Mental Health Issues: Part 2 – Have You Ever Felt Useless? Or Unheard?

Have you ever felt useless?  Unheard?  A waste of space?  As if nothing you do has any meaning or purpose?  Ever thought you didn’t fit in?  In your family?  At school?  At work?  Or that everyone else was more successful?  While you . . .?  Well!

The fact is that we live in a world where mental health, bullying and self-deprecation is escalating. Social media is, rightly, seen to be culpable. To my mind, given that it has the ability to make each one of us believe ourselves to be omnipresent (my tweets may be seen across the world) and omniscient (via Google I can ‘prove’ my knowledge to be far superior to yours) it is the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel and may, quite possibly, lead to our ultimate downfall.

Likewise, the breakdown in family life and absent fathers is cited as the reason for the rise in gang violence. Given that one of my daughters became involved in a gang following her father’s departure, I find this particularly distressing. Belonging to one another is a fundamental human need, whether that be family or community. It seems to me that in its absence, it’s inevitable that young people will look for it in other ways i.e. gangs.

Even for those who are not affected thus, the status quo looks grim. The Prince’s Trust, a charity created by King Charles, states that worries about the future, money, and ‘not being good enough’ are ‘piling up’ on young people aged 16-25 and that they are the ‘unhappiest generation for a decade’. I find that incredibly distressing. My aim, my passion, my purpose in writing my latest book, You’re Picked for a Purpose is to see it countering the sense of inferiority and powerlessness that is engendered in so many.

My own life, as I mentioned in my last blog, Mental Health Issues: Part 1 – My Story, has been one of prolonged and painful problems: a dumbed-down childhood (when my intestinal pain went unrecognised), a dunce (school reports: ‘could do better’), an abusive marriage, followed by divorce and debt. The message I now want to share is that we all need a sense of purpose in life, in order to counter the negative mental health issues we may otherwise suffer. And it was this that ultimately saved me.

Threatened with a smacked bottom whenever I played up (due to my undiagnosed pain) I would escape into the loft, where all my father's books were piled high, and I'd read and read and read. Until, eventually, I began to write – not books, but plays. With the blackout curtains creating a stage in the loft, my cousins and I became actors, charging our parents thrupence per seat, as the audience, and lapping up the applause we received from them. Becoming a different person certainly had a very positive effect on me, as did my love of story, and the faith to which God led me during my marriage – another tale, told in my book Picked For A Purpose.

When I wrote a letter to my good friend, Stephanie, telling her of my unhappy marriage and divorce, she urged me to have my story published as a book. She then put me in touch with another friend of hers, who edited my manuscript, and helped with the publication. This being before the days of the internet, I received letters, via my publishers, from divorcees all over the world, congratulating me on my openness, and telling me how much my story had helped them.

And thus my sense of purpose began, my aim being – as is stated on my website - 'to inform, inspire, and encourage. Or, to put it another way, to comfort others with the comfort I've received.' With that goal in mind, all sense of uselessness departed, to be replaced by the knowledge that not only did I know myself to be a person of worth, but also that I was a child of God, using the gift he had given me as a child, and fulfilling the purpose he had set before me in adulthood.

Giving talks all over the country, as well as on radio and TV, my voice was heard, at last. Many years of books followed, revealing the hardships and successes of my life until, eventually, major publishers contacted me, commissioning me to ghost-write the testimonies of others, one of which, titled The Last Mountain: Living With AIDS, became a Sunday Times Bestseller.