Exciting Times and Changes to Membership

Hi all,

I hope that this post finds you well?  I just wanted to publish a quick post to let every one know about some exciting changes to our membership and how we have been doing things.

As I hope you all know, and as has always been stated on our ‘About The Guild’ page,  the Mental Health Writer’s Guild was set up so as to “provide a community open to all bloggers and writers  who write pieces which are either directly or indirectly related to mental health and mental well-being and where the perceived focus of said pieces is not to intentionally bring sufferers of mental illness or poor mental health, their family and friends, or those working within this field, into disrepute.”

And providing that community which was open to all who write about Mental Health and Mental Illness in a positive way has always been important to me.

But it has come to my attention that actually the way that the Guild was set up – albeit unintentionally – has made it difficult for those who write about Mental Health or Mental Illness and yet who do not have their own blogs or websites to become members.  For example folk who have written books or who publish articles on this subject within medical journals or offline magazines etc.  And the fact that they were inadvertently excluded saddens me.

So because of this, and in the hope of including such folk and extending our membership to them I have today created a new kind of membership and have also slightly altered the current membership (in name only).

We now have two separate types of membership.  Our usual membership – now entitled ‘Blog Membership’ and awarded the new ‘Member Blog’ logo, and ‘Author Membership’ and awarded the ‘Member Author’ logo. (Featured to the right here.)

As you know, membership has previously always been awarded to the blog and not the blogger.  This is out of respect for and a desire to include those who wish to blog anonymously.  And this will continue with little to no changes other than a change to the name of this membership and a slight change to the logo  applicable to this membership  – which  now looks like this.

Ad apart from the slight change in name (and indeed to the membership logo) nothing else will change.  And it is my sincere hope that this membership will continue to grow and to show support for each other as it has always done.

And on that note I also want to take a moment to thank you all for your continued support both for the Guild, myself and more importantly for each other.  It is without doubt, you all – and the support you do show each other which makes the Guild so important.

(Please note that whilst the new logo applicable to Blog Membership  is available now  – to those who may wish to change it.  The current logo will not be being removed (and full use of the new blog membership logo) won’t actually be introduced until January 1st 2016 and so there really is no need to worry if you don’t want to change the logo that you currently use at this time.)

In terms of the new membership type, “Author Membership’ this is afforded to those who, as I mentioned above, do not necessarily have their own blogs or websites but who do write about Mental Health or Mental Illness.  Either by having written or published a book or books on the subject or by writing about the subject in off-line magazines or medical journals.

And, as I mentioned above, there is a new logo specific to this kind of membership and which is featured to the left here.

And it is my sincere hope that not only will this open up our membership and support to those who previously could not be members of the guild and yet who write about the very self-same subjects and experience much of the experiences that we do. But that it will also increase the resources available to our current membership.

Of course it is entirely possible, if not probable, that some of our members will actually fall into both categories.  Being both writers who have written and had published Mental Health related books or articles in off-line magazines and journals and who do indeed have their own blogs.  And if this is the case for you, please be assured that whilst having one type of Guild membership does not automatically infer the other type of membership , there is nothing to stop you from also applying for that kind of membership.  (Please see our Guild Membership page for more details concerning this.)

Ok that’s about it from me.  I truly hope that you are all as excited by this new membership as I am and I really hope that it extends a welcome to those who – through nobody’s real fault – previously did not fit into our membership guidelines.  And I look forward to receiving and reading any comments you may have on this.

Kind regards and God bless you.

Kevin