Vivat Libertas

It's one of those days. I have too many deadlines, the world is run by overgrown toddlers who are going to get us all killed, and May's just called a general election. Bleh. I can't hide my cynicism about this. And on top of everything, I would have to be depressed, because the best way to react to turmoil in my life is to stop being a functional human being. I've been to my GP and am now sitting tight on a referral, but the service is apparently overstretched because the NHS has no money. Right now, all I can do is wait for them to process my reference and see if they think I'm mental enough to qualify for their help. In the meantime, I've been trying to be proactive, because it beats being miserable and not doing anything. Because I still more or less trust the NHS, I looked at some of their resources for self-care, where they suggested self-help books. I'm not opposed to self-help books when used in conjunction with some kind of therapy and w...

Recently I went on a rant about how slating the eeeeevil Big Pharma without acknowledging that some people need medication to function fucks over disabled people . (For the people in the back, if the evil drugs from evil Big Pharma didn't exist, a hell of a lot more people would be dead. I hate a lot of drug companies' practices. I also acknowledge that illness is a real thing, and that medication can work even if development and marketing of drugs is done in a hugely troubling way, because I am not comfortable writing off millions of people's lives.) What I find grating is that several of the people who complain about how mental illness isn't real have...absolutely zero experience with mental illness, either as living with one or as having any kind of medical training. This is unsurprising; the less experience people have with a subject, the worse they are at appraising their own competence. They tend to assume that treatment for a mental illness is always medi...

Content note: talking about depression, suicide and other such fun things - no gruesome details but if it upsets you then don't read this I don't know how to talk about this, but I feel like I have to talk about it: mentally ill people are caught in a shitty situation. The most immediately identifiable problem is the environment. Despite many, many shiny campaigns over the years, mental illness is still stigmatised; the people actually reached by the campaigns aren't necessarily the people who enforce that stigma. Families, who should be supportive, often...well, aren't. This is compounded by lack of access to information. I'm not sure what it's like in other countries, but when I was growing up in the UK very little information about mental illness was provided to young people. It took me three years and two suicide attempts to realise that I might have to go to a doctor about this. (Yes. Really.) The combination of stigma and not being provided with i...

The Guardian's on a mental health kick again. A couple of weeks ago, it put out a request for people's experiences with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) . In the UK, it's a specialist service which helps under-18s with difficulty with emotional or behavioural wellbeing. I filled in their form for a laugh; I'd had a pretty bad experiences with my local CAMHS branch. I certainly wasn't expecting an interview request to come my way. (Fingers crossed!) I've written about mental health many times before . This is because having a chronic condition is something which affects me every day. What I've never really done is written about mental health for anyone other than myself, and certainly not for old media. I've only done a couple of old media things before, but I'm worried that if I keep doing them I'm going to be seen as part of the media establishment rather than someone who just really likes hearing the sound of her own v...

Mental illnesses are very cruel. They make you feel like you're worthless, suffering through a living hell, and better off dead. They warp your perception of reality; everything you do is a burden on humanity and everybody secretly hates you. And because the world's a horrible place, mental illness is viewed as something shameful, a weakness, a vileness in the soul. With this in mind it's important to have support and people who keep reminding you that they love you. I find that a lot of people, especially younger people or those burnt by a recent betrayal, are very hung up on the idea of people leaving. (While I'm on the subject: everyone leaves or dies. This does not make the time you spent together any less meaningful. Prepare accordingly.) A natural consequence of self-hatred and the desire to still have people love you is hyperawareness of every tiny little thing you do, constantly watching out for anything which might annoy or upset them, at which point they...

It's very common for people to say things along the lines of "In the real world, people aren't going to accept your gender identity/sexual orientation/anything else I personally find icky or confusing" to demonstrate just how tough and edgy they are. You'd think the solution to this problem would be more kindness and acceptance of other people, but then we couldn't be dicks to each other on the internet. While having a conversation with a good friend of mine who also happens to be doing some really amazing work on disability theory, we were venting about academia - me because of my exams (and I'm procrastinating right now, aaaargh), her because MA students are surprisingly immature. In my year I've had problems with some quite prejudiced people. There are myriad possible reasons to be horrible to other people, from sport to competition to the fact that there are many, many more ways to be a jerk to someone than there are to be kind. What distr...

It's Mental Health Awareness Week and I'm angry. I'm pretty vocal about being mentally ill, both online and in my personal life. I'm vocal because I believe I shouldn't have to lie about my health to be accepted in mainstream society. And amazing communities dedicated to fighting stigma and educating the public have helped me tremendously in my recovery. So I feel pretty terrible for saying it's not enough, but it really isn't. Our NHS is being gutted. People aren't getting the care they need. A&E departments, mental health wards and just about every service you can think of are being shut down around the country. A GP cannot attend to the needs of a mental health patient in a 10-minute appointment. Even the wait times for counselling are six weeks. Six weeks to someone with severe depression are an eternity. If someone needs therapy, they might wait almost two years with no mental health care at all. And if someone needs a bed on a psychiatr...

It's Mental Health Awareness Week and I felt obligated to write something. Good job I picked a controversial topic, then! Trigger warnings and safe spaces are two topics that attract heated debate - and by "heated debate", I mean "socially conservative commentators getting needlessly offended and calling each other nasty names over the internet". I'm not going to go into detail on my own position here, because it's irrelevant to the point I want to make and frankly it's not an argument I feel like having. I know people who have mental health problems and are in favour of both of these things. I know people who have mental health problems and are against both of these things. I know people who have mental health problems and aren't entirely for or against either of these things. I know people who have mental health problems and have no opinion about either of these things. The point I'm trying to make here is that people with menta...

Obvious triggers for suicide and depression are obvious. People get really, really angry when it comes to making jokes about depression, suicide and mental illness. You could make a case that they're right to do so; after all, mental illness is rarely presented honestly. It's usually romanticised or stigmatised. Why would trivialising it be any better? My honest answer is that trivialising it doesn't help. But my honest answer has a second part to it: I'm fed up of well-meaning but annoying people yelling "you're trivialising mental illness!" every time I fail to get out my handkerchief and cry over the great tragedy . Look, it's no big secret that I'm a suicidally depressed mental patient. I don't hide it online, because I have no reason to. If anything, I have several good reasons to talk about mental health openly and honestly. And it's no big secret that learning to manage your illness involves coping mechanisms. As a long-time fa...

This post discusses self-harm. You have been warned. I spend a disturbing amount of time in the company of people slightly younger than me (I'm 18). Not much  younger, of course - 15, 16. Old enough to be articulate and form ideas about the world, but not old enough to see as much of it as I have. I really need to get off Tumblr. Anyway, if you remember being 15 or 16, you probably remember being very confused, insecure and angsty. (If you don't, you're either lying to yourself or you lived in a happier time and now I'm jealous of you because I spent my early- and mid-teens being suicidally depressed.) Some of you probably remember showing your angst to others in some pretty horrible ways. I'll now make an obligatory digression so I can say something very important: if you are considering self-harm, I have been there. I have looked at my body and thought "how utterly disgusting, I'm such a poser, I need more scars". I have looked at my body and...

I don't know if anyone else feels the same way, but personally I find depression boring as shit. Right, now that I've probably got people all riled up and telling me to be more sensitive about mental health issues instead of being a judgemental twat, let me explain. I don't find depression as a mental health issue boring, because I don't find mental health issues boring. This is mainly because I'm sick and tired of having them swept under the proverbial carpet, but let me move swiftly on...I don't find people talking about depression boring as shit either. Again, I don't like having those issues swept under the carpet - and I've found it useful to be able to share experiences with others and not feel guilty or ashamed. No, what I find boring about depression is the utter monotony of it all. You wouldn't think it, but being miserable is actually very repetitive...Wanting to die gets old. Being vulnerable and shaking and crying gets old. Hurting an...

So this all started with an absolutely terrible event. I've lost my mind like I haven't done in a long time, so this post isn't going to be at all coherent. Have fun deciphering my mental scrabblings, guys. Long story short, everyone's alive. Everyone now wants to move on - except me. But why? you might ask. Moving on is desirable, the end goal after trauma. Not moving on is for weaklings, attention seekers and other such - to put it impolitely - absolute fuckheads that no sane human being wants to associate with. The trouble with me is that I think too much. It's certainly better than doing the opposite, but I don't think in straight and clear lines or elegant curves: I think in circles, tangles, swerving in sharply as I spin towards the centre of the proverbial downwards spiral. It's not good for me. Sometimes I think a lobotomy would help. It's especially odd, as in depression most activity of just about anything in the body is reduced - that...

Content note: suicide, self-harm, purging. I can't really be bothered to think up a good title for this; I'm too angry. As a mentally ill person, I absolutely beg anyone who's reading this right now not to romanticise mental illness. I beg anyone who's reading this right now to spread the word, to tell their friends and family and loved ones and children, to go and shout it from their roofs that mental illness is a terrible thing to live through. Please don't wonder why I care so much: I live through this. Rather, wonder why I don't welcome it. I've seen people defend the romanticisation of mental illness with the justification that it's better than demonisation - the trouble is that it's not. They're two sides of the same thing: a refusal to deal with mental illness honestly. And here's why. I'll start with demonisation first, because it's simpler to understand and to explain. This demonisation is dehumanising, as it st...

Life in general is a neverending stream of mild annoyances - well, it's a neverending stream of much more than that, good and bad, but I'm known for being pessimistic, negative and a lover of complaining. Between you (because let's face it, there aren't that many of you) and me, I like it that way; it means I have a way to vent about the bad things in life instead of repressing them behind faked smile upon faked smile. So why complain so much about how depressives are treated by the people around them? After all, there are a million and one things to complain about, from the exploitative nature of capitalism to how I hate having to put the bins out early. What makes this more worth complaining about than anything else? There are many things worthy of complaining about, I admit - but this is one of them. You see (and if you're sane, this will very probably offend you) people who have never been depressed seem to think that they have some unique insight into t...

Something upset me. That's pretty normal; a lot of things upset me, because I'm a very negative person. It's also pretty normal that I blog about things that upset me, because I have to get them out of my mind and laid out properly somehow. Not so long ago, I was on a CERN trip with my school to Geneva. (End result? I'm not a fan of Geneva, but CERN is an awesome place even if it does look like a bunch of industrial sheds.) When getting from the airport to the station side of the city - which is the side with a lot of shops that all close at 1 in the afternoon - we decided to plop ourselves down outside a Starbucks. Now, we're all English-speakers. I get that people don't like English and American tourists for various reasons, but normally the English are treated civilly if coolly by the rest of Europe. Such was the case in Geneva, too (well, for me anyway, because I was speaking French for most of the trip)...except for one woman in Starbucks who over...