Mentally Madeleine

May seems to be the month of awareness - Borderline Personality Disorder, Fibromyalgia, and Mental Health are a few of the various campaigns happening right now that are directly relevant to my life. Mental health awareness campaigns tend to be pretty useless if I'm honest, especially for people with severe and enduring mental illnesses. Being vaguely aware of mental health helps absolutely nobody if it's not backed up with real change and funding, and sadly this doesn't happen. I do understand the irony of me saying this whilst also being a proud mental health activist with Young Minds (the UKs leading young person's mental health charity), but the campaigns that Young Minds run are usually pretty solid and do actually create change for the people who need it. On the flip side, a lot of the government campaigns are pretty useless. One that I find particularly insufferable is the Every Mind Matters campaign. While I'm sure the intentions behind it are good i

This time last year I was a mess. A complete and utter suicidal wreck, and exactly a year ago today I was unlawfully detained by the police because of my mental illness. I've had a lot of really positive experiences with the police (and I definitely will write about them soon) but it's a year later and I'm still having the most horrific nightmares about this one. I was absolutely trollied on a bad idea cocktail of a whole bottle of shitty wine and 4 cans of cider, so you'd think I wouldn't remember this but I remember every single detail. I was in a bad way because this time of year is a bad time for my PTSD anyway, and when one of my friends called the police because they were concerned about me I was expecting it to be buisiness as usual. I'd already been detained a couple times that week and mental health services had put together their typical lack-of-care plan for me, which surprisingly was about as useful as a chocolate teapot. From the get go the poli

Dear police twitter, I'm going to preface this by saying that I think the police are great, you're overworked and underpaid and the job that you do is often a thankless task. The police have saved my life more times than I've had hot dinners and I'm eternally grateful for that. I've been incredibly lucky that I've had a lot of good experiences with the police, and they've probably done more for my mental health than the any support I've had from the three different NHS trusts I've been under. I also love police twitter. You guys are funny, you laugh when I make jokes that no normal person would laugh at. You're empathetic to my rants and my issues with various members of the public. When I do something great that I'm proud of or when I have a recovery win you often celebrate with me, and when my life shatters into pieces around me a lot of you are willing to offer a listening ear or a virtual shoulder to cry on.  TL;DR: you guys

It's a common, and somewhat understandable response. Someone opens up to you about their trauma, whatever it is, and you immediately jump to how amazing they are now. However, I have been repeatedly told that my trauma made me a better person, or that the experience made me kinder or stronger etc. and I'm over it. It's insulting. When you tell me that my trauma made me a better person, you're taking all my good qualities and attributing them to me being raped. You're telling me that if I hadn't been sexually exploited I'd be a bad person. It feels as if you're saying that I should be grateful for what happened to me because at least I'm stronger now. And you know what? I'm not even sure I am stronger now. Or kinder, or a better person or anything. I'm different now, for sure, but that's not a good thing. It feels like my life is one big before and after, and not a day goes by when I don't miss the before. Due to what happened to

Over the past few weeks I've drafted a lot of different ways of tweeting this. It's never come out under the character limit so it's my first blog post instead! There is something remarkably freeing about being the "difficult" patient. I used to try so hard to please the professionals who were involved in my care that I'd crack under the pressure and give up trying to improve my mental health. I'd smile and pretend things were working even when they weren't, I'd take everything every professional said to be completely true and it would break me, time and time again. It's no secret that some professionals can be especially rude, and I've had more than my fair shares horrific experiences with mental health "professionals" bullying me and making me feel like shit. Instead of actually aiming to recover I would get pushed down by the weight of the expectations and I'd end up nearly dead and no better off than when I started tim