Category Archives: Sirius Project News

Versatile Blogger Award

Posted on by Seeking Myself
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I’m really pleased to announce that Sirius Project has been given the Versatile Blogger Award from The Bipolar Project (despite the similar name, we’re not related). Thank you so much! :D

The Versatile Blogger

The rules of the award state that I should share seven things about myself, and pass the award on to 15 recently discovered blogs that I enjoy reading. However, Sara from The Bipolar Project chose to bend the rules a little and give the award only to Sirius, making it all the more special for us. I have decided to follow her lead because 15 is an overwhelmingly large number of blogs, especially if you adhere strictly to the ‘recently discovered’ part!

Therefore, the one blog that I’ve chosen as most deserving of the Versatile Blogger award is:

Blooming Lotus by Faith Allen

Faith blogs about her own journey to recovery from childhood sexual abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociation. Her courage and honesty is inspirational and she is always quick to share the things that have helped her with others – something that’s very in line with our own ethos, of course. Congratulations, Faith! :)

Now to list seven things about myself:

1. I founded Sirius Project back in 2003. At the time, there weren’t many good websites or forums focused on recovering from self-harm (the situation has changed a lot now), so when I realised I wanted to stop cutting I also decided to create a safe place to share with others in the same boat.

2. Also in 2003, my GP told my employer that I would never recover from depression or self-harm. Last summer, I celebrated seven years SH-free and although I still have episodes of depression, I have learned to manage them and lead a rewarding and relatively ‘normal’ life in between. There’s nothing quite like proving a pillock wrong. ;)

3. SIRIUS originally stood for Self-Injury Resources, Information, Understanding and Support. I have to admit that one of my favourite Harry Potter characters may also have played a role! Now that we’re about mental health recovery in general and not just self-harm, I like the fact that Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky.

4. Outside mental health, I love choral music, cooking, poetry, foreign languages and being my own boss.

5. They say you should never talk about religion and politics, but I’m going to anyway. :P I’m a very liberal Christian and an extremely angry and disillusioned Lib Dem voter.

6. I’m a self-help junkie and must have devoured thousands of books about coping with depression, self-harm, trichotillomania, social anxiety, fatigue and more. You can find some of these on my Good Reads bookshelf, but I tend to only remember the ones that are either really good or really bad.

7. Despite my self-help leanings I’m also a big fan of psychotherapy and medication where appropriate, and I can be quite outspoken about the NHS’s use and abuse of CBT. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with CBT per se, but it’s not the right option for everyone, and in my experience the NHS’s approach to it is often over-simplistic.

Looking for contributors

Posted on by Seeking Myself
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I’m pleased to announce that our new website is more or less finished! There are still some minor tweaks to be made and I have a couple more blog posts in the bag, but to all intents and purposes this is the new face of Sirius Project.

If you haven’t already done so, you might want to update your bookmarks from http://siriusproject.org to http://sirius-project.org (the old URL will continue to be used for our forums, which have yet to be converted and updated).

We’re now ready for submissions from guest bloggers who would like to contribute to Sirius. If you have personal experience of a mental health problem, or of caring for someone who does, and you have something you’d like to say about recovery then we’d love to hear from you. Continue reading →

An update and an apology

Posted on by Seeking Myself
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This is just to apologise really for the slow progress in updating Sirius Project. As you may know, I’ve been quite ill with depression over the past few months, and my partner is experiencing problems at work. This has slowed everything down but I am still committed to updating and promoting Sirius. Your patience is appreciated! :)

Moving beyond self-harm

Posted on by Seeking Myself
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As you may have gathered from our Twitter and Facebook accounts, or from our new tagline “Mental Health Support and Recovery”, we at Sirius Project are planning to widen our focus to cover more than just self-harm.

Self-harm is rarely something that happens in isolation, and many of our members are living with mental health conditions, traumatic pasts, or both. At Sirius Project we’ve always believed that overcoming self-harm is not just about working on the behaviour itself, it’s about addressing those underlying causes. However, so far the more general mental health stuff we’ve provided (information, links to resources, support through our forums) has been aimed at helping people who self-harm improve their mental health. What we’re now recognising is that people may be many years self-harm free, and no longer wish to take part in a self-harm-focused community, yet still be dealing with those other issues. For example, I will be celebrating my seven-year anniversary on 16 July, but my battle with recurrent depression is not yet over (you can read more about this on my blog Seeking Myself). Likewise, there may be people who have never self-harmed but would benefit from some of our other resources.

That’s why we’ve decided to become a more general mental health support site, but focused around a few areas we know we’re good at. These areas are likely to include:

  • self-harm (for definite. We know there are people who still very much need and use our self-harm resources, so don’t worry, they won’t be going anywhere!)
  • how to access help for mental health problems in the UK
  • self-help for mental health problems
  • life after recovery from mental health problems – for example looking to the future and rebuilding your life

We would love to hear your ideas for what we should and shouldn’t include, whether these are general or specific. In particular, life after recovery is a new area for us, so we want to know what you’d find helpful. So far we are planning to create a dedicated area of the forums and a page with people’s success stories, where they share not only their progress in recovery but any ups and downs they still have and how they deal with these. Do you have any other suggestions? Or are there other aspects of mental health you think really should be included? Feel free to leave your comments here, contact us through Twitter or Facebook, or email me at moon tree at sirius project dot org.