666 : What Is Normal Anyway?

For my final 666 of Mental Health Awareness Week I’ve tried to pull together some of the strands that I have dealt with over the last five days. It is fantastic having a high profile Mental Health Awareness Week, but like a dog being for life and not just for Christmas, we should actually be aware of our and other’s mental health all the time and not just a few days in May. Mental health is still seen largely as someone else’s problem and that is because we subconsciously still stick the word illness after those two words. In the same way that we all have physical health (whether we are physically ill or not), we all have mental health as we all have a mind. Just like our physical health, our mental health will go up and down. There will be good days and bad days, but that does not necessarily mean that you are ill.

666Author : Stewart Lucas22 May 2020Mental Health Awareness Week, Mental Health, Stewart Lucas, Kindness, SpotifyComment

666 : We Are Not Your Kind

It is a cliché but there is still a bizarre oxymoron that Metal is a corrosive and confrontational style of music, yet the people it attracts are amongst the kindest, most generous souls that you will find. It is like the music, channels our aggression and abrasion, leaving us inside with a good nature and caring mentality. This year Mental Health Awareness week is all about kindness and being kind. But what does that actually mean? As Forky would ask (go watch Disney +) “What is kindness?”. The formal definition is “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate”. In terms of mental health, the most important element here is consideration. You see, 40% of what happens to us we can control and 60% we can’t. But that 60% still has the same effect on us. All the actions and reactions happening around us affect us in how we feel. This includes the deeds of other people and what they say.

666 : Five Ways to Look After Your Mental Wellbeing

Our response to physical health tends to be proactive. We eat well to ensure that we stay well. We undertake exercise because we know that this makes us healthy (and yes moshing does count, according to my Fitbit I “ran” over 10km whilst in a Slipknot pit). In fact, our current reality is a massive pro-active attempt to beat disease by taking measures to avoid contraction in the first place. Our approach to mental health tends to be a little different. We view it in a much more reactive manner. We seek help only once we actually feel “ill”. The services that are available are based around mitigating conditions and syndromes once they manifest themselves and are not designed to be preventative. There is even scepticism about whether you can actually “prevent” mental ill-heath (believe me you can) or whether it is just something that happens.

666 : Fallen Hero, How Chris Cornell's Death Affected Me

There is a poetic poignancy that the first day of this year’s mental health awareness week fell on the third anniversary of Chris Cornell’s death. Around 1988 Kerrang started talking about interesting releases coming from an independent label out of Seattle called “Sub Pop”. They reviewed the first singles from Mudhoney, Tad and Nirvana, describing a raw primordial sound that took Metal’s heaviness and combined it with punk’s guttural energy. I was intrigued, but as this was the days before Spotify (and I had limited disposable income) I became a Grunge fan because I liked the way that it was described as opposed to actually having heard any of it.