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July 7 - July 21, 2023
The job I feared turned out to be life-enhancing, heart-warming, heart-breaking, sometimes grim, occasionally terrifying and often funny.
people with serious mental illness can say or do funny things, sad things or bad things; be brave, resolute, irritating, selfish, generous, kind, cruel or petty just like everybody else.
patients are not just people like you and me; they are you and me – you and me and the guy next door, and the girl you went out with, and your brother and sister, and mother and father, and son and daughter – just people who happen, sometimes once in their lives, sometimes on a chronic basis, to contract a psychiatric illness.
‘The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.’
it is the grossest insult to people with mental illness to consider them as distorting views of a normal reality – human fairground mirrors.
He was as melancholy as autumn
Holding a mirror up to dementia patients can be a merciless thing to do.
Though the body looked the same, the person they loved had long since left it. It was like visiting a grave.
there are as many illnesses as there are people. All different. All unique. All requiring to be treated seriously, individually and with delicacy.
‘There is no point in meeting trouble halfway, Dennis. It will always go out of its way to meet you. Better just deal with things when they arise.’
Philosophers are not only found sitting around in Greek ruins.
‘You can’t put a butterfly back in the chrysalis, man,’
No fictional narratives, no cinematic happy endings, just life as it is for some. Despite suffering from the most hair-raising, sometimes completely incapacitating illnesses, people’s determination to rise above the abyss was utterly remarkable.
