Author Archive for: Brigid

I’ve always had my mental health, but sometimes it’s been a bit dodgy.

Compassion (noun): a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering. Towards the end of last week in deepest west Wales, something remarkable happened. It was a gathering of people who share a passion for compassion and a hunger to see […]

Over the last 40 years as a dissident therapist and activist, I’ve known many people who were so negatively impacted by their subjective experience of receiving and indefinitely enduring a psychiatric diagnosis that I’ve come to see such dehumanising labeling as the infliction of what amounts to a medical curse.

I learned that there’s a great divide And some cross to the other side. I was seven and a quarter When they parted mum from daughter, Separating the ‘sane’ from ‘mad’ Oblivious to love she had. They came with their blue flashing light And drugged her forcibly that night. I learned that lesson.

A few years ago I organised a public meeting about suicide. To spread the word, I put up posters around my town with the question, ‘How do we live with suicidal ideas?’ printed across them. The manager of a local launderette started taking the posters down. He said he was banning me from advertising on […]