Careless In The Community: December 2011

What gets called mental disorder or illness, mild or severe, shows itself as a misplaced fear of others. Personal relationships break down, followed by an inability to form and maintain new ones. The sufferer becomes progressively more emotionally and cognitively isolated. Madness results from our failure to constantly update and modify our mental map of the world. If we do not ‘test’ our predictions, beliefs, dreams, thoughts, internal dialogue, fantasies, hypotheses, plans, ideas about how the world is, and what the people within it think and feel, our map becomes rapidly out of date. If we act with an out of date model of the world - we will look mad to others, and they will treat us as mad. If others don’t share a large part of our model of reality we are emotionally and cognitively isolated. We need an accurate map; by sharing we come to have a more complete understanding than we could ever achieve alone. The ability to doubt and live with uncertainty, and hence know that we must constantly test our vision of the world - is sanity. To control and fix our view is the first step on the road to disaster and the way an unchanging outlook is maintained is by isolating oneself from any evidence that might contradict it. An unmodified and out of date model of the world is one where our thoughts and feelings are anchored in the past, hence our predictions of the future may be hopelessly wrong.

Saturday 3 December 2011

Announcement - Rules Of Engagement (revised)

I'm still happy to meet and talk to anyone about any aspect of mental health, but it has to be in a public place and not a mental health facility (as has been my 'policy' for 18 months now). However, due to caring responsibilities (and also to fit-in with my usual flaneuring activities), 'cafe conferences' and 'street therapy' now have a more or less fixed timetable - Monday, Totnes; Wednesday, Newton Abbot; Friday, Torquay; Saturday, Exeter. Tuesday/ Thursday part-day, Teignmouth.

Usual contact arrangements, or just hit on me at one of my regular 'offices'.

(Please note; from 1.1.15 all mental health related activities are now suspended - until I get significant amount of writing done!)

Want to recover your mental wellbeing? How it's done!

Give your time and loyalty to those people you instinctively like or are attracted to in some way; imitate the way they behave, the things they do and say, the way they think and feel; learn the skills they have but which you don’t - your attraction or attachment to them will provide the motivation.

Don’t let anyone do anything for you, unless they let you do something for them; equalise the relationship by demanding reciprocity and partnership.

Only ever do things for yourself or others because it feels like the right thing to do; never in pursuit of any ideal about what is ‘appropriate’, ‘politically correct’, moral or just. Outcomes then become easy to live with.

Be aware that your emotions are always a response to what your senses are telling you in the present moment, and that thoughts follow emotions. If they seem to come from the past, something in the present is cueing them. Learn to let go of unwanted thoughts - from a past that is gone, and about a future which is unknowable.