I’ve always been a big reader and have often dreamed about becoming a writer, but I never imagined that writing would one day save my life.
Okay, perhaps that’s a little melodramatic, but it is definitely true that writing about my experiences enabled me to process what I’d been going through and allowed me to finally recover after years of struggling with depression, anxiety and insomnia.… Read more
The Muggle’s Guide to Dementor Defence is based on my experience with mental health issues. Posts like this are more personal than, for example, my recent post about sleep and insomnia, but I hope to include some helpful advice as well as telling my story.
I struggled with many things when I was suffering from depression and anxiety, including issues surrounding my career, my relationships, my social life… It’s too much to talk about all at once, so I … Read more
So, this is the first entry in what I’m calling “A Muggle’s Guide to Dementor Defence”, which is based on my personal battle with mental health problems, my notes from therapy and my own research/experience of trying to live a happier life (for more background on The Guide, click here).
One of the aims for this series is to present some practical advice on a range of mental-health-related subjects and today, I wanted to look at what was, for … Read more
A while back, I reviewed Sarah Millican’s brilliant book “How To Be Champion“, which was part autobiography, part joke collection and part self-help book. On a similar theme, I’d like to discuss another book I’ve been reading recently; “Happy” by mentalist, illusionist and warlock Derren Brown. Or, to give it it’s full title: “Happy: Why More Or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine”.… Read more
For a fair chunk of the last decade, I have been battling with a range of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety and insomnia. I suffered on and off for almost seven years before finally getting the help I needed to turn my life around. While I was in therapy, I made a lot of notes and now I’m trying to turn those notes into something useful. “A Muggle’s Guide to Dementor Defence” will be a series of blog posts … Read more
One of the things that I wanted to talk about on this blog is mental health. Specifically, I want to share my own experiences and some of the things that helped me with my recovery and continue to help me to be in my day-to-day life. In this post, I want to talk about one handy piece of advice from British comedian Sarah Millican…
As part of the process of creating the world for my story, I was working on a mini-website called the Databank, which contained information about the characters and the world. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was difficult to maintain and ultimately fell by the wayside. However, I recently returned to the idea and explored a different solution that has been incredibly helpful to me, so I thought I would share it with you.… Read more