Although I have written a lot about my own bad mental health, I was thinking yesterday that I didn’t really know how to define what good mental health actually is. I was taking a survey from SAMH that suggested one of their ambitions might be to create a version of Scotland that had the best mental health possible, and I realised I wasn’t sure what that Scotland looked like for, say, a person in the middle of several personal tragedies, or a child who was unconvinced that humanity was likely to survive global warming. I wasn’t sure how trauma or tragedies or big, uncomfortable truths would fit into that country, which they would presumably all have to even with its really brilliant mental state.
So I asked my Instagram followers about this, and they said a lot of different and wise things that helped me get better at forming my own opinion. And I’ve formed that opinion into some drawings of clouds, and here they all are on this blog:
Robert Shepherd: Writer 