'Reflective practice' - living in, working with mental illness... or something like that

'It's nothing like a broken leg': why I'm done with the mental health conversation’  @ladyhaja wrote for The Guardian in the Summer of 2018… I have had this as the first lines of my ‘next blog’ for several weeks now. When I look back at what I had written after this, it makes me feel almost like a stranger, it’s almost humorous. I guess that was the denial stage. I then moved into anger and I couldn’t write for a while after that. I guess that month or so has been the bargaining and then the depression. (AGAIN!?) I have come to think of my experience of mental health ‘services’ (or diservices) as a bereavement. It feels like a period of grief. I have moved from denial, (probably between age 19 to 31) to anger (that one has probably been the most damaging and started pretty much when I decided that I could no longer do it alone, I needed help), the bargaining, and now depression. It’s the acceptance that worries me, and comforts me the most. When I sta...

In this blog I reflect upon my mental health diagnosis'; and the recent revelation that I am not a 'little bit bipolar' any more – and perhaps I never was? How I feel now that my 'confirmed' diagnosis is emotionally unstable personality disorder/ borderline personality disorder (EUPD/BPD) and what that means to me. I hadn't intended to publish it on World Mental Health Day but I think its timely that it is. It may be triggering... In my ‘first ever’ blog I touched upon being informed in my appointment with a psychiatrist (I can’t say ‘my’ psychiatrist given that we will probably only have another 1 or 2 meetings plus we aren’t in America) that my diagnosis of cyclothymia had gone in the bin in 2016, replaced with emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD). EUPD is also known as borderline personality disorder (BPD) and borderline personality disorder is known in the World Health Organisation classification (ICD-10) as Emotionally unstable personalit...