A Day in the Life

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 ...

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, ...