#sanah ahsan

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What is the role of the poet or artist in times of great cruelty? Will we risk a brave sound? Will we craft space for illumination, for revolt, for truth-telling?

Sanah Ahsan, from her essay "Allowing Our Hearts To Break: Poetry, Our Embodied Method of Resistance", published in Too Little / Too Hard, Issue 2 Winter 2023

[storiesthatstayed]

"If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome” – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt." Sanah Ahsan

From til article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/psychologist-devastating-lies-mental-health-problems-politics?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

[dreamsofacommonlanguage]

Sanah Ahsan, Allowing Our Hearts To Break

[habibialkaysani]

tag meme

Nine people I’d like to get to know betterI was tagged by @suspendingtime - thank you! Last song I listened to: demi lovato's cover of ed sheeran's give me love

Favourite colour: PURPLE

Currently watching: rewatching bridgerton was gonna happen, but I was so disappointed by part 2 of s3 that I'm not planning on rewatching just yet. but bridgerton was the last thing I watched.

Sweet/savoury/spicy?: savoury all the fucking way. and I don't believe in mixing these at all. culinary blasphemy imo.

Relationship Status: single I suppose?

Current obsession: kathony kathony kathony!!!! any surprises there? bc this bitch has managed to write over 200k worth of fic featuring them in six months - not all of it is posted yet but good god.

Currently reading: a poetry collection called I cannot be good until you say it by sanah ahsan. gorgeous.

Last thing I googled: "which episodes of bridgerton is simone ashley in" because I wanted to screencap her scenes for giffing purposes :)

Tagging: uhhhh not sure who to tag but if you see this and wanna do it pls do say I tagged you :)

[newswireml]

Are women really more mentally ill than men? As a psychologist, I’m not so sure | Sanah Ahsan#women #mentally #ill #men #psychologist #Sanah #Ahsan

In the UK, being a woman means you’re three times more likely than a man to have a mental health problem. Rates of self-harm among young women have more than tripled since the 1990s. For those facing interlocking systems of oppression, it gets worse. Black British women are more likely to be diagnosed with a mental health problem than white women. South Asian women are 2.5 times more likely to…

[wafact]

Are women really more mentally ill than men? As a psychologist, I’m not so sure | Sanah Ahsan

In the UK, being a woman means you’re three times more likely than a man to have a mental health problem. Rates of self-harm among young women have more than tripled since the 1990s. For those facing interlocking systems of oppression, it gets worse. Black British women are more likely to be diagnosed with a mental health problem than white women. South Asian women are 2.5 times more likely to…

[lifeinpoetry]

it is not a sin. it is not a sin instead a call to prayer.

it is a call to prayer whenever my name leaves her lips with devotion i know that god is here

whenever i am with her i know that god is here.

— Sanah Ahsan, from “My Dua Is Love,” SLAM! You're Gonna Wanna Hear This, ed. Nikita Gill

[blimpsarecool]

Social action is the medicine that relieves people’s personal and collective distress.

I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health | Sanah Ahsan

[trilliannnn]

Egyetértős

[kitchen-light]

Grief is more of a public than private event, though Western capitalist myths might have us believing otherwise. Grief demands we expose love, and its immortal, disobedient direction of travel. Poetry, like grief, also risks loving in public. Poems form fascia between the individual and collective body, showing us how we are inextricably bound to each other. Rather than hold grief in isolation, each word pulsates tiny particles of sensation through a shared network of nerve fibre, cord-like tendon and bone. The poem not only operates to embody public revelation, it can reorient us towards the reality of this moment, fizzing our consciousnesses into what we have been refusing to see.

Sanah Ahsan, from her essay "Allowing Our Hearts To Break: Poetry, Our Embodied Method of Resistance", published in Too Little / Too Hard, Issue 2 Winter 2023

[blogkennethratcliffeposts]

I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health — A New Vision for Mental Health

I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health — A New Vision for Mental Health

“Society’s understanding of mental health issues locates the problem inside the person – and ignores the politics of their distress” This opinion piece by Sanah Ahsan has been published in The Guardian. It begins: “We are living, we’re told, through a ‘mental health crisis’. Mental health services cannot cope with the explosion of demand over the past two […] I’m a psychologist – and I believe…

[sustainhealthmagazine]

Tonight's Dispatches Reveals Destigmatisation May Contribute To Young People Thinking They Have Mental Illness

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In Dispatches: Young, British & Depressed, on Monday 29 July at 8pm on Channel 4, Reporter Sanah Ahsan investigates the UK’s youth depression crisis. 1 in 8 young people aged 5 to 19 have a diagnosed mental disorder, demand for access to mental health services is at an all-time high and antidepressant use is on the increase. Dispatches asks what’s causing the rise in mental health problems among young people, whether antidepressants are being made available too quickly and whether de-stigmatisation campaigns have had an unintended consequence.

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Dispatches conducted a survey of 1,000 16 to 30 year olds in the UK. It revealed:

·         68% think they have had or are currently experiencing a mental health problem. 

·         61% think that mental health de-stigmatisation campaigns have been helpful to talk about mental health problems in general

·         62% who think that they have or have had a mental health problem say that de-stigmatisation campaigns have helped them identify it.

But Dispatches discovered that whilst mental health de-stigmatisation campaigns have undoubtedly had a positive impact on society’s ability to talk about their mental health and reduce stigma, some are questioning whether the dial has swung too far and think people are presenting themselves as experiencing depression and anxiety when in fact, they are going through normal human emotions.

Dispatches conducted a survey of 1,000 GPs across the UK,

58% believe an unintended consequence of destigmatisation campaigns has resulted in more people wrongly believing they have a mental health problem.

63% frequently see patients who have self-diagnosed a mental health problem

NHS Consultant Psychiatrist Professor Sami Timimi who works with children and teenagers believes mental health is being diagnosed too quickly in some young people and many are just responding normally to difficult situations.

He said: “We’re promoting the idea that we should talk about things more often and it’s ok to have a mental health problem, but it’s made us afraid of emotions…it’s as if when you experience intense emotions, that’s a sign that you’ve got a mental health problem, that’s a sign that there’s something wrong with you and it’s putting intense emotions into a bracket other than the ordinary things that people experience when they’re growing up. And I think that’s a very unhelpful cultural message. I’d rather that we were popularising the message that growing up is difficult, that we are actually quite resilient, that most people get through these difficult periods in their life.”

Jenny - a young person featured in the programme told Dispatches: “These campaigns are asking people to reach out for help, it’s ok to feel this way, it’s ok like there’ll be help there if you reach out. There isn’t. There isn’t help. And so I actually think it’s dangerous that we’re telling people that and it's not the case.”

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Last year there were 700,000, referrals of children and young people under 19 into mental health services – a 45% increase in two years and two out of three people aren‘t getting the treatment they need.  Recent data shows half of children needing specialist treatment waited more than four and a half months after their initial assessment.

Dr Marc Bush from Mental Health charity Young Minds says this is not good enough: “I think what we need is every government to prioritise mental health. There’s been historic underfunding of children’s mental health. Lots of young people and families we talk to say they wait far too long to access a specialist service and sometimes they're turned away because their level of need isn't deemed great enough. And that's really worrying because we don't want people to end up with complex needs and we don’t want them to end up in a place of crisis.”

Dispatches: Young, British & Depressed also reveals that as the mental health system is overstretched, more young people are turning to antidepressants. Data obtained by Dispatches reveals:

In 2018-19 nearly 7.6 million people in England were prescribed antidepressants

That is a 10% increase in 3 years, and a 3.5% increase in a year.

For children, there is only one antidepressant for which clinical guidelines say the benefits outweigh the risks. Guidelines advise they should only be prescribed following assessment by a psychiatric specialist and alongside psychological support.

Data obtained by Dispatches reveals:

The number of under 18s prescribed antidepressants had its biggest yearly increase for three years.

In 2018-19, 55,210 under 18s were prescribed antidepressants – seeing the biggest yearly increase since 2015 (+2.4%)

NB: These raw figures are lower than previously reported because of a new statistical model the NHSBSA use to avoid inaccurate reporting in the past by double counting patients between age groups.

The Dispatches survey of GPs across the UK revealed:

·         86% agree antidepressant prescribing across all age groups has increased due to lack of access to other services.

·         39% of GPs do prescribe to under 18s but only 1% of them think it’s the best treatment for depression. 

Parveen – aged 18 -  was referred by her GP for adult talking therapy but on account of the waiting time was prescribed antidepressants as an interim measure .  She told Dispatches: “The therapist said to me on the phone, I'm not gonna lie to you, the waiting list is like five to six months. I went back to my GP. She was just sort of like OK well I'm going to prescribe anti-depressants. I was thinking why am I being given antidepressants because I just want to talk to someone but I didn’t have that and I wasn’t getting access to it. So I took them for two days and the second day, I remember that was the first time I self-harmed. And it was self-harm with, like, the intent to take my own life. And my mum found me and then called the ambulance. “

Three months after Parveen tried to take her own life, she’s learned her treatment has been delayed again.

Some young people find antidepressants are a useful and helpful part of their treatment, and many people do not experience any negative side effects and have positive experiences on the drugs. However Dispatches investigated the potential withdrawal effects from antidepressants that some people can experience when they stop taking them. Current clinical guidelines on withdrawal from antidepressants state that symptoms are usually mild and last a week.

Dr James Davies, from University of Roehampton, has been leading a study charting some patients’ experiences of withdrawal from antidepressants.  He told Dispatches: ”We found that antidepressant withdrawal is far more common, severe and long lasting than our current national guidelines acknowledge…these guidelines say that withdrawal is invariably mild, resolving over about a week. The research shows however that about half of people who take antidepressants experienced withdrawal.  Up to half of those report that withdrawal as severe, and a significant proportion experienced withdrawal for far longer than one week, for many weeks and in some cases months and beyond.” 

He added: “What we often see are people either staying on the medications because it’s difficult to stop or when they do stop, those painful withdrawal reactions are being misread or misdiagnosed and the drugs are being reinstated. In the most severe cases we’ve seen people commit suicide as a consequence of not being able to bear the severity of the symptoms.” [xvi] 

22 year-old Peter decided to come off antidepressants after three months. He followed his doctor’s advice to skip a pill every other day, but the next day he began experiencing severe effects.  He told Dispatches: “I just noticed this kind of sudden feeling of being completely faint and just as if I was about to collapse. And it would just last in a short burst for about half a second. By the end of the day I couldn't move my head. Anytime I'd move my head to the right I'd get this this shocking sensation on my entire body I almost felt as if I was going to die. It was much more intense than I ever could have imagined it would have been.”

He added: “It took me one month to lower the dosage to come off and even to this day I still have kind of withdrawal symptoms or the occasional brain zap. The GP told me when I was coming off that, you know it might be a bit hard but they didn't really tell me when I was going on it.”

Please note:

People who are already taking antidepressants should not stop taking them without seeking medical advice.

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Allowing our hearts to crack, is an insistence on remaining open, remaining human. It forms a pathway of return to the hearts of our mothers, our brothers and children of Palestine. The tenderness of grief allows us to humanise and hold the contradictions of this moment.

Sanah Ahsan, from her essay "Allowing Our Hearts To Break: Poetry, Our Embodied Method of Resistance", published in Too Little / Too Hard, Issue 2 Winter 2023

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This pain is evidence that we are in touch with a barbaric reality. We are fleshed from the worlds we live in, our bodies are in conversation with this unfolding genocide – shouldn’t our hearts be breaking? Staying connected to our bodies, our riotous grief, is one way we resist becoming numb or unshocked by this cruelty and astronomical scale of murder. In using our instruments; our sapped bodies, our trembling voices, our pounding hearts, we contest not only this genocide, but all inextricably linked oppressions.

Sanah Ahsan, from her essay "Allowing Our Hearts To Break: Poetry, Our Embodied Method of Resistance", published in Too Little / Too Hard, Issue 2 Winter 2023

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As a psychologist, friend and human, I am concerned about viral online content which suggests naming despair or heartbreak is a distraction, or even a separation, from Palestinian suffering. This heart-hardening ideology risks shaming and isolating each other from generative feelings of humanity, which are key ingredients for revolution. Our collective heart-smash is a form of errantry, refusing the capitalist demand of carrying on as normal. According to liberation psychology, there are profound psychological benefits that come when oppressed people gain a sense of their shared grief and power. To truly feel that we are many; that we are all Palestinian, is also to reveal our collective unbridled emotions in response to this mass destruction. Systems that are anti-life operate by disconnecting us from our messy hearts, and our messier heartbreak.

Sanah Ahsan, from her essay "Allowing Our Hearts To Break: Poetry, Our Embodied Method of Resistance", published in Too Little / Too Hard, Issue 2 Winter 2023