2012 is the most important year in Irish mental health
As I write this there are well intentioned and well meaning people preparing for a meeting at the Amnesty Ireland HQ. The meeting is made up of the voluntary bodies who lobby for those with intellectual disabilities, brain acquired injury, Alzheimer’s and dementia as well as mental health. Mad Pride Ireland has and is part of this conversation, a conversation hoping to influence the governments proposed ‘Capacity’ legislation.

Oh lord how I love my family, my first thought. Yet writing that line has brought tears to the surface of my eyes. Isn’t nature a wonderful gift, when you know, learn, and you allow yourself to be open to its lessons?
Tears are to cleanse the spirit, tears of love, sorrow, though such tears are salty; encourage the growth of peace in your spirit, when you lose a loved one.
If, a big if, you let them flow externally, from cheek to lip, while being held in friends’ and family’s caring arms. They cure grief.
Tears that we conceal; that flow internally, behind your eyes into your spirit, that we hide with false pride, tears we deny exist within us in the public domain, exhibiting our strength, will flood your heart, and drown your spirit.
That type of false strength is a huge weakness in the natural cycle of grieving.

People in power have to enjoy the privilege of secrecy in order to exercise that power. Why? What is it that that we the public cannot handle?
Is it, as Jack Nicholson famously said, “you can’t handle the truth?”. What would life be like if all decisions were made in the public arena? What would it be like if all our politicians spoke freely and honestly during debates? What would life be like if all cabinet discussions were printed as they happened, if we the public could read or listen to all their utterances real time? If the truth was reported raw?

By any criteria you care to mention, this has been some year. Peaks and valleys, highs and lows. My health, like the economy, is going to shite, but my spirit is growing.
The love I am receiving from so many is driving me on; I can no longer drive. Love is walking beside me; I cannot walk. My family growing in strength, as I grow weaker. Flocks of friends hover; rhyme, wine, song, laughter, not a whine. Possible isolation, loneliness, dispelled by community; company.

I have written about this before, and now Mad Pride Ireland are exploring ways to try to do something about it. If there is one common thread to the negative side of madness, it is loneliness. If there is one thing that needs to be cured, that it appears can be quite simply cured, it is this issue of loneliness. It is so complex. 
We need to have a national debate on loneliness, and Mad Pride Ireland hopefully is going to start that debate. We are going to begin from the premise that we know no more than the fact that loneliness exists. We are going to go to small communities and open a space where people can come and discuss the ‘fix’ for loneliness.

In the lead up to Christmas we at Mad Pride Ireland decided to host an afternoon of kids creative workshops in Cork City. Why? Because It is our long held belief that creativity brings people together, creates a positive atmosphere and is important if we are to grow as a community. So it was that on Saturday we had a fabulous day of Christmas cheer. We ran three workshops with kids and adults having the opportunity to make their own Christmas decorations, fridge magnets, badges and puppets

‘Is the ability to hold a fluid, very similar to volume,’ according to Wikipedia.
There is always a danger in the judgment of capacity when those who are discussing it come from a perspective that the pot is cracked, before they know the first thing about the capability of the pot to hold water. So many who stick their spoonful into the capacity debate have no idea of what it is to have their capacity to state their point of view taken from them.

If I was to write this as fiction, it would be unbelievable. Sometimes I think the insane are medicating the mad!
I was asked by John Hunt’s nervous mother Marion to go to an appointment she had with John’s psychiatrist in Carraig Mór Hospital last week. Again she did not get to see her son.
Carraig Mór is being exposed as a prison, emerging out of the dark pretence of being a hospital, into reality’s light as a place where the living are buried out of the public view. Carraig Mór is a grim place.
When we arrived at Carraig Mór last week, instead of the usual security staff opening the door, a male nurse met us at the outside set of the double doors and informed us I was not allowed in. Just Marion Hunt! 

God I hate my life
Never knowing from one
Day to another
Will I be able

Do we need an army? There is talk of closing the barracks in Clonmel, and in other locations. We have approximately 8,500 members of the Irish Army. Who or what are they defending? Our sovereignty! The only thing we have left worth defending in this country is fish and oil rights under the sea, so by all the Gods of logic, we must surely turn all the cannons and tanks into patrol boats and redesign the army uniforms into sailors outfits.

What a wonderful word
allowing for the
dignity of difference
would cure all ills
give the right of way
to the others to go
down their road
while you walk contentedly
alongside.

Is it not just amazing when the wind of depression begins to howl, that the first thing it does is blow the cold breeze of doubt. The chill begins in your soul, you begin to shiver, doubt your worth. The warm glow, the joy of life cools; the rate of chill determined by your own frame of mind.
Do you open the door to let the wind in? Or does it simply become so strong, that a gust will blow the door to your soul wide and the chill kills the joy?
Joy of life is a solitary thing that is so often dependant on community. Those who have joy by gift attract others into their light, like flies to a Somerset Maugham lamp in the Deep South. The joyous flies perform in the light of community dance, reflect the glory of that joy and feed from it, but never drain the centre of the energy source; the peaceful personal joy in the individual soul.
But when those whose joy have been chilled and are turning to ice, approach that light, they plunge right in; get burned.
Wounds need treatment; gentle understanding and care.

We all outraged at the victims stories of child chemical abuse.
Rightly so. There is a side to this that should also be debated but is not. How the victims were treated by society in general, and in particular the medical model of treatment with regard to mental health.
I have and had some friends who were victims all of them that I know were diagnosed with a mental illness a disease of the brain.
All my friends got angry at the unfairness of it all. Some of them became aggressive at that unfairness. Those that screamed out loud at this unfair treatment, were locked up not in gaol but in mental hospitals.
One friend self harmed in frustration, the best help on offer in the medical model is force. He was forced incarcerated; he was forced treated with medications and with ECT. He was locked into an isolation cell for 9 months.
He covered his body in scars in frustration.

Report on the EU High-Level Conference “Together with Mental health and Wellbeing” Brussels, 13 June 2008

Let me begin by stating that this is in no way meant to be a comprehensive report as the amount of information available on the day was enormous and as the day was organised, I would need to be able to bi locate in order to attend each section of the programme. So what I am about to give here are the impressions that I took from the conference some thoughts in and around it and some opinion as to change. 

In the opening remarks, if I could say in the general terms of it, that the priorities seem to be to use public health policy to attempt to identify best practice and while there was a lot of conversation or a lot of discussion around genetics and research there was very little as to any aspects of the emotional or spiritual side of mental health. There was a focus on delivery and how the European pact could do this. 

I was chatting to the lads in the tents down the South Mall last week.
One lad rang, St John Ó Donnabháin asked me to go in, meet, look about, have a chat. “How will I know you St John,” says I. “I have a long red beard and long red hair,” says he. (He forgot to tell me of the bright, sparkling, so alive eyes and the huge smile that so welcomed me). “I have a grey ponytail and I’m in a wheelchair,” says I, “we will never find each other, you wear a yellow button hole and I will wear a red one”.

St John, of Occupy Cork, showed his only flaw early on when he told me he was a Kilkenny man! They were from all over Ireland, in the cold, in tents. Debating! Subject: How do we improve the way we live, earn, save, spend our national economy.
Not just our money, but our complete economy, our real human wealth. How we run the country. Not a small topic. But these are not small minded people; they act. They look slightly un-kempt, but one lad was sweeping the park, another was cooking hot soup, another was sitting eating it. A beautiful young woman wrapped in a blanket, could be clubbing, wasn’t. A tall lad picked up his guitar, gave it a lash!