ABSTRACT
A good friend of mine who is a freelance journalist suggested that I ought to try my hand at writing something for a national newspaper. He told me about The Guardian’s regular feature, ‘Diary of a . . .’, and thought that they might be interested in the ‘Diary of a CPN’. It was an interesting experience writing something for a general audience, rather than my usual readership of nurses and other mental health workers. On the one hand, it had to be engaging but, on the other, I was conscious of the stigma surrounding mental illness and saw this as an opportunity to educate the general public and debunk some myths. I wanted to give a flavour of a typical day without it sounding either too mundane or too sensational.
