A Day in the Life

So, after a longer than usual sojourn from blogland , I have returned to say that, yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm finally losing it... Weight, that is. It has been a long and hard struggle, but if I'm correct, I think I have lost something in the region of 13 lbs, 1 lb short of a stone. Since taking anti-psychotic medication, a prominent side-effect of which is gaining weight, I have veritably piled on the pounds, and it is difficult to get people to understand that I haven't exactly eaten myself in to this situation, that it has largely been due to the medication I take. Indeed, as my girth has increased, I have become increasingly embarrassed by it and have become acutely aware of just how much our society is entirely geared towards the attainment of "thinness". It would seem, even, that we are living in some form of apartheid, the thin and gorgeous at one end of the spectrum, the fat and loathsome at the other. It is even, it seems, becoming apparent, that inci

After, only a couple of chapters ago, writing about the seemingly "insane" practice of diagnosing and medicating children with psychiatric disorders, I have found myself again pondering the apparent dangers which I think are inherent in psychiatric practice. In that post I pointed to Thomas Szasz's belief that in the wrong hands, psychiatry could become a means of social control and indeed, with diagnoses such as "oppositional defiance disorder" and the ongoing need to " pathologise " what would be seen by many as perhaps difficult, but nonetheless "normal" behaviour, it seemed that Szasz's beliefs were turning in to hardened fact. I was reminded, also, of the experiment undertaken by psychologist David Rosenhan in 1973 which resulted in the paper, "On being sane in insane places", which exposed the unreliability of psychiatric diagnoses in the US. The experiment involved admitting a number of "sane" patients on to

This will be just a short and somewhat belated blog to say that, at The Media Action Group for Mental Health ( MAGMH ), where, as some of you will know, I work as a volunteer, our "Local People, Local Lives" anti-stigma campaign is finally well and truly underway. Unlike the current "Time to Change" campaign, ours is not a national endeavour, but rather one firmly based around our own locality of Stoke-on-Trent. Indeed, our new volunteers who have joined up for the campaign will eventually be producing anti-stigma material of their own which not only , in some way, narrates and relates their own experience of mental ill health, but also gives an impression of who they are as a human being, showing their interests and achievements within the locality of Stoke. The point is to show that everyone who has experienced mental illness is more than just their diagnosis. So often in the media people are described as "a schizophrenic" or "a manic depressive&