The BBC’s fat cat factory

Drapetomania was a psychiatric diagnosis given to enslaved Africans who wished to flee their captivity. The condition was said to be brought on by masters who treated their toiling property too well, giving them a taste for better living conditions.

Similarly, hysteria was a diagnosis frequently ascribed to women who, for whatever reason, refused to bend to a man’s will (typically, their husbands). Quite simply, it was an early form of gaslighting.

According to Szasz, what both conditions had in common was not the fact that they were mental illnesses: it was the fact that both labels supplied a pretext to correct behaviour which was socially disapproved of at the time. This was the case with mental illnesses overwhelmingly, which he saw as being largely metaphorical in nature.

Psychiatry has serious form where lies are concerned and yet critics of Trump are happy to deploy it against him as a weapon. Szasz has warned us that doing so is a big mistake because, like the cons Ron listed in his amusing article, the pseudoscience of psychiatry is just another one of them.

We could learn something if we stopped to entertain ideas such as those of Szasz. We could even solve some seriously chronic problems in our society.

But, why would we?

Archie Beaton Inverness

SOME years ago my modest bank balance was marginally improved when I joined those of advanced years and was no longer required to pay a television licence. Now this amnesty is over and I find myself again being required to help fund what I think is a fat cat factory where few employees, if any, receive less than £100,000 per year, but from whose premises emerge monotonous miaows of financial misery and hardship.

A look down the excessively lengthy list of the higher-profile BBC employees quickly suggests that if this excessively financed organisation experiences any financial glitches, this has to be because of the pay level at its places of work.

Even that other cosseted closet of employment, the House of Lords, cannot be, I am convinced, doling out such beneficence as the BBC.

It could be that commercial TV is equally indulgent, but we are not commanded to fork out our pension pennies for its offerings, and that’s the difference.

It is time the fat cats were told to do some commercial feline hunting for their food.

Ian Johnstone Peterhead