Psychological problems noted

*   Did you read Christopher Eccleston's interview in The Guardian about his bout of serious mental health issues?:

His book focuses heavily on his previously undisclosed struggle with anorexia and a mental breakdown so intense that the Priory psychiatrist Justin Haslam described it as one of the worst cases of clinical depression he had ever seen.

That may have been prompted by a divorce, but it's surprising to read that he's had issues with his body image for a long time:

His doctors told him that there was a severe imbalance in his brain chemistry and he was put on high doses of medication. The trigger might have been the split from his wife, and the guilt around not seeing his children, but Eccleston’s problems had been brewing for years. Since childhood, he had suffered from body image problems. He wanted to be androgynous – “Still do, because I feel like a prop forward” – but he knew his mum and dad wouldn’t have tolerated their kid dabbling in eye liner on the streets of working-class Salford, where he grew up.

“I could do all the male stuff – I was captain of the sports team and I’d get very physical on the field,” he says, “but I also had this interest in femininity. When I did my first play at Eccles college, Lock Up Your Daughters, I wore mascara and I was like: ‘This is fucking brilliant!’ I was expressing on the outside what I felt on the inside.”

He was never confused about his sexuality, although he says he has always appreciated male beauty. His relationship with his male friends had always been especially intimate, too: “It’s a terrible word, but there were suspicions,” he says, “because of how we were together.”

I don't mean to sound rude, but he seems to be disturbed enough to have become a comedian instead of an actor.   (It also would not be a complete surprise if he later decides he is transgender.)

*  How bad is it for Lefties to giggle at Jordan Peterson's personal woes?   Some will obviously go too far; but really, as if Right wing people don't do the same when it turns out a Left wing figure is shown to have personal problems of the kind they have warned others to avoid.   And besides, the schadenfreude should probably be more directed to those on the Right who thought he was genuinely a worthwhile guru, when the evidence has long been there that he (and his daughter) have some crank health ideas that should have served as a warning as to his general reliability for life advice.  

I always thought he was a waffle merchant not worth paying attention to.  More people are likely to share that view now.

I liked this tweet on the topic: