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When I was a small child, there were two little twin retard girls who used to entertain all the other kids on the housing estate by getting down on all fours and lapping up dog shit from the road in front of everybody whilst we all stood around laughing. Not even Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s famously swallow-anything Haitians would go that far.

Long before my infant self was ever exposed to the age-old conundrum of the chicken and the egg, I had cause to ask myself which came first: the coprophagic couple’s severe cognitive subnormality, which caused them to swallow dog turds, or the swallowing of the dog turds themselves, whose likely germ-filled contents caused the girls to develop their subsequent condition by attacking their vulnerable prepubescent brain cells with poo poison.

Similar thoughts occurred to me when I saw it listed prominently upon my desk calendar—which is not specifically aimed at the mentally ill, I did not steal it from my nearest out-patient clinic—that this Thursday, Oct. 10, is something called “World Mental Health Day.” Global rates of mental unwellness, it has been widely noticed, have been rising exponentially of late, at just the same time, I note, as governmental and medical attempts to raise #MentalHealthAwareness have been increasing likewise (I was already “aware” of the existence of such phenomena; thanks very much, Oprah, Harry, and Meghan). Which came first: the plague of loonies, or the campaign to make us all more aware of our potential to join said plague’s number?

Feigning Cats and Dogs
What even is “mental health,” anyway? Just the plain common-or-garden absence of lunacy, I would once have thought: The execrable Prince Harry now wants us all to call it “mental fitness.” But, as the ever-growing, ever-manipulative wellness industry attempts to force us all to swallow its rhetorical and pharmaceutical dog-shit brain toxins via the captured media on a daily basis now, it appears its constant exhortations for us to stop viewing troubled minds through unfashionably negative prisms like stigma, pity, or disapproval have finally borne fruit, giving birth to the new phenomenon of what I like to call “aspirational madness.”

I notice an unnamed child in Scotland has just been diagnosed as having “species dysphoria” and been allowed to prowl around his school self-identifying as a wolf, eating the Year Sevens and leaving his spoors all across the playground; up until exceedingly recently, this would just have been considered an incredibly obvious case of clinical lycanthropy. I’ve written about schoolkids and adults who delusionally self-ID as cats, dogs, wolves, dinosaurs, and even sentient talking moons before elsewhere (see here and here), but up until now, left-wing pro-queerity commentators have denied such things are anything more than trans-trolling right-wing media scare stories. Now, at last, we have apparent proof the whole supposed Aesop’s Fable is true after all.

Pitiably, the school involved justified its appropriately insane decision by saying they had used something called a “wellbeing wheel” to scientifically determine what course of action was best for said infant. I had no idea the central conceit of Wheel of Fortune was now being used as an infallible diagnostic tool of mental malady. Spin, spin, spin that wheel! Congratulations, Melanie, you’ve won dementia praecox.

Thanks to the use of this fantastic medical device, school leaders have determined it is now considered the clearly crazy (or possibly just piss-taking) child’s officially guaranteed human right to get down on all fours and quite literally howl at the moon. But if the boy who cried wolf isn’t really human at all, then does he even possess human rights to be legally respected in the first place? That’s The $64,000 Question: Get it right, and be admitted to the asylum of YOUR choice today!

Brazil Nut Is Openly Cracked
Equally worthy of deep philosophical consideration is whether or not an animal who self-IDs as possessing some very human views of the concept of gender-bending is worthy of these very same human rights? This question was occasioned by a recent U.K. employment tribunal in which lesbian social worker (is there any other kind?) Elizabeth Pitt was awarded £63,000 for being wrongly disciplined by Cambridgeshire County Council for expressing “nasty opinions” about a male colleague’s supposedly “gender fluid” pet dog, whom he had incomprehensibly named Pablo Vittar, after a prominent human Brazilian drag queen. (See previous Takimag coverage here.)

How did anyone other than a qualified brain-vet know this biologically male dachshund was trans? Simple, it began wearing a dress…at the pretty obvious behest of its owner. Photos of cute little Pablo modeling frocks, said the animal’s pet-daddy, a Brazil-born “young people worker” with the quite queer name of Gleicon Analha, were intended to “prompt debate,” a debate probably generally going along the broad lines of “Why have you dressed your dog as a ballerina, you complete fucking gay lunatic?”

However, Pitt’s employers would have deemed such comments to have had a “detrimental impact on the mental health and wellbeing of the complainant,” as if this was even in any way possible. “I have seen friends dying of [such] transphobia,” he said. No, I think you’ll find that was AIDS, Gleicon.

What I find particularly depressing—in a way that genuinely is detrimental toward my own personal mental health—is that, in both of the above cases, the sources of supposed authority immediately sided with the obviously unbalanced-seeming troublemakers here, not the more demonstrably sane persons around them who clearly must have felt their behavior to have been more than a little unreasonable. Why, it’s almost as if Western society as a whole has now become not merely tolerant of, but actively in love with, mental illness…

Cupid Stunts
Or maybe, like Harley Quinn shagging the Joker, we are all just increasingly in love with individual mad people these days? Another disheartening story I read recently told of how online dating apps like OK Cupid are now providing special filters to actively allow women to seek out male sex partners who are “working on their mental wellbeing,” just like Jack the Ripper. In the words of one interviewee, men who have never attended therapy sessions are “psychologically dangerous”; one may have thought it more likely to be the other way around?

According to another story, an amazing 91 percent of users of the phone-based hookup app Hinge were actively seeking to straddle a lunatic, so much so it was seriously considering changing its name to Unhinged.

Rival app Bumble (for those seeking a quick fumble) had even begun adding twee onscreen badges for users to display to potential cerebrally dysgenic mates, saying things like “therapy,” “mindfulness,” “diazepam,” and “just been forcibly sectioned,” in order to allow users to indicate precisely what stage they had arrived at upon what is now termed their “mental health journey.”

Bumble’s busy PR bees explained that each user can “choose which [label] you feel is most authentic to you.” That comes dangerously close to advising customers adopt a position of pseudo-clinical self-diagnosis. What if someone like Hannibal Lecter chose to self-ID as being sane? If he does, never accept an offer of a dinner date with him.

“Hello, my name’s Bill Decker, and I’m a murderer,” a forgotten old British TV comedy character used to say. Nowadays, that’s a great description to post underneath your profile photo to make you sound like a literal lady-killer.

You Can’t Put a Queer in a Straightjacket
One female millennial journalist got an entire article out of posting the following profile on popular no-strings hookup app Tinder that was “brutally honest about my struggles with mental health”:

Hi, I have many mental illnesses…. Also, I don’t like my dad. Also, I’m bisexual (but that’s not a mental illness). I have many neuroses and residual traumas that make developing romantic relationships a HUGE challenge, but like, I have fun with it, ya know?”

Although open to receiving responses from persons of any and all genders, most replies came from perverted males who apparently found the prospect of sleeping with a madwoman to be sexually arousing, saying things like “I like that you’re ill. I am too,” “I’m a recovering drug addict, so I’m not super judgmental when it comes to that area,” and “Most mental girls with father issues are great in the sheets…. Maybe it’s because that’s the [only] place for them to feel a release from their fucked up lives.”

Once upon a time, such wannabe Frasier Cranes gone wrong had no option but to wander the streets keeping a beady eye out for any sexily schizophrenic-looking girls living in shop doorways in rags and licking all the windows, like Andre Bréton did when writing Nadja (an excellent book, if profoundly immoral), but ever since 2004 there has been a specific website available for those who want to make beautiful yet defective babies together, called No Longer Lonely. But how do you prove you’re mad enough to be allowed to use said service? Simple. You merely have to express a genuine desire to use the thing in the first place.

Established by a lonesome loony soul named James Leftwich, the site’s basic inspiration was described by Jim thus:

JIM’S MESSAGE
Hello, my name is Bill Decker and I’m a murderer Jim Leftwich. I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 1992. Whenever I tried to date a woman I was faced with a conundrum. How do I disclose my illness? It made me think, ‘what if I knew the other person also had a mental illness?’ It was a comforting thought. With that in mind I started the site…. There is no risk to give this a try…. We’ve had dozens of marriages result.

Like that between Bill and Hillary Clinton, perhaps?

Tie Me Kangaroo Down—and Sedate Him
Meanwhile, in some completely unrelated news, recent medical research has suggested the actual act of using dating apps in the first place can very easily make a person become profoundly mentally ill. And yet, such is these tools’ ever-growing popularity, says this very same research, by as soon as 2040, 70 percent of relationships in Australia, where said study took place, will begin online—which inevitably means that 70 percent of kids Down Under will soon be sired by outright mental people.

What ultimate effect will this have upon the poor Australian population? Well, other recent archaeological studies also show that, surprisingly, as far back in time as 5400 BC, the native Aborigines once had a highly successful technologically advanced civilization—until one of them invented the smartphone, quickly followed by the first viable search engine, Yahoo! Serious, then the original online dating app, Boomerangangbang, and before the century was out they’d descended every last man Jack of ’em down to the level of those primitive, mentally subnormal, semi-naked, Tipp-Ex-painted, alcoholic spear-chuckers we know and love (and find so very highly sexually attractive) today.

Things have certainly changed since the days of my own childhood, when the only cell phones we ever had were two tin cans attached together with string. Back then, no little boys ever wanted to kiss the lips of those smelly-breathed twin retard girls who’d just been eating dog shit, for obvious reasons. These days, the lads would literally be going mad for them.