Social Media – Thought Food

Reset

The virtual shouting stops on the boat. My compulsion to check the noise evaporates with the loss of signal, the lack of Wi-Fi. Once the grey green water of the harbour becomes ocean, the colour of a newborn’s eyes. A colour that holds the answers to everything.

When we arrive two hours later the blue changes again. Transparent and vibrant like blue heaven jelly. A giant bowl of it. Viewed from above the sharks and turtles and rays could be gummi lollies, if they weren’t moving. If they hadn’t been moving through these waters for thousands of years. Long before we came with all the awkward gear that allows us to breathe under water.

One of the first days. On the five-minute boat trip to the outer reef. We squint. It looks like a flipper, just piercing the glassy water in the distance. A dolphin? We draw closer. Engine cut. And there – barely below the surface, four metres of magnificence, mouth parts welcoming plankton. Silver, grey, black, and white – a giant silk handkerchief shimmering in the sun, billowing on the tide. A manta ray, gracing us with a moment of awe.

On another day it is dolphins, close enough to see their skin shining in the sunlight with each arc above the water.

Snorkelling off the beach. Impossibly sleek reef sharks glide close. Black and white tipped. Small eyed. Large nosed. Clown fish dart in and out of their protective anemones. Symbiosis. Ears submerged I hear parrot fish crunching coral. Their jewel tones on steroids and perfect fin flaps almost make even me believe in a god.

I hover clumsily next to unperturbed turtles. They breakfast while my breath moves noisily through my snorkel. Blank black eyes focussed on each mouthful of sea grass or coral. The patterns on their heads and shells are intricate as fingerprints. Neck skin concertinaed in wrinkles. And when one glides off unhurried, I flap along beside her, eager to witness her surface for breath.

Each evening the birds return to the island. Hundreds and hundreds fly in on the sunset as it paints a golden red carpet on the water. I could walk into forever on it. In thirty seconds, a minute at most, as a reminder that the earth still turns, the last of the sun slips into the sea like a burning coin.

In between snorkels I read. Paper and ink books. Several.

For a week, whenever I close my eyes, fish, coral, sea stars, sea cucumbers, velvety clam lips, swirling fish, play on the inside of my eyelids. I didn’t take a camera into the water with me this time. Too distracting. I take my eyelid footage with me instead.

The release from screen suction untethers me from the endless frenetic opinions and largely meaningless activity social media hurls into my brain. This passively acquired ‘content’ vacuums up my time and energy and adds nothing to my life.

I arrive home. Feelings mixed. I could have stayed and stayed. I am also relieved. The tension of possibly forgetting either or both of the two separately packed sets of medication I travel with releases. The fear of my Bipolar disorder wrecking our holiday evaporates. Because it didn’t happen. This time. It doesn’t have a good track record for respecting holidays.

I love being removed from the rest of the world. But there is a flip side. Travelling somewhere remote with no access to doctors, pharmacists and no means of contacting them, means I travel with an undercurrent of fear. The potential of having especially a psychotic episode when cut off from all of the support I need to treat it, fills me with horror.

My re-entry into signal, Wi-Fi, and responsibilities is an opportunity for a reset. Pruning and muting the unnecessary followings. Being a bit more mindful about the world my phone dumps into my head when I pick it up. Reading paper and ink books at bedtime…

And when things get hectic again – because they will – I will dip into one of my favourite pieces of footage from the time away:

On the last day. In the water. Just off the edge of the reef. Magic appears with the majestic passage of three mantas below us. Close enough for sunlight to make them shine and glisten with each leisurely flap of their wings. Impossible for anything else to exist in this bubble of time. They gradually dissolve into the deep and leave behind joy, a lifelong memory, and an elated expression on my daughter’s face.

Freedom Fighter? I Have Some Questions

Original image from ABC news has been altered

I am curious about where you are coming from. And it’s good to have a curious mind, isn’t it? So, I wanted to ask you some questions.

You know how you won’t take advice about Covid prevention from the doctors who believe in Covid (ie the majority of doctors)?

Are you aware that these are the same doctors you get your general medical advice from?

Here’s a specific scenario:

Let’s say one of your children came off their bike and… actually that raises another question – do your children wear bike helmets? I don’t want to make assumptions here, because in the same way you ‘have an immune system’ to protect you against Covid, I’m sure you are aware your children ‘have a cranium (skull bone)’ to protect them from head injury?

Do you view a bike helmet as an artificial and unnecessary device when the body has a perfectly good natural bony protection against brain injuries? Or am I drawing unreasonable conclusions about your beliefs here?

My apologies – I digress. It’s that curious mind of mine.

Let’s just say your child comes off their bike, knocks their head (helmeted or not), passes out, wakes up, and vomits. What do you do?

In that situation I would take my kid to the emergency department of the nearest hospital, but maybe you wouldn’t? From what I know about you so far, you and I make very different medical decisions.

But for the purpose of this piece of writing I will assume you do go to your nearest hospital’s emergency department. And if this is the case, my question to you is this:

Do you realise that most (if not all) of the doctors you encounter in the hospital believe we are in the middle of a global Covid pandemic and will advise that a combination of masks, widespread testing, selective quarantine, and vaccines are helpful measures to manage it?

And if you are aware of this, and you don’t trust their expertise when it comes to advice about Covid, how do you trust those same doctors to treat your child’s head injury?

How do you cherry pick which parts of your doctor’s expertise to trust?

If you take your child to hospital, do you jump onto Google before you leave and consult the same sources you do for your Covid information about the best way to treat a potential concussion in a child?

Or would you delay the care of your child’s head injury until you found a doctor who also believed masks are unnecessary and that Covid vaccines are part of a giant human experiment?

I mean, any doctor will treat your child. They have sworn an oath to treat everyone – neo-Nazis, child molesters, murderers – sorry, not equating you or your child with any of these demographics – just making the point that the doctor you see will treat your head injured child (even if they fundamentally disagree with your stance on ‘your freedoms’).

If you are reading this in Australia, you live in a first world country. If you have access to social media – and especially if you occupy an influencer space – there is a good chance you have enough to eat, a roof over your head, and access to first world medical care – including a hospital emergency department if your kid sustains a head injury.

You have an abundance of freedom.

If where you get your information from tells you not to be vaccinated – it may be inaccurate – but you do have the freedom to take that advice.

But when it comes to your refusal to follow other public health directives (masks, testing, etc), this is not about your freedom. This is about your unwillingness to accept any inconvenience. This is about you putting yourself first 100% of the time. It is you putting your convenience and comfort above the health and lives of everyone else, especially the many vulnerable people you share this country with.

So to my last question:

If you accuse the medical and scientific communities’ advice of curtailing your freedom when it inconveniences you, but then choose to rely on the mainstream health system when you have a medical emergency – Is that not the definition of hypocrisy?

Further reading

Medical Decision Making And The Wallpaper Effect

Covid Year 2: Timing Your Perspective

Covid Lockdown In A Psychiatric Hospital

Veterinary Work In The Time Of Covid-19: Unspoken Truths

The Parenting Trap – Is Information The Enemy?

A couple of weeks ago I found myself being shouted at by another parent.

Someone semi well known, a parent to several children. This person has their fingers in a few pies, some might be called parenting advice adjacent, but to my knowledge they lack formal qualifications.

They delivered their passionate message via Facebook couched as a public service to ALL parents. I am wary of all unsolicited parenting advice. My aversion to it stems from my first pregnancy and early first-time motherhood.

Back then I eagerly soaked up all the information, like a stray kitten lapping up a saucer of milk. The need to have a vaginal birth. How essential breastfeeding would be for my baby.

I made myself sick on information.

In fact, had I stubbornly clung to it, that information could have killed both my baby and I. (A baby in the posterior position, postnatal psychosis brought on (in part) by sleep deprivation, a lot of medication to treat the postnatal psychosis that passed into breastmilk).

But back to the Facebook tirade I found difficult to look away from.

The message was completely overshadowed by the breathless anxiety in its delivery. I’ve never been a proponent of parenting out of the fear of what could happen based on general information. The topic of this particular rant is almost irrelevant because it could have been about anything. It happened to be about Tick Toc. More specifically a call to ban it from our children’s devices.

Personally, I would not give my primary school student access to any social media. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

Personally, I believe banning Tick Toc from high school students’ phones rather than letting them have it and teaching them about the dangers, is a bit like banning sex instead of providing good quality sex education. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

Reflexively banning anything because you’ve come across some frightening information about it will just make it more appealing to many teenagers. Like the kid who has never been allowed sugar… But stop I am straying from the point I am trying to make, which come to think of it can still be made with the kid who has never been allowed sugar.

Take two kids with the same parent and apply the No Sugar rule.

It might work perfectly for one kid who is pretty compliant, naturally eats a wide variety of foods, and happens to love taking vegetable muffins for lunches. They grow into an adult who carries their childhood eating habits into adulthood and live happily ever after.

The other kid might be more rebellious. They might gorge on sugar at every birthday party they go to and resent their parents’ strict (though well intentioned) food rules. They trade their vegetable muffins for chocolate bars at school lunches. They feel guilt and shame associated with eating sugar and grow into adulthood with disordered eating that takes years of intensive therapy to manage.

Whether it is sugar or social media – I no longer make blind decisions based only on external information (be it expert or the anecdotal variety hurled at me by social media). I aim to interpret parenting information in the context of my child(ren) and my family before I lay down any laws.

Favouring my intuition over information isn’t easy. In other areas of my life – such as my veterinary work and the management of my Bipolar 1 Disorder, I have always relied heavily on information to help me make decisions.

But I can’t count the number of times information (even expert information) has failed me as a parent.

In this age we are assaulted by information wherever we look. It can overwhelm and make us doubt our knowledge of our children. And if we let it, the information and opinion overload becomes a stick to beat ourselves to an indecisive mess with.

It has taken me years and plenty of mistakes to marry my intuition and knowledge of my children with a scant amount of trustworthy information to find the formula that works (not all but) a lot of the time, for this family.

I am not against parents sharing information and opinions. I share my own frequently. This post is a case in point. But I find it helpful to remember that ultimately we need little information to parent well, and it is information most parents agree on anyway:

Love your children unconditionally; provide them with food, water, shelter, the opportunity to exercise, and the best medical care you can access; don’t expose them to any forms of abuse; teach them how to navigate the world they inhabit; and if you are fortunate enough to be able to – provide them with an education.

Beyond that, you can ignore what everyone else is doing. It’s down to what works for you and your child.

You may also like to check out:

Rewards For Reports: Entitled or Deserved?

Mental Health Parenting Truths 101

If you enjoy my writing, my recently published memoir Abductions From My Beautiful Life is available on most online bookselling platforms including Amazon, Fishpond, and Booktopia. You can find an excerpt here: Book

The mental load 2.0 : Airing your dirty dishes on socials

huge heap of dirty disgusting dishes in the sink waiting to be washed by unreliable flatmate

Has it really come to this?

To the women who document their displeasure about the unequal distribution of their mental load passive aggressively on social media:

The likes and laughing emojis you get from hundreds of strangers might give you a quick sugar hit of instant validation, but will they solve the issue of your unequally distributed mental load, or will it just corrode what sounds like the already leaking vessel of your marriage further?

The writers appear to feel more solidarity with the anonymous commenters than with the person they are in a partnership with. Underneath the jokes sits violently simmering resentment.

Let me back pedal to the source of my lack of admiration for this approach for a moment.

The first was a recent article a woman wrote about the (extensive) difficulty she was having getting her dog to feed her husband. Sorry her husband to feed the dog – although with the tone she used to describe her husband’s ineptitude, she could easily have meant it the other way around.

The second – I think it was on Youtube – an account of a woman who ‘went on strike’ and stopped washing the dishes and then posted updates about the ‘apocalypse’ unfolding in her house as a result of this. Piles of dirty dishes. The husband in question using a baby spoon to stir his coffee rather than doing the dishes.

I am not trivialising or dismissing the message these women are attempting to send their partners, but their delivery is conflicting.

In one breath it’s attempting humour and in the next red-hot anger.

Clearly we are not dealing with one of those minor sources of marital discord that can be shrugged off as a normal part of any relationship here.

The unequal distribution of the mental/domestic load is real and needs to be taken seriously. But is turning it into a farce and publicly infantilising the people whose behaviour you want to change the way to go about it?

Returning to the article about feeding the dog for a moment. The writer explicitly stated that in the four years she had off work outside the home, before returning to her career, she took on 100% of the domestic load. Feeling (rightly) entitled to a break, she then seemed surprised when the hand over of one chore (feeding the dog) didn’t run as smoothly as she wanted it to.

She also displayed another classic trait of the mental load martyr: overcomplicating a simple task, by insisting on her husband’s dog being fed a thermomix cooked diet for the sole reason that she thought ‘It made the dog’s coat shiny’.

Having read her article, I posted the following response:

As a small animal vet: The best diet for your dog is a high quality dry biscuit, something like hills science diet, water, and (if your dog tolerates them well) fresh raw bones for their teeth. You are wasting everyone’s time, energy, and to be honest a lot of words in your article on preparing fresh food for your dog.

As for the distribution of mental load: You mention that in your four years off you shouldered 100% of the domestic load. Why? Did you both consider your husband less of a parent or part of the household in that time? If he worked long hours, he may not have been able to do as much of it as you, but does that mean he should have done nothing in that time? If he had been living in a hypothetical share house instead of your family during the time he worked long hours, would his housemates have been happy to do his laundry, dirty dishes, and feed his dog?

So maybe setting the bar so low during those years is making it harder now? The martyrdom of women shouldering and complaining about the mental load is real. Change your dog’s diet for everyone’s sake – including your dog’s. Tell your husband if he doesn’t feed his dog you will report him to the RSPCA. If you stop treating your husband like a an inept toddler, he might stop acting like one.

To be clear – I don’t think there is anything wrong with giving your partner a wake up call to shoulder their share of the domestic load, by letting things slide. But make a choice – it’s either something funny that you don’t really care about that you post on social media, or it is a serious issue in your relationship, in which case yes, let the dishes pile up until your partner gets the message, but don’t then simultaneously trivialise and weaponise it by posting it on social media. Doing so might get you the hit of anonymous likes, but it’s not going to solve the problem in your relationship.

I have previously written about the equitable division of mental and domestic load in my relationship. Your Mental Load = Your Responsibility We both have careers. We share two children, and a menagerie of pets, and all the mental load. I have been called ‘lucky’ because of this.

I am not lucky.

I made a choice to be with my husband. We work on communicating well and from the very beginning of our relationship I have never given him the illusion that I would carry 100% of the domestic load.

But if either of us ever resorted to shaming the other on social media, if we had a significant issue in our marriage (such as the unequal distribution of the domestic load) I suspect we would each seriously re-examine our choice to stay with each other.

Post script: This post is not in any way aimed at those living with or who have escaped domestic violence or who are living with mental illness or any other disadvantage. It was intended as a prompt to reflect for the women who do not live with domestic violence, but do live with straight, white, cis-gender, non-disabled, privilege and who have choices but prefer martyrdom.

You may also like to check out:

Your Mental Load = Your Responsibility

Don’t Try This At Home: Schooling

Rewards For Reports: Entitled or Deserved?

Your Mental Illness? Make It Your Narrative

CN: brief non specific mentions of suicide, trauma, and eating disorders

If you have lived experience of mental illness, who tells your story?

Or even just fills in the blanks?

Silence about lived experience of mental illness from those who live with it is a frustrating paradox. Silence breeds stigma. Stigma breeds silence.

And there is a certain hypocrisy to complaining about the stigma if we choose silence.

I don’t say this lightly or without understanding the complexities of speaking out about our lived experiences.

I don’t live with an unprocessed trauma underlying my mental illness. Nor have I experienced treatment (or lack thereof) in the public mental health system. So, I have no right to speak about the ability or willingness of people to share their lived experience in these circumstances. I live with straight, white, cis-gendered, able bodied privilege. This means my path to diagnosis and high quality mental health care has been smoother than for those who don’t. All these factors make sharing my experiences easier.

One of the things I love about writing this blog is having ultimate control of my narrative. I don’t get paid for my posts. But I also don’t answer to anyone.

But I did recently have my voice stolen for a bit and I loathed the experience.

I’ve done some media interviews over the years Radio And Podcast Interviews and have generally felt empowered by and happy with the outcomes. Until this most recent one.

I agreed to it before I knew it would be written in first person based on a phone interview with me, but not written by me.

I was sent the article to fact check before it was published. The facts were correct. I hadn’t been misquoted, but it sounded nothing like me. It made me feel less than who I am. I was able to suggest some alterations. But even once my changes were incorporated the final article still felt clumsy. I would not have published it as one of my posts.

The journalist who interviewed me didn’t even tell me when the article was published. I found out when another journalist (who’d read the article) contacted me to ask if I’d be willing to interview for another ‘first person’ article written by them, about my experience of psychosis.

I politely declined. This (second) publication’s articles are sensationalist, pumped out to shock the masses and exploit the contributors. It would have been a hatchet job on my values. The opposite of empowering those with lived experience, educating those without.

I have no hesitation broaching my experience of psychosis with individuals, organisations, or the media, but only on my terms. Stories of psychosis are still in a different category to those of anxiety and depression. The media is not as used to them. They have to be handled with care and controlled by the person telling them.

I don’t even like my family or friends speaking for me about my illness. Not because I don’t trust them, but because I have more practice at relaying my experience with context and nuance.

However, disclosure around mental illness without an awareness of how to do it safely can be damaging, even dangerous. Whether you disclose your experience to one person, several, or in the media, yours and your audience’s safety must be your first priority.

If disclosure is likely to compromise your current mental health or retraumatise you, then you are not in the right space for it.

Especially if you are sharing with a wider audience you have to consider that some of that audience may be living through an episode of mental illness at the time of your disclosure and be particularly vulnerable to any information you share.

Content notes at the beginning of any article or interview containing triggering subjects for example suicide or trauma give your consumer the choice about whether they feel well enough to read/watch/listen on.

There are safe ways to relay distressing experiences to your audience. For example sharing an experience of a suicide attempt can help open up vital conversations around suicide and lessen stigma. But sharing explicit details about methods can be harmful to anyone in your audience who may be experiencing suicidal ideations. Similarly specific details about body weight, diet, or exercise should be left out of a safe disclosure around eating disorders.

Sharing your experience of mental illness is a personal decision. You have the absolute right not to.

But think about this – If you live with a mental illness and choose silence, you are leaving a space, for someone else less qualified to speak for you. A hole shaped like you, to be filled with more stigma.

If we give the world a void instead of our voices, it will fill it with its own assumptions. So, if you are well enough and able to do so – set your terms and boundaries, choose your conduit and gift the world your story.

I decided not to publish the link to the external article mentioned in this post. If you are interested in reading it to compare its style to my usual posts feel free to message or email me and I will share it individually.

Mental Health Parenting Truths 101

Written for Queensland Mental Health Week 2020

At some point you will get it wrong.

It will be well intentioned. It may come from a place of not wanting to replicate your own upbringing or the mistakes you think other parents are making. And it will probably be informed by your experiences and biases.

I’ve always known this…in theory.

But the other day my fourteen-year-old daughter courteously yet clearly served my imperfections in this area up to me. This was no teenage tantrum. It wasn’t even an argument. It was simply a conversation in which I was presented with unpalatable information about myself, and then had to choose what I did with it.

It started simply:

‘Mum, can I please get TikTok? Remember I asked you about it a month ago, and you said you’d think about it.?’

‘Mmhm.’

For context – she gained Snapchat and Instagram over the last few months, to my knowledge has not abused any of her privileges, and right now appears to be in good mental health.

So, we talk about how she’d manage seeing distressing content if it popped up. I probe her with her worst-case scenario.

‘What about animal cruelty?’ I say and follow it with a graphic example.

‘I’d talk to someone about it.’ She answers calmly.

‘Who would you talk to?’

She doesn’t hesitate: ‘Well definitely not you! Probably Dad.’

‘Why not me?’ I ask,

‘You and your mental health stuff – you’d blow it all out of proportion, take me to a psychiatrist, have me medicated and force me into years of therapy.’

I did ask.

And while she is wrong about the imagined consequences of telling me she saw some distressing social media content, she is right about something else.

I am hypersensitised, filled with knowledge of the very worst mental illness has to offer. And not just my own. Every time I go into hospital, I share that space with others who are going through their own worsts.

When I see young inpatients often only four or five years older than my eldest child with bandaged wrists or cutting scars, bolts of fear shoot through me. Fear that one day my children could hurt like that.

Every time after my Bipolar 1 Disorder has put me through hell I am frozen by the threat that I will have given this illness to my children. I know that (beyond not introducing significant trauma to their lives and warning them of the dangers of drugs that can trigger the genetic component of this illness) there is nothing I can do to outparent it. But I still try.

After I got sick I was determined my children would grow up in a family that was open about mental illness. There would be no shame and no stigma. They would know from a young age where I was going when I went into hospital and why.

The knowledge that sometimes mental illness sprouts in childhood and adolescence is heavy and made heavier by the fact that sometimes it is fertilised (even in the absence of major trauma) by parents unwittingly invalidating their children’s’ feelings or experiences.

I never wanted to be that parent. And I am not. But I may have made the opposite mistake.

By unintentionally force feeding my children my concerns around mental health, could it cause them to turn away from the very tools that could help them should they run into a mental health crisis?

Mental health is stitched into the fabric of our family’s conversations partly due to my lived experience, but also because of what I do. My children have never known a time when I haven’t been a vocal mental health advocate. I write about it. I talk about it frequently – sometimes quite publicly.

And if I dig deep into my motivation for wanting to change the way mental illness is perceived and treated, my children are at the core of it. That motivation is as simple as it is unrealistic:

I want to fix our mental health system so that it can help rather than harm my children should they ever experience mental illness.

I am loathe to admit it but yes sometimes all my motivation, knowledge and focus, can morph into hypervigilance, ready to pounce on the very whisper of something not being right with my children’s thought patterns. And in my futile efforts to protect them from my worst nightmares, at times I probably veer dangerously close to pathologizing their emotions, which can be as damaging as not acknowledging them at all.

I do this reflexively even as I know that parenting out of the fear of what could happen is even worse than living your own life ruled by fear.

And yet, deep down I know that if either of my children get sick it won’t be my fault or TikTok’s. If that happens, hopefully their father’s less informed love will be the perfect counterweight to remind me that while my knowledge might be useful in some situations, at other times applying the full weight of it can be like attempting to kill a fly with a sledgehammer. Ineffective and potentially damaging.

Post scripts:

It was a yes to TikTok.

While I am deeply grateful that right now neither of my children require psychiatric care, my advocacy work will continue, because it is grim out there. I caught up with a friend recently whose child does need a child psychiatrist urgently. The waiting time to get an appointment with a private child psychiatrist is currently twelve months.

Or there’s the public hospital Emergency Room if symptoms become life threatening while you wait…

Published with full permission from the fourteen year old who also helpfully pointed out I’d misspelt TikTok in the previous draft.

You may also like to check out:

Talking About Mental Illness With Children

As Mothers Of Sons

As Mothers Of Daughters

Is YouTube Rotting Our Brains?

Tokenism In Mental Health Awareness

Written for QLD Mental Health Week 2020

Saturday 10th October is World Mental Health Day and I feel a little conflicted about highlighting it. There are a lot of positives to having dedicated days or weeks to draw our attention to mental health. But I also believe we need to approach these awareness days with a little caution. It’s too easy to post or repost something related to the topic, tick the box of doing good and move on with our days.

Ironically these tokenistic efforts are becoming more common as awareness around mental ill health grows, especially when we don’t have to move beyond the comfort of our keyboards to feel as though we are achieving change. Of course it is good that there is more awareness, tolerance and marginally less stigma surrounding mental ill health than there was fifty or even twenty years ago. But we have to make sure we don’t replace the old insensitivities with their more modern counterparts.

I have written about my dislike of RUOK day before RUOK Day: Full Disclosure and this year I heard another perspective that reenforced my reasons for disliking this day. When I am well, my psychiatrist appointments usually consist of me requesting scripts for any medications I am running low on, a brief check in with how I’m going and then we chat about the state of the world, my advocacy work, his psychiatry work. This year one of my appointments happened to fall around RUOK day and we talked about the pros and cons of this day. I expressed my opinion and my psychiatrist referenced one of his patients coming in on RUOK day in distress because they were bombarded by people they knew asking them if they were ok. People they didn’t hear from for the rest of the year. People who were probably well intentioned, but using them as the token mentally ill person in their lives, to tick the box of having asked: RUOK?

Awareness around mental ill health should not be confined to one day or one week of the year. Episodes of mental illness flare unpredictably and feel as though they will never end. This feeling is fed by the fact that no one can tell you when it will end. There are good days and worse days. There are days when the risk of it turning into a terminal illness skyrockets. Someone may have a spectacularly good day on RUOK day, a calm and uneventful mental health week, but be suicidal sometime in April or on Christmas day, when it is all too easy to be under the impression that we showed our support for those among us living with mental illness back in mental health week, and Christmas day is busy and by April we are into Caesarean awareness month and IBS awareness month.

So what can we do to be meaningfully aware of the impact mental ill health has on those of us who live with it, and what can we do to support them for more than a day or a week of the year?

Everyone who lives with mental illness is different and everyone’s experience is different even if they live with the same diagnosis. So, I don’t speak for everyone.

For me – I don’t need to be asked how I am. I have enough insight into my Bipolar 1 Disorder to know when I need to seek help. I am fortunate to have good support systems in place, so I don’t tend to feel lonely or isolated.

For me it is all about the language people use. Hearing or seeing stigmatising language either in the media, on social media, or spoken, punches me in the gut. When I am confronted with words like nuts, crazy, lunatic, psycho, mental institution, – the list is long – it belittles me. It strips away the facts of my life, my healthy functional relationships, my personality, my university degrees, my profession, my interests, my sense of humour and it reduces me to a hellish caricature of who the misinformed masses believe someone mentally ill is.

So, think about how you write and speak around me. If you hear or see someone else perpetuating stigmatising language around mental illness, call it out. Do so politely, but raise awareness of it. I do it as often as I can, but I also get tired of being told to shut up, get over it, or that I am overreacting.

Perhaps the most helpful thing you can do for someone in your life who lives with mental ill health is not to automatically ask them how they are, but to ask them what you can do to make them feel valued and supported all year round. They may answer: ‘Ask me how I am’ in which case you are doing it meaningfully and mindfully, not because it is a certain day of the year.

All that said, Happy World Mental Health Day everyone. In honour of it also being Queensland Mental Health Week from 10^th-18^th Oct I am aiming to drop a few additional posts in Thought Food this week.

Look after yourselves and each other!

You may also like to check out:

RUOK Day: Full Disclosure

Mind Your Language Katy Perry

Don’t Call Conspiracy Theorists Crazy

If I were to call out language that stigmatises mental illness every time I came across it on social media, I’d be posting about it every couple of days. But no matter how called for I may feel it is, I don’t want to douse my readers in a bitter diatribe that often. I also enjoy a break from being told to shut up or get over it by people who don’t agree with my assessment of stigmatising language. So I’ve let it go for a while.

But I came across the following facebook post recently, which hit a nerve and left it throbbing for long enough to drive me to the keyboard:

Thoughts?

Now, I don’t like the word lunatic – but that is the least of the problems with this post. And as much as I’d like to agree with the sentiment, I have to ask:

What does this post imply about those of us who live with severe mental illness?

It equates us with people who believe and propagate fake news. The most pejorative label for people who don’t believe in climate change, the author of that snippet could come up with was to portray them as mentally ill.

Anti vaxxers, people who don’t believe in Covid 19, or who don’t believe in climate change don’t have those beliefs because they are mentally ill. They believe them because they are poorly informed and possibly brainwashed.

So, let’s not conflate pathological delusions experienced as a symptom of mental illness with people who are just misinformed and who refuse to delve into some scientific research.

I live with Bipolar 1 Disorder, and have experienced delusional thinking as a symptom of this illness. I not only believe in climate change, I am very concerned about it. I believe the overwhelming benefits of vaccination outweigh the few risks. Covid 19? Of course it exists. Donald Trump? Ten of my posts wouldn’t be long enough to list the reasons he has to go.

And yet when I jump onto social media I am bombarded with posts that tell me that the best way to insult the people who believe the opposite of the truth is to call them mentally ill, and thereby imply that if you live with mental illness you are in the same category as people who can be brainwashed.

Delusions caused by mental illness are completely different to the overconsumption of, and belief in, fake news. By labelling all of the people who don’t believe in scientific proof as mentally ill you insult and dismiss the many people who live with mental illness and who are critical thinkers who do believe in scientific evidence.

I can only speak from my experience of delusional thinking, but here’s what I know:

Delusional thinking isn’t a contagious false belief system you are indoctrinated with. True delusional thinking as a symptom of mental illness is completely involuntary. You don’t choose to experience it. It sweeps in on the coat tails of an illness that fundamentally changes how you interpret the truth.

For me, delusions are accompanied by mania which at its worst tilts into psychosis. The inside of my head feels as though I am riding a rollercoaster that’s on fire. I don’t sleep. The first time it happened, I tried to convince everyone of the truth to my malignant belief system. And in my experience true delusions due to mental illness resolve with antipsychotic medications.

The chances are your average antivaxxer or climate change conspiracy theorist will not change their beliefs if you dose them with antipsychotic medications.

So, If you read the post above and shrugged your shoulders or like several of my facebook friends gave it a like, let me rewrite it for you and see if you change your mind. Here goes:

‘If you believe all of (sic) world’s scientists got together to fake 7000 climate studies as part of (sic) elaborate hoax, you are not conservative you are a cancer patient. We have to stop treating people brainwashed by right-wing propaganda as political actors and start treating them on an oncology ward.’

Uncomfortable yet? You should be because the implication that people who live with cancer are idiots, is as ridiculous as it is insulting.

So why is it ok to equate my serious mental illness and the fact that I have at times spent months in a psychiatric hospital to me being an ignorant conspiracy theorist?

You may also be interested in checking out:

Mind Your Language Katy Perry

You Don’t Die Of ‘Mental Health’: Why Wording Matters

Vulnerability And The Exploitation Of Kanye West

Kanye West is unwell again. Hurtling through a manic Bipolar episode while the world laughs. And as someone who lives with Bipolar 1 Disorder, I feel for him.

In the early years after my diagnosis, during one manic episode (while hospitalised) I started discussing my sex life with strangers. My friend who was visiting me steered me gently away.

Kanye doesn’t seem to have anyone to steer him away, gently or otherwise.

Kanye is a wealthy, influential man, who probably has access to the best mental health care available. But I don’t believe his problem is accessing top quality care.

His problem is that he lacks insight and no one around him is game to have the difficult conversations with him. The conversations that point out that while he may be a brilliant artist when he is relatively stable, when he develops manic symptoms his brain needs a break from the world, and the world is not entitled to its contents.

Instead, when Kanye becomes unwell his mania is left to run free.

He has been open about his choice not to take medication to help manage his Bipolar Disorder. That is his right. Medication doesn’t work for or agree with everyone.

But he seems to be unaware that to successfully manage this illness without medication, you need to employ other strategies. You need to hone your insight. And if your insight when you are unwell is shaky, you need a mental health directive.

This means sitting down with your doctors and people closest to you when you are well and discussing how you would like to manage your symptoms when you are unwell. And if you experience manic episodes, one of the most basic requests may be to not have access to the media – social or otherwise – while symptomatic. Why?

Because mania can gobble up your inhibitions, make you see the world through a paranoid lens, and sprout delusions of grandeur.

Kanye recently gave an interview to Forbes magazine during which he rambled for four hours, to this effect:

‘…They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven. I’m sorry when I say they, the humans that have the Devil inside them. And the sad thing is that, the saddest thing is that we all won’t make it to heaven, that there’ll be some of us that do not make it.”

“Clean up the chemicals. In our deodorant, in our toothpaste, there are chemicals that affect our ability to be of service to God.”

If Kanye were a homeless man on a street corner sharing these ideas with the world, the interviewer from Forbes magazine would probably have walked past quickly, maybe shuddering at such overt insanity.

Instead that interviewer sat and listened to him for four hours. Noted down delusional quote after quote and then published an article in which they even describe Kanye’s lack of awareness:

‘If it all sounds like a parody, or a particularly surreal episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, West doesn’t seem to be in on it.’

Of course West isn’t in on it! He is walled off from reality by illness.

Did that interviewer ever pause to consider why much of what Kanye was saying made no sense? I suspect (with disgust) that they were fully aware their high profile subject was mentally unwell, but chose to exploit him while he was most vulnerable.

I have written thousands of words I thought were brilliant, while in the grip of mania. But once my symptoms recede, I am relieved no one else has read these largely nonsensical word vomits. Because if they had, that would invalidate the quality of my writing when I am healthy.

But Kanye’s word vomits are out there for all the world to snidely pick at, to brand him a rambling idiot and someone to be sniggered at.

At the time of publishing this post, headlines announcing Kanye’s withdrawal from the presidential race are emerging.

I understand stress and sleep deprivation are a president’s companions for most of their time in office, that pushing through is a corner stone of juggling the demands of the job.

Stress and sleep deprivation are the perfect fertiliser for Bipolar episodes to flourish. Bipolar episodes, once active, can’t simply be pushed through. They have no respect for deadlines or work demands – let alone international or national emergencies.

Whether Kanye recognised the risks of pursuing the presidency himself or whether someone in his circle came forward to have the hard conversations and steered him gently away, I am relieved for him.

You may also be interested in:

Misunderstood Mania

Psychiatric Medication And Stigma

If I Were Kanye West – written two years ago with a different angle to this post

Not So Body Positive

I came across an Instagram image of an obese cat recently (not the image in this post). The accompanying caption referred to the cat as a ‘body positive icon’. And it made me stop and think about whether a cat can, or even should be, an icon of body positivity.

I have never felt qualified to comment on the body positivity movement. As someone who lives with thin, white, straight, (mostly) able bodied privilege, I have been reluctant to wade into the hornet’s nest of opinions the words ‘body positivity’ evoke on social media. Until I saw this.

Continue reading “Not So Body Positive”

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