искра/iskra: It's Not Just You

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

It's Not Just You

Quick promotion for what I believe is an excellent project: Ms Ellie Rose (@eleanorrose) is looking for people who've had experience of mental illness for a blog project called It's Not Just You. The point of the project is to reduce the stigma around mental health by showing people how it is- hence the title. I'm proud to say I've contributed myself. Anyway, she can describe it better than I can, see here: http://bit.ly/li9YEr
Please circulate to your networks - the more people get involved the better.

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About me, and this blog.

(see also my twitter.)

Contact me here.

Me: I'm a Birkbeck student and a keen mountaineer. Irish/Catholic/Marxist/antihumanist. Particular focusses of my politics are welfare, homelessness, anti-racism, feminism, mental health, antirationalism and policing. I'm writing a book for Zero about antihumanist mental health politics, and I also write for the Anti-porn Men Project. I've been homeless, and later worked with the homeless. I've been diagnosed with quite a few unmentionables - although my mental health politics are Laingian and I don't find much solace in diagnoses - and worked as a mental health caseworker and crisis team worker. I get beaten up a lot and I dress like a ponce.

The blog: So far dominated by policing content, it will eventually expand into all the areas described above. A few (very) faintly notable things: my protest story was picked up by the LRB, my rant about Uli Edel's RAF film attracted the scrabbling fear of a certain Guido Fawkes, and my Big Issue article got me into an argument with one of the BI people who invented the slogan. Comments are moderated, after the number of trolls since Guido's nonsense, but basically everything gets let through. If you want to pick a fight though, you're better off doing it on Twitter, where I'll pay you more attention.

The name, iskra (Russian for 'spark'), refers not to the Leninist newspaper but to a long story involving the mark on my wrist and this: "Jeg snudde meg og så den rode stjerna som Franz hadde på underarmen. Den gløda i sola og bølga som stjerna i midten av et flagg hver gang han bevegde fingrene eller knytta neven. Det gjorde han ofte. Antakelig var han kommunist. Mange skogsarbeidere var det, og med god grunn, hadde faren min sagt."