A Day in the Life

Having taken part in the Viewpoint Survey, which I spoke of in my last post, the questions I was asked made me aware of something which, I think, may be a problem for many who have experience of mental ill health, and that is that during or after being unwell, one's social network can become not only altered, but also very limited. We know that because of stigma many can lose friends, face hostility from those they live near, and even become estranged from family. But also, even if one does make it through such difficult periods of adjustment and manage to forge a new existence and make new friends, it seems to me that one may still have a limited social network because this new existence may be one entirely based around mental illness. It seems that those within mental health services would want service users to develop as wide a social network as possible, moving into circles which are outside the realms of the mental health field. But, if my own case is...

After a couple of quite negative postings, I thought I would attempt to portray a more positive side of mental health by saying what is actually being done to combat the stigma surrounding it. The Viewpoint Survey is currently being carried out by the national mental health charity, Rethink, and The Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London. It is asking mental health service users about how they are treated by others, with interviews being carried out over the telephone. The questions being asked cover a variety of topics, including how people have been treated in different areas of their lives, whether they have changed their behaviour because of their mental health diagnosis, whether they have educated people about, or challenged stigmatising views, and whether they have access to sources of practical help. I learnt about the survey because I was randomly chosen to take part. The interview I took part in lasted around 30 minutes and covered all the above issue...

"'There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view.' 'Why?' 'Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of ...

I have just watched a film called "Roommate". It was one of those stalker movies which seem to have proliferated since the release of "Single White Female", I believe in the early '90s. And the thing about "Roommate" is, that aside from being a bad film, it is also one of the most grossly misrepresentative of mental illness I have seen in recent years. The action, if you can call it that, centres around one young girl, Sara, as she goes off to college for the first time. Needless to say, Sara is attractive, Sara is popular, Sara has a good relationship with her family, Sara soon meets a boy, who is also good looking, and Sara is talented in the area of fashion design. In short, Sara is so banally perfect that she makes you feel like being sick. However, there is one fly in Sarah's designer ointment, and that is her roommate, Rebecca, who at first appears, like all "psychos" in such films, to be sweet and charming, but later turns into a...

Today is two days before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York, an event which took thousands of lives, but shook the entire world, possibly being the defining influence on U.S. foreign policy for the last decade. It seems, like with other age-defining moments in history, everybody remembers where they were when the attacks took place. I remember at that time that I was very ill, staying in bed all day, only to awake, bleary-eyed, some time in the early evening. So it was that I awoke around 6 pm, and, turning on the TV, found the BBC news running constantly, relaying the story and pictures from across the Atlantic. At first, like so many, I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing. Was this a film? Was this real? Did it really happen? I was in genuine shock at the events which had unfolded and at the gradual realisation that, yes, this was real. This was not a film. This had really happened. With the unfolding of the ye...