Mental health from both sides
Courage is much overrated in mental illness. When I first wrote about my own experiences, a lot of people told me how brave I was to do so. This made me squirm and feel quite odd, but they would insist that it was so, even when I denied it. It didn’t feel brave or courageous;…
Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, is probably quite rare in its extreme form, when people cannot even recognise a close relative, but perhaps less so in its milder variants. I’ve never found it easy to recognise people’s faces, and tend to rely instead on build, hair, posture and the like, at least until we start to…
I have referred to the diagnosis of personality disorder in a few of my previous posts. It’s something I have thought about a lot, both in my own dealings with psychiatry as a patient, and also as a psychiatrist, and I can never feel comfortable with it. I’ve tried to justify it as a response…
Continue reading ➞ The difficult diagnosis of personality disorder
Lockdown continues, and my hair carries on growing. Trivial, yet trying, and it does make you think, given that there’s plenty of time to do so. In my youth, I was relatively low maintenance - I was one of those girls who had long hair when it wasn’t fashionable, and I rarely went to the…
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,…
As patients, we often ponder whether our doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals are caring enough. As a psychiatrist myself, I assume that I am caring. But how do you measure caringness, what exactly is it? How do we know if we have it, and how can we train others to acquire it? Even…
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…
A poem warning of the dangers of ancestry testing & the consequent risk of ill-founded doubt (with thanks to Sylvia Plath) Daddy give me a break Won't you? Daddy what will it take For you To see That I am a part of you? What do you see when you see me Daddy? Is there…
Privilege is a word that is uppermost in many minds at present. It drips off the tongue, coated in caviar, champagne and cocaine, and no-one can really decide whether they want it or not. Does it help? Does it condemn? I consider myself privileged and feel guilty for being so. I’m not privileged enough to…
When I call myself a patient and a doctor, they seem like two opposites, two sides of the same table. In mental illness they are often perceived very differently – one with knowledge and power, one suffering and in need of help. They don’t join together well. They make a whole with an empty centre,…
Psychiatry and psychiatrist are powerful words. They stop conversations, and create awkward gaps. I try not to say I am a psychiatrist in social settings, sometimes muttering something about being a doctor, and usually wriggling out of anything further. Conversely, in a clinical setting, I always tell patients that I am a psychiatrist, probably because…
I have been a psychiatric in-patient on quite a few occasions. I am also the psychiatrist on an in-patient ward. There are differences: I work with people with addictions, whereas my times as a patient have been on general psychiatric wards with severe depression. But there are also similarities, and most of my admissions were…