Mental health

Janine's contribution to A Disorder for Everyone's online poetry gig challenging the mainstream narrative on mental health, held on 16 April 2021, featuring the poems Locked Up and Down and Not OK.

• a guest post by Ian Hutchinson, autistic clinician – NHS children’s services, Cornwall 

Thinking about practical humanistic models for supporting autistic people in distress, time for a paradigm shift? 

What if I can't stand the train
without the carriage to myself?
What if I can't stretch and strain
to reach up to the luggage shelf?

What if all the outside seats
are taken and the queue's too long?
And I don't recognise the streets
and can't see left or right or wrong?

Published in Solidarity 562:

Last year, I wrote a poem (a pantoum) called 'This Place' about visiting my son in the adolescent psychiatric unit where he spent four months (read it here).

He now has his own flat, living independently with support. So I decided to write a follow-up poem of the same length in the same style, hoping that this will illustrate the wonderful progression.

Call centre working is a danger to your mental health. 

Depression, anxiety, panic attacks, high blood pressure, sleeping problems and even suicidal thoughts are common among call centre workers.

More than 4 in 5 respondents to a Unison survey said that work made them stressed.

In another survey [Mind], when asked how workplace stress affected them:

As call centre workers face a mental health crisis, Janine advocates organising for workplace change.

I come to see you in this place
A train, a bus, a longish walk
A mask of growth veneers your face
We picnic, catch up, laugh and talk

A train, a bus, a longish walk
They brought you here to make you well
We picnic, catch up, laugh and talk
You've questions, jokes and tales to tell

Janine proposing a motion condemning deaths of autistic and learning disabled people in care, at TUC Disabled Workers' Conference in May 2019.

***

On 21 March this year, an inquest ruled that the death of Colette McCulloch was avoidable.

Colette was thirty-five years old when she died. She was autistic, and in a hostile society, she had become mentally unwell.