A Day in the Life

A while ago now, I wrote a blog about political correctness and the terms which are appropriate to use when speaking of mental illness or those with experience of it. It seems to me that this is an extremely vexed question and one which, perhaps, demands a little further exploration. As I recall, I said in my blog that pejorative words used to describe mental illness were still used with a certain banal cruelty, seemingly bandied about with relative impunity in comparison to their racial or sexual counterparts. While this is perhaps true, I pointed out that there are people within mental health circles who advocate the use of words, such as "mad" in the case of "Mad Pride", which would at first seem unsuitable. The concept of "reclaiming" words and thereby defusing their power seems to be behind this particular approach. Indeed, the more I look at words used to describe those who experience mental ill health, such as "loony", "nutter"...

At a mental health fair in Stoke town centre last Friday, the Pathways Group officially launched its new website. The site is, if truth be told, in the early stages of its development, but we have managed to put up a couple of interesting articles, together with links to other sites, as well as a touching "farewell" to long-time member Cath, and an introductory brief biography of one of our members and resident photographer, Dom. There are also a number of pictures taken by Dom of the group up on the site. Although the site needs some more work, we believe that already it is giving out a message of hope to others who have experienced long-tern mental illness which has involved symptoms of psychosis. Historically speaking, illnesses involving psychosis, particularly schizophrenia, have had quite poor prognoses. However, as everyone in our group seems to be doing so well, we wanted to show that such illnesses needn't be the "death sentence" they are sometime...

The above title is taken from the autobiography of the great writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was most famous, perhaps, for writing "Lolita", that infamous tale of the academic Humbert Humbert and his perverted pursuit of under-age girls, or "nymphets", as he likes to call them in the text. Anyway, what better title for an autobiography, I thought, being, as an autobiography is, perhaps just a collection of one's past memories, all jotted down for everyone else to see. Hence the autobiography's reputation as an "unreliable" form because of its overwhelming subjectivity. When my own memory "speaks", however, it does not tend to induce the feeling that I want to write down all that I remember. Indeed, my own memory seems to be littered with remnants of embarrassing behaviour, mistakes; things, generally, I shouldn't have done. OK, so I know I've suffered from what is regarded as perhaps the most severe of mental illnesses, and at some ...

At the Pathways Group on Tuesday of last week, we were given some very sad news. We were told that a member of our little group, who had been coming since its inception some four years ago, had passed away. Her name was Cath Barker, and although we had known that Cath was suffering from an incurable and untreatable degenerative lung condition, the news of her sudden passing was an unexpected shock. Cath had been a key member of our group, always giving us a laugh whenever we would fall into silence or seemed to have nothing to say. Her buoyancy and good humour always kept us in good spirits, and indeed, even upon hearing the news that she had contracted this terrible condition, she never changed. That was what was so remarkable about Cath. Knowing that she only had a relatively short time to live, she stayed resolutely cheerful and showed not an ounce of self-pity, and in doing so, we all thought, showed astounding bravery. Not only this, though. Cath was not content just to...

I remember when I first became ill that some of my friends remarked that I had, to use a "Star Wars" analogy, "gone over to the dark side". Of course, we will all remember (well, most of those of my generation will) Luke Skywalker and his battle against the evil "empire" and the "dark side" of "the force", which was personified in the character of Darth Vader, who, as it turned out, was also Luke's father (gasp!). And then I got to thinking about why it would be that some of my friends would make such a comparison. I have blogged before about how mental ill health is often confused with just simple bad behaviour (see my blog, "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know") and it seems to me that we live within a culture which is almost, if not obsessed, then fascinated by the aberrant, the dangerous, the bad. Indeed, during a certain period in the '80s and '90s, it seemed that films and books, at least those of the thriller ge...