A private school in Brighton is providing laughter therapy to students to help them deal with post-covid gloom. The £15,000 a year Brighton Girls School is hoping that the one hour laughing sessions will ease pupils anxiety.
Rosie McColl, the school’s head-teacher, is concerned that lockdowns have had a negative effect on the mental wellbeing of her students. According to The Times:
Emma Jennings, a laughter therapist, who runs the classes, said: “Children have been isolated and no amount of Zoom contact makes up for that.”
Her lessons begin with children talking about feeling any nerves or anxiety before they are instructed to laugh “in the style of a James Bond villain”.
“The laughter will be false of course, but the body cannot tell the difference between real and fake laughter and all the benefits that laughter brings biochemically start to happen,” she said. “It’s about bypassing the cognitive part of the brain: the body is benefiting from the fake laughter you are producing, which often then does turn into genuine laughter anyway.”
Jennings then leads the girls through deep breathing exercises before “playful and silly games“ and a “no ego” exercise where they are told to point at themselves and laugh while making eye contact.
She added: “We end the session by doing some laughter meditation, laughing for no reason while sitting in a circle. You just listen to the sounds of other people’s laughter, which is very infectious.
This is all very familiar. Some years ago I reported on Chinese laughter clubs, where Chinese citizens would meet in groups to do the same thing. It looked very creepy, very Stepford. If you saw the clips, you’ll know what I mean. The Chinese are the most subservient people on Planet Earth.
Of course children are anxious. They’re being told that humanity is on the verge of extinction and that their parents and grandparents are to blame, while at the same time being told not to kill their parents and grandparents with covid. They are being terrorised. That’s no exaggeration either.
Rather than protect children by standing up to the tyranny being imposed on them, schools instead work to acclimatise them to their dystopian reality, by introducing them to humiliating and sinister rituals like laughing clubs.
Altogether now. We’re doomed.
