Bored with Manatt? You may be ill

The Editor, Sir:

Boredom is an emotion, which borders on mental ill-health. The pervasive lack of interest, which is reflected by the person who describes being bored, reflects that individual's difficulty in concentration on and attention to a particular activity.

Boredom is associated with brain attention deficits, which do not arise from a lack of things to do but in the individual's cognitive inability to handle the specific challenge. Professional psychological assessment scales exist that can measure an individual's proneness or ability to boredom and the ability to pay attention to a problem. Boredom is linked to clinical depression and depressive illnesses, and is strongly associated with lapses in attention.

Immaturity and escape

Boredom is not a mild or trivial problem; it is linked to psychological, physical, educational and social problems. It is a feature of immaturity and escape. Anxiety is a significant component of boredom, and sleep and daydreaming are common manoeuvres used by the bored to escape the psychological pain triggered by the expressed boredom.

A number of commentators and leaders in recent weeks have publicly expressed their boredom in the current Manatt, Phelps & Phillips (MPP) affair and in the furore that this issue has generated in the country. These people are deluded to believe that this issue will simply 'go away' especially by their expression of their boredom in its discourse. Their expression of their 'boredom' in this discussion is simply an expression of a fantasy daydream that the matter will simply be forgotten, or die a natural death on the altar of political expediency.

The MPP affair reflects not only the chancre of duplicity and deception that challenges and demands lancing and excision, but reflects a much deeper pathology that profoundly links the Jamaican political system to criminals and transgression, which demands revolutionary trans-formation of the Jamaican state. The ho-hum experience that has been reflected in this expression of boredom in the MPP affair is disingenuous and duplicitous, and is another expression of the madness that abounds in our society.

The psychological therapeutic advice to the bored is not to succumb to the tedium of the boredom, but to submerge and to flood (implode) oneself with the emotional and perceptual realities of the boring object. Also to force the vectors of truth and deception of the problem that triggers this boredom into a valiant struggle of reality that will eventually bottom out into the bedrock of honesty. This will allow the inflicted depressed, anxious and bored victim to surface into the healing liberating sunlight of freedom and the resultant vector of self-determination.

With this liberated psychology, we can stop the conflict, cease the fighting, develop insight from the truths of this liberation and plan constructively and communally for the future. This will allow us to collectively navigate the social challenges that beset our society.

I am, etc.,

FREDERICK W. HICKLING

Professor of Psychiatry,

UWI