you’ve had enough. you need an escape from this life. you need to stem the interminable flow of Thoughts, these wretched Thoughts, flooding your every living moment. why do you keep thinking about death? why does this make you want to join the catholic church? you don’t know, but you do know something. you’re sick of the plague called thinking. you cast off your descartes admiration, you say ‘cheerio!’ to your phenomenological inclinations, you wave a half-hearted arrivederci to your conceptions of others’ conceptions of you (this one is sure to linger). this is your manifesto against Thoughts, against thinking. you will stand high and mighty on your soapbox, like a crazed preacher opposite the derelict debenhams, and tell the world what everyone else cannot: abandon Thoughts! leave thinking about thinking to the ecclestiastical and the Mentally ill.
ironically, most people would believe you would fall into one of those two camps. that doesn’t work. who needs the world anyway? what does the world bring but death, famine, and the end of everything. you are you. try parroting those videos your sister-in-law sends you. focus on yourself. put yourself first. go to yoga, go to meditation. try and fall asleep to a £30 per month mindfulness subscription whose accent irks you (is it reverse steve mcmanaman doing the voices? why is every fifth word randomly scouse?) telling you that it’s ok to be you and to be one with your Thoughts. you don’t want that. you want your Thoughts ostracised, excised, surgically removed like an especially malignant tumour.
tumour. medicine. in your time of need, what else can you turn to but the perfectly functioning nhs? you wake up at 7:45 the next morning, your finger perfectly poised to ring your GP as soon as the clock strikes eight. you do it. you hear “you are (odd pause that changes in length every time you hear it) seventeen in the queue. please stay on the line!” for the next hour.
ah well, at least this leaves you with some time to concoct just the right mixture of words that communicate that while you are at your wits end, you don’t need to be sectioned or roundhouse kicked by police (the first will probably lead to the second, but that doesn’t matter). finally. you reach your long-awaited nirvana. you are now number one in the queue. the landline (got to keep your mobile on hand as thought suppressant-in-chief) clicks.
“hello, this is (indistinct- you’ve only recently moved here and the connection is awful. maybe riverside?) health centre, your calls are our concern. how can i help you today?”
“hi, yes, hello. uhm, i’ve been having some trouble with my Mental Health. it’s nothing serious, and there’s no risk to life or anything.”
your mum, after your last flareup of Mental Health, told you to start off by saying this, so they “don’t think you’re Mental”. words often escape one’s description of their Mental state, but for you, Mental is probably the most accurate. at least she’s trying to help you!
“oh ok. could i have your name and date of birth first, please?” (you idiot. how are they going to know who you are? you’re not tom jones!)
“oh yeah, sorry. my date of birth is one-two-oh-six-oh-two. (another bit of advice from your mum. she really hated working at that GP.)”
“your name?” (you can almost taste the exasperation over the receiver.)
“ah, sorry, haven’t had my coffee yet! (you don’t drink coffee before 9am, stomach troubles and the such.) my name is…” (you find it embarrassing to type your name out and are skirting around doing so. you’ve never told anyone this. you don’t actually mind your name, but if you could go back and be called something else, you probably would. alliterative double-barrelled surname? no thank you!).”
“ok, thank you, your GP is Dr. Stephenson, is that right?”
“i’m pretty sure, yeah.” (two days after moving here, you got bored and went to the takeaway across the road with a dodgy hygiene rating. needless to say, you had to visit the GP then, who admonished your enjoyment of so-called ‘mystery meat’.)
“you’re lucky, you’ve just snuck in to the last appointment of the day. it’s at half ten. would that work for you?”
“oh uhm, half nine today? yeah, that works perfectly. thank you so much!” (somehow, you mean this, and sound like it.)
“no worries, see you in an hour!”
you hang up. the first step to an eternal respite is one hour of frantically getting ready and running for the bus, plus an extra ten minutes of feigning normal Mental Health issues away. you spend another ten minutes laid prostrate on your bed watching a video about the economic crisis in some pacific country. how terrible. eventually, you shit-shower-shave, make a bagel and promise that as a reward, you can get some mediocre coffee after the appointment, and inevitably run for the bus. only a short ride, but you have a month rider from that last bout of temping, and you may as well save yourself the twenty-five minute walk with a five minute walk, ten minute bus, and other five minute walk. this leaves you five minutes to, in fact, get your coffee before the appointment. because you are an imbecile, you didn’t realise that you, in fact, must check in for your appointment. this is sure to take a minute. you walk into the health centre like a tornado has ravaged every part of you but your large oat milk caramel cappuccino (reclaiming basic. it’s en vogue to order things like this, don’t you know? In a moment of complete and utter desolation, you realise that these are the exact type of Thoughts that you want to be rid of.)
through all of the turmoil, you’ve made it. you plop yourself down in front of Dr. Stephenson, on a chair that is not not comfortable, but you feel will start to dig in at just the right time that you will feel coerced to leave. how do all GPs have these chairs? something for you to look up later. he has progressed from slightly amorphous blob that will give you antibiotics, to a slightly less amorphous blob who will, hopefully, help you in a similar way. mental antibiotics… do they exist? isn’t that the point of this appointment, you wonder. as you perambulate the world in which Mental antibiotics exist, you are sadly interrupted by the Doctor. you don’t know his first name. at your last GP, all of them had their first names on their doors. here, no. painfully impersonal, and seemingly proud of it. you can guess later but for now, he looks like a David. Doctor David… perhaps?
“hello [you’ve decided, for now, to refer to yourself as Name Supplied. it’s cool, chic, clandestine, subcultural.] i hope you’ve settled in well enough. did you end up visiting that gallery i recommended?” The other thing that distinguishes Doctor (Stephen? no. that would be stupid. but very funny…) is his love of art. hopefully this time he doesn’t chat more about your philosophy degree, even if he’s the only person who actually wants to do so…
“i missed the exhibition you mentioned, but i enjoyed the one they’re running now on (slightly mumbled because you can’t remember who was in the exhibition) french artists. very stimulating.” Usually, you would follow this up with asking if he’s been, but you feel that the answer would either be an interminably long yes, or an amazingly Drawn-Out no. you don’t have time for either (and let’s be honest, neither does he.)
“i’m sure. (unexpectedly trite…) anyway, back to the matter at hand. i heard that you were having some issues with your Mental Health.” the word mangles the previously cordial atmosphere into something in equal parts boring and sinister, like your head of year’s office in secondary school.
“yes, well. not the usual-”
(he cuts you off. rude!) “are you dealing with depression or anxiety? do you think about killing yourself? i’m happy to prescribe antidepressants, but they have a lot of side-effects i must tell you about. and i assume you know this, but therapy has a very long waiting list on the NHS.”
“no, no. it’s nothing like that. i just… i don’t really know how to put this. i wouldn’t say i have depression or anxiety, any more so than normal people. and as to thinking about killing myself (said with the amount of emphasis that shows you only think about it. no sectioning today!), i can say yes. i do think about that. but i would never do it. this is the main problem. i do this for everything. i keep thinking and thinking and thinking until it’s half ten and i just watch some tv to go to sleep while not really doing anything at all. i just keep thinking. and i don’t want to stop thinking, but i need an escape from the Thoughts whirling around my head at two hundred miles an hour, every single hour i am awake.” (oh no. oh no. you’ve gone too far. off to the Loony Bin with you. say goodbye to normal life! run from the gendarmerie, for they’re coming to cast you off into the dregs of society. the Mental. you think you can come back from this?)
“oh. ok. i have to ask, are these Thoughts voices? are they telling you to do bad things?” (like a fifty year old car after being dinged, you’re written off. you are no longer normal, you don’t even have Mental Health. you are Mental.)
“no, nothing like that. these Thoughts are perfectly normal, they are very obviously products of my own brain and are normal Thoughts. my problem is with the amount of them, and the annoying breadth they cover. i need them to stop, but not completely. it’s like your own tinnitus being blasted back into your ears through a speaker, it just leads to eternal ringing and loops, all over my head the entire day.”
“ok. ok, so. these Thoughts aren’t inherently harmful, you’re just (he pauses, as if you are Mental, and so must be constantly considered in every word of conversation) overwhelmed by how many of them there are?”
“yes. exactly. they’re almost always innocuous but i’m at my breaking point. if you want an example, i spent the past few minutes first wishing that mental antibiotics existed, then wondering what they would be like, then imagining a world where they did exist, and almost reached creating a doctor who episode in my mind about a world with Mental antibiotics. as you greeted me, i then realised that concept already basically exists in a series 3 episode. can’t you see? this is untenable. i can’t live this way anymore. no person could and function.” (did you make up the realisation? yes. but you think, this is still a thought, and a plausible one to have. hopefully you sound less ‘simply insane’ and more ‘at your wit’s end’. wits’ end?)
“ok, alright. i’m sorry, Name Supplied, but i’m not sure what i can do for you aside from refer you to a Therapist, but again, this will take a long time unless you can go private. (that’s it. The big T. you’ve been waiting for it, the Referral, but doesn’t he know you’re too esoteric for therapy?) you’re clearly a person who has considered (another pause) mindfulness and the entire coterie of Mental Health strategies that GPs such as myself are told to recommend, but I imagine you are familiar with those, and i don’t want you to think that this means i think you should be carted off to the Loony Bin (oh god. can he hear your Thoughts??????). thinking too much is a perfectly ok problem to have, if one i can’t prescribe something for.”
you remain slightly stunned into silence for a minute or two. you feel slightly better than you thought you would’ve. someone else has heard your pleas. you’re not crazy, you’re not going to the Loony Bin. you’re not Mental. you’re simply particularly affected by Mental Health. being Particularly Affected can be fixed.
“are you ok, Name Supplied?”
this touches you in an odd way. are you going to cry? what if you did? would it matter? why not cry. let Doctor Stephen Stephenson see you cry.
