Thread by @tamar_whyte

1) I always say I’ve worked as an LXP since 2010. But I forget the work before, my arts practice, focussing on the extremes of emotional pain, mental distress, the way others treated & viewed it. It was activism & narrative from within, naive in a true isolated, outsider sense. >

2) I connected with others in darker corners in darker places from 2005 when I was labelled and our labels connected us and helped us find each other and find comfort in sharing our dark places. Recovery wasn’t our language. When you are chronically in pain, sometimes you need >

3) other ways of relieving that pain when medication doesn’t work. Sometimes the pain is a purging to clear something terrible that is blocked. We didn’t understand our treatment from services was poor and that there were other ways we could have been helped. >

4) This is one of the difficulties with labelling. No label is adequate and no label covers us all and no label will stop us being treated like sh*t by services. But that label saved me at one point because I found other people like me and realised I wasn’t alone, it was real. >

5) Tbh, any label would have done, as long as I could find others like me and the isolation I felt was relieved with understanding. Now I understand how terribly we are routinely treated. I thought it was normal, I was confused & didn’t understand how services worked tbh. >

6) This is where the issues come in. Survivor activists are so few, have so little connection to most SUs. Ppl don’t know our history and that there are better ways we can be treated & informed or preferably co-formulate our diagnosis. I met my first Survivor activists in 2008? >

7) My activism was first through art, my #LXP work started in 2010, almost a decade later. Now I’ve merged the two, learnt a lot more and read more from those before me, and contemporaries. I question whether I know enough, am good enough, or if I am a lone Wolf who sees what

8) others can’t and I don’t have the language to convey it. I’m like everyone else, battered. Leaving. Scared by infighting & pile ons. Tired and scarred by #LXP work. We fight for equality and career progression, but the very people who blocked it in the first place are the >

9) ones given the power to decide how money is spent and who is and is not employed when funders finally listen to our lobbying. I think that has finally been my last straw. Each generation works so hard to fight, but we are just using buckets to stop the tides. >

10) Our professors retire, our prominent academics and activists burn out, the next generation struggles to repair the unpicked life’s work that the establishments manage to destroy in a fell swoop on their retirement, or death. We die, many too early. >

11) ‘Lessons are Learned’, but nothing is done. The obligatory letter is sent to the coroner promising training of staff, policies and procedures, and it not happening again. The inadequate follow through inevitably leads to more deaths, more letters with empty promises. >

12) So, my usual statement that I’ve been active in MH activism & LXP work is actually 22y, not 13y. That’s a long time. It’s tiring & I’m poor. I’m very well educated in several disciplines which I received funding for. The Mad Movement has educated me. They’ve kept me strong. >

13) Is anyone else tired and considering their options? I’m wondering what to do. I want to keep doing the activism work, but do I stop bleeding from the brutality of #LXP work? How are other people in their own places atm? Is it better or worse for you?

14) A VW camper van which doubles up as a mobile coffee vendor will do me. Coffee and cake all day. Sounds good to me. Iced coffee in the summer. Or winning the lottery where I can have my own private island and everyone can just f* off while I sip cocktails in a hammock all day.