the 283 men without personality disorders, the 86 personality-disordered men (only six of whom had disorders of antisocial type) had poor mental health (79% v. 14%), poor occupational performance and job satisfaction, and poor social competence (58% v. 10%), and although alcohol dependence or misuse was partly responsible for their poor occupational performance, it made little contribution to their poor mental health and social competence.

It is much harder to establish that personality disorder involves dysfunction, in the sense of ‘failure of a mental mechanism to perform a natural function for which it was designed by evolution’ (Wakefield, 1992). Indeed, it has been argued that several of the characteristic features of antisocial personality disorder, such as manipulation, aggression and deception, were originally successful predatory strategies that evolved in a prehistoric social environment (Lilienfeld & Marino, 1995). Fundamentally, there are two sources of difficulty. The behaviours and attitudes that define personality disorders are probably graded traits present to a lesser degree in many other people, and also quite different in different types of personality disorder; and as yet little is known of the underlying mechanisms of which they are a manifestation. It could be argued, for example, that the impulsiveness and liability to become dependent on drugs or alcohol — which are such prominent, and frequently lethal, features of antisocial disorders — are prima facie evidence of an underlying dysfunction, but in the absence of any understanding of the cerebral mechanisms involved the argument remains inconclusive.

Ostensive

Lilienfeld & Marino (1995) maintain that mental disorder is an ostensive or Roschian concept, implying that the term can only be understood by considering the prototypes of mental disorder. If this argument is accepted — and it is not easily dismissed — it is impossible even in principle to determine whether personality disorders are mental disorders, because mental disorder is inherently indefinable. The only criterion is whether personality disorders are sufficiently similar to the prototypes of mental disorder (schizophrenia and major depression, perhaps), and similarity is obviously open to a range of interpretations. It is important to note, though, that both the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association include personality disorders in their classifications of mental disorders, without explanation or apology, and have always done so, which implies that both bodies do regard them as sufficiently similar to warrant inclusion. The fact that some forensic psychiatrists see close similarities between personality disorders and schizophrenia, both in the extent of the disturbance of personality involved and in their need for treatment (Blackburn et al, 1993), is also relevant.

Discussion

It seems clear from this analysis that it is impossible at present to decide whether personality disorders are mental disorders or not, and that this will remain so until there is an agreed definition of mental disorder. It is also apparent that personality disorders are conceptually heterogeneous, that information about them is limited, and that existing knowledge is largely derived from unrepresentative clinical populations. The clinical literature on personality disorders — indeed, the basic concept of personality disorder — has few points of contact with the psychological literature on personality structure and development, and little is known of the cerebral mechanisms underlying personality traits. There is also a glaring need for a better classification of personality disorders and for more long-term follow-up studies of representative samples, derived from community rather than clinical populations, to answer basic questions about the extent, nature and time course of the handicaps associated with different types of personality disorder.

Epistemologic arguments

It could be argued that personality disorders are mental disorders on the grounds that their high mortality clearly constitutes a biological disadvantage, the key criterion of Scadding's concept of disease. However, there is little support for this definition, and (apart from antisocial personalities) the reduction in life expectancy is fairly modest. If Wakefield's definition, giving a central role to dysfunction, comes to be adopted as a general definition of mental disorder the issue may remain unresolved for some time, because it may not be possible to decide whether there is a dysfunction of some natural mechanism until much more is known of the cerebral mechanisms underlying key personality characteristics such as empathy, impulse control and emotional stability. (There is, though, already evidence that low central serotonergic activity may underlie impulsive, aggressive behaviour in a wide range of settings: see Coccaro & Kavoussi, 1997.)

Although it is difficult to provide irrefutable arguments that personality disorders are mental disorders, it is equally difficult to argue with conviction that they are not. The fact that they have been included in the two most influential and widely used classifications of mental disorders (the ICD and the DSM) for the past half-century is difficult to disregard, whether or not one accepts the view that mental disorder is an ostensive concept. It could be argued, though, that the crucial issue is not whether personality disorder is embraced by any particular definition or concept of mental illness, but what kinds of considerations lead doctors to change their minds about assignations of illness, and in this context two issues loom large.

Assumptions about aetiology and time course

The first is the validity of the assumptions about aetiology and time course which originally underpinned the distinction between personality disorder and mental illness. The former was assumed to be part of the normal spectrum of personality variation and to be stable throughout adult life; the latter to be the result of a morbid process of some kind and to have a recognisable onset and time course. These assumptions both appear increasingly questionable, and as a result the distinction between illness and personality disorder is starting to break down. Some schizophrenic illnesses have the same time course as a personality disorder: they develop during adolescence and persist relatively unchanged throughout adult life. More significantly, it is becoming increasingly clear that the genetic bases of affective personality disorders and mood disorders, and of schizotypal personality disorder and schizophrenia, have much in common. As a result, the affective personality disorder of ICD-9 has been replaced in ICD-10 by two new mood disorders, cyclothymia and dysthymia, ‘because of evidence from family studies that they are genetically related to the mood disorders, and because they are sometimes amenable to the same treatments’. For similar reasons, schizotypal disorder — which is listed as a personality disorder in DSM—IV — is classified with schizophrenia and delusional disorders (F20-29) in ICD-10 despite the fact that ‘its evolution and course are usually those of a personality disorder’ (World Health Organization, 1992a). Most disconcertingly of all, avoidant personality disorder has so much in common with the mental illness known as generalised social phobia that it is suspected that ‘they may be alternative conceptualisations of the same or similar conditions’ (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Unsurprisingly, such problems are leading many American psychiatrists to question the value of the distinction between Axis I and Axis II disorders in DSM—IV, despite the statement in its manual that ‘ the coding of personality disorders on axis II should not be taken to imply that their pathogenesis or range of appropriate treatment is fundamentally different from that for the disorders coded on axis I’ (American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

The influence of effective therapies

The second issue is the influence on medical attitudes of the acquisition of an apparently effective therapy. For nearly 150 years, claims that alcoholism was a disease, from Thomas Trotter in 1804 to Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s and 1940s, cut little ice with the medical profession. It was only in the late 1940s and 1950s, when disulfiram became available, that doctors changed their minds. Now, of course, it is evident that disulfiram is not generally an effective therapy, but in its early years enthusiastic reports of cures were published in many different countries, and it was against this background that the World Health Organization decided to include alcoholism itself, as distinct from alcoholic psychoses and acute alcohol poisoning, in the ICD, and medical organisations throughout the world issued formal statements to the effect that alcoholism was a disease after all. The reasoning involved suggests an acceptance of the socio-political definition described above, although this has rarely commended itself to the medical profession. It does seem, none the less, that possession of an apparently effective treatment can produce a decisive change in medical opinion, and Campbell et al (1979) showed that an established medical role in diagnosis or treatment has more influence on doctors' concepts of disease than on those of the public. At present, neither personality disorder nor obesity is accepted as a genuine illness by most British doctors; but as effective drugs for treating obesity come into widespread use over the next decade it is likely that obesity will come to be accepted as a genuine metabolic disorder, and the same may happen to personality disorders. Indeed, it is already happening to the ‘ borderline’ disorders as evidence accumulates that the disruptive and self-destructive behaviours that characterise the disorder are amenable to forms of psychotherapy (Linehan et al, 1991; Bateman & Fonagy, 1999). There is also some evidence that fluoxetine reduces irritability and aggression in people with a variety of personality disorders (Coccaro & Kavoussi, 1997). If, therefore, the psychiatrists and politicians who maintain that ‘ antisocial personality disorder’ has as good a claim to being accepted as a mental disorder as schizophrenia can demonstrate that it responds to some form of treatment that is not simply a disciplined environment, it is likely that the opposition will melt away, and the same will be true for other types of personality disorder.

Economic and cultural influences

Finally, it is necessary to acknowledge the influence of the setting in which psychiatric care is delivered. For the past 50 years the constraints of the National Health Service have ensured that the time and energy of most British psychiatrists have been fully occupied treating patients with severe mental illnesses. As a result, National Health Service psychiatrists have generally been reluctant to add to their workload by also accepting responsibility for people with deeply ingrained maladaptive behaviours for which there were no proven therapies. In North America the situation has been different. The prevailing systems of health care have facilitated the development of both private office practice and various forms of psychotherapy, and the psychoanalytic concept of ‘borderline personality disorder’ has provided a rationale for treating, as personality disorders, large numbers of patients who in Britain would mostly be regarded as suffering from recurrent depression. These economic and cultural differences have probably contributed to the comparative reluctance of British psychiatrists to accept personality disorders as mental disorders.

Clinical Implications and Limitations

Clinical Implications

Because the term mental illness has no agreed meaning it is impossible to decide with confidence whether or not personality disorders are mental illnesses.

The historical reasons for regarding personality disorders as fundamentally different from illnesses are being undermined by both clinical and genetic evidence.

The introduction of effective treatments would probably have a decisive influence on psychiatrists' attitudes.

Limitations

No comprehensive literature review was carried out.

The literature on personality disorders is not extensive and consists mainly of clinical rather than population-based studies.

Psychiatrists' attitudes are influenced by the setting in which health care is provided.

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