Read the full article on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/lucywishart/p/professionalism-as-protection?r=71cs29&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true There’s a quiet distortion in the mental health system that often goes unnamed. Professionalism has become a form of protection — not for the people seeking support, but for those delivering it. Over time, the clinical frame trains people to manage risk rather than meet reality. Language becomes careful.

read more at Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/lucywishart/p/i-didnt-heal-through-insight-i-transformed?r=71cs29&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true When your awakening doesn’t speak clinical. They’ll tell you recovery is about insight, strategies, and emotional regulation. They’ll offer worksheets. Grounding techniques. Reflection tools. But that’s not what happened to me. I didn’t heal in a therapy room. I didn’t stabilise through talk. I burned.

They’ll say it’s a crisis. That the system is under strain. That more staff, more funding, more strategies might fix it. But those of us who’ve lived it? We feel something deeper. This isn’t breakdown. It’s unravelling. The current model doesn’t need tweaking — it’s becoming energetically unsustainable. Because it was never built to hold what’s actually happening now: awakening, grief, aliveness, rage, transformation. We’re not in crisis. We’re in emergence. And we’re not ask

(AKA: The Time I Got Complimented for Passing as Palatable) There I was — sat across from the psychiatrist, trying not to roll my eyes hard enough to trigger another medication review — when he hit me with it: “If I was on a bus with you… I wouldn’t know you were taking antipsychotics.” Ah. The classic psychiatric compliment. Translation: “You don’t look too much like the thing we said you were.” Apparently, the goal is now to survive chemical flattening with just enough spar

Read the full article on Stubstack: https://open.substack.com/pub/lucywishart/p/what-they-called-care-was-something?r=71cs29&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true It looked like kindness. It sounded like concern. But beneath the soft language and structured plans, something else was happening. What they called care often felt like control. Like quiet dismissal dressed up as safety. Like being assessed instead of met. Managed, not understood. You learn to no

Read the full article on Medium: https://medium.com/@lucywishart1/we-are-not-the-crisis-the-mental-health-system-is-b52c90367942 They say we’re in a mental health crisis. But what if the crisis isn’t in us? What if the real problem is a system that pathologises pain, offers containment instead of care, and calls it compassion? We are not fragile — we’re aware. And we’re done being treated like symptoms. The collapse we’re seeing isn’t personal. It’s structural. And it’s been