Hey everyone, I hope you’re all well today. This is my seventh new style of blog. So far, so good, I’m hoping you’re all enjoying it.

I’m going to have guests answer some questions and hope it helps someone out there.

Today, my seventh guest on the blog is my colleague partner laila a very talented lady, who as come through her own battles

Question 1 Laila: you work with a young local theatre group, I was wondering if you’ve ever noticed any kind of mental health within the group? Can you recognise the ones needing help?

I find I’m very tuned into other people’s emotional states having personally experienced difficult circumstances from a young age, which mainly related to having parents who were not happy with each other meaning they fought all the time, and living in circumstances that were pretty consistently uncertain and often, frightening. I was also very severely bullied as a child. I think all these experiences have meant that I’m very aware of when others show similar behaviours to those that I ended up feeling and experiencing. It means I’ve become a bit of an emotion radar and can read how people feel very quickly. So yes, I do notice when young people I work with are suffering and can quickly recognise when someone really needs support.

Question 2: what is your opinion on the use of medication for mental health issues? I know it can help some but not others

I began experiencing what was labelled depression when I was 15 years old. I began to take medication when I was 21. I ended up with another label when I was 26 of Bipolar Type 2 after being cold turkeyed off the antidepressant Paroxetine by a GP which sent me manic. At the time I didn’t agree with the explanation for how I was feeling however, I was young and my parents were panicking as my life had seemingly fallen apart. I was in shock as I’d lost my job, my flat, my partner and many friends after having some very strange experiences for a period of 2 and a half months. I wasn’t sure what to make of anything anymore. I waited a year before I engaged with taking any medication. I never wanted to nor liked taking medication and was always thinking about what harm these powerful substances were doing to my body. I read and researched the whole of psychiatry, the drugs, and many different lines of thought around mental distress. I resisted taking more drugs at higher doses all the time, and was very sensitive to what were supposedly ’side effects’, but which I now see as toxic effects of the many different medications I took. I went through a period where I was a good patient and for this time I was what I call ‘psychiartrised’, but that faded as I began to feel the drugs negatively effecting my health and noticed that my condition as someone with what is called ‘bipolar’ only seemed to worsen and not get any better from taking the drugs. Surely I should have been getting better as I was doing everything the psychiatrist advised, living as healthily as I could, and more? I took drugs for bipolar disorder for 25 years. I tried numerous times to come off them and tried almost every drug prescribed for this diagnosis. I eventually managed to come off in 2021 and have not taken a single drug since.

In my opinion drugs disable you from being able to face the feelings that you need to travel through in order to put the traumas you experienced to bed, and really learn to know and love yourself. I believe that psychiatry pathologises normal human reactions to distress, grief, loss, and uncertainty. I have actually reached a point where I don’t believe in the idea of mental illness. I believe that so called ‘mental illnesses’ are completely understandable reactions of the human animal to traumatic experiences, which can be comprehended and worked through with the right kind of guidance and support. Fundamentally, I believe, that all instances of becoming stuck in a reaction to severe distress, are rooted in an assault to the nervous system, which throw a person into survival mode which our body’s cannot sustain indefinitely. I sincerely wish I had not given into the pressure from my GP and my parents to submit to the idea of having an illness which needed medicating. Psychiatry said there was something wrong with me, that I had a chemical imbalance (which was a lie), that I was ill and did not fit into what was expected of me in this society, however I know that many things happened to me that were very difficult, distressing and disturbing when I was young, and for which I received no help or support, and that there were also many things that should have happened that never did in order for me to have had a balanced and secure upbringing. I have completely changed my understanding of what is described and labelled as mental illness, mainly by understanding the way the nervous system works and how our body’s store traumatic experiences. I have also looked extensively into what psychiatric drugs do to our bodies and learnt a great deal about how driven by profit the whole pharmaceutical industry is, which has led me to doubt the trustworthiness of the whole system.

Question 3: could you explain the difference between Bipolar 1 and 2, I never realised that it was a thing

The distinction between Bipolar 1 and 2 are explained in the DSM as being about psychosis. If you experience what is deemed to be psychotic depression or mania then you’re Bipolar 1 and this usually also means you have more frequent manic episodes. Bipolar 2 is described as being more effected by depression and episodes of hyper-mania. However, I don’t believe either of these labels have any value in them to make head or tale of what are natural human experiences that cannot be neatly fitted into a a trite diagnostic label that does nothing to help someone understand what has happened to them and how to begin to address what you’ve experienced.

I would like to say a big thank you to Laila for taking but and when I get my podcast back up running I hope she will join me as a guest as there so many more questions.

This new blog of mine is coming to you every Thursday from 9.30 am UK time.

Thank you for reading, and if you want to take part, please drop a comment or leave me an email.