Beanbags

At the Central Hospital School of Nursing
students and tutors became acquainted
by throwing beanbags and naming their target
until we knew each other by heart.
Patients were already labelled and filed:
a shuffling gait indicated psychosis,
fine tremors, dystonia a dual diagnosis,
memory loss a mood disorder,
lipstick and make-up delusions of grandeur.
Signs and symptoms delineated, broken brains
marinated on shelves or laid head to head
in the back wards sleeping.
The hypnotic effect of asylums was seeping
from water-towers, under locked doors,
through medicine cabinets and pyjama trousers.
It’s all in the mind, pronounced Dr Morgan,
lovingly stroking his DSM bible,
which then ran to less than 500 pages.
Organic disorders, endogenous depression,
faulty genetics, biochemical treatment.
Is there anyone who’d disagree with that?
Mine was the only hand half-ascended,
to assert that I kept my mind open about it.
I was classified as passive-aggressive.
Now the DSM weighs in at 1000 pages,
psychiatry’s back wards have downsized to houses
and medicine gives birth to new diseases
at a rate that might make the angels weep,
if an excess of grief wasn’t thought to augur
the onset of an Adjustment Disorder.