Blackbird Singing

Graham Morgan has an MBE for services to mental health, and helped to write the Scottish Mental Health (2003) Care and Treatment Act. This is the Act under which he is now detained.

START, published by Fledgling Press in 2018, was his memoir about his years of breakdowns, the harshness of his marriage and the beauty of falling in love with his partner, Wendy. It has been widely acclaimed as a must-read by mental health practitioners in the UK.

Blackbird Singing is a continuation of those years, it tells tales of some of the things that have happened to Graham since START was published.

It is a musing, a meandering through real life. It is not about drama, although there is drama. It is not about devastation, although there is devastation. This is a book about living, about understanding, about learning, about growing, about love and also grief; about summers walking the dog by the sea and winters when we are too tired to think. It is about answering the alarm when the world is so surreal and dark that school and work seem like an absurdity and because it is Graham, it is about the world of mental illness and compulsory treatment and trying to live a normal life when everyone says there is no such thing as normal.

Auteur

Graham was born in 1963 in York. He went to university as an angst-ridden student and was quickly admitted to one of the old mental asylums, prompting the work he has done for most of his life: helping people with mental illness speak up about their lives and their rights. He has mainly worked in Scotland, having worked in the field of mental health and mental illness for most of his life. In the course of this work he has been awarded an MBE, made Joint Service User Contributor of the Year by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and, lately, has spoken at the UN about his and other peoples' experiences of detention. He has a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and has been compulsorily treated under a CTO for the last ten years. He currently lives in Argyll with his partner and her young twins. Start was his first book.