The Productive Pessimist

  What the heck do you  even know about what I'm  going through?! A very good question - there are a lot of people who get their "understanding of mental health challenges" from pop psychology books, or a two-hour online course, no contact with the real world needed. That's not where my understanding comes from. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia following a serious (and violent) psychotic break in 2007.   I've been on high-dose antipsychotics (Lamotrigine and Quetiapine combo - which followed a Risperidone prescription, which turned out to be absolutely disastrous for me.) I've recently been able to transition to benzodiazepines, which I use alongside naturopathic condition management, which in my case includes real-food vitamin profiling and elemental therapy, with journalling as a mindfulness technique. At the moment, my symptoms are primarily slightly disordered thinking, occasional paranoid psychotic thoughts (mostly around helicopters...which...no idea...

  "It's not pie! More for other people doesn't mean less for you!" This was the howl of social media's self-declared #neurodivergence, #disability communities in the late twenty-teens and into the twenty-twenties. It sounded almost convincing, a worthy rallying call that everyone who wanted to be On The Right Side of History should immediately get behind. And if you dared  to hesitate to get behind the statement, if you so much as thought  that it maybe didn't sound quite  right - well, you were privileged , you were guilty of ableism , you just wanted disabled people to not exist!  If you were  disabled yourself, and had some reservations about the pie-ness of inclusion, then you were "everything that's wrong with the world!" But - as so often happens - those who were hesitant have been proved right.  It turns out that, as many disabled people with observable, high-impact impairments, who need  workplace accommodations - and, most importantly, w...

  ADHD. Autism. AuDHD. Autistic Spectrum Condition. Neurodivergence. The words have become a jumble. Social media influencers insist that so many  behaviours are "obvious neurodiversity traits!", that if you "did XYZ (relatively common) thing as a kid, you're definitely  neurodivergent as an adult!" that it's become a meaningless fog, with some people questioning whether autism and ADHD are actually "real" conditions at all. Whether it was their intention or not, the "Neurodiversity Influencers" have brought us right back to the "naughty kids who just need to be spanked more often" attitudes, only now they're expressed as "Self-absorbed Millennials and Gen Z who lack resilience and don't want to work".   (And sometimes still as "naughty kids who just need to be spanked more often.") There seem to be so many "behaviours" that are "clearly undiagnosed neurodivergence!" that, if we w...

Along with  co-production , lived experience has become something of a buzzword in recent years, and, as with all 'trends', people are moving from engaged curiousity to wary suspicion. At The Productive Pessimist, we work exclusively from a position of lived experience - but what does that mean, and what, really, is  lived experience? What Working From Lived Experience Means For Us Working from lived experience means everyone on the Productive Pessimist team has been through what they're guiding others towards understanding of.   We didn't just take a 5hr course, watch a couple of YouTube videos, or read a bestselling book. For example, I (Ash) have the following lived experience: . 22yrs lived experience of managing all aspects of rural living, including travelling 30+ miles for work, without a car . 19yrs lived experience with serious pyschiatric conditions . 16yrs lived experience in trans masculine experience and identity . 9yrs lived experience of kinship care, ...

This piece was written by Morgana Ford-McAllister, our Neurodiversity and Gender Inclusion Lead, in response to the Cass Review , in particular the suggestion that children and young people expressing a gender identity distinct from that to be expected from their sex as assigned at birth are actually neurodivergent, most likely on the autism spectrum, and experiencing a neurodivergent 'lack of awareness of self/inability to understand gender.' Morgana is an autistic trans woman. Autistic Lack of Self vs. Gender Identity TW for childhood trauma, denial of agency, discussions of transphobia and so on. As a lived experience trainer with The Productive Pessimist, I read 35 pages of The Cass Review to get an actual feeling for what was being said and the tone being taken. From that point onwards the report seemed to move more into the models it would recommend NHS England initiate for clinic sites and a discussion of statistics, neither of which were particularly relevant to my role...

Today is Trans Day of Visibility in the UK. At The Productive Pessimist Ltd, we offer coaching, consultancy, and training from lived experience. That includes lived experience of being on the 'less-likely-to-have-national-newspaper-columns-and-a-huge-fanbase' side of the 'transgender debate.' Both our Founder-Directors - Ash, who leads on business consultancy, and management coaching, and Morgana, who leads on neurodiversity inclusion, support, and training - are trans. Ash is a trans man (assigned female at birth, and raised as a girl) who first expressed a male identity aged 9, and began medical transition aged 21.  He has experienced physical violence and conversion therapy as a result of his gender identity. Morgana is a trans woman (assigned male at birth, and raised as a boy), who, in childhood, persistently experienced a 'wrongness and lack of connection' with gender, and began social transition (identifying and living as a woman) aged 22, and medical tra...