Pick Me Up et al
I love reading those crappy cheap women's magazines like Pick Me Up and Woman's Own. I particularly like the human interest story. Each edition of the magazine has one or more of the following;

A story about a grizzly murder
A story about an abused wife
A story about someone who was abused as a child
A story about someone with a bizarre illness that doesn't really exist like Morgellon's or something.

The thing is, the victims of the grizzly murders and the abused wives usually have it coming in these stories, usually out of stupidity. If you shack up with a satan worshipper who collects machetes, you really have to accept a certain amount of responsibility for the conseqeuences. And the mystery illness stories are usually funny because it's always some hyperchondriac, and hyperchondiacs are the acceptable comic face of mental illness along with people with OCD and narcolepsy. It's only really the abused children that I don't laugh at. But I still read the stories out of morbid curiosity.

Also, I find it funny when people fall over.
(Seance Trumpet has got no beef with a man enjoying a croissant, Sun 20 Dec 2009, 22:33, 6 replies)

You can read exerpts from most online
and Pick Me Up has a library of the gruesome stories.
You need never leave the house again!
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Mon 21 Dec 2009, 5:30, closed)

People killed by bears?
Or do you mean 'grisly' murders?
( Monty Boyce, My cheese game is strong, Mon 21 Dec 2009, 12:53, closed)

You got me good

(Seance Trumpet has got no beef with a man enjoying a croissant, Sat 26 Dec 2009, 13:37, closed)

That's the point
Who is the typical reader of "Take a Break" and so on? A bored, single mother of two on a shit estate somewhere, that's who. Someone who desperately needs to read about people with an even worse life or she'd be crushed by despair. It's quite sad, really.
(ubergeekian, Mon 21 Dec 2009, 23:36, closed)

Narcolepsy
isn't a mental illness. Apparently my wanting to chop people up into little pieces who think my Narcolepsy is funny is one though, but the two conditions aren't related. It's a funny old world.
(Rsoles, Tue 22 Dec 2009, 23:29, closed)

Hyperchondria and OCD definitely are.

All mental illness has a physical or chemical manifestation in the brain, therefore drawing a distinction between a psychological disorder and a neurological disorders is just plain pedantic. The only difference is that one set of diseases causes a physical dysfunction of the brain, the other set is caused by a physical dysfunction of the brain.
(Seance Trumpet has got no beef with a man enjoying a croissant, Sat 26 Dec 2009, 13:38, closed)