Dave's Progress. Chapter 92: A Mindbloggling 100.

This is an easy post for me to write as all it is really is a self-congratulatory pat on the back for this being my 100th posting on the blogging network. But wait, I here you say, "Dave's Progress" has only reached chapter 92. Aha, I say, I wrote 8 posts previous to the development of the idea of calling my posts "Dave's Progress", hence the magic figure of 100.
So, how did this all begin? Well, I started blogging due to my involvement with the Media Action Group for Mental Health, who, in around 2007, began a project called "Mindbloggling". The aim was to get volunteers to blog about their experience of mental ill health, hoping that this would produce a firm anti-stigma message. Unfortunately the project came to an end and many discontinued writing their blogs. Now, I think, although you can still access the list of blogs that were written for the project via the MAGMH web-site, there are only two bloggers remaining- one being yours truly, and the other being my hirsute, hippy, happy friend, Gary aka klahanie. We have continued blogging despite the ending of "Mindbloggling" and, indeed, the blogs, particularly Gary's, seem to have developed lives of their own.
My blog, then, was intended to reflect what it is like coming to terms and living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, while at the same time trying to get across the anti-stigma message. How successful I have been in this is for others to judge, but I do know that many topics have been covered throughout my 100 postings. From the side-effects of medication, to the problems inherent in disclosing one's mental ill health, to the possibility of re-naming schizophrenia, the topics covered have been wide-ranging and it is now that I almost feel I have exhausted the subject.
So, as my blogging has progressed, I believe so have I. I have now had over five years of good mental health- no stays in hospital, no residual symptoms, nothing. I have learned to manage and cope with the illness, to the extent that I feel the label of "schizophrenia" really no longer applies to me. How much this has to do with the stigma associated with that term I don't really know. I know I have experienced the symptoms of that illness in the past, and people tell me that there is no cure, it is a chronic condition which can be "controlled" with medication, and like an addict, you are in perpetual "recovery". As I continue to get better, though, admittedly with the help of medication, I wonder why it is that I should labour under the stigmatizing term of schizophrenia for the rest of my life. To me, I am not "in recovery", but resolutely "recovered" and I hope this blog has gone some way to demystifying the illness and also confounding the stereotypes so often associated with it.
I am, after all, still just your normal, average, paranoid and delusional man.