A Day in the Life

So, I've been away from blogland for a while, and to my many fans and admirers I apologise for this. OK, so I'm being sarcastic, but for those of you who do follow this blog, you may like to know that I have been, as well as all the usual stuff, preparing my CV and covering letters to send to potential employers. After my invective last time, I thought I had better put my money where my mouth is and actually start doing something about what I often only speak of. However, you may also know, unless you are a hermit who never switches on the TV or radio or reads a paper, that the economic situation we find ourselves in at the moment is perhaps not the most conducive to finding employment. Indeed, although the economy is beginning to show signs of recovery, attempting to penetrate the job market, especially with my own history of illness and the type of illness that it is, may not be at all easy. Prime Minister David Cameron's "big idea" surrounding this issue is th...

I have been attending the Pathways Group at my local mental health residential unit for around three years now. The group is there for those with sometimes long-term or severe mental ill health. Although facilitated by staff, it aims to be user led. That is, run by the patients or group members themselves. Alongside this, I have also been doing voluntary work at the Media Action Group for Mental Health for around the same time. Both these activities have been valuable in my recovery. While the Pathways Group has provided me with an important social outlet and also valuable information both about my illness and ways of coping with it, my voluntary work has given me no end of confidence in my ability to cope with at least some work. In fact, I have been told at MAGMH that the volume and quality of work I have done is commendable. So, as I have perhaps said in previous blogs that I begin to feel a sometime frustration that I have not gone further in life, no doubt albeit due to ill hea...

As I took a stroll yesterday with a friend through "Sanity Fair" (the subject of my last post), we began to have a conversation about what we were both reading, and I remarked that I had just finished Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and was now on to the gargantuan Second World War epic, "The Kindly Ones", which, coming in at 975 pages long, must go down as one of the longest books I have attempted to read, excluding, that is, Norman Mailer's enormous wedge of a book, "The Executioner's Song", which was over the magic 1,000 pages. My friend then said, jokingly, that he had noted "something of a masochistic streak" in my choices of the material that I read. And, indeed, I seem to always choose books which are either massive or notoriously "difficult". And, I began to wonder, why do I always seem to want to challenge myself in this way? Was I trying to prove something? Or was it, as my friend had said, albeit jokingly, t...

So, it's that time of year again. Time, that is, for our annual celebration of all things to do with mental health in Stoke-on-Trent, "Sanity Fair". Sanity Fair is a sort of street carnival which takes place in Piccadilly in Hanley annually and is organised by my very own Media Action Group for Mental Health. As a result, our office has been extremely busy getting the event together. There will be a variety of musicians and bands playing at the event, as well as stalls representing more or less everyone in the local mental health field, from charities like ourselves, Mind, Rethink and the local North Staffordshire User's Group to those actually involved in services, from social services to the "early intervention" team. So, if you happen to be in the area please come along and join us in a celebration of "madness". Indeed, it may seem like an odd thing to do, to "celebrate" mental ill health, which can, after all, be a harrowing and pa...

Dear Reader. For a long time time now I've been chugging along, like a train, doing my voluntary work, going to the Pathways group, writing my blog, etc, etc. But just recently I have a feeling of not being sated. I have a feeling that this isn't quite enough. There is something, deep within me, that remains unsatisfied, and so I seem ever on the verge of frustration. So it is that I begin to question exactly how it is I got in to this situation. It would seem, at first sight, that it is that I have been ill and have fallen, slowly, incrementally, in to some type of conformist stupor. On second thought, is it the result of an unfeeling, unsympathetic society which does little for its minions who find themselves in the position of being mentally ill? I can only speak for myself, and speaking for myself, I find it is perhaps a mixture of both. The other week at the Pathways Group, for example, we had a guest speaker. His name was Paul Hammersley and as well as being a Profess...

So, after a longer than usual sojourn from blogland , I have returned to say that, yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm finally losing it... Weight, that is. It has been a long and hard struggle, but if I'm correct, I think I have lost something in the region of 13 lbs, 1 lb short of a stone. Since taking anti-psychotic medication, a prominent side-effect of which is gaining weight, I have veritably piled on the pounds, and it is difficult to get people to understand that I haven't exactly eaten myself in to this situation, that it has largely been due to the medication I take. Indeed, as my girth has increased, I have become increasingly embarrassed by it and have become acutely aware of just how much our society is entirely geared towards the attainment of "thinness". It would seem, even, that we are living in some form of apartheid, the thin and gorgeous at one end of the spectrum, the fat and loathsome at the other. It is even, it seems, becoming apparent, that inci...

After, only a couple of chapters ago, writing about the seemingly "insane" practice of diagnosing and medicating children with psychiatric disorders, I have found myself again pondering the apparent dangers which I think are inherent in psychiatric practice. In that post I pointed to Thomas Szasz's belief that in the wrong hands, psychiatry could become a means of social control and indeed, with diagnoses such as "oppositional defiance disorder" and the ongoing need to " pathologise " what would be seen by many as perhaps difficult, but nonetheless "normal" behaviour, it seemed that Szasz's beliefs were turning in to hardened fact. I was reminded, also, of the experiment undertaken by psychologist David Rosenhan in 1973 which resulted in the paper, "On being sane in insane places", which exposed the unreliability of psychiatric diagnoses in the US. The experiment involved admitting a number of "sane" patients on to ...