Stigma! Constant stigma!

Why is it that when you let something go from within you, you still so often still feel burdened by stigma…

Probably because you’re generally judged by what you say or do if it’s unexpected. Or at very least, the aftermath goes to show that some people just can’t approach you again, because they don’t know what to say… Is that my hang up or theirs? How do I reach those people? Or should I just class that as the attrition within the world I’m working?

I attended an event that will remain nameless for the sake of the individual… But the mayor was present and he left at half time…

Now, there may have been some emergency etc. I can’t judge on that basis, as I don’t know the circumstance. However, in my humble opinion, if you’re the mayor and people want to change the way mental health is treated/perceived/supported in your town or city, then why on earth would you leave in the middle of an event designed to do just that?

Now, at this event my speech was just before half time and it’s safe to say I’m not 100% ‘PC’ lets say, so I swear and I am very honest and open and frankly highlight some elements of my life, for the greater good, that I really don’t want to revisit, in an effort to kick people into action faster and change how they live…

That said, I have felt sick since…

Part of me feels that he just didn’t appreciate how I managed my time on stage and was offended, my colleagues tell me not to put so much pressure on myself, but it’s really hard not to do so.

In my opinion if you’re not talking about mental health, or trying to help someone or trying to do something to make a change, then you should be in some small way, but the focus of my perhaps ‘not so P.C.’ approach is really to expose those elements of what I’ve been through, that no one in their right mind would want to share with anyone…

Because if I share the dark and disgusting elements of what I’ve been through then people may take more seriously how they approach education and looking after kids and students who need support.

This may be the same mayor that chastised me when I walked past the cricket blind during a match at the local club I sponsored over 3 years. If it is, perhaps he’s still miffed about the cricket? I hate cricket! So dull! Rugby & Football any day!

In reality it’s probably not anything to do with me, or how I spoke etc. though I gave a few dockside sailors a run for their money vocabulary wise, but it is very upsetting and frustrating to think that such a prominent figure left such an important event, so early.

How do we change perceptions, if our leaders can’t be bothered to sit through a couple of hours of discussion?

Already we find ourselves in a world where no one will invest heavily in researching how mental health issues come about!

People are happy to buy the band-aid or get you some free help etc. once you’re fucked… But there’s no research into a preventative…

And why?

Because the UK & USA make so much money flogging out drugs to people rather than working out how to mend them, that we are pushing water up hill trying to change our consumerist and capitalist culture, that ensures all anyone wants in their life if to consume, in every sense of the word and the focus is on profit…

But I promise you those profits won’t go anywhere near a guy like me who started in an ex-council estate house with no money.

The revenue will go to the top 1% of earners, the elitist and we can all break our backs so arseholes like Phillip Green can literally get away with whatever they want and ruin peoples lives… because someones palm, even in those times of bad press, will be greased to ensure no love is lost. He’s not knocking about in prison for screwing the little guy is he? No…

And Amazon employ enough people, so they pay 0% tax!! How does that help us in our current economy… Where do all these special measures go and who is the moron in government making these judgement calls. Why don’t big businesses pay more tax and SME’s get more support and funding?

I have no major education and half of them went to Eton et al, but I can still tell you that if we’ve got a company like Amazon, doing so much revenue, then we should tax them!! Hello!!!!!!! You should be taxing the high net worth companies regularly, not giving them a 100% tax break… in turn, Amazon are killing hundreds of businesses who manufacture products by hand, because they fast ship mass produced products immediately, making it harder for hand manufacturers to remain competitive online.

All we are doing as a a society, which is why no one wants to fight too hard, is fuelling the consumerist attitudes of our people.

I’m so sick of the superficial, if one more person jumps on the fact that I have a bipolar disorder at an event and tries to ‘neuro linguistically programme’ me into paying them for counselling I will scream.

If there’s anything I can spot a mile off, having done NLP training back when it was fashionable 12 years ago and reading Shakespeare from around 10/11 years old (and understanding it), then it’s a shoddy pitch.

Everyone thinks I have loads of money because people always announce me as a successful businessman, but ultimately I don’t have loads of money, everything I earn I re-invest in growth meaning that as much as it makes me feel I have no balls, my fiance is the sustainable bread winner and I’m working on our long term game.

The only reason you can call me successful is because I didn’t kill myself while trying to run a business with no help from anyone in the upper echelons.

Some people react well to my message because I try and offer more energy than the average sob story, and that’s very very exciting and really does change individuals or give them a bit of light; but some think that this is a glorified ‘rock star’ like parade where we love chatting about our deepest fears…

That’s just simply not the case…. I don’t get paid to come and share my fears with people, in fact I can barely afford the sodding petrol money to get there, because no one is paying me to share my story, no one is helping me run my business, no one invests money in someone with a mental health condition like mine, and mummy and daddy aren’t going to fund my success, so I have to graft it along and frankly the C.A.B, County Court, the major phone companies, like BT & Vodafone, my bank HSBC and every well funded major company that I’ve worked with in any way, have been screwing me for years…

And why do I persist….. Because the next entrepreneur that ends their life over these big businesses (the stalwart capitalists that don’t support, only drain us), will be on my head…

I have to make a difference while I have the strength in my body to do so, because there are thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs out there getting screwed and depressed by the man and every now and then someone has to step to the man and say no!

You may think I could be some sort of excitable conspiracy theorist here, but I’m not trying to convince you UFO’s exist.

I’m trying to convince you that big companies only care about money and that when you turn on any social media site all you see is the infamous selfie lot, who pout until their lips swell to the required degree…

X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent have helped us to develop a country of lazy adolescents who think they can just bang out a sob story and sing a song and they’re suddenly deserving of money forever without doing the real work.

It’s globalisation gone mad. We are programming our society to function like a raft of consumerist muppets, so why do we expect any different.

Every major organisation has an annual health and safety budget for example.

Parts should pay for health and part for safety.

There are 35,000,000 cases of lost time every year. Of this number only 20,000 cases are safety related, because that’s where all the money is spent, because it’s easy to give you a hard hat or rip-stop jeans, but a recorded 500,000+ is based on absences due to mental heath… And that’s only the recorded stat for people who were happy to be honest!!

The underlying statistic, is that around 50% of those 35,000,000 cases per annum are based on mental health issues…..

So when your company says they’ve got a health and safety budget, ask them how much they’re planning to spend on health and how much they’re planning to spend on safety and you’ll have some semblance of what situation we’re in here.

Until mental health and well being is a mandatory issue for acknowledgement within any major business; from the internal staff to the consumers or clients they represent/support, then we’re stuffed anyway!

This is my aim…. I’ve got a big mouth and more adrenaline than the majority you may have met and I will persist, frankly because everything in the above message is based on people avoiding the heart of the problem.

We are all trying in our own way to make a change, but if society continues to focus more on revenue and supporting brands who run the show, then we are stuck.

When will there be an end to selfie sticks? When will there be more psychological assessment done before plastic surgery can just be bought and administered… perhaps we can help people before they inject their face with poisons because their husband cheated on them, because in every paper or magazine there’s a set of great boobs trying to sell you something…

Where do we as a society expect ourselves to be in the years to come? Another posh labour leader who went to private school and has no idea about how the poor manage their lives…?

Another elitist Conservative government axing all the foreigners who genuinely want to work in 9 out of 10 cases?

One racist video about the NHS services tipped Brexit over the edge… that’s the state we’re in… the ignorant are breeding and the elite are abusing their ignorance, and it will go on until someone sticks their neck out and is actually honest!

But there’s a lot of money behind shutting us up… no one at the top of the food chain wants to really fund mental health study, because as I mentioned earlier in this blog, drug sales would drop drastically.

As someone with a form of bipolar disorder who’s functioned over 12 years or so since my diagnosis, without more than 30 days of medication, I believe there is a way to work around any form of mental health without the use of drugs, and doctors shouldn’t be commissioned to flog these drugs to unsuspecting depressed individuals…

Can you tell I spend a good few years advising top pharma companies? Haha

In essence I’m lost at this point… There must be a path, I’m too small fry to do it on my own because I am not a wealthy, private school diplomat, but in unifying our approach to ending this consumerist attitude, I believe that we could encourage a better understanding of our mental well-being as individuals and really make a change.

Capitalism worked for a while, until we fucked our society with it…

The problem is, what are you trying to achieve? House, car, kids, stable job, only to teach your kids to do the same in the respective order, then repeat? Whats the point? The guy who pays your wages is off getting life experience, or wasting opportunity that should be had by you…

Are we bringing anything to this planet if we follow the way of the suit, that from school upwards we’re programmed into, while the odd, or overbearingly different kids are cut out of the process and stuck in a separate area of a school, when they may just make the others a bit more dynamic if they’re integrated?

Whats your path? Do you want your kids to ask questions? Or do you want them pouting on social media, expecting Simon Cowell to give them a record deal, while the newspapers get racist and un-eductate the concept of acceptance and togetherness within them, until such point as they marry Kim Kardashian, or Jay-Z and become a complete arsehole, but an arsehole with lots of money, that has enough PR to create a whole raft of fresh 1% arseholes, while the remaining 99% of the kids that don’t make the grade, just work themselves into a clinically obese, or drug addled state because they don’t want to work and are burdened by the stigma of failure and expectation, as they fade and die?

I’m mean, maybe I’m really driving the knife home today but lets be fair, I don’t need to even provide you with evidence that this is the case… The evidence is already there…

What our children need is a sense of purpose… And that doesn’t mean forcing them to conform to the car, house, kids etc. it means setting them free and teaching them the reality of the world we’re losing because of that attitude. Letting them make their own choices and support those, even if you’re not comfortable with what you expected…

We have the ability to craft our society and we’re letting the 1% do it for us. They dictate the budget, they dictate the curriculum, they dictate how our young minds are governed and examined, what’s normal, what doesn’t fit in the box…

But we have 99% of the population, outside the elite, and there’s strength in numbers!

Have a think and make a change… I’m with you… And together, unified, as it should be, we can slowly shift the tempo…