Epiphany

Christmas snuck up on me, this year.

I know, I know, it's still on December 25th this year so I could still have planned for it all in good time, but I didn't. Somehow it was upon me rather more swiftly than planned (erm, because it wasn't planned) so has all been a bit of a flurry. Ho hum. Or ho ho ho.

It's been healthy blogging for a year then taking some time out, but now I'm bored so it's time to start waffling on again, as is my wont. Thank you kindly for the comments and emails, which were surprisingly positive.

Just a brief aside. As folks will have gathered, I'm more than happy to be challenged on clinical opinions, indeed it's welcomed. What I think is a reasonable plan of action someone else may quibble with, the discourse that ensues is helpful and either helps me feel that my view is rational and sound, or that it isn't and helps me shift. When to give ECT, how long to be on an antidepressant for, what section 5 of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 should be used for, at what age to formally diagnose personality disorder, when to use a Supervised Community Treatment order . . . I'm happy to have offered views and chew the cud 'til the cows come home. What unsettled me wasn't when what I was saying was being challenged, but how I said things was being challenged.

Tricky one, that.

It's something I'm not easily going to change. Also, even if I stopped just posting on whim, and thought through and edited stuff, no matter how assiduously I tried I'd still cause affront to someone, somewhere, some of the time. One author of another blog rightly pointed out that a goodly number of their readers are patients (so things need to be framed in a suitably benign and universal way, presumably because patients are too fragile to exist in the really real world) which gave me food for thought. It'd be wrong for me to be saying things on other sites that could be taken as unhelpful.

I'm not a politician. I'm often wrong. Thus, I've never aspired to be "politically correct."

Medical blogs and medical student blogs I frequent seem to be liberal minded and haven't had issue with how things are said, so it seems sound to largely confine myself to such waters. And what better place to start than my own icy waters of Lake Cocytus . . .

. . . time to start blogging again.