The Productive Pessimist

  With changes to the UK's welfare provisions making it harder for people facing mental health challenges to get basic financial assistance without  an expectation that they will be pursuing employment, British business can no longer carry on its time-honoured practice of subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) pushing people experiencing mental ill-health out of the workplace, and people trying to manage even complex mental health conditions can no longer assume that they will be allowed to focus on getting to a point of reliable stability before they have to look for work. The burden on people experiencing mental ill-health is cruel, especially for those whose condition is not  "just a normal response to the challenges of life", and is, for example, something like schizophrenia, bipolar, or one of the Cluster B personality disorders , which can be exceptionally disruptive to the individual experiencing the condition, not just those around them. At 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...