Mental health from both sides
I am a psychiatrist, and I hope that when I see my patients I am helpful, friendly even. I don’t know if I am, though. For me it’s a job, a job I like very much (mostly), but a job that ends with the end of the day. I forget some of my patients; not…
We should all criticise psychiatry, all the time. We criticise many other things in life, and see it as a positive, which it is. We criticise art, literature and music; we criticise science; we criticise each other; and without this criticism we would never learn or grow. Our lives would not be interesting. I like…
Up until now I have written about my life in excerpts, usually to illustrate some point or other, or to share something that I hope will speak to, or help, others. My memoir, An Improbable Psychiatrist, which is published this week, does this too, but is rather more. It is no necklace of events, polished and…
People with mental illnesses may often be thought by others to be lazy, perhaps because they don’t always seem to do very much. There are many reasons for this – the illnesses themselves, the treatments and the wider consequences of being mentally ill. Laziness is a word with a lot of negative emotion attached to…
So much of psychiatry is opinion. While there can be general agreement that something is amiss with an individual, sometimes gravely so, there can also be a lot of debate as to what that actually is. The discussion about their potential mental disorder may be stimulating and interesting for the clinician; perhaps rather less so…
As a patient with mental illness, I am very grateful to my partner. He has stayed with me throughout, been there for the difficult times, and still takes me to my regular ECT maintenance sessions. I hate going for these; the treatment is no fun, but I also hate having to go there with him…
Asking for help doesn’t seem to be very easy. As my maintenance ECT sessions stretch further apart, I am feeling more and more pulled between huge relief at stopping, and horrible fear – also at stopping. Obviously, the hope for me and my family is that I will stay well, be there for them, and…
This is a difficult post to write, and is probably a reflection of many things - my own illness and return to work, the challenges of trying to change things in a clunky system, and maybe even just the simple need for a holiday. But I am weary of psychiatry. I just don’t know where…
There is nothing beautiful about mental illness. Art and literature may sometimes present it as such, but this is not reality. Depression first gripped me as a young woman; now I am in what can only be described as middle age, and my mood disorder has continued to torment me over the years. At times…
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…
Back in 2020, I saw myself as something of a Covid resistance fighter. When Covid-19 first hit, my ward was converted into a Covid unit (admittedly not for the very ill), and, despite taking advised precautions, it’s hard to believe I managed then to avoid that nasty little virus. But I stayed well, and even…
When I am lying in my comfortable bed at night, I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had been born, one hundred, five hundred, even one thousand years ago. And usually I breathe a sigh of relief that this is not the case, and turn over and go to sleep.…
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…
My family never ask about my mental illness. They never ask how I am, whether I take medication, whether it works. I’ve no idea why, because I don’t ask them why they don’t, either. We’re not that kind of family. By family, I mean my birth family, the one in which I grew up. Of…
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…