Category Archives: Collaborations

Happy Birthday for a lovely carer

HT39

BRENDA ONATADE

Poem from Blodwen Jones who has written a book of poems called MOONSTRUCK.

On Monday 17th August, this amazing lady will be 80 years young!
In my eyes, there is absolutely no way her praises can sung
enough to do her justice. How many people has she cared for over the years?
I truly wouldn’t want to hazard a guess – it would bring me to tears.
(Tears of respect for a selfless woman who truly cares.)
To tell you the truth, I don’t know her well, but I know enough to be able to say,
that she is an inspiration to myself and others on the IR at the end of the day.
I have never heard her complain once. In fact, the opposite is true –
and she really is a fount of wisdom for people like myself and you.
We need more people like Brenda, to make the world a better place.
She could be an inspiration for all of the whole of the human race.

 

HAVE A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRENDA.

Not all Super hero’s wear capes, well except for this one.  Brenda is that someone I have known for many years and it is her birthday today.

She has been there fighting that hard fight to get carers recognized and identified.  Brenda has been through that difficult carer story and understands how horrible that carer journey can be.

She has been a member of many groups both carer and service user and we all hope she continues to contribute to the expert by experience cause.

Happy Birthday Brenda from

From Matthew Mckenzie

Also thanks from the Involvement Register Support Group, Southwark, Lambeth and Lewisham carers.

Recovery from Mental Illness – collaboration

 

20140621_215858Welcome back to another blog post, this blog is on a well known subject within mental health fields and sometimes controversial. I decided to do a collaboration video with Malika Salih from “A Oreo Family”. We talked about mental health recovery, but this time Malika chose to focus on how mental health recovery affected her life.

 

If you wish to watch the video please click on the video below to play it.

As you can tell from the video Malika talked on how mental illness distrupted her life, but also gave her some insight into putting things into pespective. Malika rightly stated that mental health recovery is not the same for everyone, it all depends on the mental illness, the support one is getting and fighting stigma. Still it is so important to raise the awareness that mental health recovery can be possible under the right circumstances. It is a terrible situation to be aware that others fall deeper into mental illness when there are several chances of recovery.

As mentioned in my section of the video, I spoke about what impressed me about what Malika mentioned. It can be incredible difficult to speak openly about mental illness, there is still much stigma to face and the person can face ridicule. Without the support of friends, family or health professionals then the road to recovery will be a difficult one.

When mental illness impacts someone’s life, it can throw the persons life into turmoil, chaos and desperation could be the outcome, but there is always a small chance of reflection. We can begin to see how life can be incredibly fragile and as we begin to reflect on our own illness we slowly become aware of others, we become aware of the daily battle people face if they are struck with mental illness. This is just one of the reasons why Malika and myself continue to raise mental health awareness.

When you have time, please check out her videos off her media channel from the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA3enUqCcuqPt0UQcr-yL9Q/videos

Hope you enjoyed my blog, see you soon.

Tips from mental health survivor on caring

coverWelcome everyone and I am hoping you have had a good weekend. Today’s topic is another collaboration. This collaboration is with Alex from her Youtube channel “The truth about mental illness”. We decided to present on the importance of caring for someone suffering mental ill health.

There are situations where those with lived experience do not get support from a close relative or carer. There are those who feel carers are not essential. Each situation is complex and there is not often a right answer, but if someone suffering mental ill heath can get support from a carer (e.g. someone in the family or friend), then the outcomes usually tend to be better.

Living with mental illness can be challenging enough and having to go through mental ill health by oneself can be overwhelming. So I was glad to hear that Alex who is a mental health survivor wanted to present on how her mother provided support for her.

Alex promotes mental health experiences and well-being off her Youtube channel, it is worth a look to get her views, but before you check out her videos. I hope you could view the video we collaborated with below.

Alex spoke about important caring and support tips regarding how carers may have to judge the situation by gut feelings. There will be times when a carer has to assess how to provide care and support. It can be almost walking like eggshells if a carer crowds the “caree”. Alex explains this well in the video.

The collaborated video also looks into how a carer’s experiences can be vital in providing care and support, plus we look at some other tips which could be important to both the and service user or carer’s journey.

Embed from Getty Images

I hope you enjoy the video and blog and hope to see you next time when I take on an immense project in which I examine different types of therapies.

Collaboration with Jae Marie from Mental Lifestyle

Welcome back to another blog post from Matthew Mckenzie, a carer from South East London. My website helps raise mental health awareness from a carers angle, but I feel my site is versatile enough to try cover other experiences. This is why this particular blog post is a collaboration with Jae Marie from Mental Lifestyle.

We both wanted to raise the subject of “why it is important to raise mental health awareness”.

Continue reading →