Skip to main content

An Illness of Thought


Today's post is by Jonny Ward who tweets as the Anxious Fireman and has also blogged for the Stigma Fighters. 


Hello to all reading this. My name is Jonny Ward. I’m 31, male, straight, white and a firefighter with Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service. I can grout the shower, chop logs, I have an anxiety disorder, I have travelled a lot of the world and I enjoy mountain biking.

If you had to ask me about any one of my interests or traits from that list, which would it be? And why?

If this had been someone else and it was three years ago, I would have picked the anxiety disorder part. Because back then I was just as naive to mental ill health as most men. I would consider it unusual, a strange thing to say or admit too.

But over the last two years my mind-set has changed tremendously. I suffered with anxiety and panic attacks. It happened after a long period of stress. I was doing too much work, too many projects, trying to please too many people. All of which meant I burnt out, blacked out in a restaurant and woke up anxious. I started having panic attacks and in classic panic attack form became afraid of having more panic attacks around people and looking stupid.

It’s taken me a while to really understand what made me ill. It wasn’t the situation, the work load, the “stresses”. These were all purely material and circumstantial. It was my own thoughts. My cognition if you will.

Every thought I had was becoming negative, was I good enough, was I pleasing others, was I achieving enough! Was I! Am I! What if! What if! WHAT IF!!!

A negative thought affects your health, as any thought in the mind does. If it’s positive you feel slightly better, negative, slightly worse. Just like drinking alcohol, a little doesn’t kill your liver, but drown your liver in alcohol every day and eventually it will become very sick.

This is what I was doing. I was becoming a negative thoughtaholic. My self-belief, confidence all became undermined and I made myself ill. I managed to turn things around but it was difficult. I had CBT and counselling and medication.

I have recently buried a second friend (who was also fireman) who completed suicide. He had been very poorly in his head for a while and, in my opinion (I have no medical knowledge) had been thinking very negatively about who he was, his relationships, his standing in life, how he was seen for a very long time. His thoughts were very poorly. What really killed him though I think is his fear of getting help and “coming out”.

His ego, or pride would not allow it, his thought process would not allow him to accept he was human and not a ‘man’.

When I told my watch at the station, friends and family I was suffering and vulnerable, I got closer to them than I ever thought possible. I wish my friend had taken that step.

My love to you all

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.
Read more

Motivated Reasoning in Science

Today's post is by Josh May (University of Alabama, Birmingham). In this post, he talks about one of his papers published in Synthese and entitled " Bias in Science ". Josh May Much discussion of the replication crisis in science has focused on the social sciences, particularly psychology. A common narrative is that the social sciences are particularly susceptible to powerful biases, such as moral and political ideology. I argue instead for a parity thesis: all areas of science are subject to bias, through the general psychological mechanism of motivated reasoning . This provides a unified framework for understanding how values influence the entire scientific enterprise. The scientific process involves numerous decisions that can be influenced by one's values--including moral, political, and prudential values--which manifest as goals or motivations. A researcher wants badly, say, to publish in a prestigious journal in order to either advance her career or maintain ...
Read more

Models of Madness

In today's post John Read  (in the picture above) presents the recent book he co-authored with Jacqui Dillon , titled Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Psychosis. My name is John Read. After 20 years working as a Clinical Psychologist and manager of mental health services in the UK and the USA, mostly with people experiencing psychosis, I joined the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1994. There I published over 100 papers in research journals, primarily on the relationship between adverse life events (e.g., child abuse/neglect, poverty etc.) and psychosis. I also research the negative effects of bio-genetic causal explanations on prejudice, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in mental health. In February I moved to Melbourne and I now work at Swinburne University of Technology.  I am on the on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis and am the Editor...
Read more