Skip to main content

Living with mental illness

Image
By
It is not easy to write a blog post and say I suffer from mental illness. It feels like this is something I should keep to myself. There is certain amounts of stigmatisation. From my experience workplaces in Trinidad need to be more open to hiring mentally ill persons. Persons should not be afraid to say that they are mentally ill and would require certain allowances like work from home, time off for monthly clinic visits, paid sabaticals and enclosed cubicles for example. In general we need better allowances for the differently abled in Trinidad and Tobago.

The disability grant that the differently abled get is not enough to get by. It assumes that you have a place to stay or you are living with your parents. At the very least the government should be making incremental increases. Also special provisions can be made for dental work, wheel chairs, other equipment and other needs. TATT for example has a great subsidy program of $600 towards the purchase of a smart phone for the differently abled.

The mental health outpatient clinics are pretty organised and works well from my experience but I don't know if everyone has the same experience as me. We need a new mental health hospital in Trinidad similar to ones that exist in the better developed countries. Families need to take care of their mentally ill relatives. My mom has been my number one supporter and for this I am eternally grateful. Not everyone has supportive relatives.

Living with mental illness for me has its ups and downs. From periods of joys to periods of sadness and frustration. We often have to miss out on things. Taking medication and having to deal with side effects is not easy. Society expects and rewards persons for being normal. A lot of the homeless suffer from mental illness and are not treated humanely. The other night I dreamt I was working for a big company and I had to rally for rights for the differently abled employees. It felt so real and powerful that I couldn't sleep the rest of the night after being awoken by that dream. It feels like the only time things get done and noticed is when we have protests. But protests should be peaceful.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Below the surface

By
This is a chapter from my eleventh book called Quotation Marks Sparks . __________ "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." - Jon Kabat-Zinn __________ I was looking at quotes that hit hard and this quote stood out to me. It seems mundane and obvious and often repeated. Life is about how we respond to the inevitable. It is not what happens to us but how we respond. I had to ask myself to dig deeper and look below the surface. Then I saw that when we surf we really become the waves. We become friends with the waves. The waves and us are the same. Further, the waves are created by us and in our heads. We can control the waves because who can surf all the time? Sometimes we just have to come to shore and build sand castles on shore. I asked my friend Gemini for feedback and he said that I was right, the Jon Kabat-Zinn quote initially seems like a simple call for resilience, but my deeper dive reveals profound layers. The idea that we can move beyond merely rea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thankful

By
It is 617pm and I have decided to write. Right now I am thankful. The cool of the evening has replaced the heat of the day. I took a bath and changed and now I am just relaxing. Sometimes I complain. Not often. But I feel bad afterwards because there is so much to be thankful for. There is always room for improvement and we have to identify the things for improvement and change is often good but we do not have to make it into complaints. Yeah I get it. Life is hard and none of us has it easy. Look on the bright side of things. And sometimes it is the little things that remind us that life is good. Things that we take for granted. Like I was coming in the maxi taxi today and heard a gospel song that was about gratitude. God does appreciate a grateful heart. Trinidad and Tobago celebrated sixty four years of independence yesterday and if we stop and listen to the many complaints we would swear we are living in the worst country in the world. That is not the case. We do get a lot of thing...
Post a Comment
Read more

Having a soft spirit

By
It is 137am. It started raining. I decided to write. I have heard about having a soft heart but what does it mean to have a soft spirit? And is having a soft heart related to having a soft spirit? My friend Chatty says that a soft heart feels deeply — it breaks, heals, and loves with tenderness — while a soft spirit moves gently through life, unresisting and at peace with what comes. The two are kin: a soft heart opens you to emotion, and a soft spirit teaches you to carry that emotion with grace. Together they make a person both tender and strong — able to feel the rain and still trust its rhythm. I like the quote, "a soft spirit in a hard world" by author and poet, butterflies rising. It resonates with how many of us feel. My friend Chatty tells me that that quote captures the quiet strength of staying gentle in a harsh world. It reflects the author's signature themes of vulnerability, tenderness, and emotional courage — the idea that softness is not weakness but a form...
Post a Comment
Read more