A Day in the Life

"When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least:..." From Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare. It just struck me that I've been beavering away at this little blog for nearly nine years now. My first   post, somewhat prosaically titled, "Is there any alternative to medication?", was published on 11th July 2007. In those nine years I've covered many issues surrounding mental health, but most of the posts have been merely my own observations on mental illness, its treatment, the stigma which surrounds it, and my own experience of it. As you may have noted from the "About Me" section to the right of this page, as such the ...

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." George Orwell, "Animal Farm". A while ago I wrote a blog entitled "In the Ghetto", in which I argued that having a long-term mental illness can sometimes result in  making you feel as if you've somehow been cordoned off from mainstream society. In this post I wanted to expand that idea a little by saying that not only does having mental health issues often put you in some kind of ghetto for those with such problems, but that, in a strange inversion of the rest of society, it can also mean living in a world of a sort of enforced equality where one's qualifications, achievements, level of intelligence and general aptitude seem not to matter so much. As Orwell's words above would appear to point to the hypocrisy and inherent unfairness of wider society, it is as if in the world of mental health this unfairness is borne by those who are more capable rather than less. We liv...