Up Close and Personal
The monthly interview with CTM Founder, Phillip Day

ECLUB: How's your attitude this month?
PD: Surprisingly peachy, Brian, thank you for asking. For those who don't know, The Little Book of Attitude is now out, dealing with the 'mental enema' most of us would be well advised to take for a life of carefree smiles and trouble-free miles.
ECLUB: Some may already think they know all there is to know on motivation and attitude. What makes your booklet different?
PD: Most CD series and books on motivation are very long-winded, Americanized, and actually take a pile of their own motivation to get through. I read most of them during my years in America and did learn a lot, but there was a lot of chaff to flog through to get to the wheat. I was interested in doing a guide that was fast, brief, highly effective, and gave bullet-point summaries people could match to their own circumstances to see where the problems lay. If you are gnarly, growly and not having a good life, the last thing you feel like doing is flog through a 500-page book telling you how great everything is going to be.
ECLUB: What, in your view, is the major factor warping most people's attitude?
PD: The media, without any hesitation whatsoever. The media tells perfectly healthy people they've got a problem only drugs can solve. The media tells its readers all news is bad news and the world they live in is a mess. The health side is especially pernicious and they twist this with their choice of coverage, the advertorials they run on behalf of the drug industry, and this is the theme I have chosen for this month's bulletin.
The Street Spirit interview with Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill, is especially revealing, and, though lengthy, will get you into the heart of how drug manipulation is done. Also, a surprising piece to appear in a mainstream British paper, Mary Wakefield's comment on 'a pill for every ill'.
ECLUB: In terms of attitude, would you agree stress is the big killer?
PD: Yes, I would. I've spent a lot of time in the past analysing diet and hydration. 'Mental illness', though, is an unusual phenomenon in that it means different things to different people. Stress, as its name suggests, is when a part of someone's life becomes inordinately disproportionate to the role it actually should assume, if at all. By that I mean, work obsession, drugs, sex, drink, football, addictive computer games, constant repetition of a given habit or duty. The brain reacts to this by forming comfort zones (brain patterning) as part of a survival mechanism, believing that we are doing these activities obsessively to survive. On one level, we know we have a stress or addiction problem. On another, we know we are powerless to intervene and stop it from harming us and others. Everyone suffers from these dysfunctions to one degree or another. It's a symptom of the fast-paced world in which we are living our lives.
ECLUB: You mention the hamster wheel in your seminars.
PD: Yes. Advertising, TV, media, film, etc. have given us the motivation to buy more, get more, travel more, phone more, drink and eat more. Now you have that mobile phone, I can reach you on the toilet, isn't life grand? The end result is that the hamster wheel of our lives can spin overly fast if we are not discharging the stress. The end result is we fly off into the water dish with some sort of breakdown. Usually a psychiatrist fishes us out.
ECLUB: You have caused a deal of controversy in the past by saying there is really no such thing as a mental disease. Can you explain?
PD: Diseases have physical symptoms. Most mental problems are lifestyle and addiction issues that should have nothing to do with the medical profession, which does not solve these issues but merely drugs the patient up to make them forget. What we need taught in schools is Life Management, the skills our kids need to thrive and survive in the world out there and avoid the minefields. At the current time, seventeen-year-olds are thrown out of the school system and into the Machiavellian bear-pit of 21st century life with nothing more than the metaphorical toothpick. I would not entirely hesitate to say the lack of granting this sort of education to our children has been deliberate.
ECLUB: Why on earth?
PD: Create problems, offer solutions, the age-old sales formula. Drug companies are not in business to cure mental illness, they're in business to sell drugs. We see it done everyday in the newspapers.
ECLUB: Off to Australia and New Zealand on Monday.
PD: Can't wait. Not spending much time at home these days. New Zealand is first, commencing 1st October in Auckland.
ECLUB: Can you give us some sort of idea of the ground you will be covering?
PD: Certainly. How to change your attitude. How to obtain control over your sense of certainty. Mini-goals: what do you wish to accomplish by bed-time tonight? Re-sorting your life to become stress-free. Illness and depression - what can be done about them. Lack of motivation, addiction, demoralization, unhappiness - the root causes. The dangers of 'retirement'. Owning a good conscience. The fear of death and what to do about it. The secret life of plants -
ECLUB: Plants?
PD: Our leafy friends are all part of the grand picture, Brian.
ECLUB: Strewth. How can people get tickets in New Zealand or Australia if they don't yet have them?
PD: They can order through our secure servers by clicking here. Alternatively they can contact Credence Events Management in Melbourne at +61 (0)3 9891 7883 and order them over the dog and bone.
ECLUB: The phone.
PD: Precisely.
ECLUB: Thank you, Phillip. By the way, when you're in Cairns, can you bring me back another one of those Barrier Reef tee-shirts with the great white sharks on it? Annabelle washed the last one with my pair of my red underpants.
PD: Turn off the tape recorder, Brian.