equally as bad/damaging is the viewpoint that mental health hospitals are full of people who are actually sane but have been, like, DRIVEN TOTALLY MAD BY ALL THE NASTY DRUGS THEY'RE FORCED TO TAKE! There was this ridiculous guardian feature a few weeks back which was meant to be a kind of expose on mental hospitals, in which the author, who (i think) suffered from depression, checked herself into a mental hospital and then reported some totally ill-informed, sensationalist, inflammatory shit about it - totally exacerbating the kind of stigma that gets attached to mental health institutions. And this was a major story in what's supposedly the most liberal broadsheet paper in the UK. I showed the article to my girlfriend, who's a mental health nurse, and it pissed her off so much she wrote a letter of complaint to the guardian. sad but true.
anyway
a few months back, this girl at my work (who i hate, and i really rarely hate anyone), said to me, as i was reading my book and having a fag after lunch, "i never read fiction, because i have such a crazy and over-active imagination, that whenever i do read fiction, i think to myself 'i can come up with better ideas than this myself'"... is that pretentious?