Somebody not long ago asked me to discuss ‘big issues’…I was not sure how to respond to start with…I said to the person who asked about my ‘big issues’ that an important issue for me is how to survive (as mental health service users/survivors) without hurting each other…something that I feel requires a great deal of skill, conviction and effort.
Musings on prone (face-down) restraint in inpatient mental health care in England: The image depicts a scene from ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’. In this image*, McMurphy is being subjected to prone (face-down) physical restraint. Throughout the film, face-down physical restraint is normally used on McMurphy to control and punish him after he has broken a rule of the regime. Read more
Ten years ago in June 2008 my latest mental health crisis started…it lasted 2 years (2008-2010) …in 2011 and whilst attending an arts mental health project for people with ‘severe and enduring’ mental health problems (the project was START in Manchester) I did some creative writing in an attempt to represent (with words and pictures) what my latest mental health crisis felt like…I created a spidergram to represent my crisis …it is a disturbing and painful read…10 years later I am able to dream and laugh and dance again …and I want to be alive…feeling tearful whilst writing this…it feels important to share this here….
22 June 2018
It has been announced that from autumn 2018 the Department of Health (DH) and Public Health England (PHE) are launching a campaign to train one million people in Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) skills. An online course will support this programme; the course is being developed by Public Health England, aiming to give people the knowledge, skills and confidence to better support their own mental health, and that of the people around them. Read more
I am a service user researcher. Since February 2015 I have been working at the Service User Research Enterprise (SURE), a research group at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. Read more
I wonder how many of you became aware of a short documentary on the use of ECT in children in the USA that was shown by the BBC last week. The documentary was entitled ‘Our World: My Child, ECT and Me’. You can watch the documentary (First shown: 4:30am 20 May 2017 on BBC1) on http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08rzxn4/our-world-my-child-ect-and-me. Read more
