Mark Brown Profile picture
Jun 30, 2018 138 tweets 38 min read Read on X
1 like = one thing I think about #mentalhealth that I will probably will never get commissioned to write about.
Things I'll not get asked to write about 1: The things that people use their #mentalhealth medication for apart from the reasons they were originally prescribed it and what cool 'off-script' uses people have found
Things I'll not get asked to write about 2: Whether rigid CBT for #mentalhealth can deal with the reality of class and other structural inequality
Things I'll not get asked to write about 3: What happens to experts by experience in #mentalhealth after they stop being experts by experience and what they go on to do next
Things I'll not get asked to write about 4: The experiences of trans people who do not pass/ do not transition and how that affects their #mentalhealth and how they are treated or not by services
Things I'll not get asked to write about 5: How conversations about what should and shouldn't be funded in #mentalhealth look and sound to commissioners; delivered through candid, anonymous interviews
Things I'll not get asked to write about 6: Whether there will be a me too moment in the broader world of #mentalhealth and what it might be
Things I'll not get to write about 7: What happens to the #mentalhealth of young people who don't go to university and who, if anyone, is looking out for them?
Things I'll not get to write about 8: The difficulties of #mentalhealth survivor/lived experience spaces in building a safe movement and safe spaces for people people to be part of when everyone is both very f**ked up and very driven by ideas over practicalities
Things I'll not get asked to write about 9: An unnofficial history of Time to Change. No one writes stuff like that. Chronology in #mentalhealth? Pah! All history happens at exactly the same moment.
Things I'll not get asked to write about 10: What happens to people after they have taken part in public anti-stigma campaigns, say as a photo in an advert or a talking head in an advert. Did anything change for them?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 11: Whether men who have done bad things in the past can ever be good people and what that means for their #mentalhealth
Things I'll never get asked to write about 12: Whether anyone ever feels like they escape from wearing a coat marked 'mental' when they rose to fame because a part of the #mentalhealth struggle was what made them notable
Things I'll never get asked to write about 13: What right wing libertarian public figures (especially gobshites like Milo and Prison Planet) suggest when asked 'What is your answer to the question of people needing care?'
Things I'll never get asked to write about 14: The extent to which generational differences in attitude to #mentalhealth and mental illness are seen survivor/user/lived experience circles and what people think about that, if they think anything at all about it
Things I'll never asked to write about 15: What it's like to politically lobby for change in #mentalhealth, who does it and what on a day to day basis they actually do
Things I'll never get asked to write about 16: What it's like to be a #mentalhealth professional who realises the thing their job involves are the wrong things to help the people they see
Things I'll never get asked to write about 17: How does being diagnosed with a 'personality disorder' (note the quotes) make you feel about other people diagnosed with similar and how does it change your life, if at all?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 18: What happens when you're on a minimum wage job and you try to get help for your #mentalhealth at work?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 19: How good are trade unions at supporting their members #mentalhealth and where do different unions stand on #mentalhealth in the workplace?
Things I'll never get to write about 20: six months in the life of a group of people claiming benefits who already have difficulties with their #mentalhealth. Just a six month slice of that lived experience
Things I'll never get to write about 21: Six months in the life of people beginning the day after their final session with IAPT
Things I'll never get to write about 22: How much of what motivates people in the doing and changing things environment is motivated by loss of status and identity due to their experiences and the wish to get it back?
Things I'll never get to write about 23: What it's like to forge a romantic relationship when you're ill with your #mentalhealth that doesn't work anymore when you're (both?) feeling better
Things I'll never get to write about 24: What A+E staff really feel about the amount of people they see in distress and what they think should happen
Things I'll never get asked to write about 25: Whether anyone who is strongly antimeds in #mentalhealth ever changes their mind and what makes them do so? And vice versa
Things I'll never get asked to write about 26: How subcultures deal with #mentalhealth. How do kink communities deal with #mentalhealth? Poly communities? Boardgame communities? Any 'communities' at all that are very social and sociable
Things that I'll never get asked to write about 27: how parents explain their #mentalhealth to their kids and their kids understand it in return and how that all works between them
Things that I'll never get asked to write about 28: What it's like to have a client in therapy or counselling who has beliefs that are fundamentally unacceptable to you; racism, sexism, transphobia etc and what you do in that situation
Things I'll never get asked to write about 29: How you live with having witnessed a terrible abuse with #mentalhealth services and couldn't didn't stop it at the time and how that has affected you in retrospect since
Things I'll never get to write about 30: People who have based a work of art on the mental distress of someone else and how they feel about the change it has made for them and whether it made a change for the subject
Things I'll never get asked to write about 31: Has having therapy or other #mentalhealth treatment changed your political views?
Things I'll never get to write about 32: What was it like to be one of the 'housewives on happy pills' so beloved of stories about #mentalhealth prescribing and how do you feel as a woman looking back on that period of your life?
Things I'll never get to write about 33: What did you do in relation to your #mentalhealth when younger or as a member of a particular set of people or as part of a certain lifestyle that now looking back you realise was really, really bad?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 34: Where do people draw the line in supporting others with their #mentalhealth? What are the limits?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 35: What is the most shameful thing you have ever done while you are unwell and have you ever been able to bring that to any help or support you've had? How do people live with the stuff being ill has resulted in them doing?
(Right, I'm away to Lidl. That's a kind of picture of what I'd love to write. Or read. Just a kind of snapshot really of questions I find super interesting.)
Things I'll never get asked to write about 36: What would happen if people could just ask to go into hospital for their #mentalhealth whenever they thought they needed to?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 37: What does being in the closet for years do to your #mentalhealth and what does coming out do to your #mentalhealth when you finally do?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 38: Are there any scientists who study the biological basis of mental illness who experience the kinds of conditions they study and does that make a difference to their work?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 39: What do young trans and non-binary people think about the idea there is a trans conspiracy?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 40: What do working class men tell other working class men about their #mentalhealth and what happens because of it?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 41: What is the most harmful bit of advice another person with #mentalhealth difficulties has ever given you?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 42: What are the exact conditions that combine to make the person picking up the acoustic guitar in company think that Redemption Song is the best song to sing?
Things I'll never get to write about 43: Just how do we in our lives square the need for understanding and support with the wish to behave ethically with regards to expecting others to support us in conditions of gendered assumptions about who does caring work?
Things I'll never get to write about 44: If you have survived emotional abuse, how do you find the things you need from others when the act of finding them triggers flashbacks to the reason you are seeking those things in the first place?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 45: How do older people who still experience atypical mental states feel about life? How does a life lived with unusual sensations, thoughts or feelings feel looking back over decades?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 46: A piece based on the day by day accounts of tapering or withdrawing completely from psych meds, following a group of people over a period of time
Things I'll never get asked to write about 47: A popular readable history of mental health treatment and related events that begins with the foundation of the NHS in the UK and runs up to the present day
Things I'll never get asked to write about 48: A piece catching up with some of the first generation of #mentalhealth bloggers asking them what life looks like 10-15 years on from the heyday of mental health blogging
Things I'll never get asked to write about 49: A look back at the time The Church of Scientology tried to take over the organisation we now know as Mind religio.de/books/chr/chr.…
Things I'll never get asked to write about 50: The birth of SANE (Schizophrenia A National Emergency) and how its founder feels looking back on their messages from that period
Things I'll never get asked to write about 51: A piece capturing how insiders to the #mentalhealth apps industry feel about the ethics and business of trying to make and sell MH apps
Things I'll never get asked to write about 52: What it feels like to work for someone upon whom you rely for your livelihood but who you can also see is becoming unwell and making worrying decisions. Think music biz manager, erratic star. SPAD and minister
Things I'll never get to write about 53: What it feels like to be reunited with the people you knew during your maddest period after years of not being so mad anymore
Things I'll never get asked to write about 54: How it feels to realise that you have made a successful career out of what you later realise is thinking and ideas that result from your own difficulties. Think orthorexia and nutritional coach. Inspirational speaker and narcissism
Things I'll never get asked to write about 55: What it feels like for a friendship to end based entirely on differing attitudes to #mentalhealth
(So, there you go: a peep into the kinds of things I wonder about. I still think like an editor, I think. These are things I would LOVE to read as much as I'd love to write and research them myself)
Things I'll never get asked to write about 56: Why are people with #mentalhealth difficulties often so reticent to accept the idea they may be Disabled in the capital 'D' social model of Disability sense?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 57: What it feels like to be part of Randomised Control trial for something in #mentalhealth, or what it feels like to be a trial participant in general for any #mentalhealth thing
Things I'll never get asked to write about 58: What most surprises about what changes when you become unwell for your #mentalhealth and how your understanding of the way the world works alters. Example: claiming benefits for first time; seeking help from a charity
Things I'll never get asked to write about 59: What happens when a #mentalhealth worker reveals something personal to you as a client/patient that you find difficult to deal with?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 60: What it's actually like to experience #mentalhealth difficulties when you live in the countryside. Everyone says the country is the answer, but what if it's part of your problem?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 61: We assume that stigma comes from ignorance and that exposure to people who've experienced #mentalhealth difficulties reduces the expression of stigma, but: what about the people who just really hate people with MH difficulties?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 62: What happens when you don't want to be a carer for someone who experiences #mentalhealth difficulties because it makes your own mental health worse? How does it feel?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 63: The world of big pharma influencing from the perspective of people who actually do it for a job
Things I'll never get asked to write about 64: Are #mentalhealth charities happy places to work? And if not, what does it mean?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 65: What if 'culturally appropriate' or 'culturally sensitive' services aren't what's going to make sure people in the UK who aren't white get the help they need? What if the answer is something else entirely?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 66: Things that were said to you in a #mentalhealth context years ago which only now you realise weren't as bad or damaging as you thought at the time and what made you change your mind.
Things I'll never get asked to write about 67: What would a #mentalhealth discourse that was actually about class look like rather than one that uses the existence of mental distress to strengthen and bolster a critique of existing structures?
Things I'll never get to write about 68: The personal geographies of cities as experiences by people who experience mental distress. How do people experience different towns and cities based on their own personal impressions and mental state?
Things I'll never get to write about 69: The secret untold stories of sex and #mentalhealth
Things I'll never get asked to write about 70: What it feels like to ascend to the international #mentalhealth lived experience stratosphere and to go from conference to conference as a speaker
Things I'll never get asked to write about 71: A piece interviewing people with learning disabilities about how they see their #mentalhealth problems and how it feels to be them
Things I'll never get asked to write about 72: Whether there are large rivalries withing the academic lived experience world and what that has meant for the development of experience led #mentalhealth research and thinking
Things I'll never get asked to write about 73: What the world of #mentalhealth looks like for people who set up small family trust charities in memory of a loved one and how it feels to work in remembrance of someone
Things I'll never get asked to write about 74: How it feels for years to keep your struggles with #mentalhealth difficulty a secret then be forced by circumstance, not desire, to reveal them
Things I'll never get asked to write about 75: What it feels like to try to cut ties entirely with the world of #mentalhealth when the world of mental health is the only thing you known for
Things I'll never get asked to write about 76: The top ten most dangerous or disagreeable first person accounts #mentalhealth difficulty, or: "You told me your truth and I cannot accept it because its offensive." Personal experience exists politically, too
Things I'll never get asked to write about 77: What it feels like to convince people to back your grandiose scheme or idea when you then come down and realise it was hypomania or mania and now you have to deliver as a different version of yourself
Things I'll never get asked to write about 78: What it feels like to be unable to leave the house
Things I'll never get asked to write about 79: What happens when someone realises that they only fancied the mental version of their partner and can't stomach the version who is trying to get better
Things I'll never get asked to write about 80: how it feels to look back on your own experiences of altered mental states and how someone does or doesn't integrate those experiences into who they are
Things I'll never get asked to write about 81: Being a peer worker in #mentalhealth and finding there is no path of progression professionally beyond more peer work and wanting something more
Things I'll never get asked to write about 82: What's it like to have a lifetime of mental distress or mental illness then to also be told that you are developing dementia?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 83: Exactly how different nations feel #mentalhealth difficulty fits into the spectrum of human experience and how that influences what help and support is available
Things I'll never get asked to write about 84: A piece based on first person experiences of receiving ECT as it it is practiced now, not historically
Things I'll never get asked to write about 85: How it feels to see a friend not benefit from a treatment or therapy in #mentalhealth that you did so much you recommended it to them
Things I'll never get asked to write about 86: What people with very distinct political ideas think should actually happen regarding #mentalhealth support and treatment; ie lets run your thinking through the needs of people with #mentalhealth difficulties and see what comes out
Things I'll never get asked to write about 87: What it feels like for nonbinary people in #mentalhealth in patient settings
Things I'll never get asked to write about 88: The #mentalhealth loneliness paradox. To meet new people and find love you must be more well and more safe; but to be more well and more safe you must meet new people.
Things I'll never get asked to write about 89: What happens to people after they escape an abusive situation if it isn't all a rose garden and delightful new opportunities?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 90: A piece following a number of people in the weeks after they are first discharged from a #mentalhealth service
Things I'll never get asked to write about 91: What it's like being a #mentalhealth professional hearing your colleagues attitudes towards people who experience similar thing regarding #mentalhealth as you do
Things I'll never get asked to write about 92: A piece based on interviews with people detailing the period leading up to a suicide they survived but focusing more on what they did, not how they felt but avoiding discussing the actual details of what they survived
Things I'll never get asked to write about 93: Mental health difficulty and shame.
Things I'll never get asked to write about 94: Just how to #mentalhealh apps find people to trial their products on and what do the people involved in trials feel about the tech saviours they were exposed to?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 95: What's it like going to a school reunion and having to explain that the last couple of decades have involved you being ill and everyone implying they thought that's what would happen?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 96: In a world where straight men are are aware of manic pixie dream girls, 'I'm not your mum' and unfair emotional burdens, is it possible to become unwell with #mentalhealth difficulty without feeling you're screwing up yr principles?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 97: What if you have therapy and go on a journey of self discovery but what you learn about yourself is impossible for you to bear?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 98: How it feels to realise that the kindness and concern your loved ones show about your mental health is a kind of velvet prison meaning you can never step out on your own and take risks without being stopped by concern
Things I'll never get asked to write about 99: How people feel years on after getting tattoos with a #mentalhealth significance
Things I'll never get asked to write about 100: What is society prepared to give up so that people can have better #mentalhealth? What is the limit to which people will stomach change to their lives so that others lives will be better?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 101: How sex workers look after their own #mentalhealth and what answers they have as a community arrived at to support mental wellbeing?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 102: How workers have tried to take action in the workplace against specific policies or activities that make their #mentalhealth worse and what happened as a result
Things I'll never get asked to write about 103: How weird it is as someone who is working class with next to no qualifications finding themselves wanging on on twitter about #mentalhealth and accidentally finding a space, however small, in people's lives
Things I'll never get asked to write about 104: what it feels like when an online mate you've known for years but have never met dies
Things I'll never get to asked to write about 105: What it feels like to be the person in distress who is live tweeted about by an emergency service
Things I'll never get asked to write about 106: Interviews with people who started #mentalhealth projects based on their own experiences that failed and what happened next
Things I'll never get asked to write about 107: The way in which cultural metaphors for #mentalhealth difficulties (think Black Dog) actually shape people's understanding of what they're going through but also culture around it. (Think AIDS and its Metaphors by Susan Sontag)
Things I'll never get asked to write about 108: Why the ideas of safe spaces and trigger warnings are hated so much by some and how, either by intent or design, the triggering of trauma response is a political weapon
Things I'll never get asked to write about 109: 'So, you've dropped the disorder and decided #mentalhealth conditions don't have a biological or scientific basis: what now? What's changed?'
Things I'll never get asked to write about 110: A bit of futurology: If GPs don't prescribe antidepressants, what could they do instead and what kind of different world would be required for the something else to help people?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 111: The secret, illicit, possibly illegal things you all do to get through the days better. What do you do to mitigate your cognitive or other #mentalhealth deficits that you could only tell the world anonymously?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 112: A piece trying to find out what happened to some of the big ideas from the last twenty years of #mentalhealth and how their main advocates feel about them now
Things I'll never get asked to write 113: A piece about 'coming out' about your #mentalhealth and it going completely wrong
Things I'll never get asked to write about 114: The activity of fighting #mentalhealth stigma as primarily a personal project of self-redemption first, and political or social change second. Who is saving whom from what in stigma fighting?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 115: What is the actual point of #mentalhealth services and what factors define people's answers to that question? And whose answers actually matter?
(So there. More a guide to the kind of things I would love to read about #mentalhealth. A lot of them are questions I'd love to see explored more without necessarily coming to a definitive answer. Majority of them are about telling of effects of distress, not distress itself)
(And just to be clear, I have literally just been making these up as I go along. They're not long gestated ideas, just what occurred to me as I got more likes. There's soooo much that can be written about if #mentalhealth is the fire at its heart rather than its only subject)
Things I'll never get asked to write about 116: people with #mentalhealth difficulties views of assisted suicide
Things I'll never get asked to write about 117: What it's like in a news room as journalist covering a major #mentalhealth story while having your own experiences of #mentalhealth difficulty
Things I'll never get asked to write about 118: How ideas of a crisis of masculinity are holding back men from taking the steps that men need to make to look after their #mentalhealth
Things I'll never get asked to write about 119: What would happen if you set yourself up in a social club somewhere and just told people they could talk to you about #mentalhealth
Things I'll never get asked to write about 120: Little vignettes of how the rhythms and pressures of every day life add and subtract from our feelings of #mentalhealth
Things I'll never get asked to write about 121: Which #mentalhealth experiences are the ones that people wish most to be free from the 'tyranny of diagnosis' and which are the ones that people most often accept and why?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 122: The experience of being unable to be around people with a similar set of #mentalhealth experiences as you and how that makes you feel
Things I'll never get asked to write about 123: does your politics define your attitude to your own #mentalhealth difficulties or do your mental heath experiences define your politics? And does that make a difference to how things turn out for you?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 124: how does modern feminist debate understand power and narrative in mental distress and has it moved on from the groundbreaking analysis of the history of #mentalhealth from the 70s and 80s?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 125: have you ever put together a team to work on something based upon considering different strengths and weaknesses resulting from their neuroatypicality or #mentalhealtj status?
Things I'll never get asked to write about 126: a piece capturing the ways that people in close knit industries now gone or going supported each other emotionally and through distress.
Things I'll never get asked to write about 127: The emotional and other fall out when a member of your extended friendship group is revealed to be an abuser and the effect it has on the #mentalhealth of those who had been friends or more with them
Things I'll never get asked to write about 128: a piece looking at whether American service user/patient ideas and British ones in #mentalhealth align or diverge or get confused when translated, taking into account the UK welfare state, US history of Psychiatry
Things I'll probably never get asked to write about 129: people who realise their parent was probably experiencing trauma or mental distress when raising them but still cannot as adults forgive them for the way they treated them as children
Things I'll probably never get asked to write about 130: how it feels when someone tells you the #mentalhealth condition you have accepted yourself as having doesn't really exist
Things I'll probably never get asked to write about 131: how it feels to have treatment or therapy for your #mentalhealth as a British person living in another country and whether cultural barriers to understanding your 'normal' existed
Things I'll probably never get asked to write about 132: why we're so susceptible to saviours, white knights and theories of everything in #mentalhealth

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More from @MarkOneinFour

May 20, 2018
Middle class fascists are always worse than working class fascists. Working class fascists often renounce their horrible views while middle class fascists work hard to redefine the world around them until their repugnant ideas are accepted and no longer grounds to exclude them.
Working class fascists take horrible action then most grow the fuck up. Middle class fascists crave acceptance for their horrible ideas and will do anything to warp the world until ideas shift. They are far worse because people treat them as they wish to be treated: with respect
Working class people know they have no right to be heard and respected. Middle class people think they have a right to be heard regardless of their odious ideas. Middle class fascists egg on fascist violence, both physical and intellectual, then declare themselves people of ideas
Read 15 tweets
Apr 11, 2018
Interesting. I wonder how many of us who launch ourselves in weird and wonderful directions finally realise what we are when we hit a wall that can no longer be climbed?
If we're lucky, we find a profession and a way of life that fits our atypicality, the peculiar ways that we're wired. But, as is the way, we pick up complications along the way, things that our 'specialness' can't resolve because they result from that specialness
Doing something different from everyone else because somehow you're different from everyone else you have a kind of grace period where everything meshes and your quirks make the running for you. Then the period of grace ends and the quirks want their due
Read 13 tweets
Apr 1, 2018
Been thinking about this today: People who have had a terrible time don't just integrate into population of people who haven't had a horrible time when horrible time is over. You don't just become a normal person when abnormal suffering ends. In some communities horrible is norm
Bad stuff changes the shape of people. Changes their sense of who they and other people are. Removing the bad stuff doesn't remove the imprint the bad stuff left. That's the bit that I'm not sure people who haven't been through bad stuff get.
I've seen people talking about trauma informed care, and saying 'it's not what's wrong with you, it's what's happened to you' but I have trouble nailing that down to a concrete vision. What does that actually mean? Remove blame and you still have 'the stuff'
Read 12 tweets
Nov 13, 2017
This is by me about one of the ways that negative stories about trans people find their way into the media
'Talking points' about trans people are usually positioned as being about what effect trans people have on others, not what effect others have on trans people.
There's a narrative at present that interprets attempts to centre stories about being trans in trans people speaking for themselves as being about promoting 'trans ideology'
Read 9 tweets

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