Mental health from both sides
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We all have a personality, but, when you move into the realms of psychiatry and mental health, this term can take on a rather different meaning. It is often also very difficult to discuss, something which is hardly surprising, given the fact that personality disorder can be seen as a punitive diagnosis, one of exclusion…
My brain has been somewhat exercised of late, both by my own internal wrangles about psychiatric treatments and by various online debates, particularly about ECT. These debates often seem to be moral and emotional in nature, making it particularly hard to contribute or indeed come to any conclusions. I am someone with a very precarious…
It’s come round again, and so have all those feelings which made me feel so ashamed last year. Ashamed, but also slightly uneasy (a bad combination); and it may just be that the cape acquired at grumpyoldwomen.com is fitting me rather better. But crazy socks for docs has this effect on me, and I’m not…
This is pure self-indulgence – I know there are many tall people who would like to be shorter, fat who would like to be thinner, old who would like to be younger, and perhaps the vice versas. And what about those who are shunned for race, sexuality, illness? That is far more grave. But we…
I’m never too sure what I think about stigma. If you asked me now, my immediate response would be that it has had no adverse effect on my life, and of course that has to be rubbish. Things affect us insidiously, such that we discount them, or don’t even notice them. Sometimes it’s only when…