Time to change

There are very few things in this world that I really care about, but this is one of them. If you want a nice light-hearted start to your day then you might want to stop reading. Come back tomorrow. There may be puppies and rainbows. Puppies sliding on rainbows. Puppies sliding on rainbows while eating sherbet and blowing bubbles. Today, however, there will be the topic of mental health. I talk pretty frankly about my experiences with depression, because I think it's really important that people understand how common it is. There's a huge stigma attached to mental illness, which just ought not to be there, and the only way it's ever going to go away is if people talk about it. It's an uncomfortable subject for many. I've discovered over the years that a lot of people would rather I just didn't mention it, and I wonder why it bothers them so much. It could be that they're scared, in the same way some people don't like you to say the word 'cancer'. As if somehow, by saying the word out loud, you might call the illness down upon yourself. Maybe it's that people think I should be ashamed of my mental health 'issues' (god how I hate that word), and it's my frankness about it that bothers them. Or maybe it's simply that it's not a particularly fun subject to discuss. I suspect that the way people respond to the topic says more about their attitude to their own mental health than it does about their attitude to mine, but a stunning one in four people will experience a mental health problem of some sort at some point in their lives, so you'd have to be pretty damn lucky for it never to affect you or someone you care about. Doesn't that make it worth erasing the prejudice? The days of lock 'em up forever asylums are long gone, and so should be the stigma surrounding 'madness'. Frankly it's hard enough to deal with a problem of this type, without ignorant people treating you like you're crazy or telling you to snap out of it.

The Time to Change website has lots more information, and allows you to make a pledge to end mental health discrimination.

Now...onto the puppies...