Mental health from both sides
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’s something about leading a normal life when terrible things are happening in the world that is very odd. We wake up, and we eat, and we go about our business. We feel horror at what is happening, and fear of what might be to come, but, for most of us, our lives simply continue.…
Is Valentine’s Day a good thing? Or can it be harmful? Does it make people happy, or is it a celebration that we should consign to the past? I can only draw on my own experiences, which are sadly minimal, but I can and will extrapolate. When I think of Valentine’s Day, I immediately picture…
Today is my birthday. I am a day older than I was yesterday, that’s all, certainly not a whole year older. So it’s odd that we worry so much about the increasing numbers that pop up every birthday to remind us of time passing. I never wanted to be older than I was – when…
The idea that a psychiatrist could feel disempowered by mental illness may well seem ridiculous. Even when that psychiatrist is also a psychiatric patient, the notion may raise an eyebrow or two, although I am well aware that my professional position can put me in a position of power. Perhaps this knowledge is what also…
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…
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…
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 wondered recently why we, as doctors and other health professionals, choose to tell our own stories of illness. You would think that we would want to swerve away from all such things, faced as we are with illness and suffering, often on a daily basis. But not only do these stories continue to be…