Bonkersfest 2008 & Mad Pride

Sorry if anyone’s already posted this, but I’ve been reading more about mental health acceptance, or ‘Mad Pride’, groups in the US, and through this great article about Liz Spikol et al, I found out about this:

BonkersFest! 2008 ‘De-normalisation: The next civil rights movement?’

Date: Saturday 7th June 2008
Location: London (at the old site of Bedlam!) Bedlam, The Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, Lambeth Road, London SE1 & at exactly the same time and date in four other parts of the UK! (I’m working on finding out where they are now, and will post as soon as I know)

And for those who can’t make Saturday, there’s also the BonkersFest! Tea Party - Camberwell Green, London SE5 on Sunday June 8th 2008 - presumably there as it’s very close to the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital (where I used to work as PA to the Dean, oo er)…

The blurb from the site:
BonkersFest! - the acclaimed annual arts and music festival opens a public space to a roaring creative vortex. A celebration of the pure embrace of both art and madness working to a single end, the moral purpose that great art embodies and a truly joyful exaltation of madness, creativity, the expression of individuality and diversity.

“Bonkersfest!…a huge success, you should be very proud of yourselves” - Jo Brand

So, does anyone fancy going, praps as a Crazy Like Us? group?

p.s. Toe still too buggered, according to various medical professionals, to run on. I’m going back to the doctor today, so will post results of that one later. They want to put me back on SSRIs for my anxiety…

 

Update…

So, I finished my two essays on Monday, and it was tough and pretty horrible, but they’re in now..!

That evening, I may have had a little drink, to celebrate. Now, I’m clumsy and poorly co-ordinated at the best of times - I have dyspraxia, which is immaturity of motor neurone connections in the brain, and means that things like playing tennis, where you have to try and judge distance using something extended from your body at a moving object, is kind of really not possible for me. I have a total phobia of team sports because I know my body will let me, and the whole team, down. It’s like, even if my brain is telling my body what to do, the calculations always seem out.

Anyway, as I was walking out of the lounge to go upstairs to bed on Monday night, my calculations messed up bigstyle, and my right foot slammed into the door jamb. All my toes are fine, except the fourth one, which was throbbing with pain that night, and has since gone green, blue, greeny blue, bluey black, black and now is greyish. It has also gone from the size of a chipolata, back to almost normal, since Monday. Still, as I’ve either broken it (little toes notoriously break easily and are hardly ever even x-rayed by hospitals) or just really badly bruised it, jogging has been out.

Which has really sucked. My best friend, Anthea, has signed up to do the run now, and we’re going to do it, possibly with my Dad (both are fitter than me!), which means I really need to start training. Only if I run on my toe before it’s better, it’s just going to prolong the whole healing process. Sigh. At the moment, I can walk on it almost normally, with a slight limp. But such are things, yunno. A combination of a bit of celebration booze and a few crappy neurones have conspired to dock me a week, but it’s not the end of the world. I’m going to keep telling myself that, anyway…

In the meantime, mentally this week has been really hard, and I wish I could have done some running. I recently saw a report which said that exercise actually cuts your chances of feeling blue or depressed by a third. ONE THIRD. That’s amazing… I’ll keep you guys posted, anyway, and once the swelling’s gone down and the bruise is pretty much gone, I’ll strap the trainers back on again. Hope you’re all doing ok, and *hugs* to anyone who’s not.

 

Quick NB

Hi everyone,

I know I haven’t posted in a while about the running. It’s largely down to getting badly behind on my work for uni. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to do this week (my two 5000 word essays are due in on Monday 14th, after which there will be much drinking) but if I manage to get out for a run I’ll post on here. Business as usual resumes on Tuesday 15th.

 

4th jog

I went for the fourth jog last night and my muscles were hurting a bit, but I still did it. I felt very tired on coming home, though, and have decided to take today off, and do today’s run on the rest day, tomorrow.

Effect on my mental health:

So far, the affect has been negligible, oddly. Perhaps I haven’t done enough time-wise to get to the buzzy stage, although I have felt good after the runs and I’ve felt good about my committment to it. I’ve also enjoyed the actual running. Despite this, I’ve been feeling very low and have had some suicidal thoughts, although that’s hardly rare - I have them most days. I think while I feel liberated by the running, I feel trapped by my eating, which has always been a problem for me. Eating is just so complicated and surrounded by emotion it’s like trying to find sense in a Daily Mail article.

At the moment I’ve got the night to myself as S (my boyfriend) is going out to the pub with a friend. I’m trying desperately to work out in my head what to buy for dinner. I’ve already overeaten several times today, and feel pretty dreadful, but I know I’ll be hungry again in the evening. Part of me just wants to have something bingey that I know I will feel bad about, but it’ll mean that for at least a short time I’ll feel good. Part of me wants to eat nothing at all, as if that could ever be some kind of answer.

I always wondered about the different ways people deal with addiction. Cigarettes, alcohol, drugs - to give them up you have to give them up forever. But food? You have to reconnect with your actual hunger and somehow live by it. It’s a nightmarish task. Imagine asking an alcoholic to make sure they drank just three small glasses a day. Or a junkie to have 3 small hits, and 2 spliffs, but nothing else. I know Susie Orbach’s methods are the right way to eat, but I feel like I’m just too messed up to manage them - my eating habits are so f***ed that I would have to give up my job, my life, and concentrate on nothing but resolving my eating for months and months and maybe even years before I could eat properly again. It doesn’t seem a fair choice.

Anyway, sorry for being all depressive today! New Battlestar Galactica is out tonight, so I am looking forward to that. I’ve also recently done a poll with some friends about body size and the psychology around that, so I’ll be sharing that in another article soon. Hope you all have great weekends

 

3rd jog

Just got back from my third jog, and it all went well. I think at the moment a combination of my enthusiasm starting a new thing combined with it being a fairly short distance has meant that I’m confident and committed. Watch all that change on Sunday for the 25 minuter!

I remembered a fact earlier, by the way, that I thought I’d share with you all. Do you ever get fed up of hearing about men being ‘better’ at sport - faster, stronger, etc.? It annoys me, anyway. One debate has been raging, however, which women may well win:

Are women better than men at long distance running?

Now this hasn’t been proved completely, yet, but more and more evidence is coming forward to show that women’s endurance is higher than that of their male competitors. Women have also had a very late start - we were only allowed to compete in marathons in the 1980s, due to the belief that women didn’t have the endurance capability. By the 90s, people were already raising eyebrows at just how good women were. So we’ve gone from ‘not having the capability’ to ‘possibly having a better capability’ in less than twenty years? I’m intrigued.

For anyone who’s interested in this, here are a few articles on the topic.

Are Women Catching Up With Men?

Ask the running doc: Will women someday beat men in the marathon?

 

2nd jog

I went on the second jog earlier. It went fine. My motivation is obviously still fairly high as I’m quite enjoying the exercise. And because I have to write about it. I couldn’t face going into the office today, though. My anxieties get really bad at work - when I get home in the afternoon and shut the front door I feel a real sense of relief. The stress surrounding the job really gets to me, and the people are quite inpenetrable.

On my first day I was in two of my male colleagues discussed getting a stripper to come into the office as it was another male colleague’s birthday. I felt very uncomfortable with this, and, after twenty minutes of trying to work out what I should do in an office where I had no authority, I emailed a fairly friendly seeming female colleague, and told her I would leave the building when the stripper arrived, and asked if she wouldn’t mind texting or calling me on my mobile phone once she had left. She wrote back saying that it was unlikely they’d get anything organised, and in the end they didn’t, and just went to the pub.

I felt totally helpless to voice the problems I had with their behaviour, however, and spent most of my time in the first weeks of my job trying to work out just what sort of an organisation I was working for. Part of their remit is working with women’s rights groups in Africa. Yet they thought it was acceptable to bring a British stripper into the workplace, a woman who was statistically likely to have suffered sexual abuse in childhood, not to mention the concept of professionalism. Even now, several months into the job, sexist comments are regularly made in the office, and no women sit on the senior board, despite the fact that almost all administrators and lower level positions are held by women. I find the office an incredibly uncomfortable place to be in due to this, and due to the fact that despite my having asked on numerous occasions, they still haven’t got a contract for me to sign, to say I legally work there. This makes me even more reluctant to say anything, as if I am sacked I will not be able to prove I even worked there. It won’t be forever, though, only till the end of August, when my course at uni finishes and my partner and I will move back to London.

It’s opened my eyes a lot to the endemic sexism experienced by so many people in so many organisations. I hope you lot have better luck with work!

 

First jog, showering and body issues

I went to the gym about 7pm and did my first 15 minute jog, which went pretty well. Despite not really doing any exercise for a few weeks, my residual fitness level carried me through ok, and I enjoyed the run.

A few thoughts: Since I have some back problems and can’t usually run in the mornings (my back needs some time to unlock itself during the day in order to not hurt when running) I’ll be taking two showers a day - one just to freshen up before work, and one after the run. This is going to be quite a test for me, and will hopefully lead to greater body acceptance. One thing I didn’t mention in yesterday’s post, as I didn’t want to make it as long as your arm, is that I have an eating disorder, as well as the other mental health difficulties - compulsive overeating. I have also, in the past, suffered from bulimia and anorexia, and have quite warped views towards my body and food. At the moment, I regularly eat too much at mealtimes, and binge when I am bored or stressed. My weight is therefore more than it should be and I have trouble enjoying my body and often even looking at it is very difficult, provoking feelings of guilt, anger and disgust.

Showering is almost always difficult too - moving my hands over my body and bending to wash forces me to actually feel my body. Normally, I try and shower as fast as I can, and touch certain areas, such as my stomach, as little as I can. Showering twice daily means I’m going to have to confront these fears and try to accept myself a little more. I’ll report back on how this goes.

 

Jogging 1 - Prozac 0

I’m Rachel, a new writer here, and I’m going to be blogging about sport and depression. At the moment, the depression which I’ve suffered from for most of my 24 years is hanging around with a vengeance. Intrusive, upsetting thoughts are barging their way into my head several times daily, along with a low mood that seems to settle whenever I’m alone or trapped or in transit and a propensity to get weepy at the most inane things. I almost had a full blown sobbing fit earlier at the end of that episode of the Simpsons where Homer gives up his job at the nuclear plant but has to go back when Maggie’s born. See, it’s very emotional:

Therapy has helped with realising larger truths to my moods, but the only thing that’s ever made a difference to my mental state within a very short period of time is exercise. Ok, so the effect doesn’t last forever, but it’s normally enough to shift my depressed mood for the day in which I get sweaty. So, why don’t I just go for a run every day, I hear you shout? Good bloody question. The inertia of depression, anxious feelings about being outside around other people and general laziness are probably the best answers I’ve got for you. And they’re not bad answers. But versus the potential removal of my depressive moods, and generally being fitter and healthier, they feel a bit less valid.

I’ve been jogging on and off since I was about 16. I’m dyspraxic, which means that I’m not really co-ordinated enough for any sport that requires running-and-doing-something-else, or indeed, anything that involves moving your arms and legs in a way you don’t just do when walking but a bit faster. It’s not an excuse, this one: I’ve been hospitalised twice due to accidents resulting from my clumsiness and lack of co-ordination, one which required an overnight stay and an operation.

Anyway, after that marathon of an introduction (if you’ve got this far, break out the Kendal Mint Cake) I’m here to make more bad running puns and introduce you to this: The British 10K London Run 2008. I’ve done a couple of 5Ks before, but I’ve always been a goal orientated person, and think that having this to work towards will help (plus you make back your entry fee with the vouchers for trainers they send you, and mine smell of seaweed). You see, I’ve decided to do exactly what I should have years ago, and start running every day. I’ve got a schedule and everything. And if I’ve got you lot to answer to, maybe, just maybe, I’ll stop hiding out under my duvet every afternoon with Battlestar Galactica dvds and packets of Revels. This is the plan for the next two weeks to try and ease myself in:

Monday: 15 mins jog

Tuesday: 15 mins jog

Wednesday: 15 mins jog, 5 mins walk, 5 mins jog

Thursday: 10 mins jog, 5 mins walk, 10 mins jog

Friday: 20 mins jog

Saturday: Rest

Sunday: 25 mins jog

I’ll blog about how each run goes, and how it affects how I’m feeling about myself, as well as looking into the theories surrounding why exercise works. Wish me luck!