i grow more weary of #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek every year. everyone knows about mental health. “ask for help” is insulting when services are so shit. everyone loves a nice neat recovery story but no one wants to hear about chronic, upsetting, boring, debilitating mental illness

i want awareness of still-stigmatised diagnoses like BPD, about criminally overstretched services, about pushing ill people into work, about creeping police coercion & SIM, about racial prejudice in care, about abusive involuntary treatment, about hasty discharge from psych wards

i want awareness of psych drug side effects, of professionals who minimise these and are uninformed about withdrawal, about brash doctors who brush off physical issues as mental illness & vice versa, about condescending psychiatrists who ignore lived experience and patient wishes

i want awareness of broken crisis intervention systems, of the mire of admin bullshit patients regularly have to wade through to have any hope of being seen never mind treated, of unfair, damaging sanctions against people who miss appointments only through fault of mental illness

i want awareness of severely mentally ill people choosing to live medication-free, of people who relapse repeatedly and are unable to “recover” in any conventional sense, of how they are no less worthy of compassionate care simply because their conditions are deemed “too complex”

i want awareness of staggering rates of mental illness in homeless people, of a society that turns its back on addicts rather than offers ways to help them manage their illness, that scorns them and denies them proper care if they freely choose to continue using drugs or alcohol

talking with friends, having cups of tea, taking bubble baths and walking in nature are all nice, relaxing things! but i don’t think we need to be told that! and they certainly can’t fix a broken mental health system which seeks quick-fixes and regularly fails the chronically ill

(btw i know #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek is next week, i just wanted to have a little early rant lol)

imo just about the best thing you can do for upcoming #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek is read up on the dangerous SIM model of mental health care and sign the petition asking for its rollout to be halted: http://chng.it/kgkzPVZJ  #StopSIM @StopSIMMH https://twitter.com/stopsimmh/status/1386651484528459779