Second opinion

THE LATE Professor Shepherd, review- ing a volume somewhat optimistically entitled by its editor Recent Progress in Psychiatry, wrote that a more appropriate title, perhaps, would have been Recent Activity in Psychiatry.

I confess that I feel the same way about popular culture. It's popular all right, but is it culture? I suppose in the ecumenical sense of the word, as used by American anthropologists, who make no distinction between the head-hunters of New Guinea and the first Viennese school, it is culture; and in the same loose sense, the way people live in Eng- land must be counted a civilisation. Still, whenever I hear the words 'popular cul- ture' I reach for my earplugs.

Judge not, that ye be not judgmental, that is the first tenet of the First Church of Christ, Social Worker.

Needless to say, non-judgmentalism is both impossible in practice and disas- trous when attempted. People go on making judgments, but because of offi- cial non-judgmentalism are quite unable to live according to them. For example, our slum dwellers may judge all they like that a quiet life is best, but — because the Crown Prosecution Service has decided that there is nothing to choose between an intact skull and one smashed into fragments by a baseball bat — it is quite beyond their reach. So life remains for them what it need not be, a torment. Many of my patients are goaded by their neighbours, who use every refine- ment of barbarism to make their lives a misery. Sometimes I think the English are just savages with stereos.

Last week, a patient came to me to complain about his neighbours. He want- ed something done about them before he took to the axe or the lunatic asylum. I asked him for the burden of his com- plaints against his neighbours.

`Every day, we have complete swearing and spitting out of the windows.'

Complete swearing and spitting? Com- plete by comparison with what? Partial swearing and spitting? Would such par- tial swearing and spitting constitute an amelioration?

`What do you want me to do about it?' I asked.

`There should be some tablets or injec- tions to stop them,' he replied.

His belief in the powers of medicine and doctors did him credit, of course, but in this case was quite unjustified.

`I'm afraid there's not much I can do,' I said.

'There must be,' he continued. 'They make so much noise, they've got me run- ning around like a pea in a pod.'

When did the English become sav- ages? It isn't a question of education, for even the uneducated of a few decades ago behaved with more natural dignity and grace than the comparatively well- educated of today. My next patient was a nice old gentleman, an unskilled worker retired for many years, who came to ask my advice about the medicine he was taking, of which name he could only half-remember. I guessed at the full name.

`That's education for you,' he said, good-humouredly. 'Do you think I should continue to take it?'

I said that he should; to which he replied, 'Well, I can't go against a doc- tor's decision.'

His quiet dignity allowed him to assume not indeed that I was right, but that I was advising him to the best of my ability: which I was. There was no hint in him of that disappointed and enraged self-importance which lies behind pre- sent ill-manners.

My next patient, 20 years old, brought me back to modern popular culture. His 38-year-old stepfather was on holiday in Greece, and had sent him a postcard, which the patient brought with him and allowed me to read.

`Pissed every night,' it said. 'Fucking great!' Theodore Dalrymple