Into the system…

Who am I?

I’m 24, living in the North West of England with “the bloke”, some fish, two guinea pigs and a dog.

I am currently not working in consultancy, having been on sick leave since June 2008. I loved my job and hope to return to work as soon as possible; being off work when you’re a workaholic can be pretty frustrating! I seem to spend quite a lot of time writing about missing work, the benefits system and the trials of dealing with occupational health.

I like music, festivals, my dog, blogging, writing, photography, design, singing, camping, baking, travelling and more.

You can contact me at intothesystem@yahoo.co.uk.

Why intothesystem…? What is this blog about?

I was trying to think about what to call my blog and this phrase stuck in my mind. It comes from a doctor that I saw through my company’s occupational health service. He said, “I want you to see your GP. I think we need to get you into the system” and I guess that is where all this has come from. The system he was referring to, incase you hadn’t already guessed from my blogroll, was the mental health system.

So that is what I write about – entering and navigating the mental health system and dealing with the idea that I might in fact not be as well as I had pretended to be for so long. I started this blog back in June 2008 when I was starting to finally accept and seek treatment for enduring mental illness. Since then I have been through a couple of hospitalisations, suicide attempts, a selection of diagnoses and a whole host of medication. Things have been on the up as late and long may it continue. I hope that my blog will eventually see me getting out of the system too, but we shall come to that when it happens.

When I started my blog, I did so to write for myself. To keep a log of what I was going through and to help me understand what was happening. I’ve always been a diarist, scribbling away in notebooks from a fairly young age. In latter years I would write down, or rather type in, my thoughts into word documents, hidden within the depths of my hard drive, disguised under obscure file names or locked away under a password. I wondered if it would help me to “talk” about what I was going through, even if I was talking to myself. I found out pretty quickly that it did and it seems to help others too, which is a bonus I guess.

I often struggle to express myself through speech, but I like to write. Writing helps me to order some of the thoughts that can race through my mind. Sometimes it just helps to get the thoughts out in whatever order they may come. Other times I will write and rewrite until they actually make some sense. My blog can be a mix of hurried, emotional outpourings or carefully considered essays. Sometimes an entry may be a mix of both or simply a load of rubbish. Lately I have started to edit my writing more as my audience has increased, but even still the quality varies a lot. You can often expect a post to appear and disappear when I read it through again. Sometimes it will come back in a different form or sometimes it will be lost to the trash folder.

Through my blog I have also discovered a fantastic community of “mentalists”, which I am happy to be a part of. The empathy and support from my fellow bloggers means a lot to me. It can be hard to find people who understand out in the wider world, but the interweb brings people together. There seems to be growing interest in the field of mental health blogging from the professional side too and I have seen my readership increase a lot over the past couple of years. I think Mental Nurse and the Mind Blog have a lot to do with that, so thank you. Thank you to the rest of the madosphere too.

Last Edit: 16th September 2010.