Confabulation by Julia Jones
Do you remember those signs that used to crop up on office walls? “You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here / But it Helps.” I always suspected that they were the hallmarks of a rather aggressive sanity. There's a type of person too – happy to announce “Oh we're all quite mad , you know!” – when one knows quite well that they're not; they're just a bit loud and attention-seeking and probably SMUG. I almost lost my sense of humour when I noticed members of a writer's group cheerfully claiming to be “mad”. Mental illness is so un-funny and I've usually assumed that most of us write to remain sane, to make some sense of our experience of life – to try to keep the madness at bay. Dementia is (currently) an incurable mental illness which gradually takes away the ability to read, write and speak. Last year I read Naoki Higashida's autobiographical The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism and found unexpected insight into aspects of ...