Jonny

Working class and proud, twee indie pop boy, loves Chorley FC hates beetroot.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Many of them didn't. Your great-great-grandmother was probably drinking opium for her nerves, sold at the corner shop as cheap as a pint of beer. It was called laudanum, a mix of opium and alcohol that doctors handed out for anxiety, sleeplessness, and "women's troubles." Mothers fed it to crying babies. The babies often stopped crying because they stopped breathing.

The men drank. By 1830 the average American was putting away almost two bottles of liquor a week. Whiskey cost less than coffee or milk. People started their day with a shot and ended it with another. Toddlers drank from their parents' rum mugs.

ADHD has a long paper trail. A Scottish doctor described kids who couldn't focus in 1798. By 1846 there was a popular German children's book about a boy called Fidgety Philipp who couldn't sit still. In 1902, a London children's doctor named George Still wrote a famous paper on the same kids and called it a "defect of moral control." Same kid, three different centuries.

Depression and anxiety had old names too. Melancholia, hysteria, the vapors. Treatments included bloodletting, ice baths, and chaining people to a wall. By 1937, American mental hospitals held 451,672 patients and took up more than half of every hospital bed in the country. Inside the walls, about 1 in 10 patients died each year.

Then came the lobotomy. Between 1949 and 1952, around 50,000 Americans were strapped to a chair while a doctor hammered an ice pick through the thin bone above their eye and wiggled it around inside their brain. It took about ten minutes. Sixty percent of the patients were women. About 1 in 20 died from the procedure. Many of the ones who lived came out with no personality left. The man who invented the procedure won a Nobel Prize.

Britain's male suicide rate hit 30.3 per 100,000 in 1905. The lowest rates ever recorded in British history are happening right now.

Plenty of our ancestors didn't make it. They drank themselves dead. They overdosed on shop-bought opium. They got locked in asylums and never came out. They had picks driven through their eye sockets. They killed themselves in numbers we don't see today. The conditions were always there. The treatments just used to be worse than the disease.

[Jonny @jonnyblue74]

@kokeshimum @belfastDGM I'm sure he's shared this vital bit of evidence with the relevant authorities, and you know, not made this up to suit his own narrative.

[Jonny @jonnyblue74]

@PurelyFootball By far the best player in a Liverpool shirt today though.

[Kevin Maguire @Kevin_Maguire]

Plastic patriot tax exiles who fled to Gulf states to avoid paying their fair share back home should be charged the full whack if repatriated by the UK Government.

[Ineluctable Chris @BoveFromAbove]

I once lost a by-election and attributed it to sectarianism because Muslims voted for a white woman from a party led by a gay Jewish man.

[Jonny @jonnyblue74]

@AllyFogg Oh the hilarity that ensues when they grab the wrong training top and try and put each others on, an Earling comedy in the making.......

[Jonny @jonnyblue74]

@AllyFogg I read it, read it again, read it a third time and still no, don't understand the logic.

[Jonny @jonnyblue74]

@Danny_McMoomins Come on man, Leeds is practically in Lancashire, it's Derby who are at the heart of the white rose.

[Jonny @jonnyblue74]

@PurelyFootball What always gets me, why did Blackburn have to travel to West Ham when Blackpool had a home game against Chelsea, surely they could have arranged fixtures so these two swapped out to make travel easier.

[barney farmer @barneyfarmer]

It’s nice, isn’t it. The clampdown.

[Jerry Hicks @JerryHicksUnite]

Breaking : Israel says Kneecap are only weeks away from developing Nuclear weapons #Kneecap #Glastonbury #Glasto

[Jonny @jonnyblue74]

@KNEECAPCEOL Lads, lads, lads, can accept most things you've done but saying you'd rather support Rangers is taking things a little too far. Cutting your foreskin off with a rusty razor rather than be like Bono, yes, but not supporting those dogs surely not.

[Richard Ashmore @RichardAshmor]

Here's my contribution!

[Jonny @jonnyblue74]

@deathofbuckley And you are giving these gags away for free......no need toupee. Really should take this to The Fringe.

[Manchestericonic @manchestriconic]

"How can he be obstructing play he's fucking tiny"

[mooms : WCP (world cup pervert) @Danny_McMoomins]

@BritishArmy Took some doing to be the worst Michael Jackson

[Jonny @jonnyblue74]

@ScrtDrugAddict @rustyrockets This his latest gifty wifty is it then, give me strength.....

[Jonny @jonnyblue74]

@Gkts87 @GreenManFest no which is kind of worrying but money has come out of my account so assuming all is OK!