Below are links to other websites that may be useful including peer support groups that are currently being offered, useful websites and books that you may find helpful.
The Forgotten Sibling
I was delighted to take part in a short video by Luck Stockwell about the experiences of siblings.
Luke is, himself, a sibling of someone with mental health issues, and in this video he talks about how this has affected him and how those with a similar experience may be affected.
To watch this video on YouTube, simply click the thumbnail:
The link below will take you to my interview by Ella Rhodes from the British Psychological Society about the research that I carried out into how growing up with a brother or sister with a severe mental illness can impact individuals.
Rethink mental illness provide support for siblings of those with mental illness across the country. They currently have three monthly sibling groups running in the following areas:
Bristol bristolsiblingsgroup@rethink.org
South London rethinklondonsibs@gmail.com
New Tupton friendshipgroup@rethink.org
Sibling Link run two peer support groups for adults in the
Brighton and Hove area; one for those who are caring for, affected by or worried about their sibling who is experiencing mental ill health. The other is specifically for those of us – not limited to siblings – who have been bereaved by suicide. The focus is on talking and listening.
Anxiety UK offers an extensive range of expert help designed to help you to control your anxiety rather than letting it control you. Anxiety UK offers:
If you are interested in having private psychotherapy, the UKCP holds a national register of psychotherapists and psychotherapeutic counsellors. Their aim is to protect the public, and to provide public confidence in the profession they regulate. Only therapists who meet their exacting standards and training requirements can be on their register, which is accredited by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care.
You can search your postcode on their website to find a UKCP registered therapist near you.
The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters
The Chimp Paradox is an incredibly powerful mind management model that can help you become a happy, confident, healthier and more successful person. Prof Steve Peters explains the struggle that takes place within your mind and then shows how to apply this understanding to every area of your life so you can:
- Recognise how your mind is working
- Understand and manage your emotions and thoughts
- Manage yourself and become the person you would like to be
The Chimp Mind Management Model is based on scientific facts and principles, which have been simplified into a workable model for easy use. It will help you to develop yourself and give you the skills, for example, to remove anxiety, have confidence and choose your emotions. The book will do this by giving you an understanding of the way in which your mind works and how you can manage it. It will also help you to identify what is holding you back or preventing you from having a happier and more successful life.
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk
What causes people to continually relive what they most want to forget, and what treatments could help restore them to a life with purpose and joy? Here, Dr Bessel van der Kolk offers a new paradigm for effectively treating traumatic stress.
Neither talking nor drug therapies have proven entirely satisfactory. With stories of his own work and those of specialists around the globe, The Body Keeps the Score sheds new light on the routes away from trauma - which lie in the regulation and syncing of body and mind, using sport, drama, yoga, mindfulness, meditation and other routes to equilibrium.
Assertiveness Training by Chase Hill
Please Yourself by Emma Reed Turrell
We all know how it feels to want people to like us, to approve of us, to accept us. It’s part of what makes us human. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to support other people and help them satisfy their needs. The problem comes when we give up our own needs along the way. Because when we give to make others like us or approve of us, to shore up our own sense of self-worth, to feel needed or to avoid painful emotions, then we give to get. And rarely do we get what we really need.
Emma Reed Turrell works with people pleasers every day in her clinical practice as a psychotherapist – clients wrestling with the complicated dilemmas of a life in which you can’t please everyone, but you don’t yet have the permission you need to please yourself. In this groundbreaking, reassuring and essential book she presents an alternative to people-pleasing. Through the stories of people-pleasers across all walks of life she offers insights and techniques that will help you understand yourself more fully and live more authentically. It will help you get better at being disliked, instead of staying quiet. It will help you recover instead of fearing failure. It will teach you acceptance instead of avoidance and show you how to grow instead of staying small. Above all it will help you care better for others, without taking on their problems, through caring better for yourself.
The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k by Sarah knight
Are you stressed out, overbooked and underwhelmed by life? Fed up with pleasing everyone else before you please yourself? Finding it hard working from home? Then it's time to stop giving a f**k.
This irreverent and practical book explains how to rid yourself of unwanted obligations, shame, and guilt - and give your f**ks instead to people and things that make you happy. From family dramas to having a bikini body, the simple 'Not Sorry Method' for mental decluttering will help you unleash the power of not giving a f**k and will free you to spend your time, energy and money on the things that really matter.
Attached by Dr Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
Is there a science to love? In this groundbreaking book, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Amir Levine and psychologist Rachel S. F. Heller reveal how an understanding of attachment theory – the most advanced relationship science in existence today – can help us find and sustain love.
Pioneered by psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s, the field of attachment explains that each of us behaves in relationships in one of three distinct ways:
Anxious people
are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner’s ability to love them back.
Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimise closeness.
Secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving.
With fascinating psychological insight, quizzes and case studies, Dr Amir Levine and Rachel Heller help you understand the three attachment styles, identify your own and recognise the styles of others so that you can find compatible partners or improve your existing relationship.
Troubled Journey by Diane Marsh and Rex Dickens
Troubled Journey explores the nature of mental illness - especially schizophrenia, major depression, and manic depression - and provides family members with the tools to overcome the devastating effects on their lives. Family members now eagerly seek help, instead of bearing the weight of problems related to mental illness alone. Troubled Journey is written specifically for this audience, as readers are led through the essential stages of recovery, from revisiting childhood to revising their family legacy, and ultimately to reclaiming their life. The book is filled with hope, discovery and practical advice.
Circles around the Sun by Molly McCloskey
When Molly McCloskey was a young girl, her brother Mike - fourteen years her senior - started showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. By the time Molly was old enough to begin to know him, he was frequently delusional, heavily medicated, living in hospitals or care homes or on the road. When Molly reached the age Mike was when he became ill, she found herself suffering from deep anxiety and drinking heavily. She knew that schizophrenia runs in families, and at times the anxiety was so bad as to make her wonder about her own sanity. As the years passed, years when Molly - having moved from the US to Ireland - hardly ever saw or heard from her brother, she became deeply curious about his life and about what might have been. Through reading an astonishing archive of letters preserved by her mother and grandmother, and interviewing old friends of Mike's, she began to piece together a picture of his life, before and after the illness struck - the story of how a gifted and well-liked student and athlete was overtaken by a terrible illness that rendered him unrecognisable. Now, in Circles around the Sun, she tells that story - which is also the story of her own demons and of how a seemingly perfect family slowly fell apart and, in the end, regrouped.