Following on from my first book, Can You Hear Me Now: Finding My Voice In A System That Stole It, the progress I've made both personally and with Health Care Services is incredible. Once scared into silence, my first book served as a platform to allow me to lift my head and my heart to follow my passion to help others coming into contact with services because of their Mental Health. Understanding that not every service is the right fit for each person, but feeling intensely that if it wasn't necessarily going to be the thing to help them... at least don't hurt them! I hope that in this book, Resilience, A Person Not Just A Patient, you can feel the hope between the pages, the soul-searching I've done to find ways of wellbeing that are finally working for me and above all see the link between our brains, bodies and hearts.
With a diagnosis like Bipolar Disorder I was led to the medical model... and I may well indeed be someone with a chemical imbalance in my brain, but I'm also a human being alongside that. A human being that doesn't need to be squeezed into a specifically medical shaped box at the risk of overlooking I'm a whole person, and the condition is just a small part of who I am. In this journey I learned so much about more holistic ways of managing my life so that yes, I absolutely accept that I need to take medication every day for my base line stability, but I give you a glimpse into my life and my own ability to be a vulnerable human being sharing with you my good days, days I wasn't quite sure how I'd survive and also some very personal reflections on how my family changed forever since writing my last book. It's a story of Hope, Learning, Love, Loss and above all a reminder to anyone out there that you are indeed so much more than a Patient. You're a Person too, and we all deserve to sparkle in our own unique way.
