Archive for category: Frontpage Article

We’re delighted to announce that sponsorship from Legal and General  has enabled us to create more affordable tickets.

Mental health and staff wellbeing is a strategic priority for Legal and General, and they are rolling out Mental Health First Aid training to their workforce.

The sponsorship is enabling us to create new tickets for students, mental health nurses and social workers, small charities and individuals with personal experience.

Please check our website for more details, and how to register. 

In a wonderful recent piece, a response to our collective lack of compassion in the face of the migrant crisis, author and activist Owen Jones wrote: “Almost all human beings have the capacity for empathy. Everyone has the potential to be at least troubled, or feel genuine anguish, about the suffering of other human beings.”

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It all starts with love.

It took every ounce of self loathing, punishment, starvation, self harm and self directed mental abuse to keep me in hospital for two years, knocking on death’s door.

I fully believed that being emaciated was the biggest achievement of my life. And if I died of starvation then I had succeeded … I held onto this dream for many years even with the imminent threat of death, the loss of an international sports career and a modelling contract

Of course I was miserable.

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That was it – the final straw! I had to do something or risk getting a ‘diagnosis’ myself.

I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but I know that there had been an accumulation of stuff. Just one thing after the other; seemingly relentless.

It was February 2016, the UK EU referendum debate was beginning to warm up and my tolerance for absorbing toxic tweets and frustrating Facebook posts was dwindling fast. Not long before this Stephen Fry’s documentary ‘An exploration of manic depression’ had been aired and Ruby Wax was on a riotous roll, touring with her new book and generally shouting about ‘broken brains’ at every available opportunity.

The narrative of diagnosis and disorder was all over the place. It had somehow, when we were not looking, managed to sneak quietly into our profession.
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What happened when compassion replaced clinical objectivity, and creativity replaced compliance.
 
One morning in 2009 I was sitting in the psych ward, working on a plan to kill myself. I was made an involuntary psychiatric patient following a rather extreme type of self-harm, even for me. My home had been rushed by police, ambulance officers and a psychiatric crisis assessment team, and I’d been carted off to the ED, and then the psych ward. I was being plagued by the voice in my head, who I called ‘The Judge’. I thought there was a beast who lived inside me, I thought I was evil and I thought that I had to be destroyed. I felt trapped in an inescapable and tormenting madness.

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