World Suicide Prevention Day 2016

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Trigger Warning:  As indicated by the title, this post discusses suicide.  Not graphically, and not in detail, but if you find the topic triggering you may choose not to read this post.

 

Suicide (and suicide prevention) is not something I choose lightly to think about, or even write about. It is “My Scary Place”. But I’m going here because this is

Too important not to write about.

 

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To See A Light That Shines

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This little light of mine,
I’m gonna let it shine
This little light of mine,
I’m gonna let it shine
This little light of mine,
I’m gonna let it shine
Let it shine,
Let it shine,
Let it shine.

Did you sing this song as a child? I did.

Stigma Via Health Professionals

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I wasn’t expecting it from this source.  Actually I had seen this particular health professional about five times and had decided that she knew her stuff.  What’s more, I had decided that she was responding to what I was saying to the extent that I felt comfortable with her.  A big thing.

But I admit I had forgotten a brief moment in my first appointment with her when she responded to something I said with “you haven’t got a mental illness“.

Why I Disclosed My Mental Illness To My Employer

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It’s a difficult one.  To disclose or not to disclose?  There are plenty of articles around about the issue of whether to tell your employer that you have a mental illness.  I came across a recent one and it got me thinking.  I disclosed in the past but would I do it again?

The article, Deciding Whether to Disclose Mental Disorders to the Boss by Alina Tugend (for The New York Times) got me thinking.  Has my mind changed?

You see, in 2009 I chose to tell my prospective employer that I had a mental illness.

Please Understand What It’s Like To Be Me (…Or A Giraffe)

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TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of issues related to Eating Disorder recovery. No numbers involved.  

Also, there is a rather nasty animal welfare story mentioned in the first two paragraphs.

I read an horrendous story the other day about a giraffe tragically killed in South Africa recently as it was being transported on a busy highway.  The giraffe was decapitated when the truck it was being transported by drove under an over-bridge.  The giraffe was blindfolded (it makes me wonder if the driver was too), and I think that is standard practise for transporting these animals, to keep them calm (personally blindfolding me will not keep me calm).

Almost Too Sensitive For The Regular World

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Think Black and White
“Image courtesy of [anankkml] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net”.

I’ve borrowed my title from a good friend.  She struggles like me and when she suggested we were both “almost too sensitive for the regular world“, I finally had the words that I hadn’t been able to find.  How do I fit into this regular world when so much of it grates so painfully against my raw skin?

As Parents Age…

There’s a moment in our lives, for all of us, when we realise that our parents have grown old, and after a lifetime of looking to them, now they are looking to us.  A lifetime of you being their ‘child’, now in some ways, that is reversed.  The only way you avoid this is if you completely cut off all contact with them some time before. Otherwise it’s a stage of our lives that is impossible to ignore. It is a time that can have enormous effect on both our mental health and theirs.  Everything has changed.  Now you realise that you’re finally ‘grown up’.

A Work In Progress

I’m going to tell a secret:
All things that breathe, that grow,