A Day in the Life

So, having been away from the blogosphere for a couple of weeks, I finally have something to report. Yes, after many years of not getting on in life, I actually managed to get an interview for a new voluntary job. The role involves working at a local school, helping some of the children with their reading skills. I think, and hope, that with the qualifications I have, I will be able to live up to the expectations and responsibilities that such a position carries. I know it's only a voluntary role, but all the same, if I am chosen to do it (which, by the way, is not yet certain) it can only help me in looking for other opportunities. At the interview I was asked to disclose my diagnosis, which I, being the honest and upstanding person that I am, did. The news was taken by the interviewer, I thought, quite well, although he did remark that the illness I am diagnosed with remains "an emotive word". "Indeed", I thought, "and then some". In fact, I don...

Recently, at the Media Action Group for Mental Health, we have been formulating some ideas for our "Local People, Local Lives" campaign. As part of our project we will be producing postcards showing various artworks produced by the volunteers in our group of places in our locality of Stoke-on-Trent. The postcards will also have an anti-stigma message, and attempt to bring about a change in attitudes towards mental ill health. As we discussed how we would go about doing this, it became clear to us that one of the most pervasive and persistent myths about schizophrenic illness was that it is often viewed as a "split", or "Jekyll and Hyde", personality. Those who read this blog will know that this common perception of schizophrenia is entirely false, and so we began to wonder just where the misconception came from. I have often written in this blog that this myth may be due in no small part to the name "schizophrenia" itself, and it appears, that s...

I often get on my high horse in this blog about inaccurate, unrealistic and misrepresentative portrayals of mental ill health in films and the rest of the media. You may recall that I was up in arms about a film called "Roommate", which to my mind contained one of the worst, most inaccurate and fear-inducing representations of mental illness I had seen in recent times. It is nice to report, then, that having watched the first episode of the American drama series "Homeland", which was screened for the first time on British television last Sunday on Channel 4, I can say that I was quite pleased with the portrayal of one of the main character's apparent mental "instability". The series stars Claire Daines as Carrie Matheson, a CIA officer who comes to believe that an American Marine (played by Brit Damian Lewis), who was held captive by Al-Qaeda for eight years, has actually been "turned" by the enemy and now, upon his otherwise heroic return t...

Anyone who regularly reads this blog may recall that a while back I wrote a posting entitled "That Obscure Object of Desire", after the Luis Bunuel film of the same name. In that instance my particular obscure object of desire was TV chef and all-round uber-babe Nigella Lawson. But, as Nigella, with her sexy, husky voice and comely curves has now been missing from our screens for a while, her place has been taken by another erotic obsession in my increasingly middle-aged, male psyche. All it takes to describe my new obscure object of desire is two words. And here they are. Kirstie Allsop. There you go. Kirstie. Allsop. Notice how even the name alone seems to trip off the tongue, taking a tap, as Nabokov put it, on the teeth. Kir-stie-All-sop. So what is it about Kirstie that gets me, and seemingly many other approaching middle-agedom males, in a lather? Well, for a start, Kirstie shares a certain, particularly sexy, attribute with Nigella, and that is her vixen-like voice. ...

I have now been officially discharged from mental health services. They have decided that I am now well enough to go my own way and seek my fortune. Or something like that, anyway. It was at a care plan meeting at my local residential unit yesterday that I was informed of this decision. I was asked how I felt about this, to which I replied that I was "OK" about it. What I think I really meant was, "Yippee- free at last! free at last! thank God almighty, I am free at last!". OK, so I'm being a little facetious, and the notion that being under the care of mental health services somehow means that you are not "free" is a bit unfair to them. After all, despite some (significant, to my mind, at least) glitches in my treatment, they have played an instrumental part in my recovery. Since joining the Pathways Group, for example, I only seem to have got better. Being part of the "Lifestyle Project", which was run within the group, also helped me on m...

Growing up during the '70s and '80s, me and my friends became great fans of "Monty Python". Although the television series was first aired in 1969, and came to an end after 45 episodes and four series in 1974, the BBC always showed repeats of the programme throughout this time. We had probably never seen anything like "Monty Python's Flying Circus" before, and were enthralled by its surreal, anarchic humour. Indeed, I still think that it's perhaps the funniest thing to have been aired on British television to this day (perhaps with the exception of Chris Morris' brilliantly subversive satire on the news, "The Day Today"). The Python Team. Back Row: Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam. Front Row: Terry Jones, John Cleese, Michael Palin. The Python team of Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, John Cleese and Michael Palin seemed to appeal to our own teenage unruliness. The Pythons were different somehow from ...

Having recently watched Pedro Almodovar's film, "The Skin I Live In", I got to thinking about how mental illness, in particular, schizophrenia, affects one's personal identity. The film prompted this bout of contemplation as it is, in many ways, about identity (sexual and otherwise). The main plot revolves around two main characters, a plastic surgeon and a young man. The plastic surgeon witnesses the young man rape his daughter, and she later kills herself. Hell-bent on revenge, but also on recreating the image of his wife, who also died, the surgeon sets about changing the man into a woman who resembles his deceased spouse. What I found interesting in the film is how the young man copes with the new identity forced upon him, taking up yoga as a means of, perhaps, learning to accept his new role, and also of protecting an inner self at risk of being destroyed. OK, so the film appears to have little to do with mental ill health, but the way it shows a person forced ...