Capt SpaceBat

Many thanks to Chato B. Stewart from Mental Health Humor for this fine caricature.  The additional cartoon elements inspired quite a number of thoughts; mostly postitive ones, which is both a good thing as well as being possibly a first.

Fortunately (for me, in mine humble estimation) the Mental Health profession has not seen fit to treat me with pharmaceuticals; the basis of my particular personality disorder and related traits being psychological rather than physiological, so I don’t really have too much first hand experience of going through the medication treadmill.  Here, in the United Kingdom, the first problem seems to be getting any treatment at all; many trained psychologists and therapists moving straight over to the private sector once qualified leads to a patchy paucity of service.  That said, the quality of care, once finally obtained, is outstanding.  At least that is mine experience of psychotherapy.

The psychiatric and medical end of mental health provision stills seem to be trapped in somewhere, if not “half Disney, half Kraft-Ebbing” at least, a strange amalgam of Franz Kafka’s and Charles Dickens’ discarded plot-lines.  But that again is only my partially-informed opinion.

During one particularly shaky episode a few years ago, I was taken to hospital one Saturday night and - since there was nobody suitable to see me - I was discharged until the following Monday with a supply of anti-psychotics to see me through until then.  On returning home, feeling for a moment that my troubles were actually being taken seriously, I peered into the box of tablets to find 2 (yes, that’s right, two: the number between one and three) little pills.  Outraged at this, I decided the only way out was to attempt an overdose by taking both of the tablets.  At the same time.  After washing them down with a bottle of cheap wine, I decided that the mental health profession had little to offer me and that I was better off fending for myself.

How wrong I was.

Over that year, I had several (countless) episodes, some of which required short visits to hospital to discuss matters with psychiatric and psychological staff, along with the occasional request to be detained under whichever section of the Mental Health Act that I thought either appropriate or had not tried before.  By dint of being in many professionals’ thoughts as they arose, as they lay down and as they awoke screaming in the night - much to my wife’s credit - I finally started a course of psychotherapy.  Some 31 years after it had been first suggested, when I was a young child being taken into care.

The therapy - a short course and a long course - did prove invaluable; more of which at a later date.  It was only through repeated and relentless persecution of the local health authority that this was achieved.  What someone either less determined or without other support would have done to get treated is beyond me; probably resulting in an emergency admission, armed police or suicide.

Even with all this therapy under my mental belt, as stated - I think - in the Qu’ran, knowledge without use is worse than sinful and so I had not only to apply the lessons learnt about myself but to put them to some practical use and learn to interact with other people, breaking the inability to fit within accepted societal norms.  “Websites” came the answer from on high.

Wait, isn’t that what I did before, locked away in my room in the dark avoiding all human contact? Yes, but this time would be different; I would interact. I joined a college evening class to brush up my web skills and slowly reintroduce myself to the world outside of pubs, mental gutters and the dark side of the duvet. 

For both of my two immediately previous courses (online via Vision2Learn) a key part of the course had been to produce a website as a project throughout the course.  Thus two of Sarah’s brainchildren www.SansSeraphim.co.uk and www.GardenLend.co.uk had been born in digital format. 

This course was different.  Each week we learn (or usually re-learnt) some aspect of Advanced Web Design, applying it each time to a new context: Arboriculture, Classic Cars, Bookshops and the like.  Throughout the course I developed - at Sarah’s behest - a site devoted to selling Modernist jewellery: www.Modern-ism.com and managed through highly targetted site optimisation and search engine submission to get it to the front page of the major search engines for most of the desired search terms.

Our range of objets de vertu expanded, covering ever wider periods: eventually over two centuries and more, hence the name of the new website: www.2CenturiesAntiques.co.uk - we are dedicated to bringing you an interesting range of objects, including gold, silver, fine and costume jewellery, pewter, silver plate and silver metalware, glass, pottery, porcelain, costume, textiles, furniture and collectables.

We have called the site “2 Centuries Antiques” because it can contain at, any one time, pieces from any two centuries, apart from the 21st. We stock Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modernist, African, Asian and Oriental jewelry, antiques and collectibles. We try to keep our prices as low as possible, and our shipping is free worldwide.

That’s the end of this blog posts’s commercial plug; on a more personal note, if anyone who has a ground floor council or Housing Association flat with a garden that they wish to exchange for a second floor flat with a balcony on the outskirts of Wimbledon, please take a look at http://blog.gardenlend.co.uk/2008/12/03/gardenlend-the-next-stage-house-and-garden-swap/