A Day in the Life

Last Friday I went to an event organised by "Open Up", part of the "Time to Change" campaign to reduce the stigma surrounding mental ill health. It was called " yourSTORY " and was billed as a "creative autobiography event". The "purpose" of this event was to "create a safe, fun, and encouraging space where people can create a personal story from their experiences and experience creative fun and play". So, this was an event designed not only to battle stigma, it was also going to be "fun". Indeed, telling your story of mental ill health seems to be almost universally regarded as a good thing. Coming out publicly and offering your own telling of events is thought, even according to anti-stigma guru Professor Graham Thornicroft , a liberating experience which combats stigma and social isolation. At the Media Action Group for Mental Health also, in the days of the " Talkbank " project, volunteers were invite...

So, there I was, innocently sitting in a session for the Pathways Group (a recovery group for the long term mentally ill) when it was decided that this week would be a session about physical health. At this point my heart sank a little, as, although my physical health has been of concern to me for some time now, I feel I have been putting off doing anything about it out of sheer worry. If I did go to the doctor's for a check-up, for instance, I was concerned about exactly what they might find, considering I feel physically sluggish most of the time, mostly due to my increasing girth, due in no small measure, in turn, to my taking of anti-psychotic medication. Indeed, I believe I have already mentioned in these pages quite a few times, that statistics are said to be emerging of people with diagnoses like mine dying relatively early deaths due to physical health problems, which would seem to be exacerbated both by medication and our own, if we are honest about it, bad habits and o...

Having been well for some time now, but still with a diagnosis of schizophrenia hanging over my head like a veritable sword of Damocles , I am beginning to feel somewhat disappointed and, indeed, rather confused at the nature of my own past. With around four years of relatively good mental health, I find myself questioning more and more what, exactly, went wrong with my life and how, exactly, I have come to have this diagnosis which I continue to feel is a million miles away from describing the type of person that I am now. OK, so I know there were the usual stress triggers there to tip me over in to mental illness, and I have spoken in this blog about having to come to terms with the grief and loss that these situations imbued, as if falling in to a delusional insanity were some way, my way, of coping with emotions and trauma that I could not face or come to terms with in my sane state. Indeed, I do remember thinking at the time that this was all too much to bear. I had taken just o...

This time I was going to write about one of my other interests; politics. I was going to do this because, of late, there seems to have been a worrying amount of interest payed to my local area by various extreme right-wing groups. Both the BNP (British National Party) and the EDL (English Defence League) have recently come to Stoke-on-Trent either to demonstrate, in the EDL's case supposedly against Islamic extremism, or to simply make their presence felt, as in the case of the BNP , whose leader Nick Griffin recently came to Stoke with his suitably yob-looking entourage. So, why Stoke? Well, it would seem, that despite the efforts of many to warn us against such groups, some, and I would emphasise that it is only some, of the people of Stoke-on-Trent are actually listening to and voting for such groups. Now with, I think, seven local councilors, the BNP are actually finding some support here and have obviously targeted our area as a place which may be tolerant of their extreme...