DELICATE TOPICS MUST BE DISCUSSED OBJECTIVELY

Though I have formidable academic and extracurricular achievements to my credit I am a desperately unfulfilled man burdened with irrational guilt after childhood traumas and my Christian father’s constant denigration. My life has been so blighted by stigma that I have struggled to solve it by turning it upside down and writing about characters who suffer the way I still do.

“The Librarian of Charford” was to have been a TV serial life “Doctor Finlay’s Casebook” which was to disseminate information about delicate topics EXPRESSLY sp that those who suffer badly from stigmatisation would cease to feel bad and develop coping strategies. I had written episodes soon after graduation. Leading character Alan (Moelwyn)-Wright moved back to Charford in Avalonshire to become its librarian. He teams up with head librarian Bill Carter and others who have relatives with mental health problems. Each harrowing situation is portrayed accurately but sensitively and some touch upon taboo topics. At the end of each episode the public were to be shown BOOKS on the topic in question. It was rejected OUT OF HAND because Alan is the purported inventor of a Code of Behaviour called Contributionism that makes institutionalised religion REDUNDANT and he is a shameless reincarnationist.
Had it gone ahead, the English speaking world would be fully equipped to deal with the entire range of distressing events that happen to everybody sometimes in our lives. By now I would have a worldwide reputation as a scriptwriter who has successfully and creatively transformed my very own most hurtful experiences into episodes with the explicit moral messages that all of us deserve to be treated with dignity; and it would have substantially alleviated the acute mental pain which accomplishes a variety of situations where formerly people suffered in silence rather than risk being ridiculed, ostracised or perish the thought incarcerated in mental hospitals.

John Stuart Mill the champion of women’s rights in Victorian Britain declared that whenever influential minorities declare that certain topics are TABOO it’s the duty of wise and caring people to OFFEND such people by open unbiased discussions of the taboo topics. I have in fact clashed with CATHOLICS because I live by Mill’s principles and Alan Wright a.k.a. The Socrates of Charford is necessarily true to his/my Contributionist view that he has a categoric duty to help all who suffer from the affliction itself compounded by the public prejudice about it.

I have written scripts based upon my very own hurtful experiences and those of people such as a young psychology graduate wrongfully detained in a mental hospital (This is the monologue called ANDREW SINCLAIR YOU ENJOY YOUR DIGNITY) whilst I have two other Monologues of varying length, and a Radio Play. I have written Video Scripts about characters with OCD and Asperger’s Syndrome, both of which I suffer from. A supremely hurtful event invariably gives rise to a work where I carefully alter the details so that only I myself know the real people involved. This is why I set my works in a very necessary parallel universe with alarmingly altered geography and fictional Parliamentary constituencies &c.

Despite the sexual liberation of the 1960s, many people are loath to talk about their sexual problems. In the recent past, religious authoritarians have put unseemly pressures on broadcasters to suppress debates on sexual deviations that are quite harmless, which are lumped together with practices that can do long term damage. Moreover research into the effects of sexual deviations and abuse has ceased (perhaps because of interference by church people?) I read of far too many adults burdened with DELUSIONS OF FLAWEDNESS like myself and all this has come about from Christian upbringings and notably from mis-education in Christian schools. Then there are people like myself who dare not disclose that they have intense aversions to particular minorities for fear of being branded racists or misogynists. A supremely hurtful experience in early childhood might be scrambled up with a memory of somebody who looks rather peculiar or speaks differently. When I was about 5 I was scared of NUNS who looked sinister – I thought that they had NO HEADS! Even now I feel a mental tremor at the sight of a nun. An acute aversion to a regional accent may have arisen from say a teacher with that accent who was a bully. A deep seated revulsion can be firmed early in life and persist. The sufferer feels that he will be ridiculed if he talks about it.

My “Pure OCD” is bound up with experiences in early childhood and still flares up when triggered by such matters as the sight of my brother’s handwriting. I can provide a Video-script where the names of real people in my life have been artfully swapped around. It deals with a young man who like Lord Reith, assaulted his elder brother and was never allowed to forget the event. He develops an intense irrational conviction that he will go mad and assault short bespectacled men (who resemble MYSELF!) and this gets the better of him until he meets MY DOPPELGANGER after this doppelganger LIKE MYSELF gets assaulted by 3 boys. Then a young lady enters his world and she too suffers. The work ends in a paradox where MY DOPPELGANGER, physically incapable of harming anybody, discloses that he is still besieged by a delusion that he will go mad and assault his well-built, bullying brother Dominic.
I have begun to write video scripts where the action takes place on hikes through beauty spots and the characters enjoy restorative calm – see my Flyer about Wilderness Hikes. I contend that if actual people adopted my principle of writing about taboo topics set in a parallel universe they would not only cathart their own mental abscesses but enable fellow sufferers the wide world over to compare experiences and discover common ground, therefore to adopting coping strategies.
With Alan Wright’s strict consequentialism as a better yardstick than Christian morality the outcome would be that sufferers from acute mental agony about taboo topics would CEASE TO FEEL BAD and recover, so resume their dignified roles in Society.

Q.E.D.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, 6-8-2010.