Diseased Culture
Looking back
on all the encouragement
and respect
and compliments
I received from others
when I was
killing myself
through starvation
It is clear
that I was not
the only
sick
one
Poetry by LA Crompton
Showing posts with label mental health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mental health. Show all posts
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Diseased Culture
I found this poem on the Irked magazine site, which really resonates with my feelings. I get very frustrated when people compliment me on looking like I've lost weight. I don't remember people ever complimenting me when I had put weight on. I am not trying to lose weight, I don't weigh myself anymore, as I used to be obsessed with it and I'm much happier now, despite being bigger.
Irked magazine - Peabody cartoon....
My friend Jane is the creator of a weekly cartoon strip Peabody, now published in Irked magazine online. It's about depression and is witty, sharp, moving and beautifully drawn. Take a look.
The magazine itself is a space for people to "explore matters of the heart".
"Irked Magazine is committed to the concept that people improve when they know someone is paying attention. We believe that people everywhere can become less sad, or worried, or angry, or violent, or self-destructive simply by being given a forum to publish their work, and the dignity that comes with that sort of thing."
There is lots of fantastic stuff on Irked - it's well worth a good root around.
The magazine itself is a space for people to "explore matters of the heart".
"Irked Magazine is committed to the concept that people improve when they know someone is paying attention. We believe that people everywhere can become less sad, or worried, or angry, or violent, or self-destructive simply by being given a forum to publish their work, and the dignity that comes with that sort of thing."
There is lots of fantastic stuff on Irked - it's well worth a good root around.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
IWD 06
International Women's Day 2006 is looming. In Staffordshire there are a few things going on - Froomblog lists the main things that I am aware of in Staffordshire. One that really interests me is the launch of the Women's mental health standards for Staffordshire. I cannot get to the event, but I will try to find out more and hope to post about it sometime.
What do you know of that's going on in your area? Are you involved in anything? I hope that by 2007 I am in a job or have time unpaid to take part in organising something in Stoke-on-Trent.
What do you know of that's going on in your area? Are you involved in anything? I hope that by 2007 I am in a job or have time unpaid to take part in organising something in Stoke-on-Trent.
Friday, September 30, 2005
work life balance on way to being restored....
I am feeling the benefit of -
a) being off work again for a week
b) going to T'ai Chi once a week (been twice so far)
c) doing some Molly dancing (a style of Morris dancing) and accordion playing once a week (been three times now) with Black Dog Molly
d) eating dark chocolate covered ricecakes (what I am addicted to and had run out of and now have 2 wholesale boxes of )
e) having some long lie-ins
f) knowing that we are off to Cornwall soon...
g) knowing that my manager is ok about me putting in an application to go down to 4 days a week - she thinks we can make it happen and is willing to discuss how....
I think my ideal would be working a 3 day week with time to do more unpaid work getting froom up and running and helping support the development of Write-on. I could also use the time to perhaps do some sessional University teaching on regeneration/ community development/ social studies/ advice work/ counselling eventually, if I could get some hours.
I am a late bird, not an early one - and as a result am seen as lazy and a misfit. Why is the standard working day 9-5? Most people seem to prefer either 8-4 or maybe even 7-3, or a minority of us who prefer 10-6, 11-7 or even 12-8. I really need a job that is based around a working day that runs from 11am to 7pm - those are my natural peak hours.
But going down to 4 days will be a good start and should help me build up my energy levels and resilience.
My doctor told me that the dizziness I've been getting is probably not a balance/ inner ear problem. It could have been a virus thingy. It also could be a side effect of the St John's Wort. So, as I am no longer depressed I have stopped taking it and will wait and see how I feel.
I am not going to know if the dizziness was related to it if I am not dizzy again. But if I am dizzy again I will know it was not due to the medication. A bit of detective work will be needed to see what the cause is. I will probably assume it's fatigue/ stress.
The 4 day a week thing is an interesting one......
it feels like such a luxury. I am so lucky that I can afford it.
I also have struggled to get my head sorted about being a part-time worker - I had always imagined myself working full-time and climbing up the career ladder. I have now realised that I have a choice and life isn't all about career. I need to feel like I am influencing decisions that affect the bigger picture - the way services are delivered, the priorities that are set in public service, the tackling of the causes of inequalities and prevention/ reduction of them. I assumed this meant I had to be managing big budgets or lots of people or writing high level strategies.
I actually don't like do those things and have started to feel like my contribution to those things will not effect the sort of changes I want to see. I have come full circle back to the belief that is it grassroots social action that can make the biggest impact.
T and I were talking about this yesterday (again - it's a common topic in our home) and we are of the view that due to the lack of clear political principles all that government departments can do is "manage" - and that means create change to structures and systems and move people around a bit. The work that gets done is always the same. The effect on the people who are served by the services (local govt and nhs) is at best no change, at worst severe disruption to services during the upheaval and changes in personnel with reduction in trust.
For example - the cycle that the library service has gone through in the last 10 years is 5 changes of deparment each costing thousands in public money to re-brand, re-structure re-organise internally, with less to spend on changing the outfacing service.
The nhs has gone from a Family Health Service Authority monitoring the work of independent GPs, to a Health Authority, then with fund holding powers passed to GPs as individuals and groups. After that GPs formed Primary Care Groups, and then became Trusts if they were big enough. Those Trusts were told they were too small and some had to merge and the Health Authorities role shrank and so they also merged to cover larger regions. Now there is a another round of mergers and GPs will have to engage in practice based commissioning of care and services from next September. What goes around comes around.
The amount of time and money that is spent on this could be spent on managing stasis instead of managing change - and that would allow organisations to put efforts into building long-term meaningful relationships with their communities and "customers". But then the election campaigns would have nothing to put in their manifestos about changes to public services..... or is that just too cynical????
Also - back to the part-time working thing...... I have doubts about justifying it when again I am lucky enough to have a job that is not putting life and limb at risk every day. Nor is it illegal - unlike the work that some people are forced to do - having read this Guardian article about women trafficked into the sex trade, I almost cannot imagine a worse way to be made to earn money. Women and girls as young as 10 are encouraged to come to Western Europe to make money and once here are raped until they become submissive and then forced to work as prostitutes and pay their "debt" - the "cost" of bringing them to the country - back to their "owner".
As Bianca Jagger writes -
"On one level, the UK government recognises the problem. A few years ago, Home Office research estimated that 1,420 women were trafficked into the UK in 1998 in order to be forcibly prostituted. The expert consensus is that the scale has significantly increased since then. There are now certainly thousands of women and girls trapped in a horror-filled existence. Desperately poor women and girls are typically stripped of their passports and other documents by their new "employers", and taken to secure flats and beaten and raped by their "owners" to "break them in". After that, it's a soul-destroying treadmill of dehumanising servitude, providing sex for 20 to 30 men a day, according to the Metropolitan police.
Scared and abused... many lacking a good command of the language, and told by their traffickers that what they are doing is illegal and could lead to imprisonment, they are truly caught in a web. Even if they escape the imprisonment of their owners, the route home is often barred anyway, as traffickers will threaten to expose them to shame there or even threaten their lives or the lives of their families. Britain needs to stop treating women forced into prostitution as criminals. They are automatically criminalised.
In May, a new European treaty established fresh guidelines for this. The European Convention Against Trafficking, the world's first international law specifically for protecting trafficked people's rights, puts victims first. Organisations such as Amnesty International are backing the convention and calling on the UK to sign up to it, but the government is stalling. Why, when Home Office minister Paul Goggins has said that the government "fully supports" the aims of the convention? Could it be that the government is afraid of criticism from anti-immigration lobbyists that the convention extends rights to women and girls who could fabricate a story of sexual slavery to gain access to the country? You could be forgiven for thinking that protecting some of the world's most terrorised and vulnerable people ought to cancel out these peripheral concerns."
a) being off work again for a week
b) going to T'ai Chi once a week (been twice so far)
c) doing some Molly dancing (a style of Morris dancing) and accordion playing once a week (been three times now) with Black Dog Molly
d) eating dark chocolate covered ricecakes (what I am addicted to and had run out of and now have 2 wholesale boxes of )
e) having some long lie-ins
f) knowing that we are off to Cornwall soon...
g) knowing that my manager is ok about me putting in an application to go down to 4 days a week - she thinks we can make it happen and is willing to discuss how....
I think my ideal would be working a 3 day week with time to do more unpaid work getting froom up and running and helping support the development of Write-on. I could also use the time to perhaps do some sessional University teaching on regeneration/ community development/ social studies/ advice work/ counselling eventually, if I could get some hours.
I am a late bird, not an early one - and as a result am seen as lazy and a misfit. Why is the standard working day 9-5? Most people seem to prefer either 8-4 or maybe even 7-3, or a minority of us who prefer 10-6, 11-7 or even 12-8. I really need a job that is based around a working day that runs from 11am to 7pm - those are my natural peak hours.
But going down to 4 days will be a good start and should help me build up my energy levels and resilience.
My doctor told me that the dizziness I've been getting is probably not a balance/ inner ear problem. It could have been a virus thingy. It also could be a side effect of the St John's Wort. So, as I am no longer depressed I have stopped taking it and will wait and see how I feel.
I am not going to know if the dizziness was related to it if I am not dizzy again. But if I am dizzy again I will know it was not due to the medication. A bit of detective work will be needed to see what the cause is. I will probably assume it's fatigue/ stress.
The 4 day a week thing is an interesting one......
it feels like such a luxury. I am so lucky that I can afford it.
I also have struggled to get my head sorted about being a part-time worker - I had always imagined myself working full-time and climbing up the career ladder. I have now realised that I have a choice and life isn't all about career. I need to feel like I am influencing decisions that affect the bigger picture - the way services are delivered, the priorities that are set in public service, the tackling of the causes of inequalities and prevention/ reduction of them. I assumed this meant I had to be managing big budgets or lots of people or writing high level strategies.
I actually don't like do those things and have started to feel like my contribution to those things will not effect the sort of changes I want to see. I have come full circle back to the belief that is it grassroots social action that can make the biggest impact.
T and I were talking about this yesterday (again - it's a common topic in our home) and we are of the view that due to the lack of clear political principles all that government departments can do is "manage" - and that means create change to structures and systems and move people around a bit. The work that gets done is always the same. The effect on the people who are served by the services (local govt and nhs) is at best no change, at worst severe disruption to services during the upheaval and changes in personnel with reduction in trust.
For example - the cycle that the library service has gone through in the last 10 years is 5 changes of deparment each costing thousands in public money to re-brand, re-structure re-organise internally, with less to spend on changing the outfacing service.
The nhs has gone from a Family Health Service Authority monitoring the work of independent GPs, to a Health Authority, then with fund holding powers passed to GPs as individuals and groups. After that GPs formed Primary Care Groups, and then became Trusts if they were big enough. Those Trusts were told they were too small and some had to merge and the Health Authorities role shrank and so they also merged to cover larger regions. Now there is a another round of mergers and GPs will have to engage in practice based commissioning of care and services from next September. What goes around comes around.
The amount of time and money that is spent on this could be spent on managing stasis instead of managing change - and that would allow organisations to put efforts into building long-term meaningful relationships with their communities and "customers". But then the election campaigns would have nothing to put in their manifestos about changes to public services..... or is that just too cynical????
Also - back to the part-time working thing...... I have doubts about justifying it when again I am lucky enough to have a job that is not putting life and limb at risk every day. Nor is it illegal - unlike the work that some people are forced to do - having read this Guardian article about women trafficked into the sex trade, I almost cannot imagine a worse way to be made to earn money. Women and girls as young as 10 are encouraged to come to Western Europe to make money and once here are raped until they become submissive and then forced to work as prostitutes and pay their "debt" - the "cost" of bringing them to the country - back to their "owner".
As Bianca Jagger writes -
"On one level, the UK government recognises the problem. A few years ago, Home Office research estimated that 1,420 women were trafficked into the UK in 1998 in order to be forcibly prostituted. The expert consensus is that the scale has significantly increased since then. There are now certainly thousands of women and girls trapped in a horror-filled existence. Desperately poor women and girls are typically stripped of their passports and other documents by their new "employers", and taken to secure flats and beaten and raped by their "owners" to "break them in". After that, it's a soul-destroying treadmill of dehumanising servitude, providing sex for 20 to 30 men a day, according to the Metropolitan police.
Scared and abused... many lacking a good command of the language, and told by their traffickers that what they are doing is illegal and could lead to imprisonment, they are truly caught in a web. Even if they escape the imprisonment of their owners, the route home is often barred anyway, as traffickers will threaten to expose them to shame there or even threaten their lives or the lives of their families. Britain needs to stop treating women forced into prostitution as criminals. They are automatically criminalised.
In May, a new European treaty established fresh guidelines for this. The European Convention Against Trafficking, the world's first international law specifically for protecting trafficked people's rights, puts victims first. Organisations such as Amnesty International are backing the convention and calling on the UK to sign up to it, but the government is stalling. Why, when Home Office minister Paul Goggins has said that the government "fully supports" the aims of the convention? Could it be that the government is afraid of criticism from anti-immigration lobbyists that the convention extends rights to women and girls who could fabricate a story of sexual slavery to gain access to the country? You could be forgiven for thinking that protecting some of the world's most terrorised and vulnerable people ought to cancel out these peripheral concerns."
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
proper blogging?
I think this is what I understand as proper blogging - what I read of other people's is more stream of consciousness-like blurblings than what I've blogged so far.
Yesterday was my first real day off sick. I went to the doc's on Weds last week at 3pm and got 2 weeks off. I then went shopping in a bit of a daze. On Thursday I had a long sleep-in and then went out shopping again. We went out to a friends for tea that evening. Friday I did more or less the same but with T as it was his day off and then we went to Z's BD get-together in a pub - that was good - I talked to D a lot. We have thought a lot about getting a campervan since going to Scotland and D has one.
We were going to be having our best friend- C's daughter over to stay on Saturday but her Mum was really ill in hospital so we looked after her and her brothers, while S went to visit C. We had another friend over for the evening. On Sunday we went to visit C in hospital and I was distracted - partly by the 70's film of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" with Gene Wilder on the TV in the ward, and partly by nothing at all- just unable to concentrate on C which has never happened before.
I went for a long lunch with P on Monday which I really enjoyed - she is great company. Afterwards I had a counselling session that I was late for due to traffic jams. It was good though. I was reminded that I don't need to try and think things through whilst I'm off - that's what I usually do - that I can "feel" instead if I like. I realised I have been trying to fill my diary with plans for doing things - especially catching up with friends, housework etc. - and that leaves little time for real rest and recuperation. When I got back I cancelled Tuesdays lunch date - with a friend who I used to work with - knowing that seeing her would mean talking and thinking a lot about losing that job that we both did, and would put off the "recuperation". I felt guilty for a second or two, but not as bad as I often do about cancelling people.
So, instead yesterday I slept in again then lay in bed reading for ages - a book about depression. I did the exercises in it - all of them - so you see I just have to "do" and "think"! I worked out that I have mild depression that is short term and the main symptom is fatigue causing lack of concentration - I think of it as stress not depression as it is not long term clinical depression - that's my self-diagnosis anyway!
I gave myself a really painful back though - sitting up in bed. So I took some photos in the garden for a short while and then starting surfing the net again. My Mum called round with a new quilt for us - it's an early Christmas present!
Yesterday evening T took R out somewhere that was obviously very difficult for them both - the old anxieties, sadness, anger and worry came flooding back and I felt unable to help. Two years is not long after someone dies is it? It was 2 years yesterday.....
So - where does this rambling lead us - well today (Wednesday) I have slept in again, spoken to Mum on the phone, and am now writing this.
One of the things that struck me yesterday is that I am splitting myself in two by having two blogs - I decided to have 2 so that this one could be anonymous and I could write stuff I don't want everyone to know is me writing it. The other one is the "public" one. I often don't know which one to write on and it's confusing me. I want to be whole - wow I guess I don't feel whole at the moment - there are things about me that I know people can't deal with and I have been trying to be confident that it's their problem and not mine, but not succeeding.
That's interesting isn't it - that there are things I don't feel confident writing as my real name in case I am judged- I am realistic that people do judge me. In fact - the second post I ever did on this blog got me an offensive comment - something like " I hate you and people like you make me sick, so die!" As you can see I deleted the comment..... That was not a good start but it helped me justify the split! But now I am starting to blog more it's harder to manage.
I had decided this morning to give up having two blogs and just have one, but writing about it now just scares me into keeping them separate. I wanted to be able to blog about stuff that I wouldn't want people I don't know very well to know about me - like this post in fact. How do other people do it? Most people's blogs seem very personal....
Well, at the moment I am going to carry on - I was going to say what my other blog is called but I won't - although anyone who knows me well will work it out - but they are the people that know all this about me anyway. Of course all this assumes anyone is actually reading this at all - if they are not then what is the point? Some feedback would be good I suppose.
Yesterday was my first real day off sick. I went to the doc's on Weds last week at 3pm and got 2 weeks off. I then went shopping in a bit of a daze. On Thursday I had a long sleep-in and then went out shopping again. We went out to a friends for tea that evening. Friday I did more or less the same but with T as it was his day off and then we went to Z's BD get-together in a pub - that was good - I talked to D a lot. We have thought a lot about getting a campervan since going to Scotland and D has one.
We were going to be having our best friend- C's daughter over to stay on Saturday but her Mum was really ill in hospital so we looked after her and her brothers, while S went to visit C. We had another friend over for the evening. On Sunday we went to visit C in hospital and I was distracted - partly by the 70's film of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" with Gene Wilder on the TV in the ward, and partly by nothing at all- just unable to concentrate on C which has never happened before.
I went for a long lunch with P on Monday which I really enjoyed - she is great company. Afterwards I had a counselling session that I was late for due to traffic jams. It was good though. I was reminded that I don't need to try and think things through whilst I'm off - that's what I usually do - that I can "feel" instead if I like. I realised I have been trying to fill my diary with plans for doing things - especially catching up with friends, housework etc. - and that leaves little time for real rest and recuperation. When I got back I cancelled Tuesdays lunch date - with a friend who I used to work with - knowing that seeing her would mean talking and thinking a lot about losing that job that we both did, and would put off the "recuperation". I felt guilty for a second or two, but not as bad as I often do about cancelling people.
So, instead yesterday I slept in again then lay in bed reading for ages - a book about depression. I did the exercises in it - all of them - so you see I just have to "do" and "think"! I worked out that I have mild depression that is short term and the main symptom is fatigue causing lack of concentration - I think of it as stress not depression as it is not long term clinical depression - that's my self-diagnosis anyway!
I gave myself a really painful back though - sitting up in bed. So I took some photos in the garden for a short while and then starting surfing the net again. My Mum called round with a new quilt for us - it's an early Christmas present!
Yesterday evening T took R out somewhere that was obviously very difficult for them both - the old anxieties, sadness, anger and worry came flooding back and I felt unable to help. Two years is not long after someone dies is it? It was 2 years yesterday.....
So - where does this rambling lead us - well today (Wednesday) I have slept in again, spoken to Mum on the phone, and am now writing this.
One of the things that struck me yesterday is that I am splitting myself in two by having two blogs - I decided to have 2 so that this one could be anonymous and I could write stuff I don't want everyone to know is me writing it. The other one is the "public" one. I often don't know which one to write on and it's confusing me. I want to be whole - wow I guess I don't feel whole at the moment - there are things about me that I know people can't deal with and I have been trying to be confident that it's their problem and not mine, but not succeeding.
That's interesting isn't it - that there are things I don't feel confident writing as my real name in case I am judged- I am realistic that people do judge me. In fact - the second post I ever did on this blog got me an offensive comment - something like " I hate you and people like you make me sick, so die!" As you can see I deleted the comment..... That was not a good start but it helped me justify the split! But now I am starting to blog more it's harder to manage.
I had decided this morning to give up having two blogs and just have one, but writing about it now just scares me into keeping them separate. I wanted to be able to blog about stuff that I wouldn't want people I don't know very well to know about me - like this post in fact. How do other people do it? Most people's blogs seem very personal....
Well, at the moment I am going to carry on - I was going to say what my other blog is called but I won't - although anyone who knows me well will work it out - but they are the people that know all this about me anyway. Of course all this assumes anyone is actually reading this at all - if they are not then what is the point? Some feedback would be good I suppose.
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