What's it all about? Resist trite memes.

This is my first blog post, prompted by a brief stay on a psych ward. This was not, however my first personal experience with mental health issues. I will write about things as and when they occur, week by week,but will gradually add backstory when nothing of much interest has happened.

But this post is to introduce the tone and likely content, a mixture of where I am on any week, and recollections about how I got to where I am. Coping with a mental health condition concurrently with a non-neurotypical personality is many things: difficult, frustrating, terrifying. But also edifying, rewarding, and, yes, laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Why do I say 'resist trite memes'? If you have ever visited a web forum or physical facility why has anything to do with mental health, you will surely have encountered the Trite Mental Health Meme, or TMHM. Well intended gems, they are, varying from the merely naive to the downright idiotically irrational. You know the sort of the I mean. Firstly, the image: a sunset, a beach, a view looking up through trees. Perhaps a stone circle at dawn. 

And then the text. Oh yes the words. 'Remember that every time you felt you couldn't go forward, you did go forward. Reflect on that.' Bollocks, actually, literally nonsense. Almost every time I've felt that I couldn't go forwards, guess what? I didn't. I went backwards. It's a great example of well-intended TMHM which is just obviously factually inaccurate. Or perhaps 'Being depressed doesn't show that you are weak. It shows that you are strong!' This is a whole subgenre of the TMHM in its own right. 

Now, while it is not particularly constructive to point out that depression probably actually is a weakness, neither is it very helpful to suggest that it is some sort of superpower. Finally, one of my favourites, which I only saw for the first time the other day: 'Don't forget how far you have come!' I was waiting in a room, scanning the walls of sort of interview room in a mental hospital, while five or six medical health professions discussed whether I needed some time on the psych ward. I did. For the first time in my life, I was admitted to a mental hospital when they came back in. The irony of the don't-forget-how-far-you've-come sentiment was not lost on me. 'Look how far gone you are?' would have been more apposite.

Of course, we need to put a positive spin on some aspects of mental health care. But well-meaning disingenuity, if that is not an oxymoron, is not helpful. Mental health problems may not always be a curse, but are they really ever the blessing some TMHMs suggest that they are? These conditions are illnesses, not superpowers. In fact, I rather suspect that if I claimed my psychosis gave me special powers, I would have been on the psych ward quite a bit longer.