Mental health from both sides
There are many unbearable aspects to depression, and sometimes it seems that the words available just won’t do – awful, terrible, crushing. There are many more. This can be particularly hard with recurrent depression, as each time it is freshly grim, something you had previously forgotten, and it never helps when people say – You,…
How do you prepare for mental illness? I think it is exceedingly hard, and can often require the kind of confidence that is, by definition, missing in such circumstances. I have never managed to prepare well, by which I mean that I have no written plan as to what care I would prefer. The saddest…
The cushion of my desire is plump, and beckons boldly, waiting for my back to sink back softly into sleep, caressing gently. Reality is different. My feet press hardly on the lumpy seat, my bottom strains, against compressing pants that have and hold. My nerves fire pain from back to foot and back again that…
How can things be better? This is a very general question, which doesn’t have much of an answer, so I realise I need to make it more specific. How can I reduce stress at work to enable me to carry on working in a useful way while avoiding becoming ill again? It’s a bit of…
Rebecca – the doctor I would hesitate to say that climate change is the new kid on the block, because it isn’t. Our troubles have been brewing since we started burning fossil fuels in the Industrial Revolution, back in the eighteenth century, although it’s fair to say that we probably didn’t know what we were…
Continue reading ➞ Climate change – the doctor asks the specialist
I realised last week that I might need to take a bit of time off work. I’m not very ill – I wouldn’t be writing this if I were – but neither am I completely well, if well is as good as it gets, or ought to get. I have had a diagnosis of a…
Soundless you ceased to be, Oh my daughter. Unliving A shell of a life A sigh with no start. Is it better To live, twenty years and more, To long and yearn, To lose the distance That never comes? Or does the pulling darkness, The lack of time, Beguile you more? I never saw your…
When I was young and hopeful and sixteen, striving for dreams and ideas, I learnt German at school. I must have learnt quite a lot, because I read Bertolt Brecht and listened to Lieder, and was probably quite a pain in the arse. I’ve forgotten most of it since, but there is a phrase that…
I sometimes wonder why we talk differently about risk in psychiatry than we do in other medical specialties. The risk of harm or death is high in many illnesses, yet in psychiatry we manage risk in a way that seems much more personally attributable. There are balances of risk in diagnosing and managing heart disease,…
What is energy, as we experience it? It is a word with a positive force behind it, that glows and lives, and is the opposite of all that one usually experiences when depressed. Personally I find it quite difficult to recognise the feeling of low mood when I’m depressed, but reduced energy is actually more…
I’ve really been doing pretty well over lockdown, at least I thought I was. I’m not so sure now, and I’m finding myself wondering what I mean by ‘doing well’. It is with some dismay that I realise that for me this means not relapsing into severe depression, or requiring even more noxious psychotropic drugs,…
I think a lot about alcohol. This is inevitable, given that I work on an in-patient unit in a psychiatric hospital, treating people who have become alcohol dependent, but my views are less clear than you might think. When I talk about mental illness, I do so from the perspective of both psychiatrist and patient,…
I have always written fairly confidently that ECT has not caused me any brain damage. I have had around 70 treatments in total, over nearly 30 years, and during that time I have – mostly – lived a full life, sitting professional exams and postgraduate degrees, and working as a psychiatrist. I have nothing to…
Lots of people ask this question, or variants on it. Perhaps not that it’s real, but is it what it says it is? There are many possible answers, and these may depend on what is meant by mental illness; but, to my mind, if something has gone wrong with your brain, then you are probably…
Continue reading ➞ Is mental illness the same as physical illness?
When I looked up the meaning of the word confidential just now, it stated that it was information that was intended to be kept secret. Intimate, personal, privileged – these were the kind of words I found. To me that implies something you would keep to yourself and about your person, sharing it only if…