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 it is absolutely useless for anyone with pretty much any form of mental illness. I understand that mental health campaigns need to be for everyone, not just those of us who are acutely aware of and affected by these issues; but so often people with severe and enduring mental illnesses are completely left out by awareness campaigns alltogether.
I took the 5 question quiz on the campaign website and answered every question as if I was in the worst place mentally possible. One glaring error I did notice was that the question about sleep fails to recognise that getting too much sleep is as much of an issue as not getting enough - in fact it can be one of the symptoms of depression.
Among the suggestions for my "mind plan" are "do the couch to 5k", "take time to reflect", and this absolute gem:
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| From the Every Mind Matters webpage |
Whilst the advice that I recieved in this plan is good generic advice for people experiencing issues with stress, it's far from useful for people who are experiencing other issues with their mental health. This campaign isn't actually, as it implies, designed for "every mind".
I went on a little rant about this on Twitter, but I wanted to put it here too so that it's easier to find - when you tweet as much as I do everything tends to get a bit lost!
#EveryMindMatters until you're pouring your heart out down the phone to the crisis team and the only response you get is the click of them hanging up, you're just another lost cause anyway and they need a cigarette.
#EveryMindMatters until you're sat in A&E for the third time that week, tears streaming down your face as a doctor yells at you for not taking enough pills and wasting his time. You didn't want to go to the hospital anyway.
#EveryMindMatters until the paramedic who "just wanted to do something exciting today" is telling you to come back and jump when he's off shift so he doesn't have to pretend to care about you and your pathetic life.
#EveryMindMatters until you're sat in the back of a police car bawling your eyes out because you know that the empty promisies of help and safety are just that... Empty.
#EveryMindMatters until you open up to your hospital team about your trauma, and hours later two male nurses pin you to your bed because you dared to have a flashback. They fail to see the irony of their alleged help looking a lot like the harm that put you there in the first place.
#EveryMindMatters until it's yours. Until you've had a bath and you've ran the Samaritans and had a cup of tea and you're still ill. If the couch to 5k doesn't cure you then they get to decide that actually, your mind doesn't matter. You're just collateral damage.
The truth is, you can have your pretty little Mental Health Awareness Month, you can pretend that this government actually cares but at the end of it people are still going to be sick. Patients will still be let down, preventable deaths will still happen.
But I guess you're not ready for that conversation yet.
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such an interesting read xxx
ReplyDeleteThankyou 😊
DeleteInteresting....
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DeleteThis was really interesting to read thank you :) - Keely
ReplyDeleteThankyou 😊
DeleteWow. Madeleine, I feel like you talked about what many including myself are to afraid to bring up or challenge. Thank you for sharing your experiences and bringing to light the experiences of many people that are unheard.
ReplyDeleteWhat steps do you believe can be taken to better empower & actually support those severely affected with mental illness?
Sorry for the late reply! I think the first thing to do is give us space to discuss these issues and actually listen. I'm lucky that I've managed to create my own space on twitter, but not everyone can do that. Then, after the space we need people actually campaigning with us for real change, and calling people out when they erase us and our stories from the mental illness/health narrative.
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