Every year, the first Thursday in February sees Time to Talk Day, run by Time to Change. The idea is to get people talking about mental health and share their experiences with the aim of ending the stigma that people face.
For the last two years, we at LDV have taken part in the event and our readers have produced some outstanding pieces. You can read them all here.
Two years ago, Eleanor Draycott wrote about her experience of living with BiPolar:
Many people don’t understand what being Bi-polar actually means, I guess this is why I’m putting this down on paper. The most basic knowledge the population has is that someone with this illness “suffers from” extreme highs and lows and this is certainly true. One day I can be the life and soul of the party, extremely talkative, wanting to go out and embrace the world with open arms. But the next I can be so down that getting out of bed seems like an insurmountable task. There has never been any pattern to my highs and lows, either can last for days, weeks or months. Before I was on the right combination of medication, in my manic stages I wouldn’t sleep for as long as they lasted. I was always out partying, dancing, drinking, behaving recklessly, spending money I didn’t have on ridiculous items I would never need if I lived to be one hundred. I would sit up for hours writing pages and pages of rambling thoughts in notebooks, that made no sense when I came down and my mind wasn’t racing, but which at the time of writing I was convinced contained the answer to world peace.
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