About Me
Hiya,
I’m John Healy, a fifty year old schizophrenic with a thirty year history of mental illness, fifteen years of drug abuse (clean for the past fifteen years, I’m happy to say), with a total of 23 admissions to Bushey Fields psychiatric hospital since 1994…. sounds a bit negative in one sense but I’ll turn it into a positive, meaning I’ve spent a lot of time in the company of all sorts of mentally ill people and together with my insight (which I am reliably informed is exceptional) and my experience of the pros and cons of the mental health system makes me someone whom people can chat to about anything they want.
I’m a non-judgmental person, I don’t care what it is you’ve done or had done to you, you can confide in me, no matter if it’s evil, humiliating, frustrating, unjust, baffling or anything else, my position is we’re all people and as far as I’m concerned we all have certain rights:-
The right to exist.
The right to be treated fairly.
The right to our beliefs and opinions
And the right to be heard.
Nothing about human beings shocks me, our diversity and complexity as a species and the consequences good or bad are self evident.
We at 2day2gether are a group of people with different backgrounds, different perspectives, different personalities, but with the same goal:-
To help the mentally ill in our community and beyond.
Our team leader Jon Mansell is a very unusual man in his unconventional approach to mental health care reform, unusual in that it doesn’t follow any rules (apart from Jon’s) and that his lack of conformity is making waves in places where conformity was the norm.
No matter what happens we’re all gonna try to make a difference to people’s lives for the better.
If you’re mentally ill and you need help with your problems and you’d like to talk to some highly qualified (qualified by way of experience) human being try us.
I guarantee you will find us different to anyone else.
Amongst several other members of the team, as I mentioned previously, I have a history of addiction.
I was hooked on tobacco, alcohol, and eventually drugs (mainly Amphetamines and Heroin), I gave up smoking eight years ago, drugs fifteen years ago and although I haven’t attained complete abstention from the booze, I have achieved a significant level of control to the extent that it is no longer an addiction (meaning that I don’t withdraw when I don’t drink, I don’t drink because I need to, I’m not secretive about it and I cope with stress without resorting to it).
As regards the other two addictions, I gave them up because I had to. I know what works as regards giving up a substance abuse problem, what is necessary, what sacrifices you need to make and how much better life is when you beat your habit.
Don’t worry that you can’t give something up, because you CAN.
You didn’t need your habit before you had it, you don’t need it now and once you’ve left it behind you’ll look back on it all and say “what the hell was all that about”?
As Jon Mansell (exboozehound) says it’s just ‘learned bad behaviour’ and all you need to do is replace it with something new and something better…. which you can.
John Healy
I Likes It