mental health

Thursday Doors Appeal

Here’s how to make someone’s life better:

If you have been following my contributions to Thursday Doors over the years, you will know that I do voluntary work as a doctor overseas. Last year I was working at Kakumbi Rural Health Centre in Eastern Province, Zambia. It was distressing to see the lack of medical care for people with severe mental illness, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Their families would look after them as best they could; but if the patients became violent or started destroying property, this support could end. Patients would roam around the village, clearly very disturbed, behaving inappropriately (throwing stones at vehicles, wandering about naked).

Thursday’s door – torn off its hinges during a violent outburst by the man wearing white trousers. He has a long history of bipolar disorder. Neighbours managed to subdue him and chained him to the door to prevent him from doing more damage to people and property. They felt…

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There Can Be Good ‘Black Dog’ Days Too

This one was on Newborough Beach, Anglesey, one late December morning. You can just see the mountains of Snowdonia on mainland Wales in the distance.

But not to make light of those who suffer bad black dog days, and there are very many of us who do, intermittently or full-time, here is a hopeful little video from the World Health Organisation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiCrniLQGYc

Lens-Artists: Splash Please visit the Lens-Artists to see their spirit-raising photos.

Independence beckons ~ Evelyn taking flight

“These are the things that I want in life: 1. A library of my own; 2. All Rudyard Kipling’s Works; 3) lots of money so that I can make poor people happy.”

Evelyn Ashford aged 14, 1937

I don’t know who took this photograph of my aunt, Evelyn Ashford. Probably it was my father. I’ve posted it before, but now we’ve cleaned it up a little. It was taken at Pitch Hill, Surrey in around 1937 when Evelyn would have been fourteen. This was the year when she was forced to leave school to both take care of an invalid mother, and then to start work as an apprentice in the local draper’s shop in Guildford.

Given the high hopes she had for herself, leaving school before sitting her Primary School Certificate would have been a deeply wounding blow. In an English exercise of that last year at school she wrote:

“These are the things that I want in life: 1. A library of my own; 2. All Rudyard Kipling’s Works; 3) lots of money so that I can make poor people happy.” She also wanted to have lots of REAL friends and play Madame Defarge in a stage version of Tale of Two Cities. The people she most wanted to meet included Jean Batten, famous New Zealand aviator, H.G. Wells and Alfred Hitchcock.

She did not achieve these ambitions, apart from the Kipling works perhaps. All her life she struggled to make up for her lack of education. All her life she did what she could to enthuse and encourage others to make the most of themselves in whatever community she found herself. She also survived being bombed on a train, breast cancer, and accidental attempts on her life through medical negligence. But she ended her days, cut off from all of us, her mind in another place: abiding in that state they call dementia.

I have written more about her life in other posts, but I always come back to this image of her, on the trig point at Pitch Hill. She died a year ago last October at the age of 90, but still her spirit survives in this photograph: a truly independent spirit I think; one that still has the power to move and inspire.

The Many Faces of Evelyn Mary Ashford

Grand Girl, Great Prospects

Inspired by Ailsa’s challenge ‘independence’ at Where’s My Backpack Please visit her blog for more interpretations of the theme.

Windows Into The Inner Sanctum

Such a stunning insight into inner turmoil and trauma – from The Beauty Along the Road

The Beauty Along the Road

So often we think of windows as enabling us to look OUTSIDE. However, I’d like to introduce a window that allows us to look INSIDE, specifically, into the inner workings of the psyche. As a former psychologist with a specialty in playtherapy, I used sandplay therapy with both children and adults to gain a better understanding of what my clients were struggling with. Sandplay was truly a window of privilege – no other technique revealed as much about what was really going on INSIDE.

“At the beginning in sandplay, we observe images of the daily world, its difficulties. When we continue this work, we get into deeper realms of ourselves. We discover contents which have remained unknown. They have become dark and negative. All of our potentials would like to be developed. If they are not taken care of, they get furious and work against us.

Beyond this darkness is the…

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Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge