Mark Latham: Horse's A*se

Knuckle-dragging Neanderthals like Mark Latham are the reason why feminism exists. In today’s Australian Financial Review, former Labor Leader Mark Latham has used his fortnightly column to disparage workingwomen, non-working women, feminists and mental illness, and all because of Lisa Pryor's somewhat flippant column about ‘caffeine and anti-depressants’ knocked him off his chair:

I am not depressed, I am anti-depressed. Though it may not win me admiration and a sponsored lifestyle blog, a little bit of neurochemical assistance helps me actually enjoy the glorious disaster of raising two small children while studying medicine full time.

I suspect there’s now a long and feisty queue of both women and men who’d like to knock him off his pedestal. 

Unlike them, I was delighted with Dr Latham’s column. His methodology was impressive and his logic, faultless. How few mental health subject matter experts would go to the trouble of conducting a scientifically credible social experiment to prove a theory when they can just rant about it in a national newspaper?  His substantial sample of one – Lisa Pryor – along with his probing psychiatric examination of her 300-word column and some pithy anecdotal testimony from an unknown number of women who apparently live in Western Sydney, have provided him with ample ammunition to overturn decades of methodical research and undermine years of painstaking social education. 

So how on earth did Dr Latham manage to get his degree in medicine? Clearly he must have medical and psychiatric qualifications to be publishing such learned material regarding a medical condition that effects up to 20% of women in Australia. How blessed we are this morning that he has chosen to share his wealth of professional medical wisdom with us. Too many people just dash off meaningless medical frivolities without a care for acres of specialist knowledge that exist.

Until I read Dr Latham’s column this morning, I could’ve sworn that depression was a devastating medical illness, often related to complicated chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain. Who knew that it was simply an rort employed by weak, indolent women to allow them to exist more easily in a hostile professional world where men make the rules? If only these pathetic female creatures could cast off their psycho-political neuroses and stay at home with their babies, they wouldn't need to be chemically enabled. Hooray!

But Dr Latham knew – thank god! If only he’d told me years ago, I could have avoided thirty-odd years of struggling, and sometimes failing, to get out of bed in the morning. I could have skipped that fabulous conversation with my boss about why I’d been able to drive to work and park the car, but couldn’t actually get out of it and walk into the building where I’d worked for ten years. I could've missed that $200 chat with the clinical psychologist who had lost my file, forgotten who I was, and recommended that I join some professional networking groups... despite the occasional crippling bout of depression-related agoraphobia. 

It’s comforting to know that the whole thing is just a manifestation of my personal weakness. My cowardice. My failure. I’ll throw out my pretty green-and-blue anti-depressants and just get on with it, shall I? Cold turkey? Just like that? It’ll be fine...although I don't have children, so my life will in all likelihood remain meaningless.

I was surprised to learn that depression is a girl thing, like owning colour co-ordinated bra and undies sets and always carrying supplies of sanitary lady-products in your handbag. Apparently men don’t suffer from depression. I hope the boffins at beyondblue get to read Dr Latham’s comments, because those silly folk seem to think that 1 in 8 men will suffer depression in their lifetime. It says so right here on their website. They’ll have to change that, now that the truth about this massive conspiracy of lefty feminist depressed women from places that aren’t Western Sydney has been exposed. 

The real authority of Dr Latham’s revelations lie in the link between depression and feminism. His piercing wisdom regarding depression sits well alongside his knowledge of the vast morass of those generic, ovaried types who self-describe as feminists. With nary a thought given to the debate raging around him about the nature of contemporary feminism, its forms and relevance, Dr Latham has walked down the path beaten so long ago by Emmaline Pankhurst, paved by Germaine Greer, and these days, occupied by Joint Destroyers, Frightbats, and a haphazard collective of inner city, Cosmo-sipping militants with their happy pills and sad attitudes…and then he said mean things about them.

Thus left feminism is akin to a psychoneurotic disorder: externalising personal feelings of distress and deficiency into the demonisation of children.

I’ve learned so much from reading Dr Latham’s column this morning that I cried. I cried the big, fat, wet, noisy tears of a woman liberated from her own worst self. I am cured! 

Yes Mr Latham, your words have brought me to tears.

The author was first diagnosed with depression at the age of 19. She has survived living in Western Sydney while working in a male-dominated industry, being female, being depressed and being childless, all at the same time. She is a medical miracle.