Dear Fellow Bloggers...........

I have been deeply touched by the comments left by fellow bloggers on my post about my sister last week. Thanks so much to all of you, mental illness can leave the families as well as the sufferers feeling isolated and misunderstood and you have so encouraged me.

As someone who occasionally "shouts the odds" about all sorts of things, this is something I feel I have not shouted about enough. There are excellent campaigning organisations out there such as Mind, Young Minds, The Mental Health Foundation and others. But their campaigns so often fall on deaf ears. It takes a tragedy for the media to even make a passing reference to mental health care so what hope to put this issue any higher up the political agenda? The irony is that the cost of continuing to relegate mental health to the bottom of the political agenda is a cost to us all. A financial cost (for example 90% of prisoners have mental health problems) but more importantly a human cost.

At the moment I am not really in a good state to think through what we could be doing (ask my work colleagues whether I have listened to a word they said today!), but I am serious about doing something, however small, to change things. First step is a Facebook Group, second step may be a little more radical.......ideas on a postcard (or an email) please.......