Psychotics wearing romper suits

Psychotics wearing romper suits

We have come so very far

In a few short years

Commoditising childhood

Creating little consumers

Who can be crushed

When they don’t keep up with appearances

Blend into the mix

Slip easily into acceptance

Struggle to be comfortable

As outsiders,

Unless they are creatives

Or child prodigies

Who are barely allowed

To be children at all.

Were children always awaiting

Psychosis?

Adults have always thought them so

Just read Freud

Melanie Klien believed babies

Were all infant schizoids

Positioned in a state of paranoia

So feed them antipsychotics

When they are naughty

Slip them into food

Powder them into baby formula

Create mental well-being as an ideal

To be achieved once growing pains

Are medicated.

Individuality mediated by societal norms

Shake rattle and roll

Happiness rocks,

In a bottle

Take a pill

Treat Ritalin as if it is a vitamin.

See the light of day

Through a maze of crudely constructed

Diagnoses

Even anger is part of the disease

A symptom of disordered thinking

When real life is dissociated

From its social context

Any disagreement

Can be re-construed

As an oppositional disorder

Doesn’t there have to be

An opposition

Equal and opposite,

For everything to remain in one place?

Before hyperactivity

Children were full of beans

Nowadays children who are full of beans

Have a poor diet

And eat food supplements

In genetically modified burgers

Sold to kids as happy meals

The golden triangle

Of fat, sugar and salt.

Who is at fault for the malaise?

When children are the product

Of their environment

And the environment sucks

Just not through a one-use

Plastic straw,

If you please.