Chrissie Hynde's Comments Speak of a Society Still Embedded in RapeCulture - But Also Raise an Important Point

Many people - myself included - have been outraged recently by Chrissie Hynde's statements that rape is sometimes the victim's fault. The lead singer of The Pretenders remarked to the Sunday Times that the sexual assault that she experienced many years ago was "all my own doing", sparking backlash on social media from activists and victims alike.

However, it is a good idea, in this particular case, to take Hynde's comments with a pinch of salt, and to consider the mindset that they came from. Hynde's views on rape may well be what she considers to be a logical interpretation of her own experiences, which she has then applied to all similar situations, in order to be able to make sense of them. Clearly she has spent several years blaming herself for what happened to her, and coming to the conclusion that, if the assault was not the fault of the perpetrators, then something about her own actions or conduct must have triggered it: namely, the fact that she had been taking drugs. As a result, she may then have gone on to speculate that other victims of assault had invited these crimes upon themselves by making themselves 'vulnerable' through drinking alcohol, or wearing provocative clothing. After all, if the men who assaulted her were not to blame for their actions, why should it be any different for other attackers? And, so, the views which Hynde expressed in her interview may have become the only possible explanation.

But this, in turn, begs the question: what about the other people who feel this way? People who have never experienced these things, but still firmly believe that victims provoke attack by drinking heavily, wearing revealing clothing, or simply by not actively dissenting (screaming, fighting back, etc.)? In my opinion, this is simply a version of the same thought processes expressed by Hynde; many people refuse to believe that their are people in the world who are evil enough to commit crimes without a true motive. They don't want to know that there are people who will kill others without a thought, kidnap children from under their parents' noses, or rape somebody simply because they can, or because they want to feel as though they have power. Such mindsets are inherently inhuman, such people cannot possibly exist. And so excuses are invented - 'she was so drunk she didn't know what she was doing; she asked for it', 'he chose to go back with them, he must have known what was going to happen', 'they didn't fight back, so they must have wanted it, really'. These excuses make the perpeatrators seem less unfathomable in the eyes of the public: people can accept criminals as long as they are somehow able to justify their behavior - 'he just lost control, he didn't really know what he was doing'. If people can learn to recognise this harmful mindset, incidences of victim blaming can be dramatically reduced, giving victims more confidence to seek justice against their attackers, and resulting in more successful prosections of perpetrators.

Rape and sexual assault are never the fault of the victim. UK legislation clearly defines these offences as one person engaging in sexual activity with another, without the other person's consent. There is no mention of any exception based on what the victim was wearing, or how they were behaving at the time of the attack. In fact, there are no exceptions at all. They are simply crimes, and they are crimes for which the perpetrators must be punished.

P.S. All this being said, I don't advocate heavy drinking, or taking recreational drugs. Abuse of these substances has been shown to cause a number of deaths due to slips, falls, drowning and road traffic accidents, and a large percentage of sexual assaults take place when the perpetrators themselves have been drinking. Plus, I'm a musician, and I hate to think of the damage that stuff could do to my vocal cords! 

Also, I still like The Pretenders' music, even though I don't agree with Chrissie Hynde's comments.

Chrissie Hynde. Photograph: Brian Rasic/REX/Brian Rasic/REX

All Illnesses Are Not Created Equal

This week being OCD Awareness Week, I've been paying more attention than usual (if that's even possible) to how people view and talk about OCD and other mental health disorders. But what I discovered was a wider problem - a mentality that governs so many people that very few actually see it as an issue. And not everyone will think it is, but it's definitely important enough to raise.

The issue is this: the term "serious illness" has become synonymous in our society with "cancer". So great is the number of campaigns for awareness of cancer, funding for cancer research, new evidence showing that such and such a food, drink or pastime causes cancer and so on, that cancer has somehow become the only "real" illness in the eyes of the majority of people, all of whom would fervently deny holding such as view, simply because they don't realise that it's true.

That's not to say that cancer isn't a horrible illness; it tears families apart, causes months and even years of suffering to those affected, and the only available treatments kill just as many people as they save. I lost my grandad when I was eight to a brain haemhorrage caused by chemotherapy treatment for leukaemia, so I know just how much it sucks, and I think that it's a cause which absolutely deserves the funding and awareness that it gets. The problem is that other illnesses don't get the same. There are hundreds of illnesses out there that affect just as many people as cancer does, kill more people, last longer than cancer and have far fewer treatment options, but get a fraction of the attention because cancer gets it all. People diagnosed with debilitating illnesses like lupus, multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue syndrome are told to be relieved because "at least it's not cancer". There are several types of cancer that make a person a lot less ill than a person with one of these illnesses, but apparently the fact that it's cancer makes it inherently more devastating. If a person dies young, everyone will assume that they had cancer until told otherwise. Compare box office ratings from The Fault in our Stars to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and you know which film will come out on top.

What I suppose I'm trying to say is that, although I do want a cure for cancer to be found as soon as possible, I don't want the rest of the world to have to be put on hold until that happens.

So Many Arguments, So Little Time...

This week has been... shall we say, interesting. I know this because the best day of the week turned out to be Monday.

Everything was fine until the second to last lesson on Tuesday, when our physics teacher decided to spring on us that she'd been "very disappointed" with the quality of the homework that we'd handed in to her the previous week, and, save for around four people, everyone in the class would have a detention on Friday afternoon.

Let me now take the opportunity to explain what this homework task actually was. The explanation of the assignment was vague at best - nothing more than the words "How do birds aim at fish in water? Include a diagram." Our teacher made no comment on how much she wanted us to write, the kind of information she expected us to include, or even whether we were supposed to hand draw the diagram or find one on the internet. If we didn't have our timetables to tell us when our next physics lesson was, we wouldn't have even known when we were meant to hand it in. So we basically assumed that, since she hadn't actually taught us anything in the lesson that we could use to answer this question in the way it seemed to want answering, we should go home and research the topic before writing a couple of paragraphs on it and adding a diagram. Wrong, apparently. To start with, the only (and I mean only) information that could be found on this topic was a poorly punctuated paragraph on Yahoo Answers, which said something about birds having a chemical in their brains which allowed them to calculate the refractive index of the water and determine exactly where in the water their prey actually is (because it looks like it's in a slightly different position due to the refraction of the light as it enters and leaves the water). An hour of searching using a variety of different queries returned no further information, so I wrote the information down in my own words to the best of my ability and added what looked like a reasonable diagram. I was, I admit, a little concerned at how little I had done, but when I got to school on the day of the next lesson to find that the majority of the class had experienced exactly the same difficulties and produced similar amounts of work, I thought no more of it.

So, needless to say, I was surprised (to say the least) when I was handed a 45 minute detention for what my teacher loosely defined as "insufficient homework" claiming that she wasn't convinced that I hadn't just copied it from the internet. Which, by the way, I hadn't. The way in which the teacher handled this situation made me very angry for a number of reasons:

1. She literally accused me outright of plagiarism. For goodness' sake, I can't even copy learning objectives off the board without changing them, so there was no way I was ever going to steal another person's work off the internet and claim it as my own. Granted, my work was fairly similar in places to the original source, but there are only so many ways you can rewrite the phrase "the distance between the bird's beak and the surface of the water" before it just becomes wrong.

2. She then went on to accuse me of lying. When I went up to her at the end of the lesson and explained (politely, I thought) that there was extremely limited information in any source (the task wasn't even on the GCSE specification - meaning that it actually wasn't required knowledge), she replied "I beg to differ!" And well you may, but I would expect at least a slightly more mature response from a teacher.

3. Any reasonable teacher would assume that if an entire class had a problem with a homework task that there was actually a problem with the task, or the way it was explained (or, in this case, a bit of both). What happened here? For what was literally the first piece of research homework we had been set by this teacher, she gave nearly the entire class detention. There wasn't even any logic to it either - it almost seemed like she had decided randomly who would be detained for ten minutes and who would stay for forty five. Big difference there.

And thus, I went home absolutely fuming to my parents, who promptly phoned the school and were told by the head of science that she would sort it out. So when, the next day, our physics teacher didn't even so much as mention the homework issue for the entire lesson, we were fuming. The entire class refused to answer her questions, and she didn't even bat an eyelid. Confused, I went to talk to the head of science, who said that we would all need to come and talk to her at the end of the day. Hoping we were finally getting somewhere, I left the situation alone.

But when the end of the day finally came around, the answer we got was not what we were expecting. We were told that the point of the homework was not to go away and look up the question on the internet, but to use our existing knowledge to come up with an answer. Firstly, I need to mention that this was the first time we had been told anything even remotely similar to this. Well, to be "fair" we weren't actually told anything. All we got was a question written on a whiteboard, with the added instruction to include a diagram. Secondly, why then did the teacher tell me that I was wrong when I first told her that there was no information on the internet? If I wasn't supposed to be using the internet at all. why tell me that I would find what I needed on there? We were then told that our teacher was very worried that she had negatively affected the relationship she had with us. Well, much as I'm sorry that she's been brought distress by this situation, I have very little sympathy for her. She did not behave as any reasonable teacher would in these circumstances, and when confronted by a myriad of angry phone calls and emails from parents, she told us that we had misunderstood what she had told us to do. Which is a pretty mean feat when you're not told anything. Finally, we were told that the science department would "let us off" and that we could all go home. By this time, I'll add, the people who had been lucky enough to get ten minute detentions in the first place had already been there longer than they would have been if they'd done nothing.

And so much as I want to let this go and move on now, I can't. And I'll tell you why:

1. The teachers completely misunderstood why it was we were complaining. They had assumed that we were simply annoyed at having to stay behind after school, when in actual fact it was because close to an entire class of hard-working students had been punished in a completely unreasonable manner which was not in line with any school policy. Effectively, the rules didn't exist until somebody decided we had broken them.

2. They still put the blame on us, changing their own version of events several times in the process. Because apparently I'm supposed to be able to understand that a couple of sentences written on a whiteboard actually means that the answers are all on the invisible internet, but I'm not allowed to look at them, because I should already know the answer. Ha.

3. Then there's the matter of how all this affects me mentally. As I've already mentioned, this was the first piece of homework that we'd been set by a teacher we'd never had before, who expected us to know what all of her expectations were despite never having communicated them to us. When we did what was, in her opinion, wrong, we were immediately given unreasonable sanctions, and when we tried to give our opinions on why these were unreasonable, we were not listened to, but blackmailed and gaslighted until we thought we had. So now, how am I supposed to have any confidence in my work? How can I ever be sure that what I'm doing is what has actually been asked for, when nobody seems to know what's been asked for until much later? How am I supposed to believe that I will be supported and listened to if I have a problem with the work, when my opinions were effectively used against me and a number of my friends? Obviously I don't expect my teacher to have taken any of this into account - we are all only human, after all - but I can't just put things behind me like some people can, and I know I'm not the only one to feel this way.

So, while I feel terrible for being angry (although I probably shouldn't), and I hope my future experiences of physics will be more positive, I and many others, including my parents, friends and even other teachers, still think it was ridiculous that this incident was allowed to go as far as it did.

And on a side note, I would be interested to see how the situation would have played out if Ofsted hadn't sent out parent satisfaction surveys at the same time that all of this was happening. :P

Yet Another Example of Terrible Media

I don't think there's a single person in the country who hasn't heard about the tragic death of the actor Robin Williams - and the exposure of this story is highlighting some key issues in the way the media handles the reporting of suicide.

While there have been some reporters - the BBC, for example - who have reported the story responsibly, there have been others (which I will not name in order to avoid directing traffic to them) whose coverage has been frankly shocking. Several headlines this morning gave bold and graphic details about the methods that Williams used to take his life, as well as speculating on the reasons that drove him to do it, in both instances completely ignoring guidelines set out by charities such as The Samaritans and Mind (both of whom have addressed these issues and promised to contact the companies responsible for these sensationalist reports). This kind of journalism is incredibly inappropriate, and there are two main reasons why:

Firstly, it's very disrespectful to the Williams family for the media to be intruding so much into their private lives, particularly at what is undoubtedly a very difficult time for them. Not only have they lost someone that they love, but they have to now face countless newspapers and online journals telling the world exactly what he did, and why they think he did it. How can you even begin to guess the thoughts of someone you never even knew?

And secondly, giving intricate details about a suicide - particularly that of a celebrity - is very dangerous. These tabloids and websites may think that they were pleasing their readers by providing exclusive details about the story, what they have effectively done is told every single person who reads the report how they can successfully end their lives, and these journalists have absolutely no idea who will use this information. The Samaritans have already identified that the risk of copycat suicides is very high, so printing it on the front page of a newspaper in big, bold lettering is like handing someone a loaded gun. Even people who don't read that particular paper are going to see it, and once one company has published the details, others go on to do the same. And these newspapers have gone into ridiculous amounts of detail about Williams' death, from the exact materials he used right down to the position he was in when he was found. If journalists think that's a responsible way to handle an already sensitive story, then I'd hate to see an article that they find unacceptable!

You can find The Samaritans' website by clicking here, and Mind's by clicking here.

Mental Health Awareness Week 2014 | Anxiety

As you probably already know, this week is Mental Health Awareness Week (although I'll admit that I didn't have any idea that this even existed until people started tweeting about it on Monday), and the focus for this year is on anxiety. And since I've already shared my own experiences of living with anxiety (part of my series of posts during OCD Awareness Week last October), I thought that I'd share some of my coping strategies and tips instead. These may not work for everyone, but these are the things that I've found to be the most helpful in my recovery so far:

Strategy no. 1: Read.

Some people hate reading, but for me it's a chance to escape from reality for a while, while also learning new things and developing my own writing skills (an opinion that I know is shared by my cousin!). It's always a good way to relax, and if necessary can give you an excuse to escape from some social situations (for example, going to your school's library at break times instead of the canteen). Books that I've enjoyed recently include: Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult*, My Secret Sister by Helen Edwards*, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi* and The Way I See It by Melissa Sue Anderson.

* Possible triggers.

Strategy no. 2: Art and Crafts.

I've never been very good at drawing or painting, but I recently took up crochet, which I have found very enjoyable so far (although I only actually started it to see if it was as hard as a couple of girls made it look on TV - it wasn't). It's a fun way to relieve stress and be creative, and you can make a lot of fun and wacky things that you wouldn't be able to find in shops, such as this cat hat, which I found on WikiHow the other day.

Strategy no. 3: Puzzles.

Puzzles are a good way of occupying your full attention, which can be great for helping anxious thoughts to subside. I particularly like logic puzzles, but there are plenty of different types to choose from.

Strategy no. 4: Hobbies.

By far the best way I've found of relieving anxiety (and helping to keep it under control) is to find something that you love and stick at it. For me, this would be music. And you don't just have to have it as a thing on the side like most people do, I went a bit crazy with mine! I now play five different instruments (although I'm only really any good at one or two of them) and am in two different orchestras, so if you find something that you really enjoy, you can totally go to town with it. Have fun!

I hope that my little summary will be helpful to some people, but even if it's not, thanks for reading!

How Schools "Deal With" Mental Health

Anyone with any experience of life in a typical British secondary school will know that it is not easy - large workloads, less than understanding teachers and anywhere between 100 and 2000 teenagers crammed into a building that was definitely not designed to accommodate so many people is hardly a picnic, but add a mental health disorder to that already terrifying mix and you will often be left with what can only be described as a living Hell. 

When I first developed obsessive-compulsive disorder at the age of eleven, I was coming to the end of my time at primary school and beginning to prepare what would undoubtedly be a daunting move into year seven. Now, I'm not saying that everyone else found this thought easy to deal with - moving to a school more than twice the size of your current one where almost everyone around you is a scary process no matter what your circumstances, but in my case, there was one factor that was about to make the switch ten times harder. I could not - and, in fact, still can't - sit or stand with my back to anyone without experiencing serious anxiety, and without any kind of explanation for what I was experiencing, I was stuck. And once I got to secondary school, I was faced with the prospect of having every lesson in a different classroom, and with a different teacher. This meant having to face new classes full of people I had never seen before, walk down crowded corridors several times a day (no mean feat when you're trying to keep the back of your head invisible to every other person) and, worst of all, sit in a different seat in every single class. I specifically remember that I was not sat at the back of the room even once in the whole of my first year, despite the fact that the seating plans were changed every half term. Which meant that, every six weeks, I would walk into each lesson in turn and have to face the news that I would be sitting at the front of the room again.

This continued until the end of year nine (the third year), when I finally managed to figure out what was going on inside my head. When I came back to school at the beginning of year ten, I was genuinely hopeful that things would change for the better. I had a diagnosis, which meant that I could explain my situation and hopefully gain some support and understanding. And, at the beginning, it seemed that I was right. My head of year sent a message to all of my teachers telling them that I would need to sit at the back of the class, and I even managed to explain it to one or two of them myself. So, when I walked into my French lesson at the start of this term and saw that I had been placed right in the middle of the room, I nearly collapsed. If I hadn't known better, I would have run straight out of the room. French is the only lesson I have in which I am physically incapable of explaining my situation to the teacher, who insists that every student must speak only in French from the moment they enter the room. I was angry - why would she do this, when not only my parents but a fellow teacher had specifically told her that I needed to sit at the back? I told myself that she had probably just forgotten, but then I realised that that was not an excuse. If I had a visual impairment and needed to sit at the front, my teachers wouldn't forget. If I was a wheelchair user, they wouldn't suddenly decide that I could handle having a lesson on the top floor. Why should it be different just because I have a mental health problem, rather than a physical one? I decided that I needed to do some research, and find out what rights I have to be given support from my school. The result? It would appear that I have none. I couldn't even find a guideline which suggested that people like me be offered a certain level of support from any kind of primary school, secondary school or sixth form college in the UK.

The issue of schools and mental health was brought to my attention last weekend, when my cousin Clarissa texted me to tell me that her mum would be meeting with her head of year about the panic attacks she'd been having at school. I texted her again yesterday to find out how it went, fully expecting to be told that she'd been referred to her local mental health services and that she was going to get the help she needed. Did that happen? No. Apparently, the best the school decided they could do was to provide my cousin with a red card that she could "wave at her teachers to get her out of class if necessary". Which is fine in the short term, but from a long term perspective actually solves nothing at all. And when I heard that the teacher who allocated said card dismissed her panic attacks as "moments", I was angry again. Is anything actually being done to help her? Seemingly not. Does no one realise that untreated anxiety disorders do nothing but worsen? What we need is genuine support, and when that support isn't given by an establishment where we spend so much of our time, it can almost seem like it's not worth having at all.

Happy New Year - Let's Make A Change

Usually I find that New Year is one of the hardest times of the year for me - everything around me seems to be changing, a new school term looms and it always feels like the past year has gone more quickly than the last. So this year I decided that I was going to try and make new year a positive experience, perhaps by learning a new skill, or actually doing the homework that I had forced out of my mind for the last two weeks. But, after completing a biology task on the alleged benefits of sports drinks and learning both the alphabet and the numbers 1-100 in British Sign Language, I still didn't feel any better, so I decided to do something I had been considering for a while: I set up a petition urging Channel 4 to finally do something about their awful series Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, which I also complained posted about during OCD Awareness Week way back in October. Well, actually, two things, because I also bought a clarinet.

If you've read my OCD Awareness Week posts, you will most likely know why I dislike Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, but it may surprise you to know that my petition does not call for the show to be removed from our TVs entirely - all I'm asking them to do is change the name and the comments made during the episodes so that it no longer has any association with OCD. I think you'll agree that if they can't bring themselves to do that, they are very low people.

To find (and preferably sign) my petition, simply click on the button below:

Minds Like Ours and the 24 Hour Sponsored Talk

I'm sure I've posted before Minds Like Ours - a non-profit organisation dedicated to ending the stigma that surrounds mental health disorders (that I also do volunteer stuff for). Well, in order to really get people talking about mental health, they have decided to do just that, for a whole 24 hours! The talk starts tomorrow at 6pm and is the first event of its kind in the world. There's still time to donate to the sponsorship fund and check out the schedule for the event to find the bits you want to listen to, both of which can be done by clicking here. And don't worry, Doctor Who fans, the talk finishes at 6pm on Saturday, leaving plenty of time to watch The Day of the Doctor if you so desire.

OCD Awareness Week Day 7 - A Final Thought

So, OCD Awareness Week 2013 is drawing to a close, and I have to admit that, although I've done a lot to try and raise awareness throughout this week, there is still a part of me that thinks awareness weeks like this one aren't such a great idea. Why? Because they give people the idea that they can be "aware" for the duration of seven days and then go back to their everyday lives as if nothing ever happened. It unwittingly makes people believe that everything goes back to being fine and dandy at the end of the week, when in reality it doesn't. OCD doesn't go away just because we reach October 21st. I won't be magically cured of my illness at midnight tonight, and neither will any of the other 700,000+ people in the UK alone who live with OCD. It does not cease to exist just because the general public ceases to acknowledge it. So while I support OCD Awareness Week wholeheartedly, I also support OCD awareness for the rest of the year, when it is just as important.

That being said, my life does not solely revolve around my OCD. It controls a lot of what I do, but there are a lot of things in my life that this disorder can't touch. It can never take away the value I put on my family, or change any of my likes and dislikes. It is barely affecting me at all right now, as I sit on my bedroom floor typing this post while listening to Evanescence on iTunes. So yes, it is a serious illness that severely impacts my life and the lives of many other people, but it isn't everything. That's why I think mental health awareness is such an important thing; I feel that people need to see the side of it that I see every day. I want people to know that, even though I have this awful disorder, I also have likes and dislikes, hopes and dreams, one sister, a cat, a dog and ten (soon to be twelve) cousins. I live without the ability to control my irrational thoughts, but I also live in an English suburb with my parents and my little sister, just like my friends, my neighbours and the majority of the people at my school. I am mentally ill, but I am not mental, and neither is anyone else like me.

OCD Awareness Week Day 6 - Sources of Support

There are loads of places online and beyond that people with OCD can go to for support. I've listed a few here - just click on the pictures to visit their websites.

Minds Like Ours is a non profit organisation that supports those with mental health problems and raises awareness of mental health in general. I talk about them a lot, mainly because of their awesome forum.

OCD Action and OCD-UK are the UK's two charities that support people with OCD. They both do some really awesome work. OCD Action also has a website specifically for young people (if you look hard enough, you can find the article that I wrote for them recently), which you can find via their main website.

The Samaritans and Childline are both charities set up to help people in times of crisis or emotional distress. The only real difference is that ChildLine is specifically for people under the age of 18 (hence the name).

Mind is arguably the UK's biggest and most well known mental health charity. Their website has some great information about different mental health disorders, and I'm pretty sure they have a helpline as well.

Do you like my special "Click Here" buttons? I discovered picture effects presets on Microsoft PowerPoint today and it felt like Christmas.

OCD Awareness Week Day 5 - OCD and The Media

The media coverage for this year's OCD Awareness Week has been great (links to most of the best bits can be found via OCD-UK's website or twitter page), and the BBC documentary Extreme OCD Camp, which aired earlier this year, was absolutely amazing, but there have been some examples of OCD related media coverage that have not been so beneficial.

An obvious example of this is Channel 4's extremely damaging series Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners, which involves sending people who in most cases probably don't even know what OCD stands for into messy houses to clean them up. Not only is this a drastic misrepresentation of OCD, it is encouraging people to laugh at it and to believe that it really is just about people who enjoy being in a tidy environment.

Luckily, there are other people out there who agree with me, such as Claire Watkinson, who made this fantastic video response to the show:

As she mentioned, Claire is currently making her own film about OCD (you can find out more using the links at the end of the video), which I hope will contribute to the positive side of OCD awareness and help show people what OCD really is, as opposed to what horrendous shows like Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners tell you it is.

Of course, the media isn't all about what goes on in TV, so before I move on to my next post, I thought I'd share an awesome song that I found, which is Everything is Alright by Motion City Soundtrack:

I don't own either of the videos in this post, so no copyright infringement intended and all that.

OCD Awareness Week Day 4 - OCD and School

I'm afraid I haven't really felt up to posting in the last few days, but now I've finally got the energy I intend to catch up on the posts I've missed.

So, the topic I picked for day four of OCD Awareness Week was OCD and school.

For anyone whose OCD includes a fear of contamination, school is obviously going to be a challenge, but add that to being unable to have your back to anyone and being surrounded by hundreds of misinformed and in many cases totally uninformed people and it becomes a nightmare. I do have a few good friends at my school, but on the whole it's not a place I enjoy going to.

Possibly the hardest thing about the school routine is getting enough sleep. Secondary schools are notorious for starting their days much earlier than is beneficial for the typical teenager, and put that on top of an exhausting mental health problem and you're totally screwed if you're still awake past 11pm, which I always am. Why? Well, the answer is something of a vicious cycle, so I decided to make it into a diagram:

However, as with everything, there is a positive side. As I mentioned before, there are hundreds of students at my school - more than a thousand, in fact. That's a lot of people who can be made aware of OCD. Obviously I'm not going to be able to change the minds of 1000 people on my own, but there are ways of getting the message out there, such as suggesting assemblies and charity events, or making videos, such as this one, which I showed to my form just before World Mental Health Day this year:

Or this one, which I made for Minds Like Ours (although unfortunately it never got uploaded due to technical difficulties).

OCD Awareness Week Day 3 - Myths and Facts About OCD

Having created a list of topics to cover over the course of this week, I have decided that my discussion point for day three of OCD Awareness Week will be myths and facts about OCD. And there are loads! So many, in fact, that I decided to make a Bob and Steve episode addressing some of them, which you can see below:

So besides those, what other myths exist about OCD? Well, these were the ones that I came up with; let me know if you think of any more:

Myth #1 ~ OCD is Attention Seeking.
This is definitely one of my top three most hated myths about OCD. I can almost tolerate people comparing themselves to those with the disorder (I actually can't, but that's beside the point. I just have to smile and politely correct them.), and I can even put up with people laughing at my compulsions (although I really shouldn't have to, just saying), but attention seeking!?  Do you honestly think I do all of this for attention!?!? On the contrary, the thoughts and behaviours that dominate my life so much because of my OCD are pretty much the sole reason why I dread social situations, gravitate to the back of every crowd and spend many hours each day alone in my bedroom. If anything, attention is what I want to avoid, not generate. So yeah, on to the next myth:

Myth #2 ~ Having OCD Means Acting Like Monica From Friends.
On the whole, I think that TV programmes are responsible for a large number of these myths, and Friends is no exception, despite being one of my favourite shows (although it can't top Downton Abbey). While it never actually says that Monica has OCD, or even any mental disorder, her overly perfectionistic behaviour seems to be the image that most people think of when they hear the term. A far better example from the same programme would be the guy from the museum whose one line in the entire series was "I have to turn the light switch on and off seventeen times before I leave a room or my family will die!", although I was very annoyed at the fact they played the laughter track immediately afterwards. Okay, so I'll admit that some of Monica's behaviours are consistent with certain elements of OCD, but the key thing that sets her apart from an OCD sufferer is the enjoyment that she gets from activities such as cleaning. Let me make it clear now that compulsions that are part of OCD are never enjoyable. In fact, if you found your compulsive rituals fun then you wouldn't even qualify for a diagnosis of OCD in the first place. So there.

Myth #3 ~ There is Only One Type of OCD.
Contrary to popular belief - or, perhaps, popular ignorance - there are in fact several different categories of OCD, although many people fall into more than one category, and you are unlikely to ever find a professional who classifies these groupings as separate disorders. So why have a classification system in the first place? Well, it has been noticed by mental health professionals over the years (or so I assume) that the obsessive thoughts experienced by OCD sufferers usually come under a specific category, and that obsessions rarely stray outside these specific guidelines (although I'm not sure that's the right word to use). However, as I said, many people with OCD fall into several categories, and their obsessions can gradually change over time. My own OCD fits mainly into two different areas, although  there are some milder symptoms that come under others.

Funny, perhaps, but not OCD.
Photo courtesy of Google Images (in other words, don't blame me for the font).

Myth #4 ~ You Could Have OCD If You Only Spend 5 Minutes On Compulsions.
One thing that I find surprises people when I talk to them about OCD is that, in order to qualify for a diagnosis, obsessions and compulsions must take up at least one hour a day of a sufferer's time. However, this does not mean to say that everyone diagnosed with OCD spends this amount of time on rituals every day. For example, a person may have the obsession that they might poison their family if they buy the wrong type of food at the supermarket. They may only do two grocery shops every week, but have to spend four hours on each one, which adds up to the equivalent of more than an hour every day. Add that to the time they undoubtedly spend avoiding supermarkets and grocery shops, and you find a pretty severe case of OCD, despite the fact that they may be able to go days at a time with no symptoms at all.

OCD Awareness Week Day 2 - My Experience

My first post topic for OCD Awareness Week is the obvious choice of writing about my own experiences with the disorder. When I was diagnosed with OCD not so long ago, I found myself looking back at my life and realising that I first experienced symptoms of it around eleven years ago - when I was three years old. However, these symptoms only became severe enough to have a significant impact on my life about 4 or 5 years ago, when I was coming to the end of primary school. This was when I first began to fear that people could see or hear what I was thinking, even though I knew it was impossible, and I became terrified of sitting or standing with my back to people - a pretty inconvenient fear to have when your teacher decided on a new seating plan at random every Monday morning.

Some people reading this may wonder why I didn't just ask to move seats, which is, after all, something I find myself doing now on a regular basis. I almost certainly would have asked had I known how to, but the problem I had at the time was that I had no idea that what I was experiencing was a mental health disorder. In fact, it took me two and a half years from the day I first started experiencing these fears to realise that they were not something I would grow out of, and a further two years after that to find out the name of my condition.

Unlike most people, I had known about OCD for years before I was diagnosed with it, and, in fact, years before I fully developed it. But my first encounter with the disorder was not from a news feature or documentary, or even from my grandma, who I now recognise as the person I inherited the illness from in the first place. Nope, the first place I ever heard about obsessive-compulsive disorder was actually a fiction book about a group of pre teen students at the Royal Ballet School. Ironic, huh? But the funny thing was that, even at the age of eight or nine, I still related the symptoms of OCD to myself (although having said that, it seems to be something that everyone does these days). Even now, I remember reading the line "One of my friends had OCD. Her thing was washing her hands, until they were red and raw." and immediately thinking I do that, too. And it was true, I did spend a lot of time washing my hands for a child my age, and the eczema I already had on my hands was far worse for it.

And so, even though it turned out that the character in the book actually had obsessive compulsive personality disorder rather than OCD, the knowledge that it existed still stuck in the back of my mind. Despite this, though, I still didn't attribute most of my symptoms to OCD. In fact, it wasn't until a few weeks before I was diagnosed that I finally figured out what was going on with my head. I mean, I knew that I was going through two bottles of hand sanitizer a week and that I couldn't even leave the house, go into the bathroom, play a musical instrument or even type without my brain being overcome with the need to perform some elaborate ritual, but for some reason it just didn't click until someone linked me to the online M3 test and I scored a disheartening 55, with a 2 in three chance that I had depression and a 90% chance that I was suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder. This, of course, sent me straight to Google, where I eventually found the words that had been on the tip of my tongue for so long. From there, I went to my GP, and I am now counting down to my first appointment with CAMHS (the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service) on the 25th.

Now? Well, I would love to be able to say that I had improved since my diagnosis, but I haven't. I am still in exactly the same place that I described in the above paragraph, and as far as I'm aware my M3 score is pretty much the same. But that doesn't mean that nothing's changed. Once I had a name for my disorder and a proper explanation of what it was, I joined a mental health forum called Minds Like Ours and I am now one of their forum ambassadors and video editors, which is pretty fun. It's also given me the ability to raise awareness (hence this series of blog posts), the knowledge that I am not alone and the chance to get the help I need to recover (once I get over my fear of letting go of my rituals, which could take time).

OCD Awareness Week Day 1

I'm aiming to write a post every day this week for OCD Awareness Week! Unfortunately I'm a little short on time today, but starting from tomorrow I'll pick a different related topic every day and write about it.

World Mental Health Day 2013 *Possible Trigger Warning*

So, as you probably figure out from the title, today is World Mental Health Day, and, as a person who lives with a mental health disorder, I thought it would be a good idea to post about it.

World Mental Health Day is undoubtedly the biggest campaigning day of the year for many mental health organisations and charities, who take advantage of the special occasion to launch new initiatives to break down the mental health stigma (which could arguably be capitalised). I know I spent many hours creating an
awareness video for Minds Like Ours (although this will probably not be uploaded until tomorrow due to technical difficulties) in the form of a song that I wrote with my cousin Mary.

And since it is World Mental Health Day and we are aiming to share our stories free of judgement, I suppose I should admit that I really haven't had a good day today. If you've read my first post, you'll know that I suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and let me tell you, when you have this particular illness, the price for forgetting a specific ritual is pretty horrendous. This time, the realisation that I had forgotten a complex routine the day before triggered an even more complex set of intrusive thoughts that literally compelled me to tear at my skin with my fingernails constantly for six hours straight. So now you see why this post has a trigger warning. By the time I got home from school I was more tired than I have ever been in my life, and I still have several pieces of homework, many of them due tomorrow, that I haven't even started yet. Which means that I should probably go and do that...

Anxiety, Stimulants and the Sleep Cycle

As with any mental health disorder, anxiety creates its own set of problems, many of which I find involve the things I eat and drink combined with the amount of sleep I get, and that the two can often negatively affect each other.

How much anxiety I experience in a day depends a lot on what I do and where I am. I'm much more likely to come across things that trigger my OCD when I'm at school than when I'm hiding in my bedroom at home, for example. This in turn affects the things that I am able to do, which often has an impact on how I feel. You can see how I can quickly end up in a negative cycle. However, I have found that altering a few things in my life has helped me to manage my feelings more effectively, even if not entirely:

#1 ~ Sugar. This one might sound obvious, but it only recently hit me that the amount of sugar I consume and the amount of anxiety I feel might have some kind of relationship. The event that made me realise this took place near the end of the summer holidays this year, when I purchased an enormous box of gummy bears in the Duty Free shop at the airport when we were coming home from Menorca and ate the whole lot in the space of about 12 hours. This, needless to say, left me not only hyper but panicked and jumpy, and was followed by a pretty nasty sugar crash! Since then, I've limited the amount of sugar that I eat or drink in one sitting (I generally won't have anything with more than 15g of sugar per serving unless I'm exhausted or feeling low - or prepared to take a risk!), and I've found that it helped more than I thought it would. If anything, it gives me the feeling that I'm in control of something, even if the whole anxiety relief thing is only a placebo.

I still have the box. I'm not really sure why.

#2 ~ Caffeine. I've never really drunk much caffeine to be honest (unlike my younger sister, who's addicted to the stuff), so it wasn't until I started cutting down on sugar that I figured it would probably be a good idea to go decaf as well. As a result, I now drink even less caffeine than I did before (i.e. none) unless I'm absolutely exhausted or feeling very low, in which case I'll have a cup of tea. Right now I've got an embarrassingly weak cup of cold English Breakfast, which I've drunk only half of in over an hour. I'm drinking it deliberately slowly - not only to gauge my body's reaction to it but to avoid spilling it on my computer! It tastes vile, but it's doing the trick.

#3 ~ Sleep. Because my anxiety drains so much of my energy, I find that I often want to sleep at odd times (generally during school, which as you can imagine isn't favourable). I always avoid taking naps even if I'm able, as if I give in I'll mess up my body clock and end up wide awake and twice as anxious at three in the morning. Having said that, though, there is scientific evidence that taking a 20 minute nap every now and again can be beneficial (they even tested it on Mythbusters!), so at the end of the day it's really down to personal choice.

As always, feel free to post anything you think I may have missed in the comments section below, or suggest other things I could post about in the future.

Mental Health and the Daily Routine

If, like me, you're among the one in four people living with a mental health problem, chances are it can seriously affect the structure of your days. I know from my own experiences of exhausting anxiety, ridiculous amounts of time spent on compulsive rituals and an increasingly demanding schedule that it can be pretty hard to motivate yourself to get things done, which is why I've decided to share some of my tips for keeping to a daily routine here:

Tip #1 ~ Write things on a calendar. A calendar is a really useful and easy way of reminding yourself of what you have to do whilst also reassuring yourself that you haven't forgotten anything. It can also be free; you can use calendars on your phone or email inbox, or just do what I did and draw one in a notebook. I find it useful to colour code my calendar so that I can look at it and immediately have a good idea of what kind of day I'm likely to have. I write everything I absolutely have to remember (or, as the case may be, absolutely can't avoid), such as appointments and coursework deadlines, in red; significant days or annual events (like birthdays) in blue; and everything else in black. I also highlight certain days in different colours depending on how much anxiety the events on that day are likely to cause me. Yellow is some anxiety, orange is significant anxiety and pink is severe anxiety. To show you what I mean, this is what the next two months currently look like:

On the back of each month is my notes page, which is where I write the things that happen that might be useful to me in the future, such as good coping strategies I've discovered or warnings not to do things a certain way. I also colour code these notes to show how much anxiety I felt on the given day.

Tip #2 ~ Allocate your time. Make the commitment to finish the things that really need doing before moving on to other things. For example, if you know you've got a project due tomorrow and you still have half of it to do, you will feel a lot better later if you sit down and finish it rather than going off to play video games, as tempting as the second option may be. It's perfectly alright to allow yourself a break now and then, particularly if you're working at a computer or doing something that requires straining your eyes, but make sure you set yourself a sensible time limit (the recommended time for a break is about twenty minutes) and that you go back to your task once it's over. If someone asks you to help them with something or a friend calls asking if you're free, be sure to check that you actually have time before you say yes. Whoever it is will understand if you're too busy, just like you (hopefully) would for them.

Tip #3 ~ Know when enough's enough. Everyone has limits, and it's really important to remember that, particularly if you're already struggling with your mental health. Take care not to over commit yourself, and let people know if it's all getting too much. It would probably be a good idea to let your school or workplace know about your disorder if you haven't already, as they'll be able to work with you to make sure you're not taking on more than you can handle. 

So, that's my advice on keeping a structured routine. Feel free to comment with any additional suggestions, and I'll let you know how well I do with sticking to my plan!