Post 600

When I started this blog nearly two years ago I did wonder whether I would keep it up. There have been a few breaks in posting, the times that I was in hospital and again when I went through a really bad period of depression and just getting myself out of bed each day was a major achievement.

The blog was originally intended to document how I coped with depression, and to be fair it has continued to do this although I try not to make my posts depressing catalogues of how bad I am feeling. Instead I try to write about the things that I am doing to try to keep the depression at bay. And now I am writing the 600th post.

A number of posts continue to attract a lot of attention, even though they are now quite old. One is entitled 'Psychotherapy and Termination' (written in March 2009) and I can guarantee that there will be a couple of hits on this post each week. The post that is viewed most often however, is nothing to do with depression or psychotherapy. It is the post titled 'What is a Shetland Hap Shawl?' which was written as a result of a number of people asking me that question in comments to an earlier post that gave details of the Shetland hap shawl that I was knitting at the time. This post is viewed at least five times a week which is somewhat surprising considering its subject.

The posts that I am probably most proud of are those in the 'Tackling the Mental Health Minefield' series. Being admitted to a psychiatric hospital was never something that I had considered as being a thing that would happen to me. But it did, and I am just so relieved that I had enough sense to take myself off to see my GP when I started to do some really silly things that were putting me at risk. I tried to provide an objective overview of my time in hospital, the people that were supposed to be looking after me and the stupid rules that seemed to be there to make life easy for the staff with little regard to the effect that they may have had on the patients. Admission to a psychiatric hospital is never a nice thing but I hope that what I have written on the subject may help to give an idea of what to expect and how you can come out the other side without too much harm being done.

In eight days time the blog will be two years old. I think it is likely to continue to form an important part of my life for the foreseeable future, there are many things that I want to write about and I am sure that there will be more things that crop up as time passes. I hope that anyone who reads this blog will gain something from it, just as I gain something by writing it.