The mental health of politicians

Ewan McIntosh has picked another example of augmented reality up:

“Point your mobile phone at the person speaking at the lectern, the cute person in the bar or that potential recruit and see, hovering around their head, all their social networks, tastes in music and books, and dodgy photos from last night.”

The potential is quite interesting, but it’s also a bit scary. In a post here a while ago, I asked what the upsides and downsides were of forcing politicians to be ostentatious in their displays of personal virtue and openness. But former BBC Newsnight Editor Brian Walker seems to be going a good bit further in raising demands for personal transparency in this post quoting Mo Mowlem’s cancer specialist Mark Glazer over at Slugger O’Toole.

Shorter version: Mo Mowlem had a frontal lobe tumour – a condition that “can cause disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgement” at a time in which she played a critical role in fostering the negotiation of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement. This was almost a wartime posting and any errors of judgement could have had serious consequences.

So, disinhibition, behavioural disturbance and poor judgement then? Sounds familliar:

If you want to argue for mental health tests, then maybe you have to also demand a daily breathalyser? Churchill was thought to have rarely been sober beyond lunchtime during the war and we seemed to do alright in that one, didn’t we?

Senior corporate roles within PLCs have made both physical and mental health a pre-requisite. It’s not just footballers that have to have a medical as part of their job-interview any more. When a friend of mine sought a board-level post on one of the UK’s larger PLCs, I was astonished at the degree of intrusion that she had to agree to -it was not just the bog-standard psychometric testing either. One thing made this process manageable though: She was well advised not to tell anyone in her professional circle that she was applying for the job in the first place – something that she had no problem doing.

If it was public knowledge that she’d gone for the job, and she didn’t get it, then her mental health would have been a matter of public speculation.

Applying this kind of corporate risk-aversion to representative government adds a new layer of bureaucracy that politicians have to be responsible to – one that competes with their primary responsibility to those who elect them.

This isn’t entirely a one way street though, as the Guardian article that Brian points to notes:

“As time has worn on, Glaser has begun to feel that her illness may, oddly, have been a reason for the success of the peace talks, rather than a cause of instability that threatened them. “She was racing against time,” he says.”

Surely this is another argument for distributed authority in which decisions are taken in a collegiate way by a diverse group of individuals rather than they are made currently? And is this insistence upon individual public virtues actually a symptom of a decline in the quality of our democracy?

Perhaps a group of individual drunks, lunatics and hypocrites making collegiate decisions would make produce better policies than a group of buttoned up risk-averse purveyors of public cant with strong individual powers? And, as Brendan O’Neill argued a while ago, isn’t politics and democracy supposed to be about a clash of ideas and principles rather than a game of personal one-upmanship?