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 2017, 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.