A Day in the Life

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...