Category: Lived experience
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Memory, language and my psychosis
Language, symbols and memories play a significant role in my psychoses
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Mental health benefits of gardening (Part 3)
Slowing down helps me manage mania – gardening is one way I do this…
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Is gardening is self-care? It is for me (Part 1)
Someone suggested gardening as self-care for my next post – even though they hate gardening themselves. The first thing to say – the activity you choose for self-care is very personal, the benefits more universal. In some areas your health professional may be able to prescribe an activity you are interested in trying. Oxford Languages…
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Diagnostic overshadowing, insight and self-stigma
I had lived with bipolar for years when I first came across the term, “diagnostic overshadowing”, in an online forum discussion about mental illness. It means where a clinician may privilege mental illness diagnosis over what the person is saying and other symptoms, assigning them to your mental health condition. Perhaps because I am articulate,…
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Nature, nurture, nonsense
It took more than a decade of drafting my bipolar memoir, attending life-writing classes and residentials then other events where I listened attentively to authors, publishers and literary agents as they shared their secrets of how to get published before I gave up. I switched allegiance, joined Twitter and set about promoting my stories in…
