A Day in the Life

As it is the Christmas hols, I thought, as I have time, that I would write down a few yuletide musings that I've been having. These are to do with the vexed question of political correctness and how far we should adhere to it. This is of particular interest to me, as, at The Media Action Group for Mental Health, we often debate what are and what are not appropriate terms to describe mental illness or those experiencing it. It would seem, from my point of view, as one who has experience of mental ill health and, furthermore, has been labelled with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, that, in comparison with their racial or sexual counterparts, the use of pejorative terms to describe those experiencing mental ill health are still bandied about with relative impunity. It appears to me that while one would never use the "n" word, for example, to describe someone of a particular race, words like "bonkers", "nutcase", "schizo" and "loony" seem...

At the risk of repeating myself ad infinitum and becoming a bore, I ask the same question I did last year and, come to think of it, the year before that. While my lack of originality may be beginning to grate, I am simply going to say, once again- so here it is, Merry Christmas, every body's havin ' fun, or are they? While we all know what Christmas is supposed to represent; a time of peace, love and mercy, of both giving and receiving, but mostly giving, one can't help but see what it has become- an exercise in mindless materialism, a symptom of commercialism gone crazy. But maybe I am too cynical. Perhaps, for many, the true message of Christmas remains, despite the fact that before it's had the chance to say "hello", it's already saying "buy buy". Anyway, it's still, whatever it is now, a far cry from when some of the older generation of my family were young, when, as children, all they received was an apple, an orange, and a sugar mouse...

So, this is just a quick posting to wish myself a happy birthday. After all, if no one else is going to, I might as well do it myself! OK, so I'm joking. I have received quite a few cards from family and friends and have got more or less everything that I asked for. In fact, I even went out for a meal last night with my parents as part of my celebrations. However, I am now officially "middle-aged" and indeed, physically, sometimes feel even older. So, reaching the grand old age of 38 has made me feel old. I believe I wrote last year, on passing 37, in a post called "Birthday Blues" that, because of being ill for so long, I have a strange relationship with my age. While I feel, for example, mentally about 18, I feel physically a lot older. And while my peers would almost uniformly seem to be married with kids and mortgages, I just plod along with my voluntary work, mental health groups and blogs. It is not surprising, then, that one begins to feel a touch of ...

So, this is going to be an intimate blog about that most private and personal of things- intimacy. More specifically, it is going to be about how having a diagnosis of schizophrenia can affect you in intimate relationships. For a start, medication would appear to rear its ugly head again when talking about intimacy. Along with many of the negative side-effects of anti-psychotic medication, it can bring about a certain amount of sexual dysfunction . For example, it may cause "erectile dysfunctions ", such as having painful erections or out and out impotence. It can also, as far as I know, affect the experience of orgasm. Even more outlandish, it can cause the growth of "breasts" in men, and lead some even to "produce milk". I was told by my psychiatrist that this was due to the fact that some medications contain the female hormone, prolactin , leading to these bizarre side-effects. It would seem, then, that by having a diagnosis of schizophrenia, where you ...

The other day at the Media Action Group for Mental Health, we were discussing what the most harmful element of stigma was. Some felt this was in the area of employment. But, for me, if we are talking about "harm" in terms of how traumatic stigma can be, I think it is when it comes from friends and family, the people who are closest to you, who sometimes convey a complete inability to understand what the ill person is going through. Indeed, sometimes there is even very open hostility, and in my previous blog, I pointed out that, in one survey, over half (56%) of people who had experienced mental ill health had faced unfair treatment from their families, ranging from lack of understanding to outright hostility, name calling and enforced isolation. In my own experience, I seemed to face most prejudice at the inception of my illness, what must now be nearly twenty years ago, and I feel it came in the form, mostly, of sheer misunderstanding. In terms of family, my brother and pare...

I have been thinking recently about how the stigma surrounding mental ill health directly affects me, and I have come to the conclusion that, despite suffering certain unfairness early on in my illness, from friends, family and I have to say, mental health services themselves, the discrimination I now face seems less "real", in that it is anticipated, rather than actual. In fact, it could be that it is "all in my mind" sometimes. If I use an example to explain. Often, when I go to get my hair cut, the barber will inevitably engage me in conversation and ask, "not at work today,then?" At the sound of this question I often recoil in horror, because I often think it will lead to me having to explain why I do not do full-time paid work and, as an inevitable consequence of that, revealing the fact that I have experience of mental ill health. While I do not wish to censor myself or be dishonest, I feel I am faced with a difficult choice. Do I tell the truth and ...

So I was going to take a break from all this serious mental health stuff and write, as an homage to my great blogging and now also 3D friend Klahanie (aka Gary), a "real surreal" blog. I have been promising him I would do this for some time, so here goes. So, what will my subject be? Well, I was going to write about apathy, but then felt that I just couldn't be bothered! And, I was supposed to write this blog yesterday, but the procrastination board had it postponed until today. OK, so these are both jokes we know well from Klahanie himself (and for those of you who don't know, he's the l il' dude in the dress in the sepia coloured photo in my list of "followers"). So what will I write about? Well, I could write about cheese, but Id have to do it very Caerphilly ! I could write about chips, but that would be just another chip off the old blog. And there I go again. More Klahanie jokes. It just seems that the man's influence is so gargantuan (...

OK, so it's time to remember exactly what this blog is supposed to be all about. Initially, I was asked by the Media Action Group for Mental Health ( MAGMH ) to keep a record of my so-called "progress". If I recall correctly, it was as part of the " mindbloggling " project, which was still in operation at the time, but now is sadly no more, that I was asked to do this. So came about the "Dave's Progress" chapters which are supposed, in some way, to reflect my journey through coming to terms with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. For a start, I notice that there are various themes which seem to emerge from my blog. Perhaps three stand out most of all. They are: medication, its effects and my resultant feelings of a "flattening of affect" or dampening of emotion. For this see chapters like, "A Weighty Issue", "Don't Take away my Demons, Because you'll Take away my Angels too", "Me and My Anhedonia ", and ...

It would appear that one of the major issues facing those who experience mental ill health is whether or not, and to what extent, they disclose information about their experiences and diagnosis. Because of the high levels of fear and ignorance which surround diagnoses of mental ill health (one could argue, in particular, schizophrenia) many face the the threat of discrimination or rejection if they disclose information about their illness. This threat may not need to be actual, but rather anticipated, so affecting the behaviour of those with a mental illness. However, there are also great advantages to revealing one's illness. The matter of disclosure, then, would appear to be a somewhat confounding double-edged sword, with both advantages and disadvantages. As Professor Graham Thornicroft points out, the advantages include allowing other people to help, enabling a person to join self-help groups, being able to advocate for one's own treatment and care and to join groups camp...

As one who has experienced mental ill health, and yet is in so-called "recovery" (I am not cured, but my illness is rather "controlled" by medication) I find myself in the peculiar position of being relatively well and yet, because my diagnosis is regarded as a severe disability, perhaps unable to gain any meaningful paid employment. As some of you will know, I do work voluntarily for the Media Action Group for Mental Health, write articles for an occupational therapy magazine and also this blog. I do what I can, then, to fill my time, and to my mind, this is good for my mental health, maintaining a structure to my life and giving meaning and purpose to it. After all, most of this blog is about mental ill health and trying to combat the all too prevalent stigmas which surround diagnoses such as mine. As I have, perhaps, written before, it is a continual bugbear of mine that those with a diagnosis of schizophrenia find it hard, nay almost impossible to find paid work...

So, a short and somewhat belated blog to tell all out there in blogland that the Time to Change roadshow came to Stoke-on-Trent on Saturday, October 17 th , and was, by all accounts, a success. The Time to Change team came early Saturday morning to set up their stand and the various technical equipment which they brought along. The rest of us volunteers turned up at around 9am, ready for our briefing as to what we would be doing on the day. As it turned out this was to be mostly approaching the public and trying to get them engaged in conversation about mental ill health and the terrible stigmas which surround it. We tried to engage the public by first giving them information cards about mental illness. And while some simply walked past, the vast majority of people who I spoke to expressed either their sympathy for people who experience mental ill health or their own experiences of it, be it as carer, family member or sufferer. Indeed, I found the day on the whole to be quite an upli...

" And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying come and see and I saw, and behold, a white horse... And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts, and I looked and behold, a pale horse, and its name that sat on him was death, and hell followed with him" The Holy Bible, The Book of Revelations. Just thought I would write a quick post about an unusual phenomenon which appears to be taking place in the US at the moment, and that is the peculiar way of thinking that I shall call here "end of worldism ". I think I first learnt about this strange occurrence in an unusually intelligent television programme by Tony Robinson (he of previous "Black Adder" fame), where he explained about the increasing influence of the Christian right in American politics, who appear, by all accounts, to believe in the very near coming of the Apocalypse and its signifying of the second coming of Christ. OK, so far, so harmless. But when George B...

I have been talking a lot in recent blogs about representations of mental ill health which I find either misleading or downright pernicious. But, it seems, I have finally found an artist who portrays mental illness in a realistic and factually correct manner. His name was Philip K. Dick (he died in 1982) and is famous, perhaps most of all, for writing "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", the novel which later became the great Ridley Scott film, "Blade Runner". Indeed, Dick was a prolific writer of science fiction who, if my memory serves correctly, used to take truck-loads of amphetamines to prolong his often maniacal bursts of writing. He suffered a breakdown in March 1974, or as he rather liked to call it, "a moment of revelation", and his writing post this experience is largely to do with it and his attempt to make sense of what had happened to him. It is, therefore, perhaps, that Dick's own experience of mental ill health feeds into the more ...

This is just a very short blog to say a Happy 50 th blog posting to me! Yes, this is the 50 th time I've posted and I just thought it was something to celebrate. While some of you, I know, are boundlessly more prolific than I am in your writing, this is for me, nonetheless , something of a milestone. From my first tentative steps at blogging, with titles like, "A Weighty Issue" and "Is Poetry Dead?" to the later "Dave's Progress" chapters, I feel I have come a long way over the two years that I have been writing. If you notice I have gotten gradually more prolific and I also hope that you do, indeed, notice some "progress" being made along the way. As you will know, this is a blog, primarily, about mental ill health and, perhaps, above all, fighting the terrible stigma and discrimination which surround diagnoses such as mine. Indeed, it was first as part of The Media Action Group for Mental Health's " mindbloggling " proj...

So, we at the Pathways Group (a local support group for those affected by long-term mental ill health) have decided once again to pool our creative resources and make another film. The last short film we made, which was a sometimes harrowing but ultimately hopeful depiction of long term mental ill health, was such a great experience for us all that we have decided once again to have a brief foray into the movie-making business. For those of you who would like to read about the making and eventual screening of our first film, "The Search", please go to my blogs, entitled "Hollywood Here I Come", Parts I,II and III, respectively. So, at the moment we are in the very early, embryonic stages of going about making our new film, our efforts at the moment concentrating on securing some funding so that we can actually get it made. As we are relatively new to this process (the last film was funded by the council as part of the "Ward Stories" project) we have enlist...

One of my favourite film-makers of all-time has to be Martin Scorsese. From "Mean Streets" to "Taxi Driver", to "Raging Bull" and " Goodfellas ", he must have made some of my all-time favourite movies. Indeed, if I had to say, I would probably rate "Raging Bull" up there with "Apocalypse Now!", "The Godfather" and "The Third Man" as one of my favourite films. But now, it appears, Martin has, to my mind, gone off the rails somewhat by choosing to film a version of Dennis Lehane's novel, "Shutter Island". The novel is set in the Summer of 1954, as US Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chukc Aule come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of an inmate, Rachel Solando . OK, so already I'm feeling a little trepidatious . A hospital for the criminally insane, eh. Well, let's just see what sort of representations the book gives...

OK, so what the hell am I going on about here? To what, exactly, does my title refer? Well, I'm sorry to keep banging on about it, but it refers once again to the Time to Change campaign, and in particular to the so-called "viral" films which they have released via the internet about schizophrenic illness. I mentioned both these films in my earlier blog "Time to Change? Some Apparently Don't Think So", where I praised them in their attempts to alleviate some of the terrible stigmas which surround the diagnosis. However, having now watched both films a number of times, there are some points I would like to raise (to see the films for yourself, by the way, simply go to the Time to Change website). The film which I would most like to comment on is the first one on the site, entitled, ominously, "Schizo- He Lives Among Us". It soon becomes clear that the film is attempting to deconstruct some of the long-held prejudices about schizophrenia, at first ...

Just a couple of blogs ago I mentioned an article that appeared in The Guardian, which directly opposed an article written for the Time to Change campaign about film representations of mental ill health. The article suggested that far from giving negative representations of mental illness, the movies rather portray what could be called "positive" stereotypes, in that they are misrepresentative , but in a "positive" way, depictions ranging from the heroic (Jack Nicholson in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") to the endearing (Geoffrey Rush in "Shine") to the tortured genius ("The Devil and Daniel Johnston", "A Beautiful Mind"). While, as I said in my blog, I cannot agree that overall the movies present positive depictions of mental illness, it cannot be denied that some such representations exist. And, of all the "positive" stereotypes that exist, the "tortured genius" would appear to be one of the most ...

OK, not that I'm obsessed with the "Time to Change" campaign or anything, but as we at The Media Action Group for Mental Health are working in collaboration with the campaign to bring their roadshow to Stoke-on-Trent, I thought I had better give this a mention. As I have mentioned before, the Time to Change campaign is a truly national phenomenon, and must be one of the biggest anti-stigma campaigns of recent years. It has funding in excess of something like sixteen million pounds and its aims and objectives seem to go hand in hand with what we are trying to achieve at MAGMH . These aims include:- - creating a 5% positive shift in public attitudes towards mental health problems. - achieving a 5% reduction in discrimination by 2012. - increasing the ability of 100,000 people with mental health problems to address discrimination. - engaging over 250,00 people in physical activity. - producing a powerful evidence base of what works. All these aims, although some of them wou...