Mental ‘ealth. Oi’ve got trouble wif me mental ‘elf. There is a crazed elf that sometimes becomes me, and when within his possession, I am prone to committing silly, and sometimes dangerous, acts. You can’t kill the elf. He’s sort of impermeable. It’s better just to befriend him. The Elf. We’ve all got one.

I find it strange that people say, when talking about someone who suffers from depression, anxiety, what have you, ‘Aw, he’s got mental health he does. Leave that boy alone, he’s got mental health.’ Shouldn’t it be that we all have a degree of mental health, as we do physically? And that it would be more proper to say, ‘Oh, he has bad mental health. He’s been having trouble with his mental health.’? Am I being pedantic here?

I think it used to be that in days of olde they said, ‘ Aw Jaysus, oul Bernie’s bad with her nerves.’ Or something like that. Now everybody’s dying of depression, anxiety, and anything else that’s going, seemingly. I was once told in a class I was forced to take that Bi-polar had become a ‘fashionable diagnosis.’ Muddled-up folk clogging the doctor’s corridors waiting to get their badge. It’s a bit of drag, to have it for real, sometimes; but it can also be pretty cool.

When the Elf comes to town you can attempt to steal a bus and get away with it. You can spend three hundred pounds on a penpal service with non-existent Russian beauties. You can sometimes penetrate the previously impermeable and get in touch with things quite exclusive, at a price.

But all that means nothing when the dark times come, and come they do. This isn’t so fashionable, or even all that exclusive. It’s a shame is what it is. And it’s killing people all around us very slowly everyday. Mightn’t know to look at them. But if you do happen to notice the life draining slowly out of somebody, then please do something for them. We need each other. We all need help. We all need to talk. Each person’s problem is peculiar to them, therefore we need a treatment that caters to that person’s needs. And love. I think just plenty of love, really. A good starting point.

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Probably there will be some teenagers and twenty-somethings amongst us, who are just getting into their relationship with mental illness, and who maybe don’t see how things can get any better. I think there are some of us who are just born into this shit. They’ll have trouble with alcohol and substances, their emotions and trauma their whole lives. What can you say? All I know is that a man that I trusted sat me down and explained to me very gently that ten, twenty years from where I was at the time, I would be a much happier person. And he was right. For the most part. Mind yor ‘ead!