Declaring my cancer on First Dates has helped others | Annie Slater

I always confuse people who meet me. This is because even when I’m feeling awful, I look perfectly healthy. So as I sat across from my date I had to tell him the truth – even with the cameras rolling.

“I am actually dying. Slowly but surely. I’m fine about it. All it does is keep things in perspective.” Barry and I were on our first date but I had to be me, and that’s totally upfront.

I had first applied for Channel 4’s First Dates in summer 2015. At the time I was focused on getting on with my life, after being treated for breast cancer. Before starting treatment I’d had my eggs frozen, as I really wanted to have children one day. But three years later and aged 36, I still hadn’t met someone. I didn’t want to try online dating and I’m terrible at flirting. So I needed help.

I’d put the cancer behind me, which is why I didn’t mention it on the application form. But by the time First Dates called, in March 2016, scans had revealed that the cancer had returned in my bones. This time it was incurable.

I went through so many emotions, but my family and friends were brilliant. They just got on with it and gave me the ability to do the same.

When I got the call from the reality dating show, I didn’t want to lie about my situation. They were nothing but supportive, so in May 2016 I made it to the restaurant in London for my date.

The diagnosis isn’t who I am – it’s just something I have to live with

Telling Barry was much harder than I ever thought. Not because of all the cameras but because I hate getting attention from the diagnosis. But it wasn’t fair for him to find out I was terminally ill when the episode eventually aired. Plus, the diagnosis isn’t who I am – it’s just something I have to live with.

I waited until halfway through the meal to tell him. Barry was lovely and totally made me at ease, and he even wanted to see me again. Although I had a terrific date though, and Barry was a fantastic guy, I just didn’t fancy him.

While First Dates didn’t lead to love, it opened up an incredible opportunity to help other people like me.

After the episode aired, a producer put me in touch with Marie Curie. When the charity asked me to be involved in a project to help raise awareness about their work – providing care to people living with terminal illnesses – I knew this was something I wanted to do. I’m now volunteering as an expert voice for Marie Curie, sharing my experience and providing advice to help the charity.

I don’t focus on how much time I have left. The thing I do worry about is being in pain at the end. Like many people with a terminal illness, I don’t want to die in hospital. I’m not sure if I want go into a hospice or be cared for at home, but I think everyone should have the choice. That’s why I’m supporting Marie Curie – so more people can receive the support they need to spend their final days where they want to.

Earlier this month, I attended the launch of the charity’s Garden of Light to celebrate the start of the Great Daffodil Appeal. Seeing the installation of 2,100 daffodils – one for each of the Marie Curie nurses across the UK – at Paternoster Square in London was really special.

The hardest thing about my diagnosis is accepting that I’m never going be a mum. I feel lucky for the life I have had but also sad that it is going to end. I don’t feel ready for that.

I’m determined to make the most of every opportunity that comes my way. From travelling to Paris and drinking loads of wine to riding on the Greenpeace boat and hearing the choir sing at St Paul’s – and maybe even finding love –I still have so much I want to do.

• Annie Slater volunteers for Marie Curie, whose Great Daffodil Appeal runs until 31 March. Funds raised will help Marie Curie nurses care for people living with a terminal illness in their own homes and the charity’s hospices. Visit www.mariecurie.org.uk/daffodil or call 0800 304 7025 to find out more.
  

The day I made a difference is the Guardian Voluntary Sector Network’s series that showcases the work of people involved with charities. If you have a story to share about a landmark moment in your life, email voluntarysectornetwork@theguardian.com.

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Declaring my cancer on First Dates has helped others | Annie Slater

A Look at 2 Cases: How HBOT Helped in Autism and Brain Injury Treatment

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) has emerged as an effective treatment for a number of medical conditions. There are conditions in which conventional therapies have not proved to be effective. In some of such conditions, HBOT has proved its potential to be considered as a viable treatment option. After experiencing HBOT’s benefits, many people are using a portable hyperbaric chamber in their homes, offices, and clinics to continue getting the therapy’s beneficial effects.

Autism and Traumatic Brain Injury are two such conditions, in which several patients have experienced substantial improvements with HBOT. Let’s look at 2 cases – a child with autism and a veteran with brain injury – and know how HBOT helped significantly in their improvement.

HBOT for Callum – Young Boy with Autism

Callum, a young boy with severe autism, had his communication abilities limited to slapping, biting and screaming tantrums. Callum’s mother, Lee Frost, took her son for Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy treatment in a high-pressure oxygen chamber, for 3 months in 2013. Disheartened by an inadequate number of approved treatments for Callum, Ms. Frost came across HBOT through online research.

After getting the therapy, Callum, about 5 years of age now, is able to talk in sentences and get dressed up on his own in the morning before going to kindergarten, stated Ms. Frost. The therapy involved breathing pure oxygen inside a hyperbaric chamber for about 75 minutes at a time.

Dietary changes were also included in his treatment. Callum still has to go a long way, however, the child he is now, is a quite a different child, said Ms. Frost, living in White Rock at British Columbia in Canada.

HBOT for Ben Parkinson – Veteran with Brain Injury

Ben Parkinson was only 22 years old when a bomb blast at Afghanistan in 2006 left him with severe injuries. He lost both the legs and suffered major damages to his brain, arms, pelvis, skull and spine. Ever since, he is struggling to overcome these injuries.

However, Parkinson began a controversial treatment – Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy. He, along with another injured veteran, Stephen Thomas, underwent HBOT, which involves inhaling 100% oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber at an atmospheric pressure which is up to twice the normal. Oxygen is supplied through a mask in the enclosed chamber. Just after one session of HBOT, Parkinson said that he was already experiencing its benefits.

Most of the specialists would state that about 8 years after the incident, no treatment would be likely to cause any improvement in a case of serious brain injury. However, Professor Philip James, who has been advising on Parkinson’s treatment, is quite optimistic.

He stated that so far, Ben made a remarkable recovery, and he is quite a brave young man. But his head injury hasn’t recovered. Parkinson gets severe fatigue that would certainly improve , according to what the Professor thinks. The speech of Parkinson is barely understandable sometimes, but it’s better at other times. This too would improve, as expected by the Professor.

Professor James illustrated that the treatment course depends on patients individually. It can be quite strenuous and there is no quick fix. Ben was probably going to undergo 21-hour sessions over a month, and was then going to be reviewed.

HBOT is always administered under the supervision of an authorized medical professional, whether the therapy is given to a patient at a clinic or hospital, or at a home or office in a portable hyperbaric chamber.

Although not approved by FDA for treatment of autism, brain injury and several other medical conditions, many patients and families with patients have reported of the remarkable benefits HBOT can provide in such conditions. Nowadays, HBOT treatment is offered by a number of clinics, alternative medicine centers and medical spas. Many companies, like OxyHealth LLC, offer portable hyperbaric chambers for use at home, office and clinic.

A Look at 2 Cases: How HBOT Helped in Autism and Brain Injury Treatment

My awareness campaign helped get 40 people to sign up as organ donors

My mum, Patricia, has polycystic kidney disease (PKD), a genetic disorder that ends in kidney failure. We always knew she would eventually need a transplant and I was the only one in the family who was able to donate. My two sisters also have the disease and my dad has been living with cancer and receiving chemotherapy, on and off, for over 20 years.

Mum didn’t want to take a kidney from me, even though she was slowly dying – she didn’t want to put her child through surgery. We were both scared it wouldn’t work and what impact that could have on us emotionally.

But when her health deteriorated so much that there was a risk she would be too sick to receive a kidney if she waited any longer, we decided to go ahead. I donated my kidney in February this year.

I was asked what I wanted to do if the surgeons found they couldn’t give my kidney to my mum after all. The options were to either destroy it, pop it back inside me or donate it to someone else who needed it desperately. The choice was easy. Even though my sisters have PKD and will one day need a kidney, they didn’t need it yet – and someone else did. I suddenly realised the significance of what I had to give and the difference it would make.

The transplant changed our lives – we don’t have that constant worry any more. We spent two years visiting the renal ward in hospital and met other patients, their families and friends. I spent time in recovery with some patients who had received an organ from a stranger. The joy and relief in these patients and their families is indescribable. To be able to give new life to someone makes organ donation something very special.

I’m a human resources consultant, and have been working with the League Against Cruel Sports, where chief executive Eduardo Goncalves and his team supported me through my recovery after the operation. I received many personal messages, cards and flowers from my colleagues.

When Eduardo, who has himself donated a kidney to one of his sons, asked me to work with him on building awareness of organ donation, I was delighted, as I knew that the staff would be very engaged. They all have a passion for animal welfare, but also really care about people.

We wanted to encourage staff to consider joining the donor register and we did so by sharing our experiences of kidney donation. After telling our stories, and how we felt as a result, 98% of all staff at the league joined the donor register online.

I made a difference to my mum’s life, and to mine, when I donated my kidney. I made a difference by being involved in the awareness project – and thanks to the project, 40 people at the league will now make a difference to other people’s lives by being on the register.

Organ Donation Week runs until 11 September.

The day I made a difference is the Guardian Voluntary Sector Network’s series that showcases the work of people involved with charities. If you have a story you want to share email voluntarysectornetwork@theguardian.com with a short summary of your experience.

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My awareness campaign helped get 40 people to sign up as organ donors

Back to sleep: the doctor who helped stem a cot death epidemic

Parenting manuals have a lot to answer for. They brought useful advice and reassurance, true. But along with those came an epidemic that killed tens of thousands of babies. Sudden infant death syndrome – Sids – is always a tragedy, but it is no longer commonplace. It became an epidemic between 1970 and 1991, and, at its peak, babies in some of the world’s richest countries were dying at the rate of one in every 250 live births each year. The rate in the last year for which figures were available in England and Wales only, 2013, is one in every 3,000.

The Back to Sleep campaign, launched in 1991, changed the advice on sleeping position from front to back, and has had a public health benefit comparable to such breakthroughs as the moment Victorian epidemiologist John Snow took the handle off the Soho water pump in 1854 and stopped a cholera outbreak in its tracks.

At the centre of the Sids revolution was Bristol doctor Peter Fleming. He is now semi-retired, but is currently exploring a link between subtle features of the newborn hearing test and arousal mechanisms that might answer the grievous unsolved riddle of why Sids happens.

In 1978 Fleming, who had qualified in Bristol, returned from a job at the Toronto children’s hospital in Canada with funding from the US National Institutes of Health that enabled him to set up his own respiratory lab. He wanted to look in particular at the relationship between breathing and temperature control in infants.

Prof Peter Fleming, whose research in the 1980s was crucial to the reduction of Sids death rates. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

Fleming is both very clever – he has a PhD in nonlinear mathematical modelling, AKA chaos theory – and very humane. When he found that Bristol offered no counselling or support for families whose baby had died unexpectedly, he began to offer it himself. He saw the families in the emergency department and later in their homes and told them what was known – and how much was unknown – about what was then still widely called cot death.

“Lots of people still thought that the parents must be at fault in some way if their baby had died. They were made to feel very guilty. I wanted to get support, and information, to these families.”

The progress in public understanding is reflected in the change of terminology. When it was called cot death it was considered primarily a social problem, a parental failure that still carried a hint of the most unnatural of crimes, infanticide. When it became sudden infant death syndrome (or sudden unexplained/unexpected infant death syndrome, SUID), it became a medical problem that was capable of scientific resolution.

Early in the 1970s, a US congressional committee called it “one of the last great unresolved childhood catastrophes” and announced federal funding. Meanwhile, bereaved parents were organising too. In 1971 the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths was set up in the UK by a grandmother determined to explain her grandson’s death. (It recently rebranded itself as The Lullaby Trust, because it believed its previous name was too austere and off-putting.) A decade later there was an international federation of similar organisations. In 1984, Fleming, working closely with the trust, set up the Avon infant mortality programme.

“I didn’t look at the sleeping position. But in 1987, with two colleagues, I started a temperature and infection study, and we did include the sleeping position, because scientists in the Netherlands and Australia had no data but they did have a lot of careful observation that made them think it was important.” Far from starting his study in equipoise, with a mind open to every possibility, Fleming only considered the sleeping position question in order to exclude it.

There were no immediately definitive results. “It was incremental. Very few things are ever black and white. It is rarely clear-cut. It is about changing the risk,” Fleming says. This is why the maths matters. “You have to try to understand complexity. You have to see whether a small change can make a difference.”

It helped that, like many of the Bristol families whose experiences were central to Fleming’s research, he came from a working-class family. He grew up in Medway in Kent, where his father worked in the naval dockyard and his mother in the office of a local factory.

For his study, Fleming and his team talked to the bereaved families as soon as possible after the death, to gather information about the baby and the family, what they normally did, what might have been different – all the variables that might have influenced the outcome. He promised the families that they would know the results of his research before it was published: “It’s really important that the people involved feel they own the work. It is a collaborative effort. I want to work with people, not instruct them.”

GPs, midwives and health visitors were all involved. If a GP got a call about a dead or an unresponsive baby, their next call would be to Fleming. “I spent a lot of time with just-bereaved families in council houses. It didn’t bother me, because I was not inclined to see them as different from myself.”

Over the next two years, he and his team gathered data from 70 bereaved families, and from another 140 families whose babies had been born very close to the time of a Sids baby. The control group were identified by asking the health visitor for the details of the two babies next on their list. They were “the babies next door”. “There was 99% collaboration from the families,” Fleming said. “People were very, very positive about wanting to do something.”

The team was confident that their population-based study, with a control group drawn from the same population, at the same time, was as close as possible to achieving the holy grail of true comparability. Yet despite their confidence in the robustness of their data, presenting the preliminary results at the first ever meeting of the International Society for the Prevention and Investigation of Perinatal and Infant Deaths in March 1989 was a nerve-racking moment. Fleming’s findings were received by his knowledgeable audience with incredulity. “They could not accept that something so simple could be so important,” he says.

It was like being asked to believe two impossible things before breakfast. Here was a non-medical intervention that could, for no clear reason, stop babies dying of a syndrome that was also unexplained. But Fleming believed it himself. And when he went back to do a bigger study in Bristol, he found that health professionals who already knew of his findings were advising all new mothers to put their babies on their back to sleep.

Understandably, bereaved families whose babies died after Fleming’s first study believe his results should have been publicised at once. But “Nice [the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] would have laughed at my research. They want things done properly – randomised control trials and all that sort of thing. It wasn’t enough to convince scientific colleagues, and it certainly wouldn’t meet the standards for any public health campaign,” he says.

Fleming published his paper in the British Medical Journal and went back to do more research. Soon, a New Zealand study [pdf download] produced similar findings. The quest now was for evidence with which to argue for a new public health campaign. Unable to conduct a study with a bigger sample in Bristol because newborns were no longer being put to sleep on their fronts as a result of his first findings, instead Fleming found himself conducting a self-initiated, population-wide observational study of newborn babies sleeping on their backs. As his first study predicted, the number of Sids deaths fell from around one a week to less than one a month, and then to just three a year. While he was in the midst of the long process of getting this study published in the Lancet, another family’s tragedy tipped the whole project into the headlines.

Anne Diamond, whose four-month-old son died in 1991. She spearheaded the Back to Sleep campaign, which led to Sids deaths falling dramatically. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

In July 1991, Sebastian, the four-month-old son of Anne Diamond – then a household name with a daily TV show – died in his cot. Diamond’s response was to use all her fame and journalistic experience to investigate what people knew about why it had happened. When she met Fleming, and learned of the findings in the Avon and New Zealand studies, she marched on the Department of Health.

She galvanised the health secretary, Viriginia Bottomley, into accepting the need for a strong public health message. In December 1991 the Back to Sleep campaign was launched. Sids deaths in the UK fell instantly, and with astonishing speed. In 1989 there were 1,545 Sids deaths. Now there are barely 200 a year.

The Sids epidemic can be dated from the time it first appeared on death certificates in 1970, until the public health campaign in 1991. In Britain alone, it probably cost 10,000 lives. It is still hard to explain how it happened. The first recorded advice to put babies to sleep on their front is from 1943. Dr Spock changed his advice to recommend front sleeping between the first and second editions of his famous handbook in 1955.

Some studies associate the syndrome with the rise of the parenting expert, others with the industrialisation of baby care that turned it into a round of bottle-feeding and rigid routines. Others point to the fading respect for culture and experience. The only medical evidence for the benefit of front sleeping came from studies of very premature babies who are still put face down; but even they are never now sent home until they can breathe well enough to prosper on their backs. It was a tragic lesson in the danger of taking a small, sick subset of a population and extrapolating a public health message for well babies.

The architectural writer Gillian Darley lost her son Joseph when he was 11 weeks old, during a midday sleep on a cold, murky day in early April nearly 30 years ago. “I was visiting a friend. He was in his moses basket. I don’t remember being told what to do, it was just what everyone did,” she says. “It was received wisdom. The underlying thing is – like those terrible stories of children who disappear on their gap year and whose bodies are never found – the lack of closure. It’s not a constant presence, but if it was possible to say what was the trigger, it would take a whole load off my subconscious.”

Understanding that trigger is no closer. But the risk factors are now well understood: maternal smoking and co-sleeping. No one questions the former. Co-sleeping, however, has become the subject of intense controversy, not least because warnings of the dangers of taking babies into their parents’ beds has led some mothers to choose instead to nurse babies on sofas, where accidents such as suffocation are more likely. Fleming believes the direct risk from co-sleeping is very small, but the Lullaby Trust takes the view that, like advertising, public health cannot do complexity, and so continues to warn against co-sleeping.

Sids was once a curse that struck randomly across classes. Now it hits in wildly disproportionate numbers the poorest, least-educated families. More than 70% of deaths now occur in poor households, and often to young mothers.

Francine Bates, Lullaby’s chief executive, says that justifies sticking to one clear, simple message: don’t smoke, don’t co-sleep.

“It’s fundamentally wrong and preventable that it’s poor babies who are dying now,” she says. “It’s unacceptable. We’ve still got a job of work to do. Behind the statistics, there are still hundreds of babies, and hundreds of devastated families.”

Back to sleep: the doctor who helped stem a cot death epidemic

Letter: Charles Farthing helped deliver Aids out of the shadows

Charles Farthing’s crew at St Stephen’s hospital, Chelsea, handled folks with Aids as human beings

My pal Alastair MacInnes was 1 of the people taken care of by Charles Farthing in the early 1980s, in what was rightly described as a climate of fear about this mysterious illness that was killing previously wholesome, predominately gay youthful males.

Alastair was initially taken care of at a hospital where food on paper plates was pushed by means of a slot into his isolation space. No 1 knew what was incorrect with him and couple of men and women came near him. This contrasted with his following expertise as an inpatient at St Stephen’s hospital. Alastair and his companion had absolute faith in Dr Farthing and his team. On one particular memorable evening many of the inpatients held a Bet Lynch earrings party on their ward. Against a backdrop of media hysteria about the “gay plague”, folks with Aids were handled as human beings there, not lepers. I believe that this was down to Charles Farthing.

Alastair ultimately succumbed to the opportunistic HIV virus but in his last months he was able to turn out to be involved with the campaign to raise money for research into the ailment. He was specifically enthused about being a VIP guest at a fundraising musical gala. Large credit goes to Charles Farthing for bringing Aids out of the shadows and enriching the lives of so numerous youthful guys, their partners, family members and pals.

Letter: Charles Farthing helped deliver Aids out of the shadows

I was victimised for getting blind, but entire body cameras helped catch my abusers | Siobhan Meade

A Metropolitan police officer sporting a body camera. Photograph: EPA

It was supposed to be the commence of a new daily life, but soon after moving to Stevenage Previous Town in Hertfordshire last November, I found myself a target of haters and abusers in public. I nevertheless do not know why.

It started with a group of young lads trying to manual me in to a lamppost before laughing and operating away. Not lengthy afterwards, the circumstance grew worse, with groups of largely younger males circling me, swearing, and in one particular harrowing situation, telling me they had been filming for YouTube as they urged me to “journey above the curb you blind bitch” and “fuck off back to blind land”.

A lot of other incidents occurred before I broke down crying one day on my living area floor. But like forty% of detest crime victims, I still did not report it. I had no way of identifying the perpetrators, the men and women whose actions had persuaded me not to leave my property alone.

These individuals created me doubt almost everything about myself and my well worth. I felt pathetic because I could not defend myself or identify them, and it made me feel about what would come about if I was physically attacked or even raped. I grew to become a wreck, overwhelmed by dark thoughts.

I last but not least spoke to the police following the predicament came to a head, 1 early Saturday evening. Even though walking via the Previous Town higher street with my fiance, who is also registered blind, a group of younger males started out laughing and swearing at us. As we walked past, a single explained they have been going to get our income, even though one more shouted, “we’ll locate out how a lot they can see”.

I truthfully believed I was about to be physically attacked I shouted for the group to leave me alone and asked: “Why are you performing this?” My concern was so intense that I lost handle of my bladder.

Unaware of fairly how scared and degraded I felt, my fiance employed his mobile phone to try to film the individuals concerned. But when we took this footage to the police, it was also shaky to provide more than a number of small clues.

In the following days and weeks, as the abuse continued, I researched body-worn cameras, ultimately securing the loan of some from Reveal Media and Taser International – who have presented the cameras currently on trial with 500 frontline response officers in the Metropolitan police. This kit was unavailable for me to obtain from TSR, Taser’s United kingdom supplier, which was a shame due to the fact the safety they supplied, and the protection I felt, meant far more to me than I can describe.

As a result, I was ready to consider footage to Hertfordshire police, who have been extremely supportive during. They recognized some of the individuals involved, and following speaking to a single of them, the abuse lastly stopped.

Body-worn cameras gave me the confidence to depart my residence alone and provided the proof that this behaviour was occurring. Prior to I collected this proof some people identified it tough to think. I would extremely recommend the use of entire body-cams to any individual suffering abuse on the street, whilst including the apparent overall health warning that no one ought to put themselves in danger in an attempt to gather proof.

The abuse and hate almost destroyed me. But I decided to use the expertise to educate people about the genuine human charges of disability hate crime. In 2012-13, 1,841 incidents had been reported to police in England and Wales – a five% improve on the earlier 12 months – but that is only a modest reflection of the problem. The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates that there are, on average, 62,000 disability-motivated hate crimes each and every 12 months. A third of the reported crimes (32%) concerned violence.

Operating with Stevenage borough council and Hertfordshire police, I have set up a Respect campaign, going to colleges and youth groups to inform my story, and spreading the word on Facebook and Twitter (#RespectCampaign). I’m established to raise awareness, produce methods to fight these crimes, and to get the message across that dislike hurts.

I was victimised for getting blind, but entire body cameras helped catch my abusers | Siobhan Meade

Rachel Kelly: How poetry helped me recover from depression

When I was awake in the dark hours of the evening, and suffering from that sense of full isolation that is at the heart of feeling depressed, I would repeat these snatched lines to myself, prayer-like. I wasn’t alone right after all.

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It was only when the antidepressants started to work that I could focus on entire poems – and only short ones. I turned to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems which celebrate the healing power of nature, poems this kind of as Pied Beauty. Nature was reaching out and grabbing me by the collar as I recovered, my mood completely summed up by Hopkins’s celebration of even the smallest miracles of creation. The language performed for me, rekindling my enthusiasm for phrases and refreshing my own stale vocabulary.

Glory be to God for dappled factors –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls finches’ wings

A poem can also give a various narrative from the adverse story in our heads. This was how I felt when I read through George Herbert’sLove (III) for the duration of my 1st breakdown. During the very first verse I felt a bolt of electrical power pierce via me. All the hairs on my arm stood on end. It was the 1st time that had happened in a even though.

Really like bade me welcome,

But my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin,

But sweet-eyed love, observing me expand slack,

Did welcome me in.

Yes: my soul had been drawing back. Yes: I required enjoy to bid me welcome. The thought that my soul was “guilty of dust and sin” appeared the most perfect description of the depressive sickness. The poem pinpointed a sense of guilt that I should be depressed whilst blessed with a loving residence and husband, one thing I had not previously acknowledged. Herbert’s words had been bursting through the clouds of my mind. It appeared we had been to the very same location and spoke the same language, albeit that his go to was centuries in the past. I had identified a companion on my journey.

I’m not the initial to derive comfort from poetry. Apollo was the god of poetry as effectively of medicine. In 1751 Benjamin Franklin founded the very first American hospital, the Pennsylvania Hospital, in which studying and inventive writing were between the remedies prescribed for psychological illness. Freud, Adler, Jung and other people recognised the healing energy of phrases, and this led to the 1969 founding of the Association of Poetry Therapy.

Read: GPs to prescribe library books to fight nervousness, depression and romantic relationship issues

These days, figures in the literary and philosophical worlds advocate their own brands of healing phrases. Alain de Botton‘sThe School of Existence has lately begun programs in mindfulness and poetry. William Sieghart, the founder of the Forward Poetry Prize, invites audience members at literary festivals to request “Poetry Prescriptions” to suit their certain emotional and psychological demands. As Boris the bard, endorsing the importance of poetry, humorously suggests, “There is no acknowledged disaster, That poetry can’t master.”

There’s even some scientific proof that poetry adjustments the way we think. The arrangement of poetry, even the clearest, has distinct conventions to constant prose. This presents enough of a challenge to get our brains working differently. Research by Philip Davis and the neuroscience department of Liverpool University discovered that readers of Shakespeare, when they came across an uncommon but entirely comprehensible grammatical development, would show a spike in neural activity. Even even though the readers understood what was being stated, their brains have been shocked into activity. The requirement to concentrate in the second helped me quit regretting the past and fearing the long term in the adverse mental spiral characteristic of depression.

In this way, poetry can work in a similar way to mindfulness, forcing us into the current. Robert Frost, demonstrating my level properly, put it far greater when he said a poem can be a ‘momentary remain towards confusion.

Black Rainbow, my memoir about how poetry helped me recover from depression, started existence as a series of poetry recommendations to buddies. They knew what I had been through and asked for poems I thought could aid them in instances of need to have. With the book’s publication, readers have been sending me the poems and prose that have assisted them. Quickly probably I won’t need to have to clarify that poems can be as good as tablets in assisting you recover.

Rachel Kelly’s memoir about how poetry helped her recover from depression, Black Rainbow: How Phrases Healed Me – my journey via depression’ is published by Yellow Kite Books, a subsidiary of Hodder &amp Stoughton, £16.99. All author proceeds are going to the charities SANE and United Response.

Read through: How writing aided Edward St Aubyn exorcise his demons

Rachel Kelly: How poetry helped me recover from depression

How Scarlett Johansson helped me challenge disfigurement stigma

Adam Pearson is used to people noticing him. A couple of weeks in the past, he was in a DVD shop near his property in Croydon, south London, and a gaggle of teenage women starting up talking loudly about him and taking images of his face on their smartphones. “They have been saying ‘Oh, search at that man’,” says Pearson. “And all I wished to do was purchase The Hobbit on Blu-Ray.”

Pearson suffers from neurofibromatosis, a situation that affects a single in each 2,300 individuals and which brings about non-cancerous tumours to grow on nerve tissue. In his situation, the vast majority of these tumours are on his face even though, he adds drily, “I’ve received one particular on my arse I possibly will not demonstrate you”. During his 29 years, he has been bullied, harassed and referred to as every thing from Elephant Guy to Scarface.

Every single time he goes out, men and women stare. On the way to our interview, Pearson was stopped by a couple of passersby as he acquired on the train. This time, nonetheless, it was not as a consequence of his problem – it was because he has begun to be recognised. Pearson is presently starring alongside Scarlett Johansson in Below the Skin, a critically acclaimed science fiction film directed by Jonathan Glazer about an alien who roams the streets of Glasgow abducting and killing unsuspecting males. In 1 of the most poignant scenes, the alien (Johansson) is proven choosing up a hooded man at night (Pearson). When the unnamed guy reveals his disfigured face, it is a pivotal minute: the alien becomes humanised and conflicted. The two of them have a brief conversation about the nature of ignorance and prejudice. The alien does not remark on the stranger’s encounter, instead complimenting him on his “stunning” hands.

“One of the primary motives for taking the part was simply because it was so moving and truthful,” says Pearson in excess of a lunch of fish and chips in a south London cafe. “For me, the movie is about what the planet looks like with no expertise and without having prejudice. It really is about seeing the planet via alien eyes, I guess.”

A lot of the dialogue was improvised. Pearson and Johansson had a conversation beforehand about exactly where it may go – the line about the hands, for instance, came from him. “My mom likes my hands,” he says now, a touch embarrassed. He also had to movie a nude scene with Johansson – some thing even the most experienced actor would be nervous about.

“They just said ‘action’ and you do it,” he says. “I did not actually believe about it … I didn’t broadcast the info [that he was in the movie] till fairly near the release. I did not inform some folks at all and just took them to see the film. I suggest, my buddy Heidi hasn’t created eye get in touch with with me for a week.”

Johansson was “brilliant. She’s genuinely wonderful, charming, humorous and intelligent after you get in excess of the feeling of ‘Oh my God, this is Scarlett Johansson!’”

1 of his favourite memories was engaging the actress in a two-way competition to see who could tell the most inappropriate joke. Pearson won, but Johansson place up an excellent battle (and the jokes in question are eye-wateringly unrepeatable).

Much more importantly, Under the Skin gave Pearson an possibility to challenge what he sees as the stigma surrounding representations of disfigurement on display. “There is a great deal of worry close to the unknown. If I can attempt to be as normal as achievable and show there is practically nothing to concern – either on movie or day to day, going round the corner to go purchasing for milk – then the much more men and women see it in wider society, the less stigma there is. If I just sit at home and mope, hugging the puppy and crying, nothing’s going to adjust.”

He points out that facial imperfections are typically utilized as shorthand for evil in movies, regardless of whether it be Blofeld’s eye scar in James Bond or the villain in Disney’s current adaptation of The Lone Ranger, whose face was severely scarred and who was offered what appeared to be a cleft palate in makeup. “It really is always used very lazily,” explains Pearson. “In an ideal globe, actors with circumstances would play the characters with these very same problems, but which is a way off. Instead, movie-makers tend to get a generic, ‘normal’ actor and use prosthetics. If they’d acquired Adam Sandler and blacked him up to perform Nelson Mandela, there would have been an uproar … but with scars and things, it looks like individuals are amazing with that.”

In individual, Pearson is the two eloquent and really humorous. He possesses a quiet self confidence and a degree of self-awareness that is rare amongst young males in their 20s. As a little one, he had to grow up fairly rapidly. He was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis when he was 5, soon after he knocked his head on a windowsill and the resulting bump refused to go away.

His identical twin, Neil, was also diagnosed with the issue, but in him it takes a different type. “He appears typical,” says Pearson, “but he is acquired horrible short-phrase memory.”

Secondary school in Croydon was challenging. He was insulted and bullied on a typical basis and no a single knew what to do about it. He remembers 1 event when a so-called pal stated a instructor wanted to see him in 1 of the classrooms. When he got there, Pearson was assailed by a group of his peers who had been lying in wait. “I went house with spit all above my blazer,” he says. “That was horrific.”

Throughout all this, Pearson was getting operations to “debunk” some of the tumours to date, he has undergone thirty health-related procedures. As a end result, he is understandably sceptical about the growing trend in elective cosmetic surgery. “I am not a fan of cosmetic surgical procedure profiting from people’s insecurities,” he says. “I go through someplace 9 out of ten females do not like how they appear and I consider which is since they are evaluating themselves to the airbrushed pictures they see in Vogue or FHM. People lack a actual literacy in the media. They never know what goes into generating these pictures. Media literacy ought to be part of training. I think we’ve completed attractiveness a wonderful disservice by quantifying it.”

It was during 1 of Pearson’s normal visits to Great Ormond Street hospital for remedy that he saw a poster marketing the organisation Changing Faces, which helps people and households who are residing with conditions, marks or scars that influence their visual appeal. Pearson acquired in touch and asked for help with no telling his mother and father – the very first they knew about it was when the literature arrived in the publish. The charity gave him coping mechanisms, encouraging Pearson to preserve positive and to don’t forget that “they [the bullies] are the ones with the dilemma, not you”.

Factors got better when he went to Brighton University to research organization management. Right after graduating, he had jobs in television manufacturing for the BBC and Channel 4, the place he is still involved in casting for series such as The Undateables and Beauty and the Beast, the two of which challenge society’s notions of disability.

It was while he was at Channel four in 2011 that he received an email from Shifting Faces saying that a film business was hunting for a male character for Below the Skin. Pearson replied and received the work. The film has been an overwhelmingly optimistic encounter, and not just due to the fact he left with Scarlett Johansson’s personalized e-mail handle.

Pearson is keen to do far more acting. He’d like to get a girlfriend (“I’m currently single”) and, although there is a 50% possibility he could pass his condition on to any youngsters, this doesn’t fret him unduly: “My little ones will be genetically wonderful anyway.”

At the second, he is residing with his retired dad and mom, Marilyn and Patrick. Are they proud of his recent achievements?

“It truly is surely a excellent subject of conversation amongst them and their friends,” he says. “A good friend will say: ‘Our daughter just received into Cambridge’ and they will go: ‘Adam’s in a film with Scarlett Johansson.’” He polishes off the final of his battered cod. Then he adds: “Booyah! Competitors over.”

How Scarlett Johansson helped me challenge disfigurement stigma