A Day in the Life

I know I tend to go on alot about how I get bored, bored, bored in this blog. I generally, in the past, put these feelings of ennui down to having experienced a mental health problem which, in many ways, has left me somewhat socially isolated. I am often on my own for large spans of time and, almost without fail, find myself bored. I have been known to fall asleep out of sheer apathy and lack of motivation. Before, again, I have perhaps put this down to "negative" symptoms of the illness from which I am told I suffer, but lately I have been wondering whether this boredom thing goes a little deeper and is perhaps the product of a society which expects us all to be overwhelmingly conformist in our natures. I believe I feel this more acutely than perhaps other people do because I have been, at some point, at a stage where my behaviour certainly didn't conform to the "norm". It was deemed inappropriate, unreasonable- "mad". To use a literary allusion to e...

OK, it's time to admit it. Sometimes, on the odd occasion, I have been known to drink a little too much. Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm an alcoholic, but I do think I am prone to the odd binge which leaves me feeling not only physically unwell, but also seems to upset my spiritual equilibrium. It's all a far cry from when, in my teenage years, the odd binge drink was regarded as just part of the fun. And indeed, this great English tradition seems to have gone on and you can see the evidence of it in any major English town centre come the weekend. God knows, even the government is beginning to take note of the effects of this unusually British phenomenon, where you go out to a club and get so pissed that you can hardly stand up, become belligerently aggressive, maybe become over amorous with the opposite sex, and then go home, donner kebab firmly fixed between your teeth, chilli sauce running down that new shirt you'd just bought from Next. As for myself...

Before all of you scream out and say, "My God! I would never have guessed!" and start daubing my house with insults and threatening to beat me up, I should remind you that the word in my blog title is "bibliophile", not the other kind of " phile " which goes around molesting children. I only say this because there was an incident in fairly recent history when, in the UK, a paediatrician was mistaken for a paedophile, simply because people didn't understand the difference in meaning of the two words. Needless to say, people marched to her house demanding that she be thrown out of the neighbourhood. So, I reiterate, I am a commited "bibliophile", which, according to the OED is a "lover or collector of books". So, having cleared that up, perhaps I can tell you what it is like being a voracious reader and collector of books. For a start, one always seems to have the wish to have read everything. But, I can assure you, one thing you w...

It has been a while since I've blogged, but this has been because I have been quite busy (at least for me) doing my voluntary work and also working on the film I mentioned not so long ago (See Hollywood Here I Come, parts I & II). And so it came; the big day. Thursday, March 26 th , 2009. The premiere of the film. It was an important night for me as not only was I to give an introductory speech to the film, I had also written some of the voice-over for it and was also having some of my poetry displayed in the foyer of the museum where the film was being screened. So all in all, it was either a pretty nerve-wracking or exciting event for me, depending on how you looked at it. There were seven short films being shown in all. I have to say that ours, of course, was not the only one. It wasn't as if this was all about me, after all (although my ego almost had me believing it at one stage). The films, generally speaking, covered a variety of topics to do with both physical and ...

For this blog I have decided, for once, to write about something that has nothing to do with mental ill health, but something which, at the moment, seems to have the nation divided, and that is the increasingly incredible story of Jade Goody. I write this blog particularly because of the enormous amount of hypocrisy I think is being displayed by the media, especially the supposedly fairer, more intellectual broadsheets. As we all know Jade shot to fame as a contestant on Big Brother. Perhaps she was best known, sadly, for the stupidity she seemed to display during her time on the Big Brother set. Despite this, though, she was a lovable character who, although she didn't win, made it through to the final stages of the show. Before we knew it Jade was all over the place, on the covers of magazines and newspapers, selling stories about her every day life. She also proved herself to be somewhat less stupid than she appeared, becoming an incredibly successful business woman and cleverl...

Throughout my experience of mental ill health, it has often been my misfortune to think of myself as a "bad" person. Indeed, it seems to be something of the nature of depression and illnesses like it that when you are in its throes you seem to automatically come to think of yourself, not necessarily as "mad", but most certainly as "bad". This sort of thinking came to its zenith with me when I began to feel as if I were not just a bad person, but an inherently evil one. However, as sanity and its clearer ways of thinking began to sink in, I realised that these notions of evil I had been carrying around with me were pure fallacy . As they often say at the "Changes" group, we might not realise it at the time, but "feelings are not facts", particularly the feelings we have about ourselves when we are ill. But this did all get me to thinking, what exactly is a "good" person? Indeed, does goodness and evil exist at all, in the bibli...

Echoing the concerns of many, me included and perhaps others who read this blog, I have decided to share some of what I have learnt in researching mental ill health, particularly of my own diagnosis, schizophrenia. God, how I loathe "that word", but for the time being it will have to do as a description of what I have experienced over almost the last twenty or so years. It would appear to me that, according to research I have done, there is something of a split, a division, amongst the opinions of psychiatrists as to what actually causes mental ill health, in particular schizophrenia. While some would appear to see it as a purely bio-chemical condition, others, like the (something of a celebrity) psychiatrist Oliver James, for example, emphasise the impact of our society and environment on mental ill health. On the one hand, then, many would view depression as a simple chemical imbalance of levels of serotonin in the brain, and similarly with schizophrenia, levels of dopam...