Endorsements

Anon - 14th September 2009

Just wanted to write and thank you for allowing me to be included in the work that you are doing.

As you know I have suffered from schizophrenia since the age of 14. I, like so many others, have been through some extremely fucking scarily bleak times in my life. Mental illness is an awful affliction - a seriously bad hand to be dealt in life. I have felt at times, my situation, too much to continue to cope with day in day out.

I know now, thanks to the brave work of people like you that I am not alone in this suffering.

Apart from living (if you can call it that) with schizophrenia, I , like so many others have to battle another affliction daily. This is the stigma that surrounds my position in life - unemployed, on benefits, basically completely reliant on other peoples hard earned taxes to live.

Every time I meet new people I dread the inevitable question - "So, what do you do then?"

I am then faced with 2 options.

1: I lie. I tell them I work with horses.

2: I'm honest. I tell them I'm on benefits due to being schizophrenic

Option 2 is always somewhat of a conversation killer. everything goes silent while they try to figure out if I'm joking or am I genuinely committing benefit fraud, because I don't look ill, sat in the pub.

And thus I am judged within a few minutes of meeting someone. So I generally opt for option 1 and lie my way through acquaintances.

Anyway, after all that waffle, I'll try to get to the point.

I believe the importance of your work cannot be stressed to strongly. I thought the event on the 13th was fantastic. All my life I've been denying my illness but after seeing what you've done I now want to take a megaphone to the top of a building and shout at the world "I'M SCHIZOPHRENIC - ANYBODY GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?"

The poems were amazing. Not easy to listen to some as they took me back to dark places but incredible at the same time because they were the words of somebody who wasn't me.In short you are battling a social stigma that has been beating me for 10 years! and if there is anything that I can do to help I would jump at the chance to get involved.

With buckets of respect.

Agniya - September 2009

"I just wanted to say that the very idea of the book is incredibly beautiful and just right, and thank you for having a part in it and for giving a shit and being a human being."

Alison Smith - Psychotherapist working in the mental health and substance use field for 19 years

January 2010

"This is what the field of mental health has been waiting for! To have a forum which appropriately normalises depression, accepts that substance use is just one of the ways of dealing with it and celebrates the artist, their work and the use of creativity as a therapeutic tool only has in my mind one way of going - and that way is up."