A Day in the Life

I can't remember exactly when it was. It could have been the summer of '95. Or maybe it was earlier than that. '94 perhaps. But it was definitely summer, and the sun shone brightly on us as we (me and two other friends from university) went to see R.E.M. in concert at the Milton Keynes Bowl. I had first travelled to London to meet up with my friends, who were also big fans, like me, of Michael Stipe and his band. As so many people that day were travelling from London to see the concert, the journey by train to Milton Keynes took longer and was more arduous than expected. There was much queueing and waiting around. So much so that my feet began to ache even before we got to our destination, due to a lack of available seats. When we finally arrived, though, the day turned out to be worth all the trouble. I can't really believe now the bands that we saw who played in support of the main act. Radiohead, then not nearly as big as they later became, played a brilliant set be...

There is an often bandied about statistic in mental health circles which would seem to prove that mental illness is more common than one might think, and that is that mental ill health will affect one in four people at some stage in their lives. Such statistics are often used by anti-stigma campaigners to show that mental ill health is really quite common and should not, therefore, be the subject of so many negative attitudes and behaviours. However, in an article in "The Guardian" last year ("Antidepressant use rises as recession feeds wave of worry", 11.6.2010) it was revealed that the number of people being treated for mental illness could be even greater than the one in four statistic suggests. According to the article, the number of prescriptions handed out for antidepressants had risen from 20.1 million in 1999, to a staggering 39.1 million in 2009, a 95% increase over only ten years. The article, as its title suggests, attributed this new "wave" of...

The other week, I was at the "China Gardens" at the Festival Park in Etruria, where myself and other volunteers at the Media Action Group for Mental Health stopped off for a little light refreshment after taking a walk through the park area of the site as part of an art project we are currently undertaking with the help of a local artist. As I sat there sipping my coffee, I looked over to the right, where I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that someone had scratched some kind of message into one of the wooden tables which populate the garden area. Upon closer inspection I could see that the message inscribed simply read, "I like boobs". In fact, it didn't even make that much grammatical sense, and in truth all it really said was, "I like boob". As I sat there, I pondered the level of a mind that would write such an inanity, with Philip Larkin's poem "Sunny Prestatyn" going through my mind, but ended up thinking, well, I suppose I like bo...

The phrase used in the title above I believe first appears in the poem "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920) by Ezra Pound, in which it states, "The age demanded an image/ Of its accelerated grimace". However, it was also later used as the title of a poem by Ernest Hemingway in 1922. Anyway, this little phrase, and also Hemingway's poem, got me thinking, after writing in my last post about public reactions to the recent riots, just what our own age "demands", which in itself may be a little demanding for me, and I would say these are just a few thoughts on the subject, and aren't intended to be some kind of exhaustive analysis. I thought I would concentrate on the young, as it appears that most of those involved in the rioting were young people, some mere children at only 11 years old. So, as I remarked in my previous post, people have launched out on countless lines of speculation as to what might be going wrong with our younger generation, most of the...

A little while ago, well, in fact, quite a long time ago, we at the Pathways Group, for some reason, began discussing the "Jeremy Kyle Show". We, most of us, said how we detested that show. Kyle's obvious right-wing opinions, how he berates and, literally, shouts his guests into submission. And yet, one in our group, a student nurse, said, "well, I like it, because he always seems to say what you're thinking yourself." To which, of course, me and my leftist mate replied, "well, he doesn't say what I'm thinking!" However, I was somewhat taken aback by the possibility that anyone of intelligence could possibly share Kyle's belligerent attitude. But, it seems, more and more, public opinion is becoming intolerant. I have written of this before in previous posts, but nothing made this more apparent than the reaction to the recent riots which erupted throughout England. Of course people have launched out on various waves of speculation as t...

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference." Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken". The other day my Dad and I were discussing "life". Yeah, quite a big subject, really. But it seemed my Dad, after 80 years on the planet, had distilled his view of life down to one governing imperative, and that was that our existence is mostly dictated by chance or coincidence. He dislikes the term "fate" because, he said, for him, it had associations with bad things happening to people. So, he relayed to me how the result of his own very colourful life had been mostly a matter of chance. Firstly, I should perhaps explain that my Dad has indeed had an eventful existence. Joining the army at 15, he went on to fight in the Korean war. After that, having trained in the army as an engineer, he got various jobs working in that capacity. Employed by people such as "Marconi", his job took him t...

I don't know about others who write blogs on a fairly regular basis, but for me, coming up with something to write about every week has become something of a task, if not a chore. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy writing my blog and at times it has even been a cathartic tool, allowing me to vent feelings that I would have previously perhaps just bottled up. It's just that, of late, as I scour my increasingly frustrated brain, I seem to be finding it more difficult to find topics to write about. This is, in part, no doubt due to the fact that I feel I have virtually exhausted the subject which this blog is about- mental ill health and the stigma which surrounds it. Frankly, as most of the activities I undertake are to do with this subject too, I am beginning to get a little bored banging on about stigma and its pernicious effects. It could be also that many readers, after a while, begin to suffer some sort of compassion fatigue, and are, perhaps, fed up with the many appeals to ...