Gum on My Shoe

I had the pleasure to be contacted recently by Tony Roberts, Chief Shepherd of Delight in Disorder Ministries and author of When Despair Meets Delight . He invited me to contribute to an upcoming book, Hope for Troubled Minds: Letters Between Those With Brain Illnesses and Our Loved Ones . This interested me because the topic and message fit so well with what Fran and I share in our books and here on our blog. I also love the open letter format, and posted a selection of open letters here last year. At Tony’s request, I’m delighted to share the details of the book and extend the invitation to contribute. If you’re interested or would like to know more about the project, get in touch with Tony at the details shown below. Closing date for submissions is June 1, 2023. Hope for Troubled Minds: Letters Between Those With Brain Illnesses and Our Loved Ones At 8 you started hearing voices. We took you to a doctor who put you on medicine, but your depression plunged. In Middl...

But where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again. (Anne Frank) I wanted to write something that might inspire hope, but things kept getting in the way. I wanted to write about how it feels as a “well one” — carer to my best friend who lives with bipolar disorder — to be accepted in the mental health community, but then some people rejected me cos I don’t have a diagnosis and only people with a diagnosis can understand. I wanted to write about how much I learn from my friends about the realities of living with mental illness, but then sometimes it feels like I’m learning at their expense. I took the letters of the word HOPE, and came up with loads of great words to write about. But it ended up sounding trite and contrived. No good at all. Not remotely hope inspiring. I put it aside for a few days, waiting for inspiration. Another couple of false starts, a few hundred words written, changed, scrapped. I decided to let it go. I gav...

By Christine Roberts My first “visit” to a mental hospital was when I was seventeen and a half years old. I didn’t know then, but I was experiencing my first bipolar mania/manic episode. I had noticed something different about me when I was about thirteen, but couldn’t put my finger on it until much later on down the road. I was unaware for years and years of further “visits” to mental hospitals, numerous doctors, nurses, and medications. I finally got a diagnosis of something called Bipolar Disorder / Manic Phase when I was thirty-four or thirty-five. I was so glad that there was finally a name to what was going on in my whole life pretty much to that point. My latest diagnosis as of about sixty-four is Bipolar Disorder I with psychotic features. These include delusions, hallucinations, hypomania, and such during the mania/manic episodes. Now I had a name, but didn’t really know what that meant until my case manager at the time explained it to me with an illustration. I ...

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. (Stephen Grosz) Inspired by a writing prompt to “tell the story of something that happened to you, but write it from a different perspective, or as fiction rather than fact” I recently shared a short story of mine on this blog. Originally written in 1999, Home Eleven is an urban fantasy based loosely on events and experiences at Newcastle’s Green Festival. You might wonder what relevance it has to our blog’s core themes of mental health and supportive friendships. To be honest, I wondered that myself. I was persuaded by a conversation with my friend Roiben. I told her it felt a little like cheating to use a story I’d already written, especially one penned so long ago with no obvious connection to our blog’s topics. Roiben encouraged me to post the story nonetheless and use it as a jumping off point to discuss how it feels to reframe my lived experience as fiction. Her insight led to this article ...

Check out our top posts for the past month. Posts are listed by the number of page views they attracted during the month, most popular first. Effective Strategies to Manage Paranoia in Bipolar Disorder and Schizoaffective Disorder 2022: My Year in Photos and Blog Posts Our Top Posts of the Month (December 2022) How to Write the Best Acknowledgement Page for Your Book Book Review: Everything Disordered: A Practical Guide to Blogging, by Aimee Wilson The Three Kinds of Care And Sometimes It Happens: The Gentle Art of Letting Go 40 Mental Health Blog Topics From the Caring Friend's Perspective Time to Care: A Curated List of Posts for Mental Health Awareness Days and Events 21 Image Prompts for the Mental Health Blogger Our most visited pages were: Contact Us About Us Our books News and Appearances Resources Testimonials   Photo by Martin Baker.  

Sometimes I don’t want to talk about it. Not to anyone. No one. No one at all. I just want to think about it on my own. Because it is mine. And no one else’s. — Michael Rose Falling this year on February 2, Time to Talk Day is one of several awareness days and events dedicated to countering the stigma surrounding mental health. We’re encouraged to open up to family, friends and colleagues about how we’re feeling, and to be there for others wanting to tell us how they’re doing. These are laudable aims, and fully in keeping with the message Fran and I share in our book and in other writing here and elsewhere. We believe that keeping the channels of communication open is the single greatest contribution we can make to improving the acceptance of mental health issues, and keeping ourselves and those we love as well and as safe as possible. But what if you don’t want to talk about what’s going on for you? What if our friends and loved ones don’t want to talk to us? I consider mys...