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!)
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!)
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!)
Saturday, 9 April 2011
'..the best is yet to come...'
It was my intention when I started this blog a little over a year ago to have said everything I wanted to say about mental health by now. Yet I still have a mountain of half-written material. And I must go on, what’s to come is my best work, and builds on the foundations of everything posted so far. I guess I still have about a year to go (assuming my other responsibilities stay the same) before I can leave here, cross to my other blog Hunter-gatherer - the past in us ( http://hunter-gathers.blogspot.com/ ) and begin on the subject that really drives me - evolutionary anthropology. So, I thought I’d just write a short piece about where all the previous posts are leading to.
What is still to come, is first The Recovery Movement (part three); the final article on the Recovery approach looking at two local attempts to put it into practice. That should be followed by my completing an essay (about 6000 words) on my last experience of being an inpatient in 2005, a period for which I have complete medical, nursing, ambulance and police records. It’s working title is I Know, Because I Was There - health records and personal recall, two versions of a ‘psychotic’ episode. Once completed it can then be reformatted into three or four (not too long) blog posts. Following that is another essay for which I’ve allowed my myself 6000 words, and called Challenging Expertise - my misadventures in mental health education; which charts and reflects upon my experience of being a service user in education, being a service user undertaking training in mental health work, and on how academia (at all levels) trains it’s workforce and researches it’s subject. Hopefully it too will convert to three or four reasonable sized posts. This should be rapidly followed by ‘the thesis that never was’, Ways Of Being With - rethinking expertise in mental health. This was the research project which was rejected by a local university and caused me not to complete my M.Sc in Mental Health. It will run to about 12,000 words (half that already) but, minus the stuff I’ve written about before, it should be dividable into six post-sized chunks. It explores the wealth of tacit knowledge involved with being with people in mental distress, then offers a radically different (compared with current practice that is) way of thinking and behaving when trying to be an effective helper. In fact if offers a lot of ancient heuristics which are being re-emphasised as a result of the findings of neuroscience. Then comes The Sound Of Water - on the possibility of an ecotherapy. This piece is a critical exploration of the idea that there can be an ecopsychology and by extension, ecotherapy. Though many practicing green care claim that it amounts to ecotherapy, very little has been written or researched about it. It will also include an application of the principles of Ways Of Being With. Again another four or so posts. Finally Natural Mental Health, a post which asserts that there is such a thing as normal, or better still natural, mental and physical fitness (you can’t really separate mind and body) and that there is excellence in living, which can and should be emulated. After all, imitation is, what is special about human learning.
Needless to say these six projects (amounting to about twenty more posts) have been progressing in parallel for sometime (they need to, if they’re all to fit together!) The final piece should, at one and the same time, become the first post on the new blog about pre-agricultural ‘forms of life’ - how we have spent 95% of our real history as hunter-gatherers, and how that legacy is still with us.
What is still to come, is first The Recovery Movement (part three); the final article on the Recovery approach looking at two local attempts to put it into practice. That should be followed by my completing an essay (about 6000 words) on my last experience of being an inpatient in 2005, a period for which I have complete medical, nursing, ambulance and police records. It’s working title is I Know, Because I Was There - health records and personal recall, two versions of a ‘psychotic’ episode. Once completed it can then be reformatted into three or four (not too long) blog posts. Following that is another essay for which I’ve allowed my myself 6000 words, and called Challenging Expertise - my misadventures in mental health education; which charts and reflects upon my experience of being a service user in education, being a service user undertaking training in mental health work, and on how academia (at all levels) trains it’s workforce and researches it’s subject. Hopefully it too will convert to three or four reasonable sized posts. This should be rapidly followed by ‘the thesis that never was’, Ways Of Being With - rethinking expertise in mental health. This was the research project which was rejected by a local university and caused me not to complete my M.Sc in Mental Health. It will run to about 12,000 words (half that already) but, minus the stuff I’ve written about before, it should be dividable into six post-sized chunks. It explores the wealth of tacit knowledge involved with being with people in mental distress, then offers a radically different (compared with current practice that is) way of thinking and behaving when trying to be an effective helper. In fact if offers a lot of ancient heuristics which are being re-emphasised as a result of the findings of neuroscience. Then comes The Sound Of Water - on the possibility of an ecotherapy. This piece is a critical exploration of the idea that there can be an ecopsychology and by extension, ecotherapy. Though many practicing green care claim that it amounts to ecotherapy, very little has been written or researched about it. It will also include an application of the principles of Ways Of Being With. Again another four or so posts. Finally Natural Mental Health, a post which asserts that there is such a thing as normal, or better still natural, mental and physical fitness (you can’t really separate mind and body) and that there is excellence in living, which can and should be emulated. After all, imitation is, what is special about human learning.
Needless to say these six projects (amounting to about twenty more posts) have been progressing in parallel for sometime (they need to, if they’re all to fit together!) The final piece should, at one and the same time, become the first post on the new blog about pre-agricultural ‘forms of life’ - how we have spent 95% of our real history as hunter-gatherers, and how that legacy is still with us.
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