Today I'm giving all the fucks about... my publishing deal!

Important announcement re. your subscription to this newsletter and my new newsletter below: please jump to the stars if you don’t want to read the newsletter!

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Dear Zero Fuckers,

I’m not coming at you with a lengthy exercise in putting my words onto page this time. Fuck it, I never think I’m going to say very much but in our persistent quest of “getting to know ourselves”, I’m going to demonstrate my hard-earned self-awareness and admit that though I don’t intend to say much…. I no doubt will.

But, the reason this issue of Zero F*cks could be short (but won’t be) is because I’m merely coming at you with a notification - it involves GDPR and shit, probably, so I need to be very clear and concise about this. So, cutting to it:

My creative efforts are ALL (and I mean all) being expended on my new book, which I got a mother fucking publishing deal for (I will never ever get bored of this). While I love Zero F*cks (and the giving of them), my new brand and focus - for now at least - is My Sketchy Head and the book that I’ll be releasing under that brand in Jan 2024.

If you don’t yet know, the book is titled ‘The No Bullsh*t Depression Sketches: A Guide to Overcoming Low Mood and Depression’ and will be an illustrated self-help guide told through the lens of my own lived experience of depression (depression and I have hung out six times). It's being published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, an imprint of Hachette, and sold in the US, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in paperbook and e-book formats.

I CANNOT WAIT.

As such, my newsletter efforts will now be, for the most part, switching to the My Sketchy Head brand. I’ll have to watch my brand image and stuff so I suppose real Zero F*cks type content will have to wait until the day when/if this newsletter is revived.

The My Sketchy Head newsletter will share the road to publication, exclusive sketches and sneak peeks of the book, info about upcoming events (including the best launch party that ever did exist) and you’ll be the first to know when you can buy the book.

I want as many of you as want to keep up with me on my journey to be able to do so (some of you have been here since the Salome days - props to you!), so PSA:

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On Friday 29th July I will be migrating all the email addresses from this newsletter to my new My Sketchy Head newsletter. IF YOU DO NOT WANT THIS TO HAPPEN, please hit this button and enter your email address into the form:

I did my best to look up GDPR tings and I don’t think I need to ask you but it’s just polite to, isn’t it. Plus I could be wrong (it’s been known to happen, I’ll begrudgingly admit…).

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Now, I’m not one to waste an opportunity when I have a captive audience of about 200, so here are a couple of tidbits for you.

Firstly, if you’ve been a long-standing Zero F*cker, you’ll know that every year I celebrate my Depression Recovery Anniversary. It’s on 1st July. This year took me by surprise and I had my most emotional one yet, in some ways. Obviously I live by the motto, “if I didn’t blog about it, did it even happen?”. So here you go: Notes from a bench — My depression recovery anniversary 2022. If you like it, a little clap for the piece (that’s actually a Medium thing before you think I want you to clap at your screen - I literally won’t know if you are, but by all means if you love it that much, do) would be lovely.

In other news, I’ve found myself increasingly preoccupied by the state of the mental health system and how we discuss mental health issues, and those of us that have or have had them, in public discourse. A few things have contributed to that.

I’ve been reading about it a lot. ‘Cracked: Why Psychiatry is doing more harm than good’ by Dr. James Davies (hard recommend) was an incredibly eye-opening read, which shed so much light on how we got to where we are today, with rates of antidepressant subscriptions being at their highest ever, but diagnoses for mental health issues being at their highest too, with no sign of the number decreasing. If psychiatric drugs were being prescribed to the right people and were a long-term solution for the many, the logical expectation would be for a decrease in mental health issues amongst our population. Except that hasn’t happened.

Next, a landmark umbrella research study into the link between (low) serotonin and depression was conducted by some pretty prominent mental health professionals, including Dr Joanna Moncrieff, a professor of psychiatry at University College London and consultant psychiatrist at North East London NHS foundation trust. Articles on the study have been all over the news. The outcome? They couldn’t find any link between low serotonin levels and depression. That is, there is no evidence for the chemical imbalance theory, long touted by psychiatry and Big Pharma, which asserts that mental health issues are caused by “wrong” amounts of neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, in the brain - and that this can be “fixed” with medication.

Many of us will have long known or believed that the chemical imbalance theory was almost certainly not true (I only had to live through depression to know that mine is caused by external factors, not my inferior brain) but now we have the proof, which is just glorious. Still, let’s see how much difference it makes to how we prescribe antidepressants - which, I want to stress, can absolutely alleviate the symptoms of depression. I’ve used them in the past and they can help. It just can no longer be claimed that they fix the root cause of depression because they aren’t correcting a pre-existent chemical imbalance - and now we can shout it from the rooftops (even though there have never been biomarkers for depression and so the idea that there is an overriding biological aspect to our depression was always questionable).

Lastly (she says, more as a warning to herself, because she could do a whole TED talk on this - in fact, that’s actually my latest plan), I attended a poetry night last night. It was run by A Disorder For Everyone, a group that explores non-pathologising ways of supporting those with mental health issues and challenges the culture of psychiatric diagnosis. The thing that really struck me was that every single poem, read by people who had weathered mental health issues and systems of treatment, was so emotive and emotionally charged, but not on each poet’s experience of their mental health challenges themselves (and there was every “condition” under the sun), but their raw, painful emotion was created by, and directed at, the mental health systems that they had felt trapped in, judged by and exploited at the hands of. I will admit that the group’s audience are all people who agree that we need a better solution than the systems we currently have (and there is a lot of anger for those systems); even so, the fact that so many people had had such traumatic experiences (one woman talked about getting “trapped” in the psychiatric system aged 17 and only “escaping” in her 60s), is not okay. No medical system or medical care should cause people mental distress - certainly not on top of the distress they’re already feeling.

I’ve since learned that there is a word for this: ‘Iatrogenic harm’.

I felt so sad for every poet who shared their pain, their regret, their loss of respect, agency and hope, when treated for their mental health issues. It has made me feel even more desperate than before to get this shit sorted out. But, as the organiser of the event said herself, there is such a huge machine behind all of this… what could I possibly do?

Well, I suppose my book, is my attempt. It aims to help people learn how to look after their own mental health - but more than just teaching practical tools and techniques to help pull us out of our depression hole (and keep us out!), I want people to feel hope, empowerment and agency. I want them to believe that there is something they can do to feel even a little better, and that we are not “broken”, “ill” or “deficient”. I want everyone to believe (because it’s bloody true) that depression is a totally normal and understandable reaction to adverse life circumstances. Our struggles make us human.

The more I read and, now, the more I write, the bigger this goal becomes in my mind. But so, too, does the size of the problem we’re tackling become overwhelming. In the same way that Caitlin Moran talks about the “patchwork quilt of feminism”, each of us can only pick off our little square of the mental health crisis and focus on that. With time, and a multitude of voices contributing to the quilt (and hopefully diverse voices because while I might be gay, Jewish and have mental health issues, I’m so very white and middle class), we will end up with a network of people fighting for the cause so big that something will have to give.

I believe that whatever works for you and your mental health is more than valid as a treatment. I hope for everyone to be able to find their “thing” (and I hope my book helps in that, too). There should be no judgement or hierarchy when it comes to mental health support. But, fundamentally, it has to work. At the moment, our systems simply don’t.

Forever giving zero fucks (about things that just don’t matter) and imploring you to do the same,

Jacs x