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You swore and said we are not
We are not shining stars
This I know, I never said we are
Fun – Carry On
With this year’s theme for World Mental Health Day being ‘mental health in an unequal world’ I’ve toyed with a number of ideas for creating a blog post with it in mind. No matter which angle I attempted to write from though, I found myself always talking about the inequality I’ve experienced in the blogging world. Whilst I realise this might seem completely different, superficial, and irrelevant to mental health, my blog has had an enormous impact on my mental health…
When I first created I’m NOT Disordered in 2013, I’d only heard of three mental health blogs: one was by a psychiatric nurse, another by an ex-service user, and one from a Police Officer with a keen interest in mental health law.
This lack of mental health themed content, firstly meant a distinct absence of inequality because there was no real competition. I don’t really like to use the word ‘competition’ because I don’t agree with the feature of it in the blogging world, but the post is titled ‘the reality’ and competitiveness is definitely real in the industry!
To me, bloggers should be supportive of one another rather than competitive and determined to ‘one up’ someone else. And I believe they definitely shouldn’t be blogging purely to compete with another blogger. To me, that says they’re in this for all the wrong reasons – similarly to when someone creates a blog with the expectation and only drive being that they might receive freebies! Having bloggers like that out there, actually ends up setting a poor example for the rest of us who are in it for the more meaningful gains e.g. psychological or emotional benefits, or sheer enjoyment.