A Day in the Life

After writing, only in my last post, about the use of drugs and an increase in deaths caused by such things as excessive drinking and smoking, on Saturday, 23rd July, I found out that the brilliant, but troubled singer, Amy Winehouse, had been found dead at her Camden home at the appallingly young age of only 27. I can only say that, as a fan, I was shocked and upset by the news. Indeed, for me, who does not usually become overly-emotional at such things, I was, somewhat to my own surprise, overtly moved and saddened. Perhaps it is because Amy's life was so turbulent that I felt this way. Having had a long battle with drugs and alcohol, Amy had also had problems, it had been reported, in the area of mental health. At one stage she was said to have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, although did not take medication for this condition. She was also said to have had trouble with an eating disorder, and on many occasions appeared painfully thin. Such problems w...

The other day on our local radio station, BBC Radio Stoke, it was announced that admissions to hospital for women aged between 30 and 60 for alcohol-related problems had increased by a third over the last few years. This statistic was taken from hospital admissions specifically related to my own locality of Stoke-on-Trent. Numerous people came on the radio to comment about the issue, and, to me, only one made any sense of this disturbing statistic. She was a woman from the charity, "Brighter Futures", and her suggestion was that we face such economic and social discontent in our area that such figures are not really surprising. She went on to suggest that people have to be given hope for at least some kind of future if we want them to adhere to suggested limits of the ingestion of things like alcohol. Why, she postulated, would people actually want to live in a terrible situation until old age? If you don't have any hope, why bother? Th...

"Many of the battles we fought were over issues of 'representation'- a loosely defined set of grievances mostly lodged against the media, the curriculum and the English language...ours was a politics of mirrors and metaphors." Naomi Klein, "No Logo". At the Media Action Group for Mental Health, part of our stated aim is to "promote positive, accurate and realistic images of mental health and people who live with mental distress." The key word here, perhaps, is "images", for at our charity, we are mostly concerned with what is sometimes termed "identity politics". That is to say, we do not promote actual, concrete reforms in law, for example, but rather, seek to better the "representation" of  mental illness and those with experience of it. Our hope is that by doing this, some social change will take place- knowledge, attitudes and behaviour will somehow transmogrify. As Naomi Klein (above) points out in her book, ...

"Madness became pure spectacle...which was offered as a diversion to the good conscience of a reason sure of itself...Until the beginning of the nineteenth century...madmen remained monsters- that is, etymologically, beings or things to be shown." Michel Foucault, "Madness and Civilisation".   The most recent initiative from the national "Time to Change" campaign, aimed at dismantling the stigma which surrounds mental illness, is called "It's time to talk". The brains behind the campaign think that talking openly about mental health is, to quote from their "Update" magazine, "one of the best ways to improve knowledge, attitudes and behaviour." One of the aspects of their new initiative has been the opening of various "human libraries" around the country, where people with no experience of mental illness can meet those who have had experience and, hopefully, therefore, "see beyond the label and meet the ind...