I never think of myself as a writer, sounds far too grand doesn't it? A writer is someone like Michael Connelly, someone who has a list of books as long as their arm in the front of their latest bestseller, someone who makes a living from their work.

Though, having said that, it's true I have written a novel. Not only that, it was a novel that had something very important to say about the human condition, about how we care for people who are mentally ill. It's a message which is equally important today, maybe more so. My novel was published originally by Penguin, a top London publisher, which isn’t nothing is it? And Rogers, Coleridge and White, an eminent London literary agency, believed in the work, chose to represent me. The BBC even took out a 3-year option on the rights to my book, commissioned a writer to come up with a script, which he did, though it was never produced. Not my favourite Auntie then?

So maybe I am a writer after all? Not a commercially successful one perhaps, certainly not one with a yacht or a New York penthouse. But successful perhaps in standing up for those vulnerable people without a voice, for adding my own voice to the loud chorus of the deinstitutionalisation movement, of helping to see an end to those dreadful old mental hospitals that were originally built as 'lunatic asylums' in the 19th Century and which, over 150 years later, were still being used to accommodate people who were seriously mentally ill. That’s the sort of thing writers are supposed to do, isn’t it, to write about stuff that's important?

Writer or not, when I was working as a Registered Mental Health Nurse I wrote a book called ‘Buster’s Fired a Wobbler – A week in a psychiatric hospital’. 30 years after its original publication it’s now available again, this time as an eBook. Am I a writer? You can read the book and let me know. I’d be interested to hear what you think.