Month: June 2017

Birthdays And Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 14 Comments

When I was younger and heard adults saying things like “I just want to forget about my birthday this year”, I thought that adults were crazy and needed to seriously reconsider the way in which they were living their lives. Why on earth would anyone ever want to forget about their birthday?

For me, birthdays were something to look forward to and something I couldn’t forget about if I tried. Birthdays were about choosing which soft play area you were going to take all of your friends to for the party, buying rainbow coloured bouncy balls to fill party bags with and deciding whether you wanted a Thomas the tank engine or Spice Girls birthday cake ready to decorate with a flaming beacon of candles. Birthdays were about unwrapping incredibly exciting and complicated plastic contraptions that you would then spend the rest of your day watching your mum struggle to assemble amidst an encyclopedia of instructions in every language but English, before finally making it look like the thing on the box, only to realise that batteries were not included, causing your mother to curse the creators of Toys R Us and howl at the moon until the early hours of the morning, Barbie’s camper van standing motionless and taunting you from the corner. Birthdays were about wearing a badge with your age on it to school so that everyone would know how very mature you were and how much respect they should bestow upon you, and no birthday was complete without a trip to TGI Fridays where you would stand on your chair like a king whilst a chorus of red and white striped waiters belted out “Happy Birthday”, the performance concluding with rapturous applause from all around and, if you were lucky, an extra gummy worm in your Mississippi mud pie. With all that to look forward to, how could anyone dread a birthday?

I was sure that I would always look forward to my birthday and would never be one of these fools who looked upon the occasion with anything other than spine tingling excitement. I was wrong.
For the past few years, despite little Katie’s best intentions, I have become one of those people who wants to forget about their birthday, and I think it is because as you get older, birthdays don’t mean the same things as they used to. They become less about gummy worms and birthday cakes and more about time passing you by, life passing you by, which isn’t something you really care about when you are younger and your main focus is getting the bit of icing on the cake that has your favourite cartoon character on it. On top of that however, when you are mentally ill, I think they are especially hard because for me at least, a birthday can feel like a reminder that you have wasted another year drowning in anxiety and the older you get, the longer you have been stuck with this mental illness bothering you all the time.

That said, I guess you can sort of see birthdays and that marker of time passing as a positive thing. This year for example, I turned 25 (I did it last Thursday as a matter of fact and luckily, despite all the dreading and worrying about it talked about in this post, I really did have a lovely birthday, so if you sent me a birthday message or said hello to me at all on the 22nd June then thank you for being someone who made it special. I really appreciate you all so much). Alas! I must get back to the point!
So, turning 25 means I will have been unwell for 14 years. On the plus side, whilst a depressingly long time, it is an improvement in the sense that I can say the number 14 because it is a safe number, unlike the number I used to have to say, (the one that comes between 12 and 14), which is a somewhat difficult number for me to handle in terms of OCD (YAY SILVER LININGS).
Also there is something rather motivating about birthdays in that they often inspire you to make goals of things you are unhappy about and want to change before the next one.
Indeed, I think that as the number of years I have been ill has gone up, the more motivated I have become to fight my illnesses and push as hard as I can for recovery even when it involves doing something scary.

During the first years of my illness when I had to go back a year in school and take time out of education to go into hospital, I was motivated to fight purely because my illnesses were making me unhappy, but not so much because I realised what I was missing out on whilst stuck in my head. Ok I often couldn’t leave the house and I missed out on a few sleepovers with friends, a couple of school trips and several opportunities to share a pizza and watch a movie on a Saturday night, but to begin with, missing the odd pizza isn’t that big a deal. Obviously I would have liked to have done all the things like going bowling with friends and eating popcorn at the cinema, but for me being safe at home not having to touch or eat anything, felt a lot more comfortable. I would have rather stayed in my little bubble avoiding as much anxiety as I could, even if that meant being a little bit lonely, than go out of my bubble and cause myself a lot of distress trying to wear a pair of bowling shoes or eating a mouthful of popcorn. Staying safe was my priority, and if that meant missing out on a few sleepovers/meant less terror, that was a necessary sacrifice I would take. Why terrify yourself for weeks and weeks just trying to get the courage to see a friend for an hour? Better just to avoid it.

However the longer you live with mental illness, the more those little things add up over the years, and suddenly you find you have not just missed the odd sleepover, you have missed hundreds of sleepovers, hundreds of moments in which people took photos and made memories that they reminisce about and fondly recall with sentences beginning “Oh my goodness do you remember when…”. After several years, you haven’t missed one bucket of popcorn, you have missed an entire swimming pool worth of popcorn (not that I advise you put popcorn into a swimming pool…just trying to get the image of how much popcorn we are talking about across), and that amount of popcorn can’t be caught up on as easily as the one bucket you missed in the first place. As the days become months and the months become years, you realise just how much of your life you have missed out on because you were too scared to take part in it, and suddenly the motivation to work even harder to stop the years passing by without you noticing increases, because you finally understand how rubbish it feels to be left so far behind everyone else.

However at the same time, whilst the longer you live with a mental illness the more anger and frustration you have at it to motivate your recovery, the further entrenched you are in that illness and thus the harder it feels to get better. It is a catch 22 situation, the most vicious of all the vicious circles.

Time passes, you get angrier at all the time wasted, you become more motivated to fight but then find it is harder to fight than the first day you tried to challenge yourself because the illness has used the time wasted to dig its claws into you even further. Odd things that started out as little quirks to keep yourself safe become engrained habits and habits are a lot harder to break than things you only did a few times. I have smoked only one cigarette in my life and I will be honest, I hated it. It was like swallowing a smelly smokey fire. Therefore deciding to “give up” on the idea of smoking after that cigarette was not a challenge at all. I had spent longer as someone who didn’t smoke than I had spent as someone who did, it wasn’t a habit and I was not addicted or used to the comfort or feeling of a cigarette in my hand. Now however, I have officially been mentally ill for longer than I have ever been not mentally ill and I have dug myself into a hole so deep that it is far harder to get out of. Years ago I didn’t go to a meal out with friends because it made me uncomfortable, but that uncomfortable feeling has built over the years, and now I don’t go because I am terrified. Eating out doesn’t make me anxious, it makes me feel like I am dying on the inside. The longer you are ill, the more set in your ways you are and the harder it is to get better.

This year then, as always, though I dreaded my birthday as it scares me to think how long I have been trapped in my own mind, I am trying to see it as a positive motivation for change, an opportunity to say “this past 14 years has been hell and I am determined to fight as hard as I can to make sure that number doesn’t go up by one every time my age does”. I am fed up, truly angry every year as I see the growing list of all the opportunities I have missed out on and I really do want things to be different. It is just difficult, ageing with mental illness. As the years pass you may feel more motivated, but at the same time, you just feel more trapped.

Take care everyone x

BirthdayBlog

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Why Are Eating Disorders Competitive?

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 9 Comments

Many people are aware by now of the dangers of eating disorders, the emotional inner turmoil, the isolation, and the potentially fatal consequences. However, one of the biggest dangers that isn’t quite as discussed is the fact that eating disorders can be incredibly competitive. It sounds odd and it is quite hard to explain how an illness can be competitive, but basically if anorexia was ever personified, it would be the person who becomes dangerous when playing board games and is prone to breaking valuable ornaments in the home over an unlucky roll of the dice in a game of Monopoly.

I think most people, often and unknowingly, see other homo sapiens as threats for many different reasons in every day life. At work you may feel in competition with someone to get a promotion, in a supermarket you might choose the best looking bunch of bananas so that yours will be better than those of whatever potassium craving customer comes after you, or in a car park you might discreetly race another vehicle to get the last available space. Maybe your competitive streak involves competing with your gaming arch-nemesis to be captain of the tiddlywinks championship team, whatever it is, at some point in every day, whether we realise it or not, most of us enter into little competitions with our fellow humans and in turn those people become threats.

It is rare however, for people to compete with another person’s illness, and I have often wondered why eating disorders are so different in that respect. Possible reasons I have come up with are things like the tendency for people with eating disorders to naturally be high achieving perfectionistic people, or that eating disorders are an illness that usually involve a lot of numbers and in turn, ways the illness can be “measured”. Obviously, in reality the severity of someone’s eating disorder is impossible to measure no matter how many scales you weigh them on or how many calories you see them eat, but no matter how incorrect the idea, people who do not really understand eating disorders to be a mental illness rather than a physical one, tend to measure the severity of an eating disorder by the physical effects they can potentially lead to. If people see a thin person they will wrongly assume that person to be more “anorexic” than their equally troubled neighbour who just so happens to be a healthy weight. With other illnesses though, this ability to gauge how ill someone is just by looking at them, however inaccurate the final judgement may be, is far more difficult in comparison. For example two people can have a liver disease but when they are walking side by side in a park, you cannot guess as easily who you perceive to be the sickest unless you take a few blood tests and maybe open them up with a scalpel (which would probably lead to them asking why you were wandering around a park asking people for blood tests and performing major operations).

When an illness is seen as focused around numbers then, comparison and thus competition tends to breed. Over the past decade I have met people whose eating disorders have led them (for I highly doubt someone’s individual personality would compete about such things), to compete with regards to numbers as to how much someone weighs, what their BMI is, how many calories they consume, even obscure things like who takes the longest to eat a meal, who has been into hospital the most times or who has the lowest white blood cell count. It is a disgusting, sick and twisted side to the illness since you are basically competing to see who can kill themselves the best, but I cannot deny it happens.
For this reason I actually think the more distanced a sufferer attempting recovery is from the intense eating disorder community, the better. If you are living in the middle of nowhere with a family of healthy people, you simply have your eating disorder to wrestle with (and lord knows one is still far too many). In hospital settings like inpatient eating disorder units, therapy groups, or even social media recovery accounts online, you are surrounded with other sufferers and thus other eating disorders to battle with. Don’t get me wrong, it is lovely to have people you can relate to, but the ability to relate to other people who are unwell and spending large amounts of time with them can lead to a loss of perspective.

Gathering a group of people with eating disorders together, either physically or online, is sort of like gathering a group of wild gorillas in the middle of the rainforest (I would avoid both of these gathering activities if I were you as neither are particularly safe…if you are an avid collector or gatherer may I suggest gathering stamps or Pokemon cards instead).
There are probably a hundred reasons as to why gorillas sometimes stand on their haunches and beat their chests, but from my dedicated research and observation (I watched Tarzan), when a gorilla beats its chest in front of another gorilla, it can be interpreted as “look how big and mighty I am! Have you ever seen such a fine specimen of gorilla? Look at my hairy arms! They are fabulous! I am the best gorilla in all of the world and far superior to you! I am the best! Leave my forest or I will strike your hairy behind! Back off I say! Flee! Flee!”.
All the gorillas in the rainforest will naturally want to be best gorilla around to ensure their survival, establish their right to the most attractive mate or the biggest banana. They aren’t doing it for laughs (maybe the odd titter), but they are naturally born with that competitive instinct so that they can stay alive.
Similarly, when a group of people with eating disorders gather, their internal eating disorder gorillas perk up and start beating their chests to let everyone know that they are the best and strongest eating disorder around. Ironically though, unlike the real gorillas, the “winner” in terms of measuring who is the most physically ill from their eating disorder, the thinnest or the one who has gone the longest without eating, is the least likely to stay alive the longest.

If you are reading this as a healthy minded person you are probably thinking that competing as to who can lose the most weight is ridiculous and sick, and when it comes to that judgment, you would be right.
However I think people often forget how much competition there is with regard to weight loss even in “healthy” circles. On TV shows like The Biggest Loser, people compete to see who can lose the most weight with a cash prize for the winner, and though perhaps less extreme than competing with white blood cell counts, surely this is similar? What about in local weight loss clubs when people compete with their next-door neighbour to see who can lose more weight than anyone in their area in order to be awarded with the sash declaring them “Slimmer of the Year”. When you think about it, in our society, competing around food and weight is not as alien an idea as people with eating disorders can make it seem.

There is however one reason people often suggest as the answer to the “why are eating disorders competitive” question, that I strongly disagree with, and that is the idea that people compete purely because they want to be the “thinnest” and that the competitive drive is all about vanity and outer appearance. If anything, I think the drive is the total opposite to vanity, and more to do with insecurity and low self esteem regarding the internal self.
When you live with an eating disorder you basically live with a voice in your head telling you that everything you do is wrong and no matter how hard you try to please it, it will never be satisfied or see your “efforts” as enough. No matter what you eat, your eating disorder will tell you it was too much. Even if the portion was initially decided by your eating disorder, it will tell you that you could have left a bit or maybe it will tell you that you ate it wrong; too quickly, too slowly or with the wrong sized mouthfuls. Whatever you do, the voice will tell you you are not living up to the standards you should be, you are not good enough.
My drive to lose weight is not to see a nice patch of rib cage, it is to achieve something that my eating disorder tells me is “better” than my former self. Of course there is nothing “better” that can come from starving yourself and if I were talking to any other sufferer I would tell them that the “best” they can be is the healthy version of themselves who is able to nourish their bodies and enjoy a healthy relationship with food. Yet still when it comes to me, the eating disorder somehow manages to manipulate my thoughts in that direction that I am a “better” me, less repulsive, less annoying, less deserving of a punch in the face, if I stick by my eating disorder’s rules. I am constantly held up between my past self, current self and encouraged to compete against them to reach this “superior” future me. When you add another sufferer into the mix then, it is yet another person for my eating disorder to compare me to. No longer is it telling me to lose weight or starve because I am not good enough compared to the potential me I could become if I were to behave myself, now I am also not good enough compared to the person or group of people surrounding me. I don’t follow the rules to the standards my eating disorder would like in an ideal world, and when I am around other people it tells me that I am even more inferior because they are following these stupid rules better than me. I don’t feel competitive because I am vain and want people to admire my collarbones, I feel competitive because I despise myself, because behaving well and following all my rules gives me a sense of self worth, a sense that I am doing something right, so if I am not following the rules “the best”, then I am not good enough.

So why are eating disorders competitive? Well, there are many reasons from internal anorexia gorillas to self hatred, perfectionist personality traits or the ability to compare and misunderstand the importance that physical numbers have to play in a mental illness. Obviously this competitive undercurrent is wrong, needs to be tackled and is disgustingly disordered, but we are dealing with eating “disorders” so I suppose it makes sense. What I want more people to know though, is that of all the reasons, as sick and twisted and horrible as they are, they are not reasons that derive from vanity or any sense of bodily pride compared to the person in the next bed to you. If anything it is about desperation to be good enough in the eyes of a devil that is constantly telling you you are worthless, both in yourself, and in comparison to everybody else.

Take care everyone x

HairiestGorilla

The Numbness Of Depression

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 12 Comments

Trigger warning: This blog post does include a reference to self harm (a very casual one with no details), but if that would trigger you please go and read something more relaxing like a manual telling you how to grow vegetables. I hear it is the perfect time to plant courgettes…

Depression is, technically, one illness named after one emotion. For me however, what depression feels like is different every day. Sometimes having depression is the experience I imagine most people picture depression to feel like, aka some days I am depressed/agonisingly sad. Over the course of any average week though, it is likely that depression will throw up some different negative emotions picked out of its sinister collection. One day the main emotion might be guilt, the next hopelessness, anxiety, anger or even intense pain to the point that I go a bit delirious and start laughing for no reason because I don’t know what else to do. For me, depression is not simply about being depressed, it is about being and feeling many different things and sometimes, in my experience, living with depression is about feeling nothing at all. Today is one of those days.

I think trying to explain what it feels like to be numb is one of the harder aspects of depression to express because…well…it doesn’t FEEL like anything…that is the point…
If I had to try to describe it I would say it’s like you turn into a robot or someone who is sleepwalking. I can walk, talk and carry out mechanical actions when instructed, but I am not really there, sort of the classic the lights are on but no-one’s home because the occupants have decided to go on a Mediterranean cruise for a few weeks (they went waterskiing and had ice-cream on the beach. It really was a wonderful holiday).

When I feel numb I am technically alive in that I am breathing, but there is no real life there, it is just a body on autopilot, a tin man who hasn’t yet been given a heart.
There is no passion, no want or desires. There aren’t even preferences, because when you don’t feel anything, everything in this world is the same so there isn’t anything to choose from.
For example, if you have taste buds, buying a tub of ice cream involves making a choice because all the flavours taste different and will therefore be experienced differently. The tub of vanilla will taste of vanilla, the chocolate of chocolate and the strawberry ice cream will taste of pistachios (there was a mix up at the factory).
If however, all the ice creams were to taste the same, there would be no choice to make, you cannot choose one thing over another when everything tastes of cardboard.
On these numb days, days like today, you could honestly walk up to me and give me the options of either a hug or a punch in the face and I would be indifferent to both of them. Logically I can see that it is nicer to have a hug than a punch in the face, so rationally I can understand that the hug should be my choice, but that choice has no feeling. I don’t want the hug nor do I dread the punch in the face, I just know the one to go for through the same logical process you might use to tick a box in an exam paper of non-verbal comprehension.

On the one hand you would think it might be nice to not feel anything, and you could say that it is better to feel nothing than to feel heart aching sadness. I do not agree.
When you are angry or sad, you get through that emotion by feeling it and living out the experience.
When you are angry you can ride that wave by shouting into a pillow to get the frustration out (be sure to apologise to the pillow later), and when you are sad you can cry until you run out of tears. I actually think that the feeling you get after a really good cry is almost worth all the crying it takes to get there.
When you are numb however, you can’t scream or cry it out because there is nothing there to get out. You can’t whip out some techniques you have used in therapy to calm down, there is no proactive action you can take, you just have to stand there staring into space (you can stare at a TV screen or a tree instead but it won’t make any difference because everything looks the same, like all of the ice cream tasted of cardboard). You just have to sit with it.

If I am feeling numb I often try to motivate some kind of feeling or life back into myself by looking at one of my lists of reasons to stay alive. Sounds a bit dramatic but these days suicidal thoughts are so frequent and loud that I have to have at least one list on me at all times to provide an answer to the question of “Why not just end it now?”.
I have lists on my phone, lists in my diary, on my wardrobe, lists of the people that I love and any possible goals or aspirations for the future.
For example I know that one day I want to be a writer, I want to go to Disneyland, I want to have a cat and a dog, I want to read all of the books I can get my hands on and I want to have a house with one of those bookshelves that has a ladder attached so that I can swing between F.Scott Fitzgerald, Harry Potter and the Bronte sisters like Belle from Beauty and the Beast.

When I am numb however, the lack of desires, want or interest in anything makes these reasons that I hold as fundamental to my survival, redundant. They don’t mean anything. They are just empty words. It makes me sound like a terrible person and there are probably people out there who think I am a terrible person for what I am about to say but the truth is that on days like today, I even look at reasons like “You need to keep fighting for your Mum and Dad” and I feel nothing towards it or my parents.
I know logically that I love them more than anything and I know they are the most wonderful, caring and supportive parents in the world, but I don’t feel that love, I don’t feel that “I love you”, it is merely a factual statement. I can read the words “You need to keep fighting for your mum and dad who you love very much” but that’s all they are. Letters. Words. A variety of marks and symbols made out of ink on a page, words with no more weight, depth, significance or profound importance than a casual offhand comment someone might make about how much milk they like in their tea. “I love my family” should have far more passion in it than “just a splash of milk please” but again, I am numb, the feelings are on mute, everything is the same. Everything is cardboard.

Similarly, there are many reasons as to why I struggle with self harm. Sometimes I do it because I feel that I need to be punished, need to release some built up anxiety rushing through my veins, need to make an invisible pain visible so that I can understand it, and sometimes on numb days, I do it to try and get myself to feel something. ANYTHING, even if that feeling is unpleasant.
Today I self harmed to try and inspire the life back into me, shock the system from robot mode to human just as you might pinch someone to wake them from a dream. I thought that if I caused the body pain, my mind would come back to feel it and then maybe I could cry and feel better, but even though I could see the damage on my body I couldn’t feel a thing. It was like harming a very lifelike mannequin.

Today then, that is what depression feels like for me. It feels like nothing. I feel numb. Everything is cardboard. Today, I have no passion. All I have are these words, so that is what I am giving to you. I hope you find some meaning in them.

Take care everyone x

RobotKatie

Is Donald Trump Mentally Ill?

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 2 Comments

Since his inauguration in January 2017, there have been a lot of articles written about Donald Trump and considering he is now President of the United States (feel free to cry uncontrollably about this), that is not a surprise. The job of President of the United States is not exactly one you apply for if your goal in life is to keep a low profile and avoid people noticing you. Of all the articles I have seen there have been serious statements about his political endeavours as well as more lighthearted comments about how his hair always looks like it is trying to escape (and who can blame it), or a more recent movement talking about how much his chin looks like a frog. Lately though, more than people comparing the lower part of his face to a tadpole laying amphibian, people have been writing about the fact that Donald Trump is so outrageous in his running of the country that he must be mentally ill.

Now, I am not denying the possibility that this is the case and that Donald Trump is indeed suffering from a mental health condition. I am not a psychologist who can make a statement either way on the matter and funnily enough I have never met old frog face (sorry, “President Trump”), as he lives in America and he doesn’t tend to hang out in the places that I am frequently found (aka my nearest Eating Disorder support service and my local Co-op.) For this reason I cannot meaningfully make accusations either way with regard to the accuracy of these claims. Maybe he is mentally ill, maybe he is not, but my issue with the whole thing is the fact that Donald Trump is only one in a long line of outrageous unpopular characters who has their persona explained away by the idea that they must be mentally ill. You hear it all the time from the newspapers to day to day conversation. If anyone ever says something ridiculous or if you ever hear about some murderer on the loose, people make comments like “they are clearly mad”, “they ought to be committed” or, as my Dad says, “their mind’s addled and they ought to have their bumps read”.

Of course, I understand that in some cases criminals are mentally ill and are therefore sent to psychiatric hospitals rather than prison, so I am not denying that diagnosable madness is never the cause of a crime or a foolish opinion. That said, this is not the case for EVERY crime or every stupid statement made and stating this idea over and over again, always explaining a murder or Donald Trump with the label “the person is mentally ill”, does nothing but perpetuate the mental health stigma that already exists and that damages the general “crazy” common folk like myself. I am always saying that nobody should ever be ashamed of being mentally ill and a lot of charities and celebrities have lately been supporting this message, coming out with their stories to encourage others to speak out and seek help. Is it any wonder people are afraid to say that they have a problem though, when the word “crazy” has become synonymous with actions or opinions that people think make someone a bad person.

Every time I read a headline that says “Donald Trump is like someone who is mentally ill” it feels like someone is instead saying “Donald Trump is like Katie Simon Phillips”. Obviously I realise it isn’t personal to me specifically but the comparison of Donald Trump to someone with a diagnosed mental health problem does lead to a large group of people who are unwell and who have no similarities to our floppy haired President, being lumped in the same category of some horrible Venn diagram. It just doesn’t feel fair. Why do I have to be shoved into the same category as Donald Trump? I have never threatened to build a wall (much to my Dad’s disappointment, he really needs help building our new conservatory), I have never stolen anyone’s health insurance and though I admit to having insecurities and am not the biggest fan of my appearance, I don’t think that my chin is particularly reminiscent of a toad. Admittedly I walk like and have similarities to a penguin, but a toad? Seems a bit harsh if you ask me.

Like I said, I know that whenever anyone makes statements like these they are not meaning to speak negatively of the mentally ill people of our world, but I think that it is because it is so unintentional and “unmeant” that it is such a problem. Mental health problems are so synonymous with criminal acts or outrageous opinions that you don’t even have to make an effort to draw a connection, it is automatic. I have personally found it particularly frustrating with Donald Trump especially, because one of the main things people accuse him of is having some kind of personality disorder, a diagnosis I have myself. This specific correlation seems even more personal than “he is mentally ill like you” because it lists a specific condition I am familiar with and I am sure it feels personal to many people out there.
“He needs serious therapy”, “he needs medication”, “he needs to be hospitalised” the people cry, and I find myself wanting to wave my arms about and cry back “yeah. a lot of us do, but that doesn’t mean that we are bad people or power hungry tyrants who discriminate against a variety of genders, sexualities and races that don’t fit into his perfect ideal of the “straight white male”. Not everyone who needs medication wants to build a wall, not everyone who needs intense therapy has got to that point because they have committed a crime and not everyone in hospital is roaming the corridors with ridiculous hair (although to be fair to people I do at least fit into that one.)

In a sense I suppose it is good that there is more of an awareness as to the things that could influence a person’s behaviour. These days people are seen less in the black and white “heaven or eternal damnation” terms than they were in the middle ages. People don’t see others as simply “good” or “bad”, even villains in movies tend to get backstories these days and are rarely the two dimensional moustache twirling creatures of pointless evil, with no more desires or motivation than those who used to tie people to train tracks in silent movies. They say every Saint has a past and every sinner has a future and I fully agree with that as well as the ideas that human actions and behaviours are often far more complex than they appear on the surface. Nevertheless, why can’t we accept at the same time that as complex and intricate as minds and motivations are, sometimes there are still things that are random, things that don’t make sense and that how things look on the surface may occasionally be a good representation of what is underneath. Why do people have to see the morally questionable things Donald Trump says and does and explain them as a sign of a diagnosed mental illness that needs therapy and emergency hospitalisation. Why can’t we see things he says or does that we perceive as idiotic and explain them simply as due to the fact that he is indeed a bit of an idiot. Maybe this sounds incredibly politically incorrect, but to be honest as someone who is frequently likened to and lumped in the same pile as Donald Trump, I am bored of being politically correct. I just think that people we decide are bad people and moustache twirling villains, did not all disappear the day we discovered the explanation of mental illness. Mentally ill people exist, but so can complete and utter plonkers who have nothing to do with mental health problems.

So back to my original question and the title of this blog. Is Donald Trump mentally ill? I DON’T KNOW (bet you are glad you read all those words to get to that groundbreaking conclusion). Maybe he is perfectly fine in the head and maybe he is totally off his rocker, but either way can we please stop with this need to compare anyone who commits a crime or has a political stance that many regard as offensive, to people who are mentally ill. I am mentally ill but I am not Donald Trump and neither are a lot of people out there who I have met in psychiatric units, passed in the therapy waiting room or stood behind when queuing up for their latest prescription of anti depressants. Like I said mentally ill people exist, idiots with mental health problems exist, but sometimes, if someone is behaving like an idiot, maybe they are just an idiot.

Take care everyone x

Trump