So, what kind of monster eats a mental health magazine?

The below is the editorial for the autumn 2013/winter 2014 issue of One in Four.

A resolve and a mystery

Happy New Year! If this is your first issue of One in Four, welcome! We hope that it’s a mix of mental health news, views and information that works for you.

2013 was a year of great hardship for many and certainly change for most. Changes to benefits eligibility rules, rearrangement of NHS services and reductions in funding to a variety of services have left many of us squeezed between coping and not coping.

These system wide changes, many resulting from changes in government policy, has introduced even greater worries into the lives of people with mental health difficulties.  Many struggling to get through things have found themselves struggling even further.

We all need help from time to time.  In 2014, as in every year since we began in 2007, One in Four remains committed to bringing you real life experiences, ideas and knowledge to help you make your way through life and to find the help and support that you need.

What kind of creature eats a mental health magazine?

If this you are one of our regular readers, it won’t have escaped your attention that this is the autumn/winter edition of One in Four.

You might reasonably be asking: where is the autumn edition of One in Four?  Don’t worry, it didn’t get lost in the post.  The answer is that it got eaten.  Not by a dog, like the traditional forgotten homework, but devoured never the less.

So, what kind of creature can eat an issue of a mental health magazine?

As regular readers will know, One in Four is written by people with mental health difficulties, for people with mental health difficulties.  As you’ll also know, One in Four came out of my own experiences of mental health difficulty.  Not an historic experience of mental health difficulty.

Any of you who experience depression will know of the capacity it has to devour time and to make words that once seemed full of meaning and sense turn to ash in your mouth.  Depression removes your nerve, makes the possible consequences of any action seem far too terrible to contemplate.

The autumn issue of One in Four eaten by the editor’s depression.  It would be hypocritical to avoid speaking about my own mental health difficulties in a magazine about mental health difficulties. I generally don’t do so because there are far more interesting things for One in Four to publish than accounts of my own experience.  I have a diagnosis of Bipolar II which means I’m mostly mucked about by depression.  I’m not that interesting.  I’m also lucky.  Our company is set up to understand mental health difficulties and make adaptations for them.

We haven’t got much in the way of resources to produce One in Four, so me, as editor, being out of action held things up.  Like many in far more severe situations, we couldn’t pay for outside help so we had to sit the grey storm out.  With the understanding of colleagues I made it through and the issue you’re reading now is the result.

This isn’t an admission or a confession, it’s a statement of fact.  Mental health difficulties are just that; difficulties.  They sometimes come along and muck things up.

Here’s hoping One in Four can help make getting around those difficulties even a tiny bit easier.

Mark Brown

Editor

(don’t worry, all subscriptions are for 4 issues rather than a calendar year. Look out for your autumn/winter issue arriving soon)