HEALTH professionals should tell patients they are ‘nutjobs’ rather than ‘Daily Mail readers’, the public health minister has claimed.
Anne Milton said terms such as ‘nutjob’, ‘lunatic’, and ‘willfully ignorant fruitloop’ were more likely to motivate to people into not being mad and stupid.
She added: “If I look in the mirror and think ‘I am a Daily Mail reader’ it makes me less worried than if I look in the mirror and think ‘I’m a total fucking psycho’.”
She said too many staff working in the NHS were worried about using ‘nutjob’, but suggested it could help to encourage personal responsibility, adding: “Just look them in the eye and say ‘you’re a bloody lunatic, now get the hell out of my office before I call the police’.”
The term ‘Daily Mail reader’ comes from the Latin word ‘dailymailreaderus’, which roughly translated means ‘intensive consumption of insanity commissioned by the world’s maddest man’.
Societies have long been worried about problems of excess insanity, though it was not until 1954 when Oxford psychiatrist Stephen Malley linked the Daily Mail with diseases such as screeching mentalness and chronic unhingement.
But some GPs have insisted the words ‘nutjob’ or ‘maniac’ could stigmatise those who are completely off their heads.
Dr Tom Logan, from Stevenage, warned: “Reading the Daily Mail is something that happens to people rather than something they are.
“I would probably say something like ‘can we talk about which newspapers you’ read’ rather than just calling them a total schizoid.”
He added: “That said I do always have a syringe filled with horse tranquiliser concealed in my left hand.”
