On a scale of 1-10, how crazy are you?
In this TEDMed video (15 minutes), actor and playwright Elizabeth Kenny “performs an excerpt from her play – ‘Sick’ – dramatizing her horrifying journey through the American medical system”:
bipolar
Rethinking the Use of Psychiatric Drugs
In “ Rethinking the Use of Psychiatric Drugs ” (Nov. 2016), Robert Whitaker writes: “As prescriptions for antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs have risen, the number of people disabled by mental disorders, in country after country, has risen in lockstep.” He continues: Psychiatric drugs do not…
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Literature and Mental Health: Reading for Wellbeing
This free, online course is offered by FutureLearn (owned by the Open University), who say: “Find out how poems, plays and novels can help us understand and cope with deep emotional strain. The great 18th century writer Dr Samuel Johnson, who suffered from…
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Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness
Written by Robert Whitaker, the first edition of this book appeared in 2010. The publishers say: “In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally…
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On Just Being Crazy Enough
In this 6 minute video from TED’s Full Spectrum Auditions, Joshua Walters, a young beat boxer who is also bipolar, talks about why he views his mental illness as mental skillness:
The impact of social prescribing on people and communities
In this 5 minute video (see below), Debs Taylor describes the impact of attending Creative Minds’ art classes in her recovery from mental illness. The video was recorded at a King’s Fund conference – “Social prescribing: from rhetoric to reality” – on 18 May 2017: …
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Art allowed me to express myself in a way I had never done before. I’ve come so far since my desperate suicide attempt
Writing in The Guardian , Debbie Taylor: “When I was growing up in the 1970s, mental health issues were not widely understood or discussed. One morning when I was eight-years-old, I woke up in bed and felt funny, I was shaking. It…
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Understanding Bipolar Disorder
Why some people experience extreme mood states and what can help. ‘I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic depressive illness … Strangely enough I think I would choose to have it. It’s…
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