We Are Amazing

Hello readers!  Apologies for my long silence – most of my time and energy have been taken up with work and cycle training recently – but there is no excuse for not writing and I will endeavour to post a bit more regularly in the future (people tell me one of the best ways to get good blog readership is to post regularly, so I hope I still have some despite my atrocious irregularity!!).

I should take a leaf from his book and blog more often!

I’d like to clarify that the fact I haven’t published anything on here in a while doesn’t mean I’ve lost my enthusiasm for the things I write about.  I suppose I’ve had less energy to think and write about these things because work has been tough going, but right now I’m sort of feeling a new lease of life and hoping it lasts!

Recently I’ve met and had discussions with a fair few people who share my views on mental health, body image, etc.  The feeling I get is there are a lot of us, which makes it even more frustrating that things aren’t changing more quickly.  Anyway, my favourite encounter happened a few weeks ago when I discovered a new musical hero, who by fortunate coincidence was the support act at a gig I went to.  She goes by the name Philippa Hanna, and one of her songs in particular struck a chord with me (pin not intended!!).  Well, more to the point, the sentiment behind the song struck a chord (this is one thing I really like about this girl - she is a proper singer-songwriter and gave a little synopsis of each song before performing it - nice touch!). 

Philippa talked of how in the past she would do things like go on crazy diets to try and conform to the image of ‘beauty’ prescribed by the media.  Sometimes she thought that she couldn’t get a record deal because physically she wasn’t beautiful enough.  Then, she tells us, she realised it wasn’t necessary to do this, that she was beautiful the way she was, that each one of us should be happy with ourselves because “no one else can be you”.  She then wrote a lovely song called I Am Amazing, which illustrates her change of heart and encourage others to challenge negative thoughts about themselves.  I don’t feel I’ve done this justice as I remember Philippa putting it a lot more nicely and eloquently than I have!  But the point is that there are just too many people striving for unrealistic and impossible ideals of ‘beauty’ because it is drummed into is culturally that this is what we should do.  We need to break free from this viscous circle of media distortion and unhealthy behaviour. 

Let's stop striving for unrealistic ideals of physical beauty

Mental illness is on the up, particularly amongst young people, and I feel that this problem is a big contributing factor to this.  Probably my favourite lyric from the song is Not gonna listen to the voices of my enemies today.  I see the harmful ideals being imposed on people by today’s Western culture almost as an enemy that needs to be challenged, and re-shaped into a healthier form.  This is one of several big cultural changes that I strongly feel need to take place, and I’m determined to contribute to making this happen.

After I saw Philippa Hanna perform, I was fortunate enough to have a brief but interesting conversation with her and told her how pleased I was to hear her speaking the way she had about body image and the media.  She mentioned to me that there have been attempts in the past to pass a law the required all airbrushed images to be labelled as such.  Sadly such a law has not been passed.  Personally I think this would be a very positive step towards reducing the current problem whereby such a great number of young people are taking unhealthy steps towards unobtainable ideals in appearance.  Perhaps my next step will be to start a petition to make this happen… Who’s with me?!

All We Do Is Aim For Better Things

Hello readers; and thank you for being here!  I must begin with an apology, as once again I’ve allowed myself to slack and haven’t written a post for some time.  I could make excuses such as “I’ve recently moved house” and “I’ve started a new job”, but I won’t (both are true, but I’m confident I could’ve found the time to write something if I’d really tried!).

Onwards!  I like to think it doesn’t matter too much how long I go without posting something, as long as people enjoy reading it when I do.  So please do enjoy, leave comments and share if you think it’s worth sharing.

When I was thinking about what to write about this evening, I was going to refer to my little notebook of ideas(!) when I realised I’m always writing about things I don’t like about how, things that I want to change.  What about things that are good, I asked myself; why not write about those?  Which brings me to today’s topic: things that I think are great about mental health services.

Those of you who know me or read my blog will know of my passion for mental health, and those who know me will know I’ve been working at a mental health hospital since February this year.  Whilst I believe there are many things that need to change about mental health services, I love working at the hospital.  We have fantastic teams that provide really good care to people that really need it.  Staff are passionate about helping their patients and are amazing at working together and supporting each other, even in times of real adversity.  There is constant striving towards providing better care.  Incidentally, this is where my inspiration for the title of this post came from (I like to name my posts after songs and lyrics).  In case you’re interested, this particular title is a lyric from a lovely folk musician by the name of Seth Lakeman.

Speaking of improvement, it happens that just this week two brand new wards are opening in the hospital I work at.  They feature a combination of light, airy communal spaces, vibrant colour schemes, homely en-suite bedrooms and fantastic facilities that I think will be really conducive to recovery.  It really pleases me that spaces like this are being created to care for people experiencing severe mental health difficulties, and I look forward to seeing more if it in the future and to being involved in an organisation where these things are happening right now.

My main inspiration for this post is around something that, quite rightly, is becoming more and more prominent in modern mental health services: peer support.  Evidence is mounting to suggest that this is probably one of the most important factors in recovery from mental illness.  Simply giving patients a chance to talk about their difficulties with each other can be really helpful.   For some, this will be giving them an arena in which to disclose things about themselves that perhaps they have never felt able to tell anyone before.  For others, simply knowing that others are experiencing similar difficulties may be comforting.  Perhaps a patient who has had difficulty trusting others will find that they can in this setting.  At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why it works, but it does, so I’m really glad to see it being used more and more in our services!

Today I attended an ‘away day’ (we didn’t actually go anywhere!) with one of the teams I work in, and we were fortunate enough to have some peer specialists with us.  They spoke to us about their own experiences, their recovery processes and their current endeavours and successes in wellness.  Hearing from people like this inevitably inspires me and reminds me why I’ve chosen to pursue a career in mental health in the first place.  I am grateful that there are people like this around to inspire, motivate and instil hope and positivity in patients and staff alike.  Thanks peer specialists! 

On that note, this feels like an appropriate place to finish.  I hope you've enjoyed reading this; it feels good to have written about something really positive for a change... I’m looking forward to (hopefully) having many more positive things to write about in the future!  As always, thank you for reading and I would love it if you could leave a comment and share with others.  Thank you!

Different But The Same?

This post is inspired by a research talk I went to a few days ago, which in basic terms was to do with the relationships between eating disorder (ED) symptoms and emotional processing difficulties.  As you might expect intuitively, there was found to be a greater incidence of emotion processing difficulties amongst ED patients than that their healthy counterparts.  There were some other interesting findings, but the thing that really got me thinking was something not covered by the researchers… 

An explanation of correlations - in case you don't know!!

Allow me to explain!  When introducing the research and talking about the methodology, the researcher mentioned that one of the things they had measured was depression symptoms (using the Beck Depression Inventory, or BDI), but that since there was so much data she wouldn’t be discussing this in her short 30 minute presentation!  Naturally this disappointed me slightly, as someone with a very keen interest in depression.  So, once the talk was over and it was time for questions from the audience, I couldn’t help but ask how the BDI data had been used.  She explained that they had looked at the correlations between this and the various forms of emotional processing difficulty, in the same way as they had correlated these with ED symptoms.  BUT… “Did you look at the correlation between depression and eating disorder symptoms?” I asked!  “No” was the answer, but I got thinking about what the outcomes might be if they did…

What I’m thinking is this: although I’m purely speculating at this point, I think it’s fairly likely that there would be correlations between depression symptoms and ED symptoms.  In fact, in the study I have been talking about, a higher number of anorexia patients suffered from depression than healthy controls.  What I would like to know is what are the relationships between specific ED symptoms (for example, weight concern and eating concern) and depression?

Could depression and eating disorder symptoms be, to an extent, 'different but the same'?

Why am I so interested to know this?  Well, given the general in-my-opinion-too-high levels of weight and eating concern in Western society today, and the also-too-high depression rates, I feel this type of information could be very useful in combatting and preventing these types of problems.  

If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll already know that I have strong feelings about some of the things that should be happening to combat problems with body image and mental health.  If what I’ve suggested about the links between the two is true, this brings a whole new level of importance to combatting these problems!  (I realise I have made a swift shift from eating disorder symptoms to body image in the general population, but I think it’s fair to say that many people who wouldn’t necessarily be classed as having an eating disorder do experience high levels of weight and/or eating concern). 

If my claim that depression and ED symptoms are correlated is substantiated, this would mean we should be working towards interventions that aim to tackle both issues simultaneously; and given the high incidence of both, this could be extremely beneficial!  How we do this is a different question altogether, but as I’ve eluded to in previous posts, I think that schools and the media have very significant roles to play.  

Food for thought!

I realise this is all a bit woolly as it’s based on my own speculations to an extent – I do plan to try and find some relevant research literature and will be sure to do a more evidence-based post when I do! – But in the meantime, I hope you’ll agree, it certainly gives us some (excuse the pun) food for thought! 




 
Links:

Information about the Beck Depression Inventory:

http://www.apa.org/pi/about/publications/caregivers/practice-settings/assessment/tools/beck-depression.aspx 

Feeling The Moment

Is it just me, or is the world becoming far too reliant on technology and social media these days?!  
 

I have to admit, I’m guilty of it myself: I love my social media, updating my status when I’m out & about and showing off about all the fun I’m having (!), and get very annoyed when my mobile internet doesn’t work!  But it seems that people of the Western world are coming to 'need' their smartphones, tablets and various other gadgets a little bit too much.  I refer to two examples and how these show that an over-reliance on technology is becoming a bit of a problem…

 Firstly, whilst I can’t for the life of me remember who it was, I very distinctly remember someone telling me about a time they had been travelling on a bus around school leaving time and had therefore been on the bus with a number of teens going home.  Apparently these kids spent the entire journey pretty much in silence, then, when one of them was getting off, he turned to the others and said “Facebook tonight yeah?!”.  So they’ve just spent 20 minutes sat with each other not interacting, and instead they’re going to chat online when they get home?! Madness!  It seems that if things don’t change soon, people are going to end up losing  the ability to communicate face to face.  Worrying isn’t it?!

 This reminds me of one of the first iPad adverts, which I’ve put a link to below.  The gist of this ad is that ‘we’ll still do all the things we do now, but the way in which we do them will never be the same’.  In some cases, fair play, but one of the examples given is going to meetings -  Apple, this is not a good thing! – I personally feel that talking to someone via a screen just isn’t an acceptable alternative to interacting face-to-face, but maybe I’m just overreacting?  What do you think? 

I've also noticed on some adverts that people seem to be playing musical instruments on the iPad - a bizarre and surely inadequate alternative to the real deal I think!

Anyway, onto my second example, which comes from a conversation I had with a friend a while back that has always stuck in my head: she was telling me how her younger brother seems to always ‘need’ to have about 5 apps running on his phone all at once, and struggles concentrate properly on a single task, such as having a regular conversation.  As well as demonstrating the problem of a loss of face-to-face communication, there is something else that concerns me about this.  

Is social media slowly making us lose the ability to interact face-to-face?

For a bit of context, I’ll just explain that I was recently reading some information about DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy).  DBT is essentially about learning skills to change behavioural, emotional and cognitive (thinking) patterns in a way that helps you to cope with life’s problems and challenges.  Whilst it is a therapy for people who have particular difficulties, I think we could all learn something from DBT and that some of the strategies would be helpful for anyone who wants to enjoy optimum mental wellbeing.  One of the things that struck me when I was reading about DBT was this: 

“Do one thing at a time.  When you are eating, eat.  When you are walking, walk. … When you are in a group, or a conversation, focus your attention on the very moment you are in with the other person.  When you are thinking, think…” and so on.

"When you are eating, eat." - Enjoy the moment!

This reminded me of my second example and also made me think about my own tendency to often be doing several things at once.  Our technology-saturated lives lend themselves to a craving for constant stimulation, but I think it’s fair to say that if we all slowed down a little bit and really enjoyed a moment, just sometimes, it might help us to all be a little bit happier.  Maybe!

In sum, whilst technology is great and has it’s many benefits and uses, if it continues to develop the way it is now, I fear that it will completely take over and people will lose the ability to communicate with each other face-to-face and to really enjoy experiences.  Let’s all take a little step back from it and see if we find ourselves feeling a bit more happy and relaxed!

 

Links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSRPWWSeJww

Life Left To Go

If you’ve read my earlier post Staring at The Sun, you’ll know that I’m passionate about issues surrounding mental health.  One of my main concerns is lack of awareness of mental health issues and the treatment available amongst young people, and one of the bodies that I think can be most helpful in tackling this is schooling.  Today, one of my colleagues showed me a report on mental health services provision in schools, which was put together by the St Albans Youth Council (SAYC).  The report is based on research into the awareness of and need for counselling services in schools, and makes some amazingly pertinent and important observations and recommendations, most of which I whole-heartedly agree with.  I’d like to summarise some of them here in the hope that others will share my enthusiasm, spread the word and where possible take steps to act on them. 

The SAYC contextualise their report by noting that their concern for mental health was brought on by what they saw as an alarmingly high number of incidences of suicide among young people in their region.  Touchingly, they dedicate the report to those young people who felt that this was the only option available to them.  What better reason could we want to work towards improved mental health, to ensure young people get the support they need during difficult times?  I share a vision with SAYC that by providing appropriate levels of support and signposting, we can make all those who are suffering realise that there are other solutions to their problems.  I find that songs can express my own thoughts and feelings better than I can half the time, and a simple but effective lyric that springs to mind is “There’s more life left to go…”.

One of the main points I want to iterate is that there quite clearly is not enough mental health provision out there for young people.  In their report the SAYC note that a local charity that provides talking therapies for young people had recently had to close their waiting list, because the need for help was simply too great for the provision available.  Whether this is due to a lack of funding, lack of willingness by those in power, or something else, I don’t know.  What I do know is that, if we want to stop young people from reaching a critical stage in their mental illness, whatever the cost, the need for mental health services needs to be given a lot more attention in the coming years on both local and national levels. 

The SAYC collected data using questionnaires in 11 schools in their region. Whilst all but one of the schools provided a counselling service, an average of 65% of pupils were not aware of this provision; in some schools this figure was in excess of 80%.  Quite rightly, the authors therefore recommend that schools use better signposting to ensure that pupils know what help is available to them, both inside and outside of the school setting.  As we can see from my previous point, the need for services is far greater than the provision as it is.  But I ask this:  what is the point in providing a service for young people if they simply aren’t aware of it and therefore cannot make use of it?

Another part of this report I find particularly striking is to do with factors that deter pupils from seeking counselling.  Those rated highest were those regarding privacy, such as ‘fear of friends finding out’ and ‘school setting’.  In other words, young people do not want to seek help for mental health issues because of fear of people finding out.  At first glance, this might suggest that we need to provide better signposting to services outside of schools, to reduce the fear of friends finding out.  But the wider issue highlighted here is the stigma around seeking help for mental health problems.  If young people saw it as socially acceptable to do this, then surely friends finding out would not be a deterrent from seeking help? 

For me, this all goes back to the need to educate young people about mental health, bringing it to their awareness in the same way as physical health.  I’m pretty sure a young person wouldn’t think twice about seeking medical attention for, let’s say, a sprained ankle, so why on earth should they feel any differently about a mental health problem?  As Nick Clegg has recently noted, “mental health must have the same priority as physical health”.  I don’t often have a great deal of time for what our ‘top’ politicians say, but I couldn’t agree more with this!

There’s a lot more I could say, but I’ll leave it here to keep this a reasonable reading length!  I hope you will all agree that this is absolutely one of the most critically important issued faced by our society today.  If there is one small thing you can do to help the cause, such as sign the Time To Change pledge (link below), increase awareness by sharing this page with other people, or signposting a young person in need to a local mental health service yourself, that would be amazing.  If you’re someone who has the power to do something big like take steps towards increasing funding, or set up a new mental health service, even better!  As my song lyric from earlier goes, ‘there’s more life left to go’, and I really do believe that the quality of that life can be enhanced for a lot of people with the right services and strategies in place. 

Thanks for reading and comments welcome as always.

Links:

http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/pledgewall