HUMOUR & MENTAL HEALTH | MY THOUGHTS & A Q&A IN COLLABORATION WITH AWARD WINNING COMEDIAN, DAVE CHAWNER

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In 2015, I was asked to do the social media at a Newcastle University event named Mind The Gap Conference (you can watch my vlog from the day here), I had the honour of watching a sketch by the award winning Comedian; Dave Chawner, before having the opportunity to have a 1:1 chat with him. I found him so inspiring; his sketch was centred around mental health and his particular experience with Anorexia, yet it had THE most hilarious moments! I believe he has mastered what I think is a key difficulty around humour and mental health; that some people have the attitude that mental health is so important it should be taken seriously, and there should be no light to make of it.

I’d like to think that if you’ve been reading my blog for a little while – or even if you’ve just read one post – you can see from it that I regard mental health very highly and have nothing but respect for people struggling with theirs. Whilst this is so true, I’m also a firm believer that humour can have a place in most generally difficult topics/subjects. I like that phrase ‘if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry’ and completely agree that this is particularly true with mental health because it can really be the difference between someone feeling that things are bearable to a person being suicidal. I think that I mostly feel this way because I use humour myself as a very effective coping mechanism and find it incredibly encouraging of positive and safe thoughts and feelings.

BLOGMAS 2019 – POST THREE : THE HAPPI EMPIRE | ETSY COLLABORATION | AD

Thanks to a poll on my Twitter back in November, my wonderful followers decided that I should publish a blog post and film a vlog every day for the entirety of December!

So welcome to December 3^rd…

Today is all about my collaboration with one very special brand on Etsy, in this post I’ll be reviewing the products they sent to me and on December 23rd you can enter a competition to win these products and the remaining nine that I’ll be reviewing every other day this month!


The first of the Etsy products is this little mindfulness journal by the wonderful Happi Empire who are based in Perranporth, England. 


When I first began learning Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital specializing in Personality Disorders, I absolutely hated the coping skill of mindfulness! I took it to mean that in DBT they recommend that you ‘stay in the moment’ and I wholeheartedly believed that I would be unsafe if I did so. 


After the abuse in 2006 and 2007, I spent the following five years until I was admitted to the long-term hospital (for two and a half years) trying to pretend it hadn’t happened or do everything I could to block out the horrific memories. So, the last thing I wanted was to allow myself to ‘be in the moment’ where I worried that I’d end up so lost in the memories that I’d be unsafe. In all honesty, I thought that I’d end up wanting to be dead. So, I refused to engage in the Mindfulness exercises and hated completing the worksheets in group DBT sessions.