Essential reading at the Quietus, from a superb article by Josh Hall on depression:
[...] "Everybody gets depressed," [India] Knight blithely asserts; a sentence as blisteringly inaccurate as one suggesting that everyone gets the occasional spot of MRSA, or suffers from an annoying recurrence of brain tumour. Despite railing on Twitter about her late father's depression, it is clear that Knight has absolutely no conception of the illness; clear that she lacks the critical faculties to distinguish between a bad day and a mental disorder.
Not everybody gets depressed, just as not everybody gets cancer and not everybody loses a limb. In any given year, around one in four British adults will experience at least one mental disorder. Of those, depression and anxiety are the most common. Depressive episodes can be all consuming. They can render life unfeasible, exploding our capacity to deal with the minutiae of daily existence. They often come hand in hand with psychoses – delusions, hallucinations, an inability to interact with the world at large. Recurrence is common: more than half of those who experience a depressive episode will suffer from at least one more. Depression is chronic for one in five sufferers. It is not the same as feeling a bit mardy.
For something completely different, there's this post on Drowned In Sound looking at (well, listening to) the confused mess that is Radio 1:
[...] I personally fail to understand how anyone over 8 would be able to bear daytime Radio One, having endured it for a few days to write this. Stretched across a playlist that suggests an ADHD maniac with a Spotify account, bouncing wildly from chart pap to Muse and all points in between - in a manner that would redefine ‘eclectic’ to mean ‘random choice of music with no discernible taste or reason’ - the main problem I find with the station is the presenters. Whether it’s Fearne Cotton’s two ladies at the hairdressers chat with Cheryl Cole, in which the main point of conversation was how she had hurt her leg, or utter cuntery of Scott Mills with the weakest fart joke since my first year at big school, the bits between the random music selections are the real killers. Then there’s Newsbeat, which appears every hour with its ‘news for idiots’ approach that seems to take John Craven’s ‘Newsround’ as a starting point and then dumb down (and down some more). ‘Grimmy’ (urge to kill rising every time I type that) is undoubtedly a cut above the above, as it were, but he still has to fit into this template that is driven by demographics.
And this article by Patrick Stokes did the rounds on Twitter at the weekend, with good cause:
[...] The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.
