Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent. RD Laing 

 

In the bloody water the woman's head was immersed. As they drove the iron through her skull, a technique called trephination.

She let out the roar of the damned, thus confirming trephination's efficacy, and their suspicions. 

Yellow bile for mania, black bile for depression, we need to teach her a lesson.

This innocent touched by angels, blessed by God, left to scream and scream and sleep on shit and straw.

Do you know how very much we do not know? No?

Hysteria:  a plague of females, brought on by moonbeams and menstruation. Lunacy a disease of the womb. Live too long, to die too soon.

Poor villagers would take mentally handicapped people into their homes and treat them like children. The church disapproved.

Some of the troubadours, travelling musicians, poets, sang of tragic love madness. The mad were blessed. The church thought otherwise.

William Blake, poet and artist, talked to the spirits who he saw everywhere. They inspired 'Songs of Innocence and Experience', he painted them too. He was locked up for sedition. 

My friend went to the doctor with symptoms of profound (de profundis) grief and they pushed antidepressants at him. 

Psychiatrists label unconventional  forms of behaviour as medical to treat under the guise of a supposedly curative medical intervention: RD Laing said: "Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death."

The diagnosed ill are subjected to treatment which is a violation of their basic human rights and a profound attack on their common dignity. He was left floundering, my friend.

The water gurgles and whooshes under the bridge. He's tried to kill himself twice. Third time lucky?

When I pass from summer into autumn. I do not expect to see the like of summer again.