Doing The Maths

[tectak]

In time all things shall be counted and weighed,
yet not until Seventeen Ninety Eight picky but "in time all" is not reconcilable with "yet not until"
when the date is in the distant past
did Monsieur Pinel, famed breaker of chains
which bound the insane, pause to explain
that there were but four mental disorders:
madness had been drawn and quartered
and hung from above.

You might be manic or melancholic,
maybe demented or idiotic;
you could suffer combinations of it - combinations, plural, of "it", singular
Monsieur Pinel knew his stuff.
With that absence of equivocation
shrinks use when they talk to patients,
he said that four was quite enough.

There’s no evidence that angry punters
disappointed at the dearth of numbers,
manned barricades or raised their voices
to express displeasure at the meagre choices.
What were they thinking of?

I’m guessing, but as near as dammit
a billion souls lived on the planet.
Now mankind’s increased seven-fold
and madness populates the globe.
Four hundred mental illnesses
unearthed in the last two centuries.
We’re beaten, I reckon,
a hundred to seven
by burgeoning insanities.

The medicalisation of everyday life
isn’t likely to keep me awake at night –
I never go without my sleeping tablets.
But how many planets shall we require
at some future date, so all may aspire
to their designated quota of madness?

Make that four hundred and one.

I like the overall concept. It is commitment verse. An argument well made. My small complaints are largely just that...small. There is a further point, though. This kind of witty approach can benefit from a background rhythm, if only to delineate and emphasise each well made point. The lack of rhythm is disconcerting because it is there and then not there....but the contextual sense is quite uniformly distributed throughout the piece. As would then be expected, the synchronisation of words (including the meaning of) and meter breaks down in random fashion.
Overall, though, your usual accomplished work. Good stuff.
Best,
tectak
PS. You will note that I avoid trochee-spondee-iamb-anapest talk. For the pupose of crit it must be understood that only if the writer makes great effort to comply with one of the describable verse forms, and fails iredeemably or succeeds spectacularly, is it worth critting on that level.