Dear All,

I am writing these words as I reflect on the last few days and the very real beginning of this social media campaign. Until last Monday, it was just a select few family and friends who had been invited to read this blog. I have spent the last few months organising this work, learning about social media, understanding things such as 'keywords', 'backlinks','SEO's,'SERP's and a whole plethora of concepts and strategies designed to reach as wide a digital audience as possible. According to the dust jacket introduction to the book, One Million Followers, written by digital strategist and 'growth hacker', Brendan Kane, there are over 60 billion online messages sent into the world every day. That means the question for anyone who wants to gain mass exposure for their transformative content...is how to best take advantage of the numerous different platforms.' I want to reach as much of that audience as possible, as soon as possible, to gain the optimal exposure for my story and engage with a massive social following. When I started this blog I had no real idea of how I was going to spread my message. I just knew it needed to be done. I'm learning.

At the start of this week, just four days ago, I started to extend an invitation beyond family and friends to a wider community of healthcare professionals and the national press. It has been exciting to watch the analytics, seeing visitors to the blog, watching the AI driven data as it emerges, in real time. It gives me encouragement, energy and the hope that something positive might come of this. There has been scant hope over the last few years.

With just one singular exception, the first batch of invitations sent to art therapists listed on the website run by the British Association of Art Therapists has been accepted without comment. I acknowledged a request to remove the details of one healthcare professional from my list of invitees and complied, immediately. To those of you already invited, and to those of you that I continue to invite, please accept this opportunity in good faith. I don't know that there has ever been such an undertaking as the one that I am embarking on but I will continue to tell my story, unabashed, with brutal honesty, and with a clear sense of purpose. Or should I say purposes.

I consider this blog a journal with real therapeutic value. Clinical research confirms the physical, cognitive and emotional benefits of journaling. An article published on the website Positive Psychology goes further, stating 'Research has consistently linked the habitual tendency to accept one's mental experiences with greater psychological health. Study findings suggest that accepting our feelings is linked to better psychological health and positive therapeutic outcomes'. The therapeutic value of writing about stressful and traumatic events is laid out succinctly on the Positive Psychology website

https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-of-journaling/

This blog serves another purpose. As it grows it becomes a living testimony, a declaration of events that can be used in a court of law. It is likely that I will soon be faced with a series of trials as I work to correct a false narrative, right an injustice and tell the truth about what happened to my daughter and what happened to me. One of those trials is going to put my life in danger. This blog will be a formal eyewitness account that can be used as evidence. I have somewhere in the region of two thousand pages of documented evidence in the form of medical records and emails that need to be either published or identified, at least. I will endevour to publish as much evidence while I still can.

In those two respects, this blog serves my daughter and serves me. You might say it serves a selfish purpose but this blog tells a story that goes beyond my daughter and me. My own path through mental health services here in Basingstoke has crossed many other paths. I have met others, all too many, discarded and disenfranchised. I met some at the Wellbeing Centre, a charitable service run by Andover Mind to support people with mental health problems in Basingstoke. I was moved to tears by some of those that I met. I saw their scars and heard their stories. They are people who, by and large, don't have a voice. People who are underserved and deserve better. I have cried for them and now I am angry on their behalf.

And then there is another purpose. This blog is for you, the reader. More specifically, this blog is for those of you that work in mental health services. This is for you, the professionals, the child psychoanalysts, the counsellors, practitioners in the NHS and those working privately, the supervisors, the team leaders, the managers and the Trust Chief Executives, and, of course, all you art therapists. What I am inviting you to read is the raw and honest account seen through the perspective of two service users, a single dad and main carer and his mentally ill daughter, abused and damaged. The insight offered is unique. If you come at this with an open mind, you will walk away, hopefully, better equipped, more resourceful, wiser.

PS. I will be spending some time over the next week, working on other social media platforms, like Instagram and Twitter. I aim to coordinate and link the various platforms as part of a strategy intended to reach a far wider and more diverse audience. I will be creating new forms of content and have plans to start posting new art therapy drawings and a sequential diary of embodied images. I will resume posting 'Four and Twenty Dead Crows' to this blog on Sunday the 3rd November. Thank you all.