I received the good news that one of my pieces was accepted for the Perceptions of Balance Exhibition at Shape Arts.   My piece is called ‘Balanced Mind’ I have been labeled ‘mad’ by society, so therefore seen as unbalanced. Society’s way of redressing that is not to help me make sense of the childhood trauma that triggered my psychosis, nor to tackle inequality and discrimination in society because of that label. Its way was to medicate me into...

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I don't know how many people share this experience, but I am a bi-realitist. Having the intense, divergent mind psychosis brings but able to comprehend the world of consensual reality, albeit a bit strangely, and in an off the wall way. But sometimes one overpowers the other: when the psychotic side does it, I am compelled to create art to exorcise; when the 'normal' side does it, I am compelled to create lists. I needed to create this piece of art, and now I feel haunted by one less ghost....

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 Here is my itty-bitty contribution to Channel 4 Goes Mad season. 4Thought asked the question: 'What is Madness?' I could have talked for hours on the subject, but if fact the producer didn't want me to answer it but tell my story in a minute and a half. I would have liked longer to qualify some of what I said, but here it is www.4thought.tv/themes/what-is-madness/dolly-sen. What has been interesting about the 4thought this week, when it poses that question is the debate it has...

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 Anyone who knows about the Nazi's Disability  Euthanasia Programme Action T4, will see unsettling parallels to what is happening to disabled people now. The current demonisation and persecuting of disabled people , the media hype over disabled people being burdens and scroungers, an ecomonic strain to society,  is following the Nazi Euthansia's To Do list to the letter. I left my last job in April due to stress, which triggered psychosis and depression (which is one of the...

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I have started doing collages, actually there was a compulsion to do a collage of a human being. Maybe I was just feeling all that was wrong with the world, but in my psychosis, human beings were growing shark heads. Is psychosis a collage of the cutting outs of reality? Dunno. But my source material isn't women's weekly, it is the complex human being. I get frustrated with people who say humans have fundamental goodness. Tell that to any human being who has died at the hands of someone of his...

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I am mostly a happy go lucky person, with a certain cheekiness. I hope when people meet me, they detect the light in me. But I haven't had an easy life, as I have dealt with extreme abuse as a child, and its consequent madness and pain. Over the period of decades, my madness went from darkness to a strange light with some lapses into the shadows. The soul must do its work, dip into the shadows to see why they are there, and try to remove the caustic monoliths that cast them. I do not...

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I graduated from Uni about a month ago, and said to myself, I am going to take a year off. But only two weeks into that resolve, I became bored and am productive again. I am looking for work - and also creating work for myself. One of the ways I am doing that is to promote what I already love doing. So I have a lot of website and updating to do, like my artist website etc. The first site that is nearly done is Ascend Mental Health Training and Consultancy. Check it out if you...

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When I used to believe in Recovery as concept and practice, I took part in a film about the subject matter, made by my good friend Michelle McNary. I think she made a really touching and powerful film. It was made for our local Mental Health Trust, so my decision to wear my mad pride t-shirt was deliberate! Recovery and mental illness: part two continues a series of edited testimonies from system survivors on youtube...

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I have just moved to Eastbourne. BBC Sussex presenter Danny Pike interviewed me about the stigma attached to being labelled with a mental health condition - as part of Mental Health Action week.

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My one-off blog for Mind about access to psychological therapies gives an opinion on supporting Mind’s 'We Need to Talk' campaign.

Let me know what you think?

At the moment I am mostly thinking why He-man had a girl's hairstyle?

xxx

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Fundraiser Event at the Candid Arts Trust
6th November 2009

screening of Leo Regan/The Doctor who Hears Voices with Q/A with Doctor and the protagonist Rufus May

This is to raise money for a documentary on psychosis by Dolly Sen

www.idomind.org.uk

Starts at 19.00 2 Torrens Street, London, EC1V 1NQ

(Right behind Angel tube station)

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I DO MIND FILMS presents ‘voices from a strange land’ Lurking behind tabloid interest in the mental health crises of celebrities is a vast unease around mental ill-health. The everyday stigmatisation of the Mad affects everyone. Films about madness are usually made by people who have not been there. Dolly Sen has been there, and is making a travelogue about a place few return from unscathed. Most films about madness turn us into something to be feared or vilified, it does not see...

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Survivor's poetry and music - Mad Chicks and the Bath Mad Hatters Budding Hub Gallery, Fri 28th August 2009 6:00pm - 8:00pm A multi-faceted cornucopia of readings, talks and sound performances around the works of those who have suffered from mental illness from Mad Chicks and the Bath Mad Hatters. Mad Chicks is about women psychiatric patients and survivors of the psychiatric system. The movement developed from within Mad Pride, a user-led mental health civil rights movement, committed to...

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hey there guys, the last month I have been mostly in front of my computer, fundraising and form filling, and there's nothing to report about that, except it seems easier to write a book than fill out a funding application. The only time I have left the house is to go scouting for locations for my Trapped Birds documentary or meeting with my lovely producer Nora Somogyvari, a fellow LCC student and native of Hungary. She has been amazing, and has brought a lot of Hungarian crew to the project,...

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Recovery heroes – a profile of Dolly Sen by Dolly Sen, Sarah Morgan and Jerome Carson A life in the day Volume 13 Issue 2 May 2009 © Pavilion Journals (Brighton) Ltd The development of the recovery approach must mean a fundamental change in how mental health services see service  users, for as the Social Perspectives Network paper rhetorically asks, ‘Whose Recovery is it?’, it is, of course, the service users’ (Social Perspectives Network, 2007). The recent...

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I was over the moon to get picked to direct a documentary on psychosis as my graduation for university, but now it is the dirty business of raising funds. I want to raise unrestricted funds, in that the usual suspects who fund these kind of films are medical based, and I want to get away from the medical model. So here are the details of what I want to do: A synopsis of the idea It is a self-reflexive documentary about the experience of psychosis, focusing on the sensory aspect of it but also...

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Waking up this morning has kind of answered the question I posed in my last blog. I can see the London skies are grey now but they weren't when I opened my eyes. Reality changed its mind this morning. The colours of at my window waxed deeper, stronger, wilder; the skies were the colour of a thousand setting suns reflected in the swirl of melting glass; every particle of air had its own individual, unequivocal jewel. Birds were flying free Free FREE across the skies. Trees turned into giant...

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This week I have been put on some new meds for some recently developed epilepsy, and my mind has done some thinking on it that I am not sure would have arisen if I wasn’t taking these new drugs. Now with Epilepsy on top of Psychosis, I am doubly ‘disabled’ but how come I don’t get twice my DLA? I have also come to the thought that prospective employers are gonna love me! I went to a DAO meeting today, and we talked about spaceships, and Colin recreated the universe into...

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