QUEER LONELINESS & THE IMPENDING MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS

Posted on May 30, 2020 by Norwich Radical in Perspectives and tagged #StayAlert, #StayHome, coronavirus, Covid-19, crisis, featured, health, healthcare, LGBTQIA+, lockdown, london, loneliness, medical, mental health, mental illness, network, NHS, public information, queer, race, racism, support, together, uea pride, uk.

by Kasper Hassett

CW: mental health

Long predating the lockdown, members of the LGBTQIA+ community have reported feelings of isolation and loneliness at alarmingly high levels. This reached a point where ‘queer loneliness’ was dubbed an epidemic, and the mental health of the community overall was recognised as dire. With many now separated from their support networks during lockdown, queer people are experiencing new lows in their mental health. Additionally, much of the previously mentally healthy population is also struggling, and NHS services are suffocating from cuts, meaning that many queer people will miss out on vital mental health services as a complacent wider world focuses on going ‘back to normal’. Continue Reading

PROFIT BEFORE PEOPLE

Posted on January 12, 2019 by Norwich Radical in Perspectives and tagged active listening, bart johnson, featured, HMP Norwich, mental health, mental illness, nursing, peer to peer, personal, prison, prison reform, probation reform, reflective writing, samaritans, social work, trained listeners, virgin care.

by David Breakspear

Whilst going about my daily ritual of spending hours in front of a computer screen researching in a variety of areas, one of which being the criminal justice system, I came across this piece with the headline ‘Mental health trust takes back contract for more serious conditions at Norwich prison’. It was a report in an edition of the Great Yarmouth Mercury.

I have served as a prisoner for a good number of years at HMP Norwich, and as someone who has a complex mental health history, I came into contact with the mental health team on a regular basis. I was also a trained listener and would have dealings with the team as a third party on behalf of individual prisoners.

MARBLES: MANIA, DEPRESSION, MICHELANGELO AND ME – REVIEW

Posted on September 27, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Arts and tagged bipolar disorder, depression, Ellen Forney, featured, graphic novel, I was Seven in '75, Lucy Caradog, Marbles, Marbles: Mania Depression Michelangelo and Me, mental illness, Michelangelo, Steve Rhodes, Van Gogh.

by Lucy Caradog

Content warning: depictions of mental illness

Just before her thirtieth birthday, Ellen Forney is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo And Me is an autobiographical journey which follows her years-long exploration of medication, therapy, and how they affect her creative drive. Despite it being referenced off-hand in popular media, a taboo around bipolar disorder still remains prominent – this is something that Forney does an excellent job of addressing in her graphic memoir: during the second meeting with her therapist, she recalls saying “My mother and I both have bipolar tendencies, but I’m not like, bipolar bipolar”. Despite having an understanding of the mental illness, she initially rejects the possibility of having it.

BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER: A REPRESSED SUPERPOWER, PART II

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Perspectives and tagged abuse, behaviour, behavioural disorder, bipolar, Bojack Horseman, borderline personality disorder, BPD, care, cbt, DBT, eggshell therapy, emotional intelligence, empathy, featured, MAriah Carey, mental health, mental illness, misconceptions, personal, psychology, Raphael Bob Waksberg, research, stigma, superpower, therapy, trauma, UKCP.

by Sunetra Senior

CW: abuse | Continues from Part I here

Both Analytical and Emotional Intelligence

Mystification: go to work in an office to endorse more of that analytical, grounded thinking.

Hidden Truth: having these two qualities in equal measure means you have constant access to an enviable social clairvoyance that does well in advisory and imaginative professions.

The twin pairing is an attenuated, ongoing version of psychosis which means you can control it and draw from it whenever you want. What’s more you can immediately translate profound ideas to those around you, having one foot in the cosmos and the other in the everyday. That same parental lacking when a person with Border Personality Disorder grew up, made them sharp to environmental clues in order to survive. As this person grows older, they will retain this attentiveness, accumulating little signs and symbols – politically, mathematically and socially – to equip them to make impressive and perceptive connections and even predict sociological algorithms.

Additionally, you are likely to be excellent in the arts and in critical thinking because you process such a sensitivity to surroundings and are rapidly processing information and images. You can identify intuitive nuances that make great cinema and literature.

The world needs more dedicated artists, sociologists, researchers and socially conscious politicians, not bankers, marketing executives and legal crooks.Continue Reading

BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER: A REPRESSED SUPERPOWER, PART I

Posted on May 29, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Perspectives and tagged abuse, behaviour, behavioural disorder, bipolar, borderline personality disorder, BPD, care, cbt, DBT, emotional intelligence, empathy, featured, MAriah Carey, mental health, mental illness, misconceptions, personal, psychology, research, stigma, superpower, therapy, trauma.

by Sunetra Senior

CW: self-harm, abuse

As a homage to mental health awareness week (14th- 20th May), I have decided to write on an often misunderstood and underrepresented psychological health condition close to my heart, or more accurately my spirit. Borderline Personality Disorder or BPD is characterised as a ‘behavioural disorder’, which is intrinsic to one’s selfhood, and because of its often abuse-induced origins, has been notoriously difficult to treat. It is not the expected actions or the very true fact that the condition is deeply ingrained that I take issue with, but the medical paradigm of dysfunction and negativity implied by the alliterative last acronym.

This pervasive perceptual context, reflective of the attitude towards many mental health issues, permits an entire trail of prejudice, extending to the defining symptoms of BPD. Common misconceptions are “attention-seeking, manipulative and over-emotional”. This comes from the high numbers of those with BPD who self-harm, especially during their already tumultuous teenage years, their expressing the need for special care or extra-vigilance and seeming not to be able to cope with the interpersonal and social challenges that everyone else can.

It is time to not only put the record straight, but to add some fucking colour.Continue Reading

ANOTHER HIGHER EDUCATION IS ALREADY HERE – BEYOND TUITION FEES #8

Posted on May 12, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Student and tagged 1963 Robbins Report, 1997 Dearing Report, 2010 Browne Review, academics, administrators, adult education, AntiUniversity NOW, authority, Beyond Tuition Fees, borders, capitalism, competition, corbyn, course closures, employability, featured, Free Education, grading, grassroots, higher education, Labour, Leicester Vaughan College, mental illness, metrics, Mondragon Unibertsitatea, nationalism, neoliberalism, privatisation, privilege, radical imagination, social inequality, Solidarity Acadamies, state funding, student debt, student loans, students, teaching, tuition fees, UCU strike, uk, Universidad de la Tierra, universities, university management, workers rights, workplace abuse.

By Sarah Amsler

It is a time of extraordinary potential for change in UK Higher Education. Labour’s promise to end tuition fees has defied the critics and united many behind Corbyn’s political project. But what will the implications for universities be if this comes to pass? And what can we do to leverage this progress? In this series, the Norwich Radical and Bright Green are bringing together perspectives from across the sector to explore these questions.

‘The university’ is a fertile space within which to practice radical imagining and world-making today. I do not mean that actually-existing universities, in the UK or elsewhere, necessarily provide space for such work. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that the spaces for critique and creative thinking in higher education have shrunk as forces of commodity fetishism, privatisation, competition and authoritarian modes of control have permeated university governance. Continue Reading

AN OPEN LETTER TO STEVE DOWNES, EDP.

Posted on March 4, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Community and tagged accommodation, advice, anon street team, barriers, charities, City, Community, crisis, Eastern Daily Press, edp, exclusion, featured, foodcycle, grassroots, Haymarket, homeless, homelessness, hot meals, housing pressure, isolation, mental health, mental illness, norfolk, norwich, Norwich City Council, norwich foodcycle, Norwich Soup Movement, poverty, private landlords, rough sleepers, Shelter, social exclusion, soup kitchens, stereotypes, steve downes, stigma, The People's Picnic, unemployment, vulnerable, zero hour contracts.

by Eli Lambe

No, Soup Kitchens are not making Norwich’s “Homelessness problem” worse. It might seem that way to you, if you’re used to brushing the vulnerable off and not having to see the reality of more and more people’s lives. The easy solution – and the one that your newspaper and the local police like to peddle – is to force rough sleepers and vulnerable people out to the fringes of the city, where they’re cut off from their community and support and, most importantly it seems, you don’t have to see them.

What makes you think that your walking past the Haymarket every so often qualifies you to write about the lives of the people in the queue?Continue Reading

YOU’RE HAVING A LAUGH

Posted on January 20, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Perspectives and tagged comedy, depression, eds, endorphin, featured, happy, joke, knowledge, laugh, laughter, medication, mental health, mental illness, news, parody, process, propaganda, satire, self care, spoof, wellbeing.

by Alice Thomson

Life is hard. For everyone. We’re all trying to find some meaning to our lives, trying to figure out where we belong and what our purpose is. Amongst that, we see what is going on the world, either connected to us or globally. Our environment can be tough to digest.

My last article was about the cuts the government is in the process of implementing to benefits for disabled people. I spent a lot of time researching the article and it really brought me down. I already knew it was a problem and needed to be spoken about, bknowledge,ut to learn the extent of the issue and read personal experiences, made me feel hopeless. The news can easily do that. Making it difficult, not only to take control and make positive changes to our environment, but to make those changes for ourselves. It’s a trick that’s as old as the book. Since the time people were able to establish a hierarchy, those on top kept everyone else in the dark to keep them in their place. Knowledge is power. Muddy the water of knowledge, and we disengage and disenfranchise the masses.Continue Reading

THIS IS MY LOVE STORY

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Norwich Radical in Perspectives and tagged anger, cbt, dating, discrimination, fear, featured, love, mental health, mental illness, personal, PTSD, relationship, sex, story, support, therapy, tree.

by Anonymous

cw: sexual assault, PTSD

There’s something weirdly intimate about being curled up in a corner of a bed, completely naked and sobbing uncontrollably, unable to catch your breath and being very conscious of the wet space between your legs where a warm body was just seconds ago. The face belonging to this body is now centimetres away from my face, asking too many questions, and panicking more than I am.Continue Reading

A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A REST?

Posted on December 23, 2017 by Norwich Radical in Perspectives and tagged confession, depression, disability, ehlers danlos sydrome, healthcare, life, mental health, mental health stigma, mental illness, norwich, personal, Perspectives, PTSD, royal national orthopaedic hospital, Scotland, uk.

by Alice Thomson

So much has happened in only a few months, for me personally as well as globally – let’s be honest, the the past year’s events in the United States of America alone of the past year would be tough to sum up in a 1,000 word article. I don’t think I could do justice to the topic. As this is my first article in a while, I thought I’d focus on what I’ve been up to, to give you an idea of the reasons for my absence the last few months.Continue Reading

mental illness

QUEER LONELINESS & THE IMPENDING MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS

MARBLES: MANIA, DEPRESSION, MICHELANGELO AND ME – REVIEW

BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER: A REPRESSED SUPERPOWER, PART II

Both Analytical and Emotional Intelligence

BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER: A REPRESSED SUPERPOWER, PART I

YOU’RE HAVING A LAUGH

THIS IS MY LOVE STORY

A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A REST?

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