Know what you're talking about before you speak.

This has to be one of the few things that really frustrates me. People that feel it is alright to have an opinion on something they know absolutely nothing about. In all honestly, this was something I used to do a lot, about games or films or music just so I could keep up with the 'in' crowd at school which doesn't annoy me so much. What does though, is when people have an opinion on medical problems that they don't understand and they can often say some hurtful things.

Someone said a couple of days ago that "Depression is the way you choose to look at things, you could choose to be happy if you wanted to'. Clearly, this person (whose name I wont mention) knows nothing about Depression yet somehow feels that it's okay to have this opinion. I don't know whether they just fabricated their own idea of what depression is, but this is completely untrue. People don't choose to be happy or sad any more than they can choose who they love. You cannot force yourself to be happy and more than the people around you can. Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be unhappy? Even if you don't know anything about the topic itself, common sense should tell you that much.

This person also went on to say 'You just have to think positively to deal with it'. Now this confirms to me that they really don't fully understand this problem. Happy thoughts aren't a cure for depression any more than a kitkat could cure cancer. Sure, it might make you feel a little better, but in the long term it isn't enough to fix the problem. Picture for me a scale, with books on one side representing all the negativity you may be feeling. On the other end a feather, representing all the happy thoughts you have. The good that happy thoughts can do are minute in comparison to the amount of negativity a person can feel. Not only that, but to try and think so positively all the time is exhausting. Depression is caused by a lack of the chemical Seratonin, it isn't something we can turn on and off. People with depression do know how to be happy, they are able to laugh and joke, it's the times when they can't do that where it becomes an issue.

Someone else genuinely asked "Why are people depressed for?", to me it's suggesting again that people have the choice to be depressed. We can all be happy, sad, confused etc. for no reason. Why does it become a choice with depression? The same person also seemed to believe that "People our age don't get depressed". It was at this point that I lost all faith in younger people and face-palmed so hard my face can still feel it. Naturally, I then tried to think of reasonable explanations for it. Maybe this person was just completely unaware of depression as a illness, maybe he just didn't want to talk about how he actually felt, maybe he was just acting up in front of his friends. I wanted to know what real access to information about depression this person had had, I then found out one of their parents was a GP. Yes, one of his parents actually is a doctor, and still this person seemed to know nothing. They were so naive that they actually said "suicidal people are stupid." I don't even think I need to discuss that one. I just feel bad that young people are not fully educated about things like mental illness, to the point where they don't even acknowledge they exist. I'm not angry at this person, I'm just sad that they haven't got the information to make a proper assessment.

All I can say now is this. If you want to have an opinion on a medical issue, read up on it first. Make sure you know what you're talking about. If you don't you could say things that seriously offend people and in turn make you look like a horrible person. You could become that person that just doesn't get it, and who is going to want to ask you for help if they're suffering?

Value

To start with, I'll apologise for being terrible at this lately! I've had a fair bit of work to do and obviously had to get my priorities sorted before blogging! This is a shorter blog but I hope to have another one up by sunday!

This time, I want to talk about value. What do we value the most? Is it materialistic things? People? Ourselves? I ask this because lately I've struggled to remember what really matters most. After a lot of thinking, I've come to this conclusion. As much I want to say that my own happiness and my own well being is my priority, I can't say that. Because I don't care about what happens to me so much. As for gadgets and clothes and money, I could live without them even though to have them is great. What I value most of all is the people around me. I wouldn't be the person I am today without the influence of every person in my life right now. My boyfriend, my best friends, my parents, my sister, all the people I consider to be as close as family. They are the thing I value most in this world.

A lot of people say that I should focus on myself and that nobody else's needs should come before that. To that I say, you're wrong. To help other people and to make sure that those people are happy is what drives me to not give up with everything I have achieved. They are what makes me happy. My needs are secondary to this. If someone is feeling down, I'm there. I don't need anyone to be there in return, that isn't why I do it. I do it because I want to. Maybe I should care more about myself, but I don't. Think of that what you will but  know this, if you need me, I'm a message a phone call or in some cases, a door away. I'd be there for you like a shot.

Short blog I know but for anyone that reads this, I wanted to pose the question to you. What do you value most in life? 

Self harm

First and foremost I want to make the point that self harm IS NOT something done to seek attention, though some naive and desperate people will do so for this reason. However, It's so much more serious than that. Self harm can be the need to feel pain, because of what's happening around you or how you feel on the inside. It is a lonely, frightening and horrible thing for a person to have to go through and as a person who saw it happening to the people around me it was equally distressing. For this blog, i'm going to talk about some of the experiences I had with self harm and for reasons anonymity I'm using different names.

My first real experience with self harm was when I was 13-14. Imagine how it might feel to see cuts and scars appearing on your friend's arms, stomach and legs and not knowing what on earth you could possibly do to help them. As  person that strives to help people, it was really emotionally difficult to see that happening to someone I cared so much about. At first, I didn't understand what was happening and I asked them straight out "Jess what happened to your arms?". I always got the same responses. It was either "Nothing" or "My cats". Looking back I feel like I should have realised immediately what was going on, but as a naive kid who didn't know any better I accepted these excuses because what else could I do? It may sound stupid now, but one night when I got home, I googled 'My friend has cuts on her arm'. The first thing I did was cry when I realised what she'd been doing. Then I was angry at myself for not realising it. Eventually, I couldn't keep ignoring the cuts that seemed to be getting worse and I went to my head of year at school and told them what I had seen. Sometimes even now I wonder if i did the right thing, because doing that made a lot of people stop trusting me and I lost a lot of friends. But as I learned how serious self harm can get, I keep telling myself that I did do the right thing. After all, Jess is still here even if we don't talk any more.

As I got older I realised that looking 'pretty' and being skinny was important, especially in school. Something I learned very quickly was that other people can be really cruel if you give them reason. If you were slightly overweight, you were fat and they would remind you of that every day. If your hair was a mess or you wore it a way that they didn't like, you were ugly and they would remind you of that too. It was really hard to try and figure out what I wanted to be when that was being dictated to me by everyone else. It was important to have friends to me, and if that meant I had to be unhappy then I would do it. After all, it was better to have friends then to be alone. You weren't such an easy target that way. However I soon learned that people would still be mean if you weren't as popular or pretty as them and a lot of horrible things happened to me. A rumour went round that I was gay, and people wouldn't come anywhere near me. I was called fat, ugly, stupid and various other names every single day. Eventually, you start to believe those things. I hated myself so much because I felt like I would never fit in, it got to the point where it felt like no matter how many friends I had I was alone and that nobody understood how it felt. One night it got too much for me and I started to take it out on myself.

This happened for a while and I kept it from everyone. I didn't trust people enough to keep it a secret. I went through it on my own, and I came out the other side on my own I realised that it doesn't matter what other people think of me. My 'friends' weren't really real friends, I stopped caring about whether other people liked what I wore, whether I wore make up, what my hair looked like, how much I weighed, or indeed my sexual orientation. If they wanted to believe I was gay then I'd let them, because what's actually wrong with being gay anyway?. What they saw as my 'flaws' made me who I am today. Let me tell you, It's a lot easier to get on with your life if you're comfortable with yourself.

Don't let other people define you, your happiness is more important than every other person's opinion in the world. I went through it on my own but that doesn't mean that you should. If anyone reading this blog wants to talk about their own problems, I promise I'll help you as much as I can. If anyone reading this had the view that this is just a cry for attention, or that it's used to be 'cool' and fit in with the crowd then I hope I've managed to make you see that in many cases it really isn't.

If anyone has any questions, needs some advice, just wants a friendly chat or wants a request for another blog then please, email me at Kershiafield@hotmail.co.uk or contact me via facebook!

Mental Illness

After a request from a friend i've been asked to do a blog post about Mental illness. At first I didn't want to do this, Mental illness is something that I've have to deal with personally and externally my whole life I'm not going to talk about every illness because there isn't enough time in the day, but I will be picking out the ones closest to me and things I have experienced. My own personal experiences of it have been terrifying at times and this blog is probably the most difficult I've had to write. 1 in 4 people suffer from a mental illness. Just let that sink in, how many of your friends or family do you think have suffered? It's a frightening statistic that gets scarier as time goes by.

Depression is the most common mental illness and affects 17 million people every year.1 in 33 children suffer from depression as do 1 in 8 teenagers. Forms of depression include  Dysthymia, Bi-polar, Post-natal depression and Seasonal Affective disorder. A lot of people think that Depression isn't a real illness and that it just means you're in a bad mood or feeling melancholic. Let me tell you this, it isn't like that at all. It can begin that way, especially in teen years but often this passes. When it lingers however and it begins to affect you life in drastic ways, this is when it can be diagnosed as clinical depression. For me, it was a constant feeling of worthlessness, that I was never going to amount to anything. Everything seemed bleak and it was difficult to find pleasure in things that I used to. It interfered with my sleeping and eating patterns and I found it hard to find anything that made me believe that it was worth trying to keep going. People think that you can just snap out of it, or that you're just being stupid but that isn't true either. Depression is a proven medical issue caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain. It is hard to deal with and it is easy to push away anyone who wants to help you deal with it. I lost friends and I almost lost my boyfriend because of it. I've seen it affect my friends before and it's hard to watch them suffer without knowing how to help them.

With Depression often (but not always) comes Anxiety. Research suggests that as many as 1 in 6 young people will suffer from anxiety at some point in their lives. In America, 40 million people suffer with some sort of anxiety disorder and it is estimated that only a third of these people get treatment. That means almost 25 million people in America alone are suffering in silence. Anxiety can also come in different forms such as Social Anxiety, phobias, Post-traumatic stress and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Anxiety isn't something that can be controlled, it isn't an 'over-reaction' as it is often perceived. It can make people imagine that things in their lives are much worse than they actually are and can sometimes stop people from confronting their fear. It's like being in a constant state of worry. The physical symptoms of it can include increased heart rate, 'jelly legs', shaking, dry mouth, nausea, hyperventilation, dizziness and difficulty breathing. The psychological symptoms include, feeling like you're losing control, thinking you might die, feeling like people are looking at you all the time, feeling like you want to run away and escape, feeling detached from the environment and the people around you, feeling on edge. On a personal level, I have seen people have to deal with the more difficult forms of anxiety and have been there through the difficult times. I've seen people have panic attacks, break down in tears shaking, telling me that they don't know how to deal with it. From this perspective alone, it is one of the most difficult mental illnesses to deal with, I can hardly imagine how hard it must be to be suffering from it.

The final thing I want to talk about is eating disorders and body dysmorphia. Until recently this was something i'd turned a blind eye to, I didn't understand it, until recently I didn't think I knew anyone that suffered from it but I was shocked to find it was closer to me than i ever thought. Eating disorders can often go hand in hand with Anxiety and/or depression. They can be triggered things including, a traumatic experience, stressful situations or having a history of eating disorders or substance abuse in the family. Anorexia and Bulimia are the most well known eating disorders. Anorexia usually develops between the ages of 16-17 and affects 1 in 250 women and 1 in 2000 men. Bulimia normally develops later between the ages of 18-19 and around 90 percent of its sufferers are female. Many people who have an eating disorder will not seek help because they don't believe that anything is wrong with them. They just think that their weight is an issue and set out to deal with it. Anorexia and Bulimia can be easily hidden in it's early stages and in many cases are not noticed until it begins to seriously affect the health of the sufferer to the point where it can cause death. Recovery can take a long time, and things like Counselling and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy play a huge part in the recovery process. When I found out that a close friend of mine was suffering this way it was a very sobering experience.

They say that you don't fully understand something until it's happening in front of you and I can not emphisise enough how true this is. Too many people have a lack of understanding of mental illness, a lot of people think that just because you can't physically see the effects of the illness, that it doesn't class as one. Others think that mental illnesses are just cries for attention. They aren't, mental illnesses are a serious problem affecting more and more people each year. The mind is one of the scariest and terrible things at times, how long before people realise that these illnesses can not be helped? How long before we start to do something about the millions of people suffering in silence every day?

It's not a choice.

A friend of mine was talking to me today about her faith and her views about being gay. Her claim was that it is a choice that is made by the person alone and that it is still considered to be a sin. Now I have every respect for her faith, in fact I think that faith is a wonderful thing to have, but when it come to this subject matter I can't understand how people can still accept this.

In a lot of ways it upsets me that people still believe that being gay is a choice someone makes. If you believe in the idea that 'you cannot choose who you fall in love with' for the opposite gender then how can you suggest that because you fall in love with someone of the same sex all of sudden you have chosen to do so? I didn't choose to fall in love with a male any more than my female friend fell in love with a woman. Love is an emotion that makes the human race very flawed. It is the one thing that we have no control over, desire isn't a thing that we can turn on and off.

The idea that you can do such a thing baffles me. If this were the case, we would settle for the first person that we 'chose'. It suggests that you can never fall in love with anyone else because we can choose not to do so. It is entirely possible to love more than one person and more often than not it causes heartbreak. We don't choose to fall in love with someone else because as I said before, love isn't a thing that you can control.

Dr Christian Jessen (Embarrassing bodies) is openly gay, he has recently filmed a documentary called 'Cure me, I'm gay' in which he goes undercover claiming he wants to be cured and tries out various 'cures' to see what would happen. Some of the 'treatments' he received were frankly horrific. In one clip he is made to drink a syrup that would make him sick, then put in a room with pictures of naked men and a recording telling him what a disgusting person he was for 'choosing' to be that way. At first, I didn't understand why people would put themselves through that. Then I realised, it's because of the view that homosexuality is a sin. People torture themselves this way because of this view, and the desire to be accepted is a strong one.

The beauty of love is that we don't understand it, we can't explain why it happens, we can't explain why we love. I to this day can't explain the love I feel for my boyfriend, I just accept that it happened. I didn't choose for it to happen, I had no idea that it would. Why is it okay for opposite genders to feel that for each other but not two people of the same?

There isn't a 'cure' for being gay. You can't change who people are.  Let love exist, whether it be between two men, two women, an man and woman, transgenders, transexuals, genderqueer, bisexuals, asexuals, pansexuals and whoever else. Everyone deserves to love freely, not to be forced otherwise.

Sexism towards men...

I wasn't going to do a post about sexism because it's not something i ever personally felt strongly about. But, since my essay is about sexism and it seems that I can't really get away from the subject, I've decided to address the topic properly regardless of anyone's thoughts. I have accepted that sexism is always going to exist. And by sexism, I mean discrimination towards BOTH genders. I think it's sort of sad how people think of sexism and automatically assume it means discrimination towards only women. Are women the only sex? No. this affects men just as much and that's what I want to talk about.

Why can men only take 2 weeks paternity leave when a woman a year? This marginalises the role of fathers and denies them the opportunity to take an equal share in the role of parenting. It is a piece of legislation which further perpetuates the stereotype of man as breadwinner and woman as carer. Why can't we scrap the terms all together and call it 'parental leave'? That way responsibility could be shared between both parents. Why is it if a man can't afford to pay child support he's seen as a lowlife waste of space whereas if it's a woman who can't support her child people take pity? Who decided that this meant that men didn't care about their children if they couldn't pay?

What about health? 40,000 men are diagnosed with Prostate cancer every year, compared to the 48,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer. Why is breast cancer awareness and campaigning recognised more than Prostate cancer? It's also a little known face that Prostate cancer research receives less funding than Breast cancer does...

My final point is this. Statistics show that men are on average 3-5 times more likely to commit suicide than women. In fact it is the biggest killer of young men in the UK. There is a lot of pressure on men to be the ;breadwinner'. To be financially secure, to support families. If a man is unemployed I believe that it would affect him more than it would a woman in a similar situation (of course, there are exceptions!) I think that a lot of men would find it difficult to speak up about problems they're having. It's not easy to talk about thinks lke anxiety, depression and emotional termoil as it is, but with the generalisation that men are the less sensitive of the genders, i think it'd be harder for them to come forward and admit them. It's seen as their weakness and failure as a 'man'.

Finding my place

I was told that there's a moment in you life when things just slot into place.I never believed it. I thought i was going to be the person who just drifted and never really did anything  productive with her life. But all of a sudden in the space of 24 hours I feel like my life has slotted into place and I know what i want to do and be.

I would love to teach, but i don't think I would have felt as fulfilled as a person if I go ahead and do so. I want fun and excitement and to feel like I'm making a change in the world. Yes teaching would give me that, but to be involved with the law and the criminal justice system? That fills me with so much excitement that i've hardly stopped talking about it all day! I want to do forensic linguistics.. code breaking and looking at how language is used to cover up crime! How exciting does that sound?!

Everything that seemed to go right today, and things really seem to be looking up!