Steve Johns Bare Naked

 

ANTARES PLACE

ASYLUM

CAUTION LUNATICS AT WORK

I have made a sign to go on the Swimming New Zealand (SNZ) door between their office and the Millennium Pool, Wholefood Café. The idea came to me yesterday when I found the Steve Johns’ insanity quote. As a reminder, here is what Steve Johns said.

“But we haven’t been getting the results we’d hoped we would, and certainly from a High Performance Sport perspective what they had hoped and expected we would be getting.

“So to continue with the centralised model and expect to get different results is the definition of insanity.”

I’m not sure what academic training in mental disorders Steve Johns has to diagnose insanity. However he does work in the asylum. I assume he sees the disorder “up close and personal”. Or perhaps he is not using the word in a medical sense. He may find that the common usage of “insanity” is sufficient to describe what goes on behind the asylum’s closed doors.

Goodness knows the condition he is talking about has gone on for 20 years and has cost supporters of the asylum $30 million. Stop and consider that for a moment – 20 years and $30 million. A mental condition that has lasted that long certainly merits being described as “insanity”.

The internet says the condition that Steve Johns tells us has inflicted itself on Bruce Cotterill and the other members of the asylum is:

Insanity describes a spectrum of individual and group behaviors that are characterised by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns In contemporary usage, the term insanity is an informal term denoting “mental instability”. In medicine, the general term is used to include the presence either of delusions or of hallucinations or both in a patient.

Does this fit SNZ? Steve Johns works in the asylum and tells us it does. HHHhHHHHHe should know. But let’s take the definition one line at a time.

Individual and group behaviors – Both those categories work in the asylum. In fact the asylum website tells me there are 15 patients plus 6 seriously ill inmates, called the Board who, I am told, are on a solitary confinement waiting list. Given the amount we ever hear from them, they may already have started their solitary.

Abnormal mental or behavioral patterns – Steve Johns is right. Insanity is a problem. Of course I agree with him. No one needs a medical degree to understand that what goes on in the asylum is not normal. Normal people don’t lie to their sponsors and their supporters. The pathological lying present in this asylum, I’m told, is called pseudologia fantastica. Normal people don’t break the law by hiding an individual’s private information. I’m told that is a form of schizophrenia.

Delusions or hallucinations – Here we have the proof Steve Johns must have been referring to when he described the behavior of SNZ as insanity. Johns has nailed the problem perfectly. When the inmates of the asylum, especially the six in solitary confinement, pursued a doctrine called “centralized training” for twenty years, at a cost of $30 million, for nothing in return the diagnosis of “delusional hallucinations” seems perfect to me. What made it so much worse was the sick irony that two generations of New Zealand’s best swimmers were forced to go along with the delusion. Inmates of the asylum told the country’s most talented swimmers that victory was about to be theirs. And the swimmers, through embarrassment or fear, I don’t know which, played along with the hallucination. The emperor had no clothes but no one dared say. Steve Johns and Bruce Cotterill were naked in the asylum and no one said a word.

Sadly the condition was diagnosed by one lonely voice – Swimwatch. The asylum inmates had their condition described. They knew about the futility of it all. They were told it was all for nothing. But still they spent and spent in their quest for victories that were never going to happen. It was delusional. They were having hallucinations. They were drunks begging for another whiskey. They were lung cancer patients smoking a packet a day. And that is why Steve Johns calls the inmates of the asylum insane. And all the time he’s calling them insane he’s failed to notice he and that Bruce have no clothes.

But be careful of the inmates in the Antares Place Asylum. They can be dangerous. Yesterday, as I walked past the door between the café and the Antares Place insane asylum I heard the inmates chanting “Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen–” Steve and Bruce could clearly be heard leading the chorus. I was so fascinated I walked to the door and puts my eye to the keyhole and Gary Francis poked me in the eye with his finger and the inmates started chanting “Fourteen, fourteen, fourteen–”

 

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