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NB: This may not be a word-for-word transcript. Living Long-Term with Mental Illness We would – of course – want to get rid of this thing forever and heaven knows we will have tried. We’ll have gone on courses, read books, hired psychiatrists and psychotherapists, taken medicines. And through this, we would have veered between despair and hope that we might eventually be able to achieve a victory over our monsters. But the more time passes, the more we have to take on board a bleaker, unavoidable reality: this thing is here for the long term. In the one life we’ll ever have, this is us. We’ll never be rid of the bugs. We have a chronic condition of the mind, not an illness. So how can we survive this ostensibly extremely dispiriting realisation? A range of thoughts come to mind. First and foremost, we need a certain mindset, one combining intense doses of pessimism with bleak humour and the most tender compassion. We never asked for this, we didn’t do anything especially
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