Master The Mind, Master Anything with Dave Cottrell

Mxiety is an amazing mental health streamer who has helped so many people over the past 3 years through a blend of communication, honesty and vulnerability all balanced out with epic guests and some gaming just for good measure.

When I first started looking into mental health streaming her name came up time and time again and after checking in with a few vods I knew I wanted to get a chat in the diary with this amazing woman.

This is that chat!

We talk about the good, the bad and the mind boggling world of mental health streaming and answer some great questions from the live chat.

Toxic positivity is a phrase you may have started to see getting thrown about on social media.

To truly define it I would describe it as the need for everything to be positive all the time and the rejection of anything (or anyone) that doesn't present as positive 100% of the time...

HOWEVER...

As we know can happen with the internet it is easy for instead of a specific KIND of positivty to be branded as "toxic" it is becoming increasingly frequent that people are labeling ALL kinds of positivity in this way.

As your resident centrist/fence sitter/man who tries not to think in black and white I want to share my thoughts with you on all of this!

Samuel Allsopp Phillips is an amazing individual. Having spent his entire life struggling with self harm, depression and gender dysphoria he is now most of the way to transitioning completely to male.

What is utterly fascinating is how the transofrmation has been just as dramatic on the inside as the outside and how he has found a huge amount of resilience even in having an extremely difficult time in 2020.

In this interview he talks about growing up in a body he felt he didn't belong in, learning about sexuality and gender in a world where these things were still very much taboo and eventually becoming the man he is today.

This one is probably going to be a pretty uncomfortable episode as I delve into so inconvenient truths about the mental health industry.

From my experience both working in and living with mental health for several years now representation of how things really are in mental health are rare.

We take partisan views on it, one side saying EVERYONE with mental health is attention seeking, dangerous or manipulative, the other side saying that absolutely NO ONE is like that.

The truth is that so long as we continue to use these generalisations to define "the other side" (and so long as there are righteous supporters on boths sides of the aisle) the stigma can never truly go.

People with mental health issues are people first and foremost, with the same rights, entitlements, tendencies and possibilities as any other person. The vast majority of people with mental health issues (just like the vast majority of people without) are good, honest people. However just like a person without mental health issues could be dangerous, attention seeking or maniuplative, so too can a person with mental health issues.

The problem is that this does not conform to the narrative a large portion of the mental health industry wants us to believe. However I also believe that by trying to uphold that narrative, a narrative that is false, this further contributes to the stigma.

If you think me don't talk about mental health, then their sexual health is probably even further down on the list.

We seem to encounter (and re-enforce) stigmas wherever we turn when it comes to the health side of things and this is exactly what Kevin Button faced when discovering his possible infertility.

He was given two options; sperm donor or addoption and no other support.

Off the back of his own experience he decided to launch them_ancave a support site for male infertility and mental health.

On this episode we discuss all of this and more!

Friday 18th September is the 3rd anniversary of the podcast and I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that.

In three years we have covered so much and I have got to speak with so many amazing people, but the reason I wanted to make this episode to remember why I started.

I started to honour YOUR progress however that looked, not based on my ideas or map of the world, but yours.

I hope that I can continue to do that moving forward!

Here's to another 3 years and more!

In 2020 we know that one size does not fit all, but we have to act as if it does if we are to make anything stick on social media.

It's such a shame, but moderations, common sense or centrist views just don't gain popularity the way polarising opinions do.

And unfortunately popularity is the name of the game online, so as a result people will try their best to push one size fits all, even though it doesn't.

In this episode I discuss my feelings on that and sit hoping that someone (maybe even me) may one day make the middle ground a little bit more exciting to people!

We have a truly exceptional man on the podcast today. Someone who has lived their entire life with a brain tumour which has lead to a disability and OCD; but doesn't let any of that stop him!

Chandy is someone who has both a personal story of mental health and a qualification in social work and combines these two things to inspire, educate and to make social work more social.

I don't want to spoil some of his many achievements so I'll leave that for the episode, but what he has done with both body and mind is truly inspirational!

Every felt like your brain has too many tabs open? Me too!

On this episode I talk about how journalling (or simply just writing stuff down) can create a lot of room in your head to help make space for other things... like creativity!

Alastair Dickinson is someone who was forced to assess his definition of happiness when living life by following what "should" make you happy.

Coming from a background in rugby had what he describes as a stereotypically masculine view of mental health. Meaning we keep a lid on it and we move on.

This lead to his mental health deteriorating to the point of it affecting his job as a teacher where his depression and anxiety would often make him physically sick.

I'll leave it to Alastair to tell the rest of his story, which he does here but also in much finer detail in his book You're Not Alone.

Links:

Alastair on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/alastairthewriter/

Buy the book from Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Youre-not-alone-Alastair-Dickinson-ebook/dp/B08FP1TM2F/ref=mp_s_a_1_8?dchild=1&keywords=youre+not+alone&qid=1597398968&sr=8-8

This episode of the podcast was recorded live on Dave's Twitch stream. To be a part of future recordings or to check out the rest of the stream head to https://twitch.tv/mindsetbydave