A more human mental health system
Oh boy. So a bit has happened since the last newsletter.
Hasn’t it always?
I’m writing this from a room by the beach on a small island in Indonesia.
Naturally.
Honor and I are attempting our first proper “holiday” since… well, basically since we started dating seven years ago. Because...
We suck at holidays
Honor sucks at holidays because she struggles to feel she’s ever really allowed to take a break from work.
Not without someone jumping out from behind an unread email yelling AHA! SEE WE KNEW YOU WERE A SECRET SLACKER ALL ALONG!
I suck at holidays because I often feel freaked out and unsafe in my own house. So the prospect of going to a whole new country dials my internal threat levels up to roughly 1000%.
(Which makes me a super fun holiday hang, right? Guys…?)
We had to book the flights in a mad rush two days before leaving or else it was never going to actually happen.
But you know what? We goddamn did it. We’re here.
We’ve spent the last week engaging in a heady mix of:
beach swims
health anxieties (me)
existential angst at not having work to do (Honor)
more beach swims
A whole lot of cathartic crying (both of us, at the local yoga shala via various guided meditations / sound journeys / cacao ceremonies).
This is how everyone does beach holidays, right? Slap on a hat, slop on some sunscreen, sob until you feel you’ve finally come home to yourself after years in the wilderness?
I’ve written a couple of big pieces about all this, and had several epiphanies. But nothing I’m quite ready to send out yet.
So watch this space. Meanwhile...
I do have something else for ya
I’ve been meaning to tell everyone about a trove of Big Feels-adjacent content we’ve been putting out on our other channel: the Big Feels At Work podcast.
Big Feels At Work is the podcast we make specifically for mental health and addictions workers who also have big feelings of their own.
Wait what? I thought people who worked in mental health had their shit together??
(Jokes I know no one really has their shit together. Except anyone I am currently or historically comparing myself to at any given moment.)
We have a bunch of new episodes of Big Feels At Work out, including one in particular I think you might find interesting whether you work in mental health or not. It's an episode about why the mental health system is the way it is.
Changing the mental health system
The ‘yoga and meditation’ parts of our holiday have got me thinking.
Sometimes it feels like it’s so hard to find mental health spaces where you can just go and be your full, messy self -tears and all - without feeling like this is somehow a problem that needs fixing. Or that you’re making the other participants (or workers) uncomfortable.
At the yoga shala here on this little island, tears flow regularly amongst the participants (and the people running the meditation) and that’s just considered normal.
It’s got me wondering, what would it look like if mental health services could channel more of that ‘just messy humans being human together’ energy?
If you’re interested in why the mental health system is the way it is (and what we’re trying to do to change it) check out this episode of Big Feels At Work I made with Mary O’Hagan.
Mary’s a big important public servant in Victoria’s Department of Health. She’s advised the UN and has helped make major changes to mental health systems around the world.
But she spent her 20s in and out of psych wards being told she’d never amount to much.
Mary helped start the “psychiatric survivor movement” in New Zealand in the 1980s. Fellow patients banding together to offer each other the kind of support they definitely weren’t getting from services, all the while advocating for change.
They helped carve out space for things like Big Feels and many other peer support initiatives happening today.
My chat with Mary is a fascinating conversation about how we got here, and where to next.
Click here to listen on Soundcloud.
Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts.
Click here to listen in on Spotify.
— Graham
