Mental health from both sides
I have written very little in the last few months, as I’ve been quite unwell. Even I realise this, something which suggests rare and blossoming insight – although it may evaporate as soon as normality returns, who knows. But things have been hard. My mood has been very low, my beliefs about myself and my…
I often read blogs or writing by other people with mental illness – I find them interesting and inspiring, and often curious. After all, we all live within the confines of our own experience, however much we think we ride above it. Even as we start to understand, it often changes. Perhaps we get a…
I wonder, at times, why I didn’t write more about my experiences of mental illness when it was hot off the press. Not necessarily when I was very unwell, but in the aftermath of early episodes, when I was young, and emotions were high. It would have been very different, and I might not like…
It’s very hard to know whether you’re wrong or right about things, even when you have all the information that you think you need. In fact, while I would always advocate acquiring facts and proof, I think that it’s virtually impossible to do this in a non-biased way – we can’t help but be pulled…
These wards contain so many people’s individual horrors, and there needs to be enough beds and enough people to carry all this and care for them. Otherwise we lose our humanity.
Becoming a psychiatrist was very important to me as a young doctor. As a patient, who had been in and out of a psychiatric hospital, it felt like a lost dream, something I could never hope to achieve. It is true that I had wanted to train as a psychiatrist before I became ill, but…
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…
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…
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…
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 already written about psychiatric drugs, but this is a new post, and perhaps more personal than the last. For me, and I suspect others, taking psychiatric medication is a problem every day of my life. It’s like I have two people in me, one saying – ‘Yes, you know you need to take them,…
Mental illness is very personal, and also very immediate. When it happens to you, it is all that there is, surrounding you, bending your thinking, affecting what you say to others. But those people that are listening to you are not always in the same place as you, even those who have experienced similar illnesses…
So many moments make up a life. Some are forgotten almost instantly, some fade with time, and some are written hard on memory. Some of these are happy, some painful and humiliating. Do we really remember them, or do they curl into something else, worn by memory itself? Do we talk about them, look at…
My second child was due to be born when my daughter was four years old. Psychotic depression, before and after her birth had meant that we thought we would not have another, and it was a joy to think that we might have a different experience. I had been on lithium when the baby was conceived,…