I have just had a wonderful time at the Author at My Table event, more about which later. But there’s one thing I need to mention really quickly. I wrote an article that got published this weekend in the Daily Mail. The article isn’t important because I wrote it. It’s important because it talks about the time I took – and failed – a psychometric test to measure my mental health aptitude for a job in 2009 and the offer was rescinded. So when I get angry about stigma, in life and in fiction, I have good reason.
The article is in the Daily Mail this weekend. This supplement is not available online, but I would strongly encourage anyone who is feeling isolated, ashamed or small about their mental health because someone shamed them, to get the paper and read it – and take all that for the nonsense rigmarole it truly is. I’ve seen stigma and come out the other side. Thank God, I’ve been lucky with my workplaces. My colleagues have been so supporting and encouraging about the book, they’ve renewed my fate in humankind.
We work. We thrive. And we kick stigma, and its perpetrators, right up their snotty, mediocre, shaming, unimaginative, clenched, bony, little arses.
Susan Lanigan - WWI Historical Fiction 