Navigating Suicidal Thoughts Together by Kevin Hall
One World Suicide Day 2022, read this powerful post by Kevin Hall, first written in 2018 after fashion designer Kate Spade and TV chef Anthony Bourdain died by suicide
Googling for Compassion by Joanne Parker
I’ve always had my mental health, but sometimes it’s been a bit dodgy.
Social Connectedness and the Future of Compassionate Mental Health by Dr Charlie Heriot-Maitland
Our brains are naturally very good at adapting and responding to our environments. That is, after all, how we’ve survived (in an evolutionary sense), but these built-in adaptive processes are still very apparent day-to-day. Read more
We are all Seekers, we are all Guides by Serena Jones
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 more of it in the way we approach health, specifically mental health. It seems a cruel irony that at a time when people most need a compassionate response, all too often feel unheard, disconnected and disempowered from the very systems supposed to help. Read more
Healing my Human Soul by Sophie Robinson
Feeling disconnected and misunderstood I took a last minute decision to go to the Compassionate Mental Health Conference in Wales last week. I’d had such an affirmative experience there back in March I felt It would be just the medicine I needed to restore me and nurture me. Read more
A Heartbeat of Hope by Gary
Not long out of hospital again, where I received little care.
Feeling powerless and hopeless and so full of despair.
My ‘life’ has been traumatic, distressing, I long to be free.
Yet, I don’t deserve kindness from others, let alone me! Read more
Does a Psychiatric Diagnosis Have the Impact of a Medical Curse? by Michael Cornwall, PhD
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.
Healing our Troubled World with Emotional CPR by Daniel Fisher
We live in troubled times. Prejudice, oppression, poverty, climate change, and nuclear war affect everyone simultaneously thanks to the internet and TV. We see more and yet are more fragmented and powerless. These factors are creating trauma for everyone. Most people are now in a state of dissociation in which their feelings and emotions are severed from their thoughts.
Those of us with lived experience of recovery from trauma through extreme emotional states labelled mental illness are offering a gift. We have learned that our recovery from trauma is helped by three simple phases: emotional connection, emotional empowerment and emotional revitalization. We call this process emotional CPR (eCPR). Read more
I Found Compassion by Vicky Ola
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. Read more
Reflections on a Compassionate Gathering by Nicky Hayward
A long-awaited compassionate take on ‘mental health’ is gaining momentum – join us on 4th-5th October to find out more!
On November 18th 2016 “some 100 people concerned to change the face of mental health care in this country gathered for an inspiring one-day conference run by Compassionate Mental Health … Part of the growing movement looking beyond the bio-medical model to centre, instead, on the need for compassion – importantly compassion for self as well as for others – the day set out to inform, inspire and empower both people working with mental distress and those, themselves, living with it. The impressive range of speakers focused on the need to move away from an assumption that emotional distress was nothing more than a symptom of biological illness. Walking alongside the person with compassion was more effective than electric shocks and long-term medication, they emphasised”. Read more
Latest Blog Posts
Not Just a Dream: Finding the Mental Health Community I’d Been Longing For by Robyn ThomasFebruary 2, 2024 - 1:54 am
Towards Compassionate Mental Health by Brigid BowenJune 25, 2023 - 2:02 pm
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