´óÏó´«Ã½

This is the full transcript of Ouch – Mentally Interesting the cabin fever podcast as broadcast on 21st〶ÄDecember 2020 and presented by Mark Brown and Seaneen Molloy.

[music]

〶Ä

Mark - Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of Mentally Interesting, a podcast where we shoot the breeze about how we all are really feeling during this pandemic, and how we’re managing our mental health. I’m Mark Brown.

〶Ä

seaneEn - And I’m Seaneen Malloy. We’re taking over the Ouch feed once a month and each episode will have a loose theme. On this one we’re going to talk a bit about mental health and loss. Firstly though, let’s introduce ourselves.

〶Ä

[music]

〶Ä

seaneEn - I’m a mental health blogger and charity worker from Belfast. I live with my son, my cats, and three things you might not know about me. One, I was born in a lift. Two, I have absolutely no idea when my birthday is, and nor do my mum and dad. And three, the only thing I can cook without burning the house down is soup.

〶Ä

Mark - And I should introduce myself as well, rather than being a disembodied voice at the start of the podcast. My name’s Mark Brown, I do mental health stuff. And I’ve been doing mental health stuff for about 15 years or so, and I met Seaneen a very long time ago, because we were both doing mental health stuff. I’m from Newcastle, the land where people aren’t ever allowed to wear coats, because that would make you soft. I now live in South London, in one of the country’s remaining prefabricated houses. Houses that were built after the Second World War and that were meant to last about ten years, I’m living in one now. I live here with lots of spiders and, this week, some mice. And I’ll tell you something about the mice. It’s not like it is in Disney films. I fell asleep when I was doing some work and I didn’t wake up to find that the mice had completed it for me, what I found out was they’d chewed a hole in a cereal box. I really, really like foxes, and I’m really, really lucky where I live and I get to see some foxes.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - It does sound like Disney, Mark. [laughs] Spiders and foxes.

〶Ä

MARK - Spiders, foxes, you know. Well, it’s lockdown isn’t it, you have to get your company where you can. I think the reason why I’m doing this podcast is, like, over the past 15 years I’ve had the experience of using my own experience of mental health difficulty as a way of trying to make it easier to understand what mental health difficulty is. And I’m also a really massive health services nerd, and get really excited about finding things out about health, how health services work. And I also spend a lot of time just hanging around in mental health spaces, talking to other people who experience mental health difficulties, and just trying to work out what all of these different experiences mean in a world that isn’t necessarily always set up for us in the way that we’d like it.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - I’m kind of interested in the kind of rights of people living with mental health issues and in the kind of intersection between ‘normal’ experiences, normal… I did, like, air inverted commas, not that anyone can see, and experiences which are perceived as not being normal. We’ve come a bit of a way in terms of how we talk about mental health, and I’m interested in how that conversation’s going to progress. One of my, well I guess one of my kind of wishes and hopes is that the more ‘severe’, in inverted commas types of mental health conditions, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychosis start to gain more traction and attention in public. And also the experiences that might fall outside the experiences you hear about, people who fall outside recovery narratives, and people whose symptoms, experiences and backgrounds fall outside those kind of common stories, that’s what interests me.

〶Ä

[music]

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Mark, how are you feeling at the moment?

〶Ä

MARK - You know, we’ve been in this pandemic for such a long time that things sort of feel normal, but at the same time every morning you kind of wake up and you go, oh this is all normal, this is fine, I don’t leave my house anymore. I don’t see anyone. I’ve not seen my family for seven months. Hang on, this is a bit weird isn’t it? So, for me, I have moved from feeling like things were very much out of my control to doing things around the house to make the house feel better. I spent about six hours yesterday attacking some particularly vicious black mould that had decided to move in as a lodger to my house, so I was squirting bleach all over the place.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Along with the mice.

〶Ä

MARK - [laughs] So I’ve got mice, mould, foxes. My entire life in lockdown has turned into a kind of weird nature documentary with me standing whimsically making up names for everything. I didn’t make up a name for the mould, ‘cos I wasn’t that pleased to have it visiting, but I found it just really difficult to feel a connection to the rest of the world. I’ve been working all the way through this lockdown, and I’ve done the inevitable million Zoom calls, and sometimes I get up and I’m not even sure that I’m real. I’ve been wondering how many Zoom calls I can do without paying any attention to them and just getting emails at the end of the week saying I’d agreed to a load of things and just go, well I wasn’t present at all. So I find it in some ways a very unreal or surreal experience, ‘cos a lot of the kind of anchor points of life aren’t there. So for me I’ve focused on going to the supermarket, eating food, being whimsical and trying as much as possible not to feel responsible for the scary events that are beyond my control. What about you, Seaneen, because your situation’s a bit different? You’re in Belfast.

〶Ä

seanEEN - So I am in a different situation. I’m pregnant, I’m basically about to give birth. I’m at that stage now. You know, at the moment it’s a pretty bad time, you can’t have your partners at scans except for the 20 week scan. I’ve been going to everything alone, sitting in my car as it rains around me and… It’s not what I imagined. I don’t have the same experience as the first one. I think I’m in the five stages of grief, you know, this feeling of loss, and I’m in the anger stage. I feel angry about the way things are, and I don’t feel like it’s a rational feeling and I know that what we’re doing is the right thing to do, but I’m just really sick of it. I’m sick of it.

〶Ä

MARK - It’s a very mental health feeling, that. Because a lot of the time when we’re experiencing difficulties with your mental health one of the things that you just don’t know is when those negative experiences are going to end. You don’t know when you’re going to feel better, you don’t know when the clouds are going to part. And it feels like lockdown and the pandemic is a little bit like that as well, because no matter how much we’re thinking, oh there’s going to be a time where we get back to normal, everything’s going to go back to where it was, you know, this time last year, it feels like the uncertainty is a kind of loss.

〶Ä

Like, you know when you have a sense of a possible future that is receding and some other future’s coming in that you’d rather not have, you kind of feel a sense of sadness for the future that will never be. And I’ve felt that a lot of times in my life with my mental health, was a sadness at accepting things that I might never do, or places I might never go or things I might never be, and kind of almost, like, grieving for myself, but it feels like across the world many of us are in a situation of kind of looking at what we thought 2020 was going to be and finding out that actually what 2020 is is some Zoom calls and looking out of the window.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Yeah. No, I definitely identify with that, and looking around as well, mad Twitter is what I’d call it basically, mental health Twitter community, I think that’s just a feeling a lot of people are having. And it’s been interesting too because I’ve seen, especially people with chronic disabilities, talking about how now everyone is experiencing what they’ve been experiencing for years, which is the restrictions on freedom, the uncertainty, the difficulty in accessing support. And even what scant support they had people are losing, and with each successive change is more uncertainty and more loss, because it’s the big things over the next year.

〶Ä

But it’s also the small things, it’s not knowing when your next appointment’s going to be. Even things like, for example, I’m having a terrible time getting hold of prescriptions at the moment, even trying to get through to my GP surgery, and it’s just things that you could rely on which are sort of gone. And it’s an endless frustration not knowing what the next week’s going to look like or the next month, and then the next year. I think there’s a feeling of collective but disconnected loss, because we’re all sort of losing different things at the moment.

〶Ä

MARK - It’s like a big cloud of loss which is raining on different people to different extents, but it’s definitely a huge weather front lying across our kind of psychic maps collectively. I thought I was going to have a great time during lockdown because I am probably the world’s most introverted person, and I thought it was, like, you know, this is the time where introverts will shine, like, you know, avengers assemble, but separately and don’t talk to each other. And I’ve found myself missing the kind of things that you’ve been missing. I really want to go and sit in a café. I want to go and sit in a café on my own but I definitely want to sit in a café.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Yeah. No, I totally want that too. And I want to be on my own in a café. And my kind of holiday from this, but then also it feels like oh, I’m a vector of infection, is to go to Tesco with my mask and my hand sanitiser and keep my distance and it’s like, this is like the Bahamas, the Bahamas full of COVID. But it’s just I’m out of my house, you know, and I’m on my own. And that’s the thing that’s kind of driving me slightly mad, is… And this is another different situation thing, but I’m, like, stuck in my house with my husband and son, no offence husband, son and cats, but go away. [laughs] Can you live in another house for, like, a few days and can I just sit on my own? And that’s kind of getting to me as well, just the loss of my own space. But I have a get out card, I can say, oh I’m really tired, I need a pregnancy nap and then just, leave me alone.

〶Ä

MARK - I absolutely share your pleasure enjoying supermarkets. Supermarket shopping is one of my favourite things in the world, and I’m picturing a post pandemic world where supermarkets start advertising themselves as if they were holiday resorts, like you said. Kind of like, luxury is wide aisles, brightly coloured things you’ll never buy.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - But then supermarkets also have those weird ‘Logan’s Run’ type announcements over the PA. Like, I go to the supermarket for my weekly relaxation, and over the PA it’s like. "Coronavirus is here, please wash your hands, we’re all in this together. Don’t die." And like, stop bring bringing dystopia into my weekly shop, I just want some chocolate.

〶Ä

mark - The way the pandemic seeps into all of the areas of your life. I don’t know about you but there’s been a whole lot of people talking about having very, very strange dreams, or kind of strange fantasies about stuff. And I’ve found myself having really, really vivid dreams, often that involve linking to the overall theme of our conversation in this episode of Mentally Interesting, that are about loss of one thing or another. Like, I found myself having dreams about situations where I have mucked up or relationships that I’ve let drop, or times in my life where, like ‘Sliding Doors’ the film, things could have taken a very, very different course, I found myself dreaming about things like that. Almost as if a bit of my brain is looking for a kind of escape hatch by kind of travelling back in time to a time before this and somehow being able, like in ‘The Terminator’, to prevent this terrible future from happening. But also just dreaming about really mundane and silly things, and very much about foxes. I dream about foxes a lot. What have your dreams been like?

〶Ä

SEANEEN - I don’t remember any of my dreams. I’m not even sure I’m having dreams. I remember when I was off work, so when I was off and I was really, really ill and I was off work for four years I used to have dreams I was in the office and I would wake up after eight hours and feel like I’d done a full day’s work. And it was really tedious, boring, detailed stuff, like filing and getting caught using the internet and being shouted at. But that was what it was like then in that kind of weird… It wasn’t a blank space at all when I was off work, but it was sort of like my brain was trying to tell me this is what life should be like, so have a dream about it and pretend you’re living it. I mean, I’ve been having some pregnancy anxiety dreams. I have a massive bump and then it disappears, that kind of stuff you get when you’re pregnant. And this whole thing has been making that just a lot harder.

〶Ä

So, for the first time in years, it took me a long time, so because of my pregnancy and because I have bipolar disorder, which is something which is taken quite seriously in pregnancy because it has a very high risk of relapse and psychosis, so I’m back in the system. And I’m grateful, like, I’m pleased but also a bit annoyed, [laughs] because it’s not like your mental health is this race to the end where you’re discharged from services and someone gives you a mortar board and tells you, "Well done! Well done on that." Recovery, it’s not like that, it’s not a linear thing where there’s an end. And it’s not like, you know, you’re sick and then you throw up on your door one day and there’s loads of people there being like, "Well done. Welcome back to the land of the sane." It’s not like that, you have to pick up the pieces of your identity, your life, people you’ve probably really annoyed, you might have lost your job, that kind of stuff.

〶Ä

So that was my experience which was when my symptoms stopped being so bad that I could actually function. I looked around and was like, whoops, got to try not to do this again. And over the course of years I would lapse in and out of different, you know, being well, unwell. But I’ve managed. So I was out of the system because I could manage and now I’m back. That’s been quite hard, because even though it’s not really an achievement it did feel a bit like one. So now I’m with the perinatal health team and I know that that’s a good thing because they should be looking out for this stuff. Postnatal psychosis and depression are so serious they can be fatal. I think the biggest cause of death in new mothers is suicide.

〶Ä

So, I’m back. I’m having appointments in the mental health team, wearing masks which is very strange. And I had my birth planning meeting last week, which feels like you are Glastonbury. It’s like you go into a room and there like, ten people there and they may as well be wearing tabards with clipboards, it’s like, "So, take us through this," and it’s like, "Got pregnant this time, you know, what’s going to happen, you’re going to go here, do this, this is what we need to look out for." And it’s kind of cool because you feel you’re taken care of but it’s also kind of weird, intrusive and strange. But reassuring. So many conflicted feelings about this.

〶Ä

And I’ve also had to start medication again. It took me a long time to get off medication, so I was on basically all of them at some point, but the big one I struggled to get off was an antipsychotic. So I’m back on antipsychotics now. And that was difficult. You know what, like picking up that prescription was really hard. It felt like… Not taking a step back, that’s not at all, because I can manage most of the time to keep myself, not well all the time, but to minimise the kind of destructive impact of my illness. And then having to pick up that prescription was like I feel like I am, not not coping but sort of back a little bit.

〶Ä

And I’m not a person who feels a lot of stigma about her mental health, because I have been so open about it, and the stigma hasn’t affected me as profoundly as it does other people because of the kind of sphere I work in. I’ve sort of deliberately worked in this kind of sphere to avoid some of the worst impact of that. But, like, picking up the prescription with the antipsychotic on it just threw me back to how I used to feel when I did that from the pharmacy. I would have this weird feeling of worry that I was going to be judged, especially when I was pregnant as well. So with my bump and getting antipsychotics I’m just like, oh God, please don’t think badly of me.

〶Ä

And that’s a terrible thought, and it sort of hit my self-image a bit in terms of a sense of loss of that ‘normal’, inverted commas, pregnancy experience I was hoping for, but also knew that I probably wasn’t going to get. It’s tricky because I do know that I should be looked after and it is a big risk, but at the same time I kind of wanted to be left alone and I wanted to sort of give crunchy earthmother-dom a go. But it’s not me, you know, it’s not who I am. But, you know, you want to try. Everything’s a bit different, can I not try to be a crunchy earthmother who just doesn’t take any medication and just takes multivitamins and does yoga? The answer is no because I can barely move at the moment. I can’t eat crunchy things because I’ve also got gestational diabetes. And now I’m on antipsychotics. So it’s great.

〶Ä

MARK - It’s awful isn’t it, when you kind of recognise the kind of discomfort of necessity? It’s a common experience with chronic conditions, and it’s a common experience with mental health difficulty, and it feels like an experience of life during the pandemic as well, where if you sat down and you wrote a list of things you really wanted to do, or things that you really wanted to experience, there’s stuff that you would put on no list ever. There’s no way you would want to do any of the things that you have to do to stay well and to stay safe and to look after yourself.

〶Ä

When I was younger the sense of loss from accepting that I experience mental health difficulties was the experience of accepting the necessity of either doing some things or the necessity of not doing other things. So I’ve spent effectively my entire adult life now since about the age of 22 as a northern person in the UK who doesn’t drink. And that’s a really weird one. I had to accept the necessity of not drinking to look after my mental health. And I’m not like, yeah, woo, look at me, I’m someone who doesn’t drink, I’m like, yeah, God, barbeques are awkward. [laughter]

〶Ä

SEANEEN - But I’m the same as you, I mean, I had to do the same thing, which is accept that there are things I can’t do because of having mental illness. And being really boring basically, having a really boring life and trying to be the sensible person most of the time. But I guess in terms of the loss thing, the pregnancy and the babyhood and parenting was one I hadn’t really thought about when I was younger. I hadn’t really imagined what that experience would be like as a person with a mental illness. I was lucky enough in the last one to stay pretty well, so I haven’t had the postnatal experience of needing intensive support, although this time the home treatment team are going to be visiting me every day, which is going to be weird. And I feel like I should, like, tidy and make tea, and I’m going to feel like I have, like, five mother in laws coming to judge me. [laughs] It might not be like that, but that’s the kind of experience I’m imagining, where they sit around in a circle.

〶Ä

mark - And that is a very, very Irish feeling.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Oh yeah, yeah. And I have a teapot and my boobs are hanging out and, "Welcome to my lovely home."

〶Ä

mark - I wanted to ask you, how have you found the experience of connecting with other people during this lockdown? Because my slightly whimsical existence with the foxes and the mice and the spiders and giving all of the things in my house names, like the exercise bike’s called Barry Horse. I’ve got this creeping suspicion that when this pandemic does end and when there is a successful vaccine and we can return to some kind of normal life people are just going to have no idea what I’m talking about. And even a little bit now I feel like a bit of a fraud talking about experiences of lockdown and being on this podcast, because I feel like I don’t know any more whether my experience is valid. I don’t know whether it’s a shared experience. How are you feeling about connecting with people who aren’t in your immediate household?

〶Ä

seaneen - First of all, I think your experiences are valid. I think everyone’s are. We are all going through this…

〶Ä

MARK - Oh, you’ve not heard all of them. [laughs]

〶Ä

SEANEEN - I’ve heard enough, Mark. [laughs] In terms of loss, experiences, you know, at the beginning of this lockdown I did suffer a loss, a bereavement. And it wasn’t related to Coronavirus but we couldn’t go to his funeral, you know, it was done on Zoom basically. And I think I’ve almost sort of disconnected myself a little bit from people to avoid that fear of loss, if you know what I mean. I don’t want the contrast. So I just don’t talk to anyone. I’ve just got to say that my extremely mentally healthy way of dealing with this kind of stuff is just to shut it down. Just shut down. I’m just going to be over here in my cocoon and everyone can leave me alone. I know it’s not the best way to deal with things, you know, I did like two Zoom quizzes at the beginning, all right? That’s enough isn’t it?

〶Ä

I’m told I’m coming in and out of the mic a bit, and that is because I have a human being’s head pressing on my bladder and it’s making me squirm around a bit. I could hold the microphone, except that my medication’s making my hand shake like I’m trying to throw confetti at a wedding.

〶Ä

MARK - It’s a good job that we did mention that you’re pregnant earlier in this podcast, otherwise that would have sounded like a very, very strange admission.

〶Ä

[music]

〶Ä

SEANEEN - It’s time for the book of awkward questions. [thump]

〶Ä

MARK - In my hands I am holding an incredibly thick and heavy book. It’s a book that’s filled with mystery. It’s thick and it’s leather bound and it’s corners are tipped with brass and it smells of dust and secret places. I’m looking at its cover now, which is a deep red scuffed leather, and in faded gold leaf the title reads, The Big Book of Awkward Questions. Handed down from generation to generation, only two copies of The Big Book of Awkward Questions are known to be in existence. I’ve got one copy in my house and Seaneen has the other. No one knows who compiled it or why, but in it are contained every single awkward question that has ever been asked to someone who experiences mental health difficulty. Each of its pages are covered in lines of type, so tiny that I’m squinting to try and read them. Each page is smudged with generations of dirty fingerprints.

〶Ä

What we’re going to do is, we’re going to open The Big Book of Awkward Questions and see what awkward question it suggests to us. You can get in touch with us and you can see whether your awkward question features in its ancient pages. So now, without any more introduction, Seaneen is going to choose one of the awkward questions from the book.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - [creaking sound] So I’ve opened the book. My hand is going over the tiny smudged print, and the question is: Why can’t you just look after yourself better?

〶Ä

MARK - Oh! That is an awkward question.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Well…

〶Ä

MARK - Well. Well, obviously I am just stubborn and I am a fool and it’s absolutely great not being able to do stuff and feeling like your head is filled with mouldy porridge.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Love it. This is the wellness narrative isn’t it? This is all those kind of advice articles, which is, five ways to wellness and how you can be a mentally healthy person, which says, if you basically indulge in capitalism you will be a mentally healthy person. So if you take a bath, if you have time to yourself to, you know, to read every day. If you do yoga. If you cut down on your alcohol. If you don’t eat sugar or dairy or anything else, and if your life is basically perfect and ordered that you will be well. And it does not work like that. You can have a perfectly ordered life and still be unwell and still have periods of mental illness, because I’m not saying you can’t control aspects of it, you can, with medication or therapy or having an awareness of what makes you ill or what your symptoms are, but sometimes when you become unwell it feels like a flu. It feels physical, it hits you like… And to keep on the topic of the podcast, it hits you like a virus.

〶Ä

And you can do a lot of things to make you feel, a bit better, but it’s not going to get rid of the things that are not making you feel better. And I don’t like this idea that it’s an individual’s job to be perfect and to always be happy and always be, like, on top of everything. You can look after yourself as well as you can, and it might not make you mentally well all the time. It’s not your fault basically, is what I’m saying. Do you know whose fault it is? It’s society’s. No.

〶Ä

MARK - Yeah, we’re all to blame.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - But that’s true. There is an aspect, sometimes it is kind of societal. But there’s a strong association with mental health and poverty and mental health and deprivation and mental health and discrimination. And all those kind of factors get lost with these kind of questions. It just puts all the onus on the individual person to basically heal thyself. And it just doesn’t work like that.

〶Ä

MARK - Yeah. I mean, there’s so much stuff in a lot of societies across the world that’s about individual self-reliance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and I didn’t get where I am today by letting myself become mentally ill. And the challenge is that a lot of the advice that people give you is given from the perspective that it worked for them or that they’ve read it worked for other people. So it’s basically giving people the advice that the way to avoid being unlucky is to be lucky. Because if you were luckier then you wouldn’t be so unlucky. And I think also as well with that, there’s kind of coded into it the idea that there’s something bad about needing help or support or treatment. There’s something bad or wrong for not having all of the resources within yourself to sort everything out.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Yeah.

〶Ä

MARK - And, you know, we all need a mess of help to get through our lives and that’s true if you experience mental health difficulty, it’s true if you don’t. My best example of this is I remember a family member of mine found out that I’d been unwell for a while and they said to me, "You’re vegetarian," and I went, "Yeah?" and they said, "Do you think you might be feeling bad because you’re not eating the foods you were weaned on?" And I was like, are you suggesting that I have mental health difficulties because I’m not eating little jars of pureed carrots or indeed, drinking breast milk? Like, what sort of a weird bit of advice was that? The thing was somehow that I had become unwell because I had strayed from my planned place in life, that I wasn’t in the Northeast of England anymore, that I wasn’t doing a manual job, you know, carrying big girders through sleet or whatever it was.

〶Ä

The sense that somehow I had made a lot of the mistakes in my life and the experience of being unwell was kind of like a punishment for getting out of my lane and doing something different. What often feels very uncomfortable to me is it’s people who are very, very comfortable in their lives who have the resources to be able to make lots of choices. They have material comforts, they have money. They have chances that other people don’t have. They present the idea of becoming unwell as if someone hadn’t made good choices and present their own mental health as coming from somehow inside of them, even when they had far more external health than they would recognise as being help. You know, so in the UK the waiting lists for even very basic forms of therapy and support are massive, and part of looking after yourself is knowing what you need and when you need it. And it’s incredibly frustrating to your own sense of how you’re doing, and also to how things turn out for you when you cannot get the things that you need at the time that you need them.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Yeah.

〶Ä

MARK - And I always get a bit grumpy when someone’s answer is, what you need to do around your mental health is to get access to things that you can’t access.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Just reach out.

〶Ä

MARK - And you definitely need to do it, even more quickly than is possible for you to do.

〶Ä

MARK - So I was looking this week at a recent study about loneliness in the pandemic, and its conclusion sounds really obvious, but people who weren’t lonely at the beginning of the pandemic didn’t feel any more lonely during the first lockdown of the pandemic, and people who did feel lonely felt lonelier. And it’s like the advice about when you find yourself lonely or isolated is usually don’t be lonely or isolated. [laughs] And it’s like, yeah, that’s not so helpful. And it comes back to yeah, why can’t you just look after yourself? Why can’t you just not be mad?

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Basically, if anyone’s listening and they’re thinking if someone’s ever asked this question I want to say it is not a test of your character, it is nothing to do with your character. It is nothing to do with anything you’ve done, you’ve not failing if you’re struggling. And if you can’t just ‘get better’, in inverted commas, that is not your fault. And, if anyone’s asking that question, if anyone’s looking at someone who’s really struggling at the moment and that’s their helpful input I would suggest, look around you. This is what happens. The pandemic has illustrated that anyone can lose everything at any time.

〶Ä

All the things that we need access to, things that help us to feel better, to feel more connected, can be taken away at any point in time. And whether that’s a pandemic taking it away or if you’re unwell and that means that you do find it hard to connect with people, do find it hard to be around people, all those things that help us to feel better can be taken away or hard to access, through no fault of our own. So, basically, stop saying why don’t you just feel better. And on that note, I’m now going to close The Big Book of Awkward Questions for this month. [creaking sound]

〶Ä

So, thanks for joining us and weirdly, we’ve both enjoyed talking about loss. If you can relate, please do get in touch. You don’t have to give your real name, you can give yourself some random name. There’s no rules here. You can send us a voice note, you can write something, you can send us a picture, or send us anything that works for you.

〶Ä

MARK - Email us at

ouch@bbc.co.uk, and just make sure that you put Mentally Interesting in the subject line so we can find it. Or you can find us on Facebook and on Twitter at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Ouch. And if you enjoyed this episode you could subscribe on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sounds, which would mean that actually you’ll get every single episode of Mentally Interesting right on your phone or your device.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - So, join us next time. We’ll be talking about shame, which is a big topic in mental health that no one ever actually talks about. We’ll have plenty of stories and thoughts to share and we want to know how shame and your mental health get along together.

〶Ä

[music]

〶Ä

SEANEEN - I’ve been Seaneen Malloy, and I’m now going to run for a wee.

〶Ä

MARK - And I’m Mark Brown, and luckily, because I’m not in the same place as Seaneen I’m not going to be joining her for a wee but I might well have one, just to break up the monotony of lockdown. See you next time.

〶Ä

SEANEEN - Bye.

〶Ä

[music]

〶Ä