A Day in the Life

As it is the Christmas hols, I thought, as I have time, that I would write down a few yuletide musings that I've been having. These are to do with the vexed question of political correctness and how far we should adhere to it. This is of particular interest to me, as, at The Media Action Group for Mental Health, we often debate what are and what are not appropriate terms to describe mental illness or those experiencing it. It would seem, from my point of view, as one who has experience of mental ill health and, furthermore, has been labelled with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, that, in comparison with their racial or sexual counterparts, the use of pejorative terms to describe those experiencing mental ill health are still bandied about with relative impunity. It appears to me that while one would never use the "n" word, for example, to describe someone of a particular race, words like "bonkers", "nutcase", "schizo" and "loony" seem...

At the risk of repeating myself ad infinitum and becoming a bore, I ask the same question I did last year and, come to think of it, the year before that. While my lack of originality may be beginning to grate, I am simply going to say, once again- so here it is, Merry Christmas, every body's havin ' fun, or are they? While we all know what Christmas is supposed to represent; a time of peace, love and mercy, of both giving and receiving, but mostly giving, one can't help but see what it has become- an exercise in mindless materialism, a symptom of commercialism gone crazy. But maybe I am too cynical. Perhaps, for many, the true message of Christmas remains, despite the fact that before it's had the chance to say "hello", it's already saying "buy buy". Anyway, it's still, whatever it is now, a far cry from when some of the older generation of my family were young, when, as children, all they received was an apple, an orange, and a sugar mouse...

So, this is just a quick posting to wish myself a happy birthday. After all, if no one else is going to, I might as well do it myself! OK, so I'm joking. I have received quite a few cards from family and friends and have got more or less everything that I asked for. In fact, I even went out for a meal last night with my parents as part of my celebrations. However, I am now officially "middle-aged" and indeed, physically, sometimes feel even older. So, reaching the grand old age of 38 has made me feel old. I believe I wrote last year, on passing 37, in a post called "Birthday Blues" that, because of being ill for so long, I have a strange relationship with my age. While I feel, for example, mentally about 18, I feel physically a lot older. And while my peers would almost uniformly seem to be married with kids and mortgages, I just plod along with my voluntary work, mental health groups and blogs. It is not surprising, then, that one begins to feel a touch of ...

So, this is going to be an intimate blog about that most private and personal of things- intimacy. More specifically, it is going to be about how having a diagnosis of schizophrenia can affect you in intimate relationships. For a start, medication would appear to rear its ugly head again when talking about intimacy. Along with many of the negative side-effects of anti-psychotic medication, it can bring about a certain amount of sexual dysfunction . For example, it may cause "erectile dysfunctions ", such as having painful erections or out and out impotence. It can also, as far as I know, affect the experience of orgasm. Even more outlandish, it can cause the growth of "breasts" in men, and lead some even to "produce milk". I was told by my psychiatrist that this was due to the fact that some medications contain the female hormone, prolactin , leading to these bizarre side-effects. It would seem, then, that by having a diagnosis of schizophrenia, where you ...

The other day at the Media Action Group for Mental Health, we were discussing what the most harmful element of stigma was. Some felt this was in the area of employment. But, for me, if we are talking about "harm" in terms of how traumatic stigma can be, I think it is when it comes from friends and family, the people who are closest to you, who sometimes convey a complete inability to understand what the ill person is going through. Indeed, sometimes there is even very open hostility, and in my previous blog, I pointed out that, in one survey, over half (56%) of people who had experienced mental ill health had faced unfair treatment from their families, ranging from lack of understanding to outright hostility, name calling and enforced isolation. In my own experience, I seemed to face most prejudice at the inception of my illness, what must now be nearly twenty years ago, and I feel it came in the form, mostly, of sheer misunderstanding. In terms of family, my brother and pare...

I have been thinking recently about how the stigma surrounding mental ill health directly affects me, and I have come to the conclusion that, despite suffering certain unfairness early on in my illness, from friends, family and I have to say, mental health services themselves, the discrimination I now face seems less "real", in that it is anticipated, rather than actual. In fact, it could be that it is "all in my mind" sometimes. If I use an example to explain. Often, when I go to get my hair cut, the barber will inevitably engage me in conversation and ask, "not at work today,then?" At the sound of this question I often recoil in horror, because I often think it will lead to me having to explain why I do not do full-time paid work and, as an inevitable consequence of that, revealing the fact that I have experience of mental ill health. While I do not wish to censor myself or be dishonest, I feel I am faced with a difficult choice. Do I tell the truth and ...

So I was going to take a break from all this serious mental health stuff and write, as an homage to my great blogging and now also 3D friend Klahanie (aka Gary), a "real surreal" blog. I have been promising him I would do this for some time, so here goes. So, what will my subject be? Well, I was going to write about apathy, but then felt that I just couldn't be bothered! And, I was supposed to write this blog yesterday, but the procrastination board had it postponed until today. OK, so these are both jokes we know well from Klahanie himself (and for those of you who don't know, he's the l il' dude in the dress in the sepia coloured photo in my list of "followers"). So what will I write about? Well, I could write about cheese, but Id have to do it very Caerphilly ! I could write about chips, but that would be just another chip off the old blog. And there I go again. More Klahanie jokes. It just seems that the man's influence is so gargantuan (...