THE RED FLAGS IN COMMUNICATION AROUND MENTAL HEALTH | IN COLLABORATION WITH NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST | TIME TO TALK DAY 2024

This post is in collaboration with the Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (NUTH) who I’m helping and supporting in their creation of a Trust-wide Mental Health Strategy (which I’ve previously blogged about here, here, here, here, and here). Together, we’re marking Time To Talk Day 2024 which is a date where everyone is encouraged to talk more about mental health in the hope that it will tackle the discrimination and stigma held against the topic and that, in doing so, it will also improve the help and support that is offered or available for those who might be struggling with their mental health. We’ve decided to utilise the fact that whilst there is – rightly – so much content around encouraging conversations, there are too few pieces around the importance of recognising when a communication around mental health needs to be reconsidered whether by terminating it completely or changing the route it seems to be taking – something which is as equally important as starting a chat. Thankfully and admirably, it’s also something NUTH recognises to be an essential component to their upcoming Mental Health Strategy…

AN INTERRUPTION TO BLOGMAS UNBOXED | TW: DISCUSSION OF SUICIDE

I honestly can’t believe what I’m about to blog about… I mean, it happened over a week ago, but it still feels surreal. And I still find it extremely difficult to actually even just say the words because they continue to feel dramatic and unbelievable. I mean, a little while after I first became poorly – and right around the time I was given the Personality Disorder diagnosis! – I was labelled an attention-seeker and dramatic countless times by mental health professionals. And in all honesty, the sentence I’m about to say feels like I’m fulfilling all those remarks… In the early hours of Friday 8^th December 2023, I jumped from a bridge…

WHY NHS TRUSTS NEED TO BE FOLLOWING IN NEWCASTLE’S FOOTSTEPS!! | IN COLLABORATION WITH THE NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST

Our first collaboration: FROM INTENSIVE CARE TO COLLABORATIONS | IN COLLABORATION WITH NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST TO MARK THEIR BRAND-NEW MENTAL HEALTH STRATEGY | I'm NOT Disordered (imnotdisordered.co.uk)

Our second collaboration: EVERYTHING I’M LEARNING FROM MY WORK WITH NEWCASTLE HOSPITALS ON THEIR MENTAL HEALTH STRATEGY | IN COLLABORATION WITH NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST | I'm NOT Disordered (imnotdisordered.co.uk)

So, I’ve been working with the Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (NUTH) for over a year (you can read all of our previous collaboration posts above) on their upcoming Mental Health Strategy and spending so long on this project, has really opened my eyes to so much that I thought I might confront, and so much that I hadn’t even imagined would come up from doing this! The main experience and huge benefit from this project, for me though, has been the recognition that in working together, so many thoughts and feelings I’d held against the Trust for saving my life when I made a suicide attempt were completely changed; and for so many different reasons…

Going through abuse can really leave you quite vulnerable in so many ways, but particularly when it comes to your thoughts, feelings, and opinions on hatred and resentment, and this can go on to affect so many instances and relationships in your future… So, for me – in the beginning – I held a lot of anger and hatred towards my abuser and was 100% confident of both the fact that he was worthy of it and that it was completely fine for me to feel this way. I didn’t foresee anything bad arising from it. If anything, to be honest, I thought it was a good thing – a healthy thing. I thought that anyone and everyone would be full of this amount of anger and spite if they had gone through what I had.

RELATING MY RECENT RELAPSE TO A DRAMATIC SCREAM QUEENS QUOTE | IN COLLABORATION WITH DISNEY PLUS UK

This post is in collaboration with Disney + who are currently streaming two seasons of Scream Queens, which is described by Disney as being ‘… a genre-blending comedy-horror anthology series… The first instalment revolves around a college campus which is rocked by a series of murders.’ Does it sound like your cup of tea?

You can stream it now:

Watch Scream Queens | Full episodes | Disney+ (disneyplus.com)

FROM INTENSIVE CARE TO COLLABORATIONS | IN COLLABORATION WITH NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST TO MARK THEIR BRAND-NEW MENTAL HEALTH STRATEGY

“To me, the model of success is not linear. Success is completing the full circle of yourself”

Gloria Steinem

All the way back in April last year, I received an email from Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne, and Wear NHS Foundation Trust’s (CNTW’s) Involvement Bank with a request for those on the Bank (service users, ex-service users, and carers) to help Newcastle Hospitals with the creation and development of their new Mental Health Strategy. Having had a number of experiences with one of the Trust’s sites (the Royal Victoria Infirmary aka the RVI) from a patient point of view; I applied to be part of the project…

The attraction for me to this opportunity was mostly centred around my previous, mental health related patient experiences with the Trust. Well, one experience in particular…

LESSONS LEARNT FROM I'M NOT DISORDERED'S FIRST POSTS | MARKING EIGHT YEARS SINCE BEING SECTIONED FOR 2.5 YEARS

Earlier this month (July 17^th), it was eight years to the date of me being sectioned and beginning a two-and-a-half-year long admission in a psychiatric hospital which specialised in Personality Disorders...

For the three years previously to that admission, I’d been in and out of both psychiatric and medical hospitals because my local NHS mental health Trust had no services specifically for someone with a Personality Disorder diagnosis. The lack of understanding from the professionals who – in my opinion – should have actually been the most knowledgeable people in providing help and support, contributed to a number of other reasons why I had made two suicide attempts and self harmed on a number of occasions. The lack of services in my locality was also a reasons why, when I ended up on life support after a third suicide attempt, the professionals made the decision to admit me to a private hospital over 100 miles away from home, where the ‘average length of admission, was 12 – 18 months.

After around six or seven months in the hospital, I had a really positive 1:1 with my Key Nurse and it felt like such a productive step toward recovery, that I decided I wanted to document it in some way. And so, I’m NOT Disordered was born and my blogging career began.

“WHO ARE YOU GOING TO PRETEND TO BE?” | REALITY & MENTAL HEALTH | HAPPY HALLOWEEN

Taking your breath, stealing your mind

And all that was real is left behind

-        The Greatest show

With a key component of Halloween being that people don costumes and become someone else, I thought I’d play on that notion of an absence of reality and use it as inspiration for this year’s Halloween blog post…

IT STARTED WITH DISASSOCIATION…

The first difficulty I experienced in regards to reality, was when the abuse started in 2006 and I found myself constantly, desperately, trying to pretend it wasn’t actually happening and I think that a huge reason for this was that I’d known my abuser for two years before he started hurting me. It meant that everything I thought he was – all the things everyone else thought of him – was completely untrue. It was a lie. A cruel, deception that meant when he became the exact opposite, I was so shocked and surprised, that I questioned the entire reality of it! Partly as though he surely couldn’t be the same person, and partly because how could anyone do what he was doing to me?!

Out of panic and fear, whenever he called me or took me to his office, it was as though my eyes detached from my body and all of a sudden I was watching him hurt someone else. Some poor girl who couldn’t fight back. I just had to sit back and watch it happening from my new position on the ceiling – something which rendered my view ineffective when it finally came to reporting the abuse and the details of it, to the Police. It was kind of ironic that me detaching in that way, was very obviously a coping mechanism that my body had seemed to just naturally fall into, yet doing that, was actually hindering of me getting justice for the reason I disassociated.

WHEN THEY SAY SUICIDE IS ‘SILLY’

You, with your voice like nails on a chalkboard

Calling me out when I’m wounded

You, pickin’ on the weaker man…

And all you’re ever gonna be is mean

Taylor Swift - Mean

So, a few days ago I was in a mental health crisis and there was a Policeman who…well, let’s just say I’ve put a lengthy complaint in and have been told mine isn’t the first against him. Anyway, he made a number of discriminatory comments around mental health and a few very personal ones specifically about me, but the one which stuck out and which seemed to fuel everything else was when he referred to suicide as ‘something silly…’

THE IMPORTANCE OF RESPONSIBILITY

My immediate response to the comment was to tell him that he ‘really shouldn’t use a word like that to refer to something so serious.’ Of course there was no apology. No hands up to say “yes, ok. I was wrong, I’m sorry.”

Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I hold apologies quite highly in considerations around respecting and appreciating someone or an organisation on a whole. I think this stems from all the years of Crisis teams telling me to take responsibility for my own safety and then trauma therapy and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) encouraging you to view your behaviours as a chosen response.

Initially that was a hard thought process because who ‘chooses’ to self-harm? But I learnt and realised that it was more about the fundamentals of the situation. You know? Like, if someone touched your skin with fire, you’d burn. If someone touched your skin with fire and you punched them in the face(!)… Well, you could argue that a level of that was instinctual, but it wasn’t something which everyone would do. And recognising that I’m responding to something because of something inside of me and not looking to blame another person who arguably, might have at the very least stoked the fire, was just one key to my recovery. 

TIPS FOR WRITING ABOUT HALLUCINATIONS | I WROTE A CHAPTER FOR THE PRACTICAL HANDBOOK OF HEARING VOICES – AVAILABLE TO BUY NOW!!!

Buy your copy: https://bit.ly/38P5yag

Let the walls crack, 'cause it lets the light in
Let 'em drag you through hell
They can't tell you to change who you are
That's all I know so far

All I Know So Far – P!nk

 A good few years ago, I began collaborating with the author of the book Emily’s Voices (which you can buy here), and she asked me to write a chapter for the book she was in the process of writing; The Practical Handbook of Hearing Voices! The book was scheduled to publish a while ago, but the pandemic kind of put a spanner in the works and so I’m really pleased to say, it has been officially published TODAY!!

I wrote a blog post for World Suicide Prevention Day with advice for writing about suicide (you can read it here), and its popularity has encouraged me to write this piece in a similar format…

Find a metaphor or expect a lack of empathy 

I think that when I discovered a metaphor for my auditory hallucinations not long after creating, I’m NOT Disordered in 2013, it was a real turning point in me feeling understood and that gave me the experience of an overwhelming sense of relief.

Without that metaphor, I experienced such a lack of empathy – which I attributed to the pure fact that no one could understand or appreciate what I was going through. And I believed this was the case because admittedly, even I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I didn’t have the words to form an explanation that I believed would be efficient and powerful enough so that others would understand. That might seem hard to believe considering I’m a blogger and all I do is come up with words to explain things! So I think that not being able to do that, really illustrates just how new, scary, chaotic, and unpredictable things were.

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT SUICIDE | IN PREPERATION OF WORLD SUICIDE PREVENTION DAY 2021

When I first created, I’m NOT Disordered and began my blogging career in 2013, I was an inpatient and had been admitted to the psychiatric hospital because of a suicide attempt. It wasn’t my first – and it ended up not being the last… So, I guess that from the offset, I knew I would end up blogging about suicide…

I’m always very cautious around writing advice posts, for two reasons:

1.      I wonder what right I have to advise anyone about anything!

2.      What if my advice doesn’t help and leaves a person feeling hopeless?

With the first point, as my reader count has soared, I’ve found more and more confidence because whilst I realise not everyone who reads my posts will like them, I must be doing something right to be almost at one million readers! And that, coupled with my confidence to write advice around mental health (which I’ve found the confidence to do so from my own recovery), has given me the courage to write this post.

The second point is a worry I have which is based on my own experiences of being given advice and it not helping. In those instances, I’ve never looked to the person giving the advice as useless or criticising that they don’t know what they’re talking about, I’ve always looked inward. Looking for the reasons why it’s my fault that the advice wasn’t helpful. As though I was the failure and it was my fault for having such terrible mental health that advice which helped others, was wasted on me!

ALL THE QUESTIONS ABUSE BRINGS UP

We are problems that want to be solved,

We are children that need to be loved,

We were willing, we came when you called

But man, you fooled us, enough is enough,

What about us?

P!nk – What About Us

For me, abuse raised a lot of questions in my head – and sometimes out loud! – which I often, couldn’t find an agreeable answer. Sometimes, my answers would be deemed as ‘wrong’ by professionals, and sometimes professionals would give me answers which I didn’t believe or agree with. So, here are some of my questions and the answers which I either ‘correctly’ came to myself, or which have been provided by professionals.

When did it even begin?!

The abuse I went through started so slightly and so quietly that hearing a ‘pin drop’ would’ve been a definite possibility. And it’s actually really strange that this is the case, because a part of me is really validated that since it had such a tiny start, it makes sense that no one realised what was happening to me.

When I eventually reported my abuse to the Police (which I’ll talk about later) they told me that the beginning of my abuse was ‘grooming’ so I guess I’ll start there…

Whilst I can’t tell you my abuser’s name, (which I’ll also talk about later!) I can tell you that he was in a position of power and that even without the abuse; he had a certain level of control and responsibility in my life. This meant two things: Firstly, that he was trusted and respected by so many people. Secondly, that those beginning instances of ‘grooming’ weren’t completely unheard of in others in his profession.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LANGUAGE IN MENTAL HEALTH

As a Blogger, I obviously spend a lot of my time writing/typing and so I have a huge interest in language (not as academic as to succeed at English Language A Level though!) and – of course – especially where mental health is involved! There’s been a few instances recently around language and mental health that have really sparked debates between myself, my Mum, my friends, and my Support Worker, and they are what has inspired this post…

The Brave Debate

The most recent instance was when a ‘mental health advocate’ on Twitter tweeted: ‘Please stop telling people they are brave when they are just being themselves.’ I immediately questioned it; I couldn’t understand how someone could say that but then I thought on it… ok, so to me; there shouldn’t be a rule saying you can’t call someone brave. You should be able to say it and if that person is uncomfortable then respect their view and don’t do it again. And it’s not that I can’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to be labelled as brave; sometimes it can feel condescending – especially when you don’t feel that your ‘bravery’ is anything special, when you think that it’s just normal and how things should be done. This can also link into someone feeling that they aren’t worthy of this label and find being called it, upsetting because it reminds them of all the bad things, they think of themselves.

However, there are a lot of people out there (myself included) who thrive from being labelled brave and courageous because it encourages them to speak out more and continue their ‘brave’ behaviour. For me, it’s usually around talking about the rape and abuse I experienced and honestly? Having people appreciate and acknowledge how daunting speaking up about that can be, is such a motivation for me to continue doing so.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WASTING TIME IN MENTAL HEALTH

It might still be a few months off, but I feel like my Thirtieth Birthday is looming and with it, my need to justify what I’ve achieved so far in my life. And it’s inspired this post…

Back in 2007 – when the abuse had just ‘ended’ – I had wanted to work in Law so that I could help others get justice for when they had been wronged. I think I was so passionate and eager to give a voice to those who deserved it, when I felt as though mine had been silenced for the past year. I wanted for others to feel that those who’d hurt and upset them in some way, had gotten the consequences and punishment that they deserved because for so many reasons, my abuser never did.

After my mental health deteriorated during my exams at School, I lost the opportunity to study Law at University and instead, found passion to go into Childcare. I guess that again, I was projecting my own experiences and harnessing them as motivation to work in a particular industry. My thinking behind Childcare was that I wanted to promote that children have a similar, innocent childhood to my own, but that they were also aware of all the things that I hadn’t been; and which hit me like a ton of bricks when I finally experienced them.

Again, though, my mental health prevented me from taking this aspiration any further and before long I was spending the following three years in and out of both medical and psychiatric hospitals worrying that I was wasting everyone’s time. This concern didn’t just come from my own thinking though, I was told this was the case by Police Officers and A&E staff. I think that from the Police force’s view, they were there to fight crime, catch perpetrators, and protect victims; and not to sit for hours on end with someone who was in a mental health crisis. But their legal obligation to have a duty of care for everyone, their powers under section 136 of the 1983 Mental Health Act, and the fact that mental health services are operating on a very low budget with a limited amount of staff has meant that they’ve become somewhat responsible for helping and supporting someone in a mental health crisis. Of course, they aren’t the ‘best’ or the ‘right’ people to do this job and I think that maybe those feelings of inadequacy led to a lot of frustration for Officers who also felt that this wasn’t what they had expected in joining the Police. Inevitably, the frustration was taken out on the nearest person and that person was often me. Except, because I was in crisis, I couldn’t understand or appreciate their side of things and to me, they were just being rude, insulting, and unfair in saying I was wasting their time.

WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE TO BE UNDER THE CARE OF THE CRISIS TEAM

“Never give up on someone with a mental illness. When ‘I’ is replaced with ‘we.’ Illness becomes wellness”

Shannon L Alder

The Crisis Team are definitely an element of mental health which is misunderstood, and the Teams are often the ones who receive the most negative feedback. In this post, and as someone who is currently under the care of the Crisis Team, I hope to promote a better understanding of them and instil hope in others to utilise their local Team for help and support in a mental health crisis.


The first instance

My first memory of an interaction with the Crisis Team is from 2009 when I had attempted suicide through taking an overdose. Somehow my Mum knew I had done it and she tried to convince me to go to hospital for the potentially life-saving antidote treatment. I refused and she asked what she was supposed to do, and I remember telling her “ring the Crisis Team because it sounds like you’re in a crisis!” To be honest, I don’t remember actually speaking to the Crisis Team, but they came to the house and arranged for me to have a Mental Health Act assessment with two Psychiatrists and an AMHP (Approved Mental Health Practitioner). I was detained under Section 2 of the 1983 Act and the Crisis Team opened the door to allow six Police to march in, restrain me, handcuff me, and carry me out to their van.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE MEDIA & MENTAL HEALTH | IN COLLABORATION WITH TIME TO CHANGE STORYCAMP 2020

The latest theme for Time To Change StoryCamp 2020 is mental health and the media and I thought it might be a good opportunity to talk about my own experiences with the topic, the positives and negatives I’ve discovered, and my advice on dealing with those negatives of the media…

My first memory of the media

I guess that my first real recollection of the media and the impact it could have on the world was when my cartoons were paused to break the news of the death of Princess Diana in 1997 – when I was just six years old! I guess this meant that the first thing I learnt was that horrific stories could put a stop to fun and laughter. They could over-rule them, take priority and become the focus for everyone. I also saw how media can influence your feelings in projecting emotions appropriate to the content. Finally, with the circumstances of the Princess’s death being around photographers chasing her car (I realise this is debateable!) I saw the impact the media can have on a more practical level and that once you’re in the ‘spotlight’ you can almost completely lose any sense of privacy.



The lack of content on some topics

My next thoughts on the media have come through the abuse I experienced when I was 15. In 2006, when the abuse started, I felt that there weren’t a whole lot of stories in the media about abuse and rape. The lack of this content meant that the only reason I suspected what was happening to me was wrong was because it hurt so much! The absence of these stories also meant that I felt so alone in my experiences and thought I was literally the only person in the world who had ever been raped or abused. Feeling lonely with something like that can be so debilitating because you’re thinking that you can’t talk to someone as they won’t be able to empathise, understand, or identify in any way.

There was also a huge lack for content on mental health, suicide, and self-harm back then which meant that I was absolutely terrified when I started experiencing hallucinations and thoughts to self-harm and attempt suicide. I think that it stemmed from the fact that without any information to the contrary, I thought if I told anyone what I was experiencing and feeling I’d be locked away in a psychiatric hospital and medicated! I also didn’t know who I would even talk to in terms of professionals. Like, I didn’t realise you could speak to your GP or even that you could have therapy on the NHS.

“YOU’RE JUST GOING TO CUT AGAIN!” | THE IMPORTANCE OF BELIEF & HOPE IN MENTAL HEALTH | MY RECENT SURGERY

For those who are new here or have missed my previous posts on it, in December 2019, I tore my EPL tendon in my thumb while opening a bottle of Prosecco on Boxing Day(!) and had to have emergency surgery. I then accidentally tore the repair and have been set to have a tendon transfer surgery (where they take some of the tendon from my index finger and use it in my thumb) ever since -  you can read about how I’m coping with the prospect of more surgery here.

My second surgery hasn’t just been postponed because of the lockdown though, my Surgeon is of the mindset that they need to get my thumb into as good a condition as possible before operating on it. So, until the surgery, I’ve had to learn how to cope with the pain and until the night of the 7^th (of May), I was managing with painkillers and my physiotherapy exercises. On the Thursday night, though, I got the most incredibly overwhelming pain in my thumb and out of pure desperation, I decided that I literally wanted to just cut it off! Looking back, of course that seems like a… ridiculously stupid idea but at the time, I was just so sick of the pain that I was willing to do whatever it took to make it stop. I’ve been in physical pain before and have never self-harmed because of it, so I just hope that this illustrates just how bad that initial pain was. On the other hand, I’ve self-harmed a lot as a result of psychological and emotional pain so maybe I shouldn’t be all that surprised that I had turned to it as a coping mechanism for this physical pain.

THE REALITY OF LIFE AFTER ATTEMPTED SUICIDE | TW

I’m all for using previously popular posts as inspiration for new content, and the success of my post ‘THE REALITY OF LIFE OF LIVING WITH SELF-HARM SCARS’ last April, has inspired my thoughts around this new post about what it’s really like to continue living after you’ve attempted suicide. Another inspiration for this post came in the form of someone sharing an in-depth look into their suicide attempt story after finally recovering from jumping off a bridge and ending up in a coma and with a lot of broken bones and internal injuries. This person’s aftermath was obviously a completely different journey to my own, especially physically, but it inspired me to talk more about the consequences to a suicide attempt rather than my usual concentration of the run-up to one and the actual act of it.


I’d like to also give a trigger warning (TW) to this post because after the media shared the means which Caroline Flack used to commit suicide, there was a lot of controversary in the mental health community around the necessity of disclosing this information. Some people worried that it would trigger others to follow suit and some thought it completely inappropriate and unnecessary to talk about the method. Personally, I agree that it isn’t relevant to tell the general public such details, so for this post, I will talk about the method of suicide I used only where it is necessary and relevant such as when I talk about the physical aftermath. If you’re concerned that this information will be upsetting, then please don’t continue reading this post! If you do read on and it becomes triggering, please use healthy and safe coping mechanisms and speak to a professional for help and advice.

THE PHYSICAL AFTERMATH

This is probably the only area where talking about the method I have used is relevant, so I thought I’d get it out of the way quickly! I also thought I’d talk about this aspect first because it is probably the most immediate because all of my suicide attempts have been through overdoses of paracetamol. 

SOCIAL MEDIA & MENTAL HEALTH

Initially, I was worried that lots of readers will think that it’s quite wrong of me to write a blog post about the most recent celebrity suicide because I’ve actually heard of the celebrity (Caroline Flack) this time; but it’s more about the assumed cause of the suicide; trolling and social media in general. I’m not weighing in on things because I won’t pretend that I know a lot about the entire situation, it’s just that it has inspired me to write a blog post about social media, coping with trolling, thoughts on suicide, and why I promote social media despite all of this negativity and this horrific influence it can have on a person’s life.


I think that a lot of people will assume I might never have had a bad experience with social media if I’m so determined to tell people how great it is and convince others to utilize all of the good it holds; but that isn’t true. When I was fifteen, a group of girls at High School began bullying me and one of their methods was through MSN messenger (bit of a throwback!) because it meant that the bullying could continue even into the comfort of my own bedroom. They weren’t limited to snide, spiteful comments in the corridor or spreading rumours among the other pupils. Social media meant that they could harass me when I was just sitting at home or playing on the computer, where I thought I was safe from them. Somewhere that – I thought – was my only escape, actually turned out to be at their easiest reach.

TIME TO TALK DAY 2020

https://www.time-to-change.org.uk/get-involved/time-talk-day

This year, for Time To Talk Day I’ll be celebrating my Mum’s Birthday so I’ve had to reject all of the event invitations for the day and decided instead to schedule this post in advance so that I can really dedicate my day to my Mum!


Note: For 2020’s Time To Talk Day, Time To Change have chosen to base the theme around the popular game; ‘Would You Rather?’ so this blog post will be in keeping with that…


Would You Rather is a bit of a controversial topic in mental health I think because a lot of people are very – and rightly so – defensive of their actions and decisions where mental health is concerned and particularly where self-harm is involved. I guess that a lot of that comes from the feeling that self-harm isn’t very often a ‘decision’ because it can sound as though a person is choosing to self-harm rather than feeling that it isn’t an option. Of course, if it were, then they wouldn’t choose self-harm and all of the negative consequences that come from it! Another reasoning for some finding the idea of mental health being a choice is the thought of what has led them to be struggling the way that they are. For me, if I could have made any decisions around the trauma, I went through which triggered my ill mental health, then I would have most definitely opted to have not experienced any of it! Or would I?! And here’s where Would You Rather comes in!

LYING & EXAGGERATING IN MENTAL HEALTH

“Things come apart so easily when they have been held together by lies”

Dorothy Allison

The inspiration for this post came when I was in Accident and Emergency (A&E) after my EPL tendon repair snapped (to read about the surgery, go here) and after being given painkillers and an emergency appointment at the Plastic Surgery Trauma Clinic, I was on my way out when I overheard a conversation… A girl had told her friends and the Doctors that she’d taken an overdose but – to one side of the waiting room – the Doctor told her that her blood tests had proven that she hadn’t; and after admitting to the lie, the Doctor asked her to leave the hospital. Outside the doors, her accompanying friends then promptly ripped her to shreds (verbally!), shouting that she was a liar and that they had wasted their time sitting with her in A&E.


Now, I feel like there’ll be three schools of thought on this one… There’ll be people who agree with those friends and think that the girl is disgraceful for lying about something like that. There’ll be others who think that the focus shouldn’t be on the lie; it should be about why she told that lie and the attention put into supporting the girl. Finally, there’ll be people who are balanced and can see the truth in both of the previous two thought processes. Me? I think I’m going to be pretty balanced on this one – something which might surprise some of you who know that overdosing is something I have experience of. Maybe that makes me more entitled to be angered by the lie; the fact that I have actual experience of the horrors of overdosing – the shame in telling others what you’ve done, the physical side-effects of anti-dote treatment, the subsequent mental health reviews…