The subject of Joey Barton’s post football career is certainly causing much debate among those who have always detested Barton, those who became little more than fan boys (and girls) and those who inhabit the somewhat spacious area in between. Following his long overdue sacking by Bristol Rovers – and I am in the camp who have argued that he should never have been appointed in the first place, his being the most disgraceful appointment in the long history of the club – Barton has gone down the rabbit hole of grotesque populism, as he launches his podcast.
His vicious (verbal) attacks on the involvement of women in football have now been followed his ‘like’ of a video on X where a man tells a person, presumably of colour (the man refers to him as Abdul, so it’s fair to make an educated guess) who is off camera that he “should go home to where he comes from”. That on top of Barton’s comment that his brother “lost 17 years his life” for murdering the black teenager Anthony Walker in what Barton referred to as “a fucking scrap”. A “scrap” that involved being attacked with an ice pick. Call me old fashioned, but the way I look at things is that Michael Barton served 17 years for murder and it was Walker’s family who have received the life sentence.
Anyway, Barton has a long and chequered history of doing bad things, although it should be said in his defence that he was neither tried nor found guilty of assaulting his wife because the judge said he could not get a fair trial. And his regular musings have been the subject of much anger and despair, but now, with his football career in tatters, he has launched a media career and concluded that the best way to pursue it is by way of being outrageous. I’ll get to the point now. The question some people are asking is this: is Joey Barton mentally ill?
I’ve seen it all on social media. Barton “needs help”, he is “having a breakdown” and so on and, people say, you wouldn’t say the things he is saying unless something was very wrong with your mental health. Making it all about me yet again, I know there have been times when I said things I rather wish I hadn’t, often when I have been particularly depressed or anxious. I know I have upset friends by my actions and words. I have had numerous diagnoses of clinical depression and various kinds of anxiety by actual professionals. But the people suggesting Barton has mental health issues do not know that. It’s an assumption that no one could possibly say the things they were saying unless they were mentally ill.
Yet Barton has history. In 2021, he described Rovers’ performances as “a holocaust”. A brief internet search reveals all manner of quotes from the not-so-great man which suggest, perhaps, a man not exactly at peace with himself. Either that, or these seemingly mad quotes show him for what he actually is; his version of ‘normal’, whatever normal is.
It’s always the mentally ill stuff that especially boils my urine. A man commits murder. “He must have mental health issues”. A suicide murderer blows himself up, along with a number of innocent people. “I’ll bet he has mental health issues.” Time and time again, we hear it. If there’s a terrible incident, the assumption is that the perpetrator must have mental health issues. But here’s the thing: us mental folk are far more likely to damage ourselves than others. If I am having an episode, others are not in danger and I don’t go off on a tangent about how useless women pundits are in football. And I can’t imagine if I’d had a brother who committed a racist murder I’d suggest he was somehow the victim and not the boy who was murdered.
I repeat: if someone says or does something very bad, we’re told they must be mentally ill. In the absence of any evidence whatsoever, it’s not Barton’s fault. I just don’t buy it. Maybe he’s just a very bad bloke? Unless I hear anything to the contrary, I’m accepting Barton’s comments at face value. He’s of sound mind, at least his version of it, and he knows what he is saying and more importantly, he knows why; to publicise his post football career. I can’t prove that any more than I can disprove evidence-free assertions that Barton is ripe for sectioning. But until I hear otherwise, what else can I say?
