Dusty Wentworth

  Recovery Planning Is Not Just for Mental Health Recovery planning is often associated with addiction or mental health, but it is just as important for people living with physical disabilities and long term illness. In this context, recovery does not mean cure. It means living as well as possible within ongoing limitations, maintaining stability, managing symptoms, and reducing the impact of setbacks. A recovery plan provides structure when health fluctuates, energy is limited, or capacity drops. It shifts the focus from fixing the condition to protecting function, independence, and quality of life. How to build a simple recovery plan Define what stability looks like for you. Be realistic. Identify early warning signs that things are worsening, such as fatigue, pain, missed medication, or reduced function. Decide in advance what helps when symptoms increase, including pacing, rest, assistive equipment, or scaling back commitments. Be clear about what does not help, as well int...

  A World Not Designed For Us There is a window in my room. On the days when my body refuses everything else, when getting up is impossible and the world has shrunk to four walls and a ceiling, I sit and watch through it. If the sun is out, I see people passing. Children playing. Ordinary life unfolding at a distance. It feels close enough to touch, yet completely out of reach. This is what disability looks like from the inside. Not laziness. Not a lifestyle choice. Not a calculation about whether work pays more than support. It is a window. And sometimes, no matter how strong your will is, you simply cannot get to the other side of it. I live with PTSD from military service, fibromyalgia, Functional Neurological Disorder and acquired brain damage following a ruptured brain aneurysm. There are weeks when my body confines me completely. The world carries on without me. The isolation is not just physical. It reaches back into eleven months of hospital admissions and brings that da...

  How rhetoric shapes public perception of disability and benefits Welfare reform in the United Kingdom is routinely presented as a matter of fiscal management and administrative efficiency. The stated objectives are sustainability, fairness and fraud reduction. These are legitimate governmental concerns. However, beyond the policy detail lies a quieter force that exerts considerable influence over public perception: language. Language does not simply describe reform. It frames it. Over time, that framing has shifted the cultural tone of welfare from social support towards behavioural scrutiny. The vocabulary surrounding contemporary welfare policy is instructive. Terms such as assessment, conditionality, compliance, capability and sanction dominate official documents and ministerial statements. They are operational words, drawn from management and enforcement. They carry a procedural logic. Yet when applied to individuals experiencing chronic illness, disability or prolonged une...

  There is a quiet crisis unfolding in contemporary society. It is not marked by sirens or headlines, nor measured in casualty figures, but it is no less consequential. It is the erosion of authentic manhood, replaced by performance, imitation, and confusion. Modern culture has perfected the art of the mask. Curated personas, borrowed confidence, and exaggerated declarations of strength frequently conceal insecurity and disorientation beneath the surface. Men today are presented with a false binary. On one side, they are told to shrink, to apologise for their nature, and to regard traditional masculine instincts with suspicion. On the other, they are encouraged to inflate the chest, dominate others, and mistake aggression for strength. Neither path leads to maturity. Both are hollow imitations of something deeper. The result is a generation of men caught between contradiction and accusation. Masculinity is criticised as toxic in one breath and ridiculed as weak in the next. Olde...

  There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not come from illness alone, but from being sent in a circle. Not treated. Not resolved. Simply redirected. It starts with a referral that promises progress and ends with a letter explaining why progress is not possible. Each appointment points elsewhere. Each service draws a boundary around its remit. Somewhere between departments, responsibility quietly disappears, and the patient is left holding the consequences. Being labelled “too complex” is not a diagnosis. It is an administrative decision. It is how care ends without anyone having to say so plainly. Living with PTSD, fibromyalgia, Functional Neurological Disorder, and acquired brain damage following a ruptured brain aneurysm is not an abstract challenge. These conditions do not exist neatly side by side. They compound each other. Pain intensifies neurological symptoms. Neurological symptoms drain energy and cognitive capacity. PTSD keeps the nervous system perman...

  I did not set out to become a writer. In October 2023, I was admitted to hospital. As with many long admissions, time became distorted. Days blurred into one another, routines were imposed, and the sense of identity I had carried for most of my life began to erode. During that admission, my occupational therapist suggested I keep a diary. It was not framed as a creative exercise, but as a practical intervention, a way to track thoughts, symptoms and emotional changes during recovery. I was sceptical, but I agreed. At first, the entries were short and functional. Notes about pain levels, fatigue, frustration and sleep. Slowly, almost without noticing, the writing changed. The diary became a place to offload emotions I could not articulate out loud. It became somewhere I could process fear, anger and grief without having to manage anyone else’s response. Writing imposed structure on chaos. It helped me make sense of what had happened to me and what was still happening. After el...

  There is a fashionable line in Washington that European NATO members are feckless passengers, forever borrowing American protection while giving nothing back. It is a neat story, domestically useful, and strategically corrosive. It is also false. NATO’s collective defence clause, Article 5, has been invoked only once, after the attacks of 11 September 2001. It was invoked by the United States. European allies responded, not with speeches, but with troops, body bags, and decades of political fallout at home. Yet Donald Trump’s public contempt for EU and NATO partners, coupled with threats of tariffs as a lever to force compliance, treats allies like subordinates and trade like a weapon. That posture cannot be waved away as “tough negotiating”. It is a rejection of diplomacy in favour of coercion. And it is happening again, now with Greenland. Article 5 Was Invoked Once. Allies Paid in Blood. Afghanistan was not a side-show for NATO partners. Non-US NATO forces suffered over...

Resilience is the ability to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, stress, or significant sources of pressure, while maintaining or regaining psychological and physical functioning. It is not the absence of distress, nor is it an inherent toughness that some people possess and others lack. Modern psychological and occupational health research consistently shows that resilience is a dynamic process, shaped over time by skills, habits, relationships, and environments. This distinction matters. When resilience is misunderstood as personal toughness, people are encouraged to endure conditions that are objectively damaging. When it is understood as adaptive capacity, it becomes something that can be developed, supported, and sustained without denying reality. This article sets out what resilience looks like in practice, what the evidence says about its effects on health and performance, and how it can be strengthened at both individual and organisational levels. Resi...

One of the hardest parts of my recovery has not been PTSD, fibromyalgia, Functional Neurological Disorder, or even surviving a ruptured brain aneurysm. Those things are visible enough. They can be named, diagnosed, measured, medicated, explained. The real fight has been with masculinity. Not in the abstract, but in my own life, my own body, and my own sense of self. That fight came in two parts. Waking Up in the Future After my aneurysm rupture, I regained consciousness with significant memory loss. Doctors, nurses, and family kept telling me I was fifty years old. In my head, I was still in my mid thirties. I had not aged into this stage of life. I had arrived in it without warning or preparation. It felt less like recovery and more like waking up in the future. If someone had asked me in my thirties whether I would like to time travel fifteen years forward, I would probably have said yes. You expect things to improve. You assume progress. Instead, I woke into a reality th...