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Showing posts from May, 2020
Should We Replace the Collective Term 'Personality Disorder' with Something More Sensitive?  Years ago, when I was a student mental health nurse, I wrote an article for an NHS magazine called Mental Health Practice. It was an opinion piece, reflecting on how careful we should be when labelling a condition as a personality disorder, because, the meaning carries connotations directed at ones sense of identity. It is counter-intuitive given how invalidation itself significantly impacts on people living with these diagnoses. The name of this condition acts like an ongoing trigger of the condition: We can, for example, argue, that borderline personality disorder, alone, is infact, confining a person to their disorder. When a trained psychiatrist labels someone, and, someone who (like everyone) will have their own personality, will feel an unkind impact. Immediately, upon diagnosis, their personality is sort of stamped 'out of order,' you could expect a person might feel fraz

My Approach To Creativity.

When we read a book such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein we will conjure up various images of Victor Frankenstein, even though the classic black and white film used a mad scientist archetype, which however, is not in the novel at all. There's nothing wrong with borrowing this popular movie icon to fit Shelley's story if ever you begin to read it. Either way, the point is, Victor Frankenstein, (like many fictional literary characters) will work your imagination; we take on the job of visualising or bringing characters to life through interpretation—this is where the work of the author ends and where we begin. The cartoonist and illustrator does exactly the same with character creation or the composition of visual comedy. Symbols, pop culture, stereotypes, tropes and memes are all tools. We all saw the caricatures of Trump that saturated Instagram, especially the tantruming child or cry baby? This man has been symbolised, mocked and postured more than most political figures I