Staying Free
While going paid (sort of)
I’m turning on paid for this Substack, but I’m keeping everything optionally free (this will make sense later). I’m sure I would make a terrible marketer. Reasons why – both going paid and a terrible marketer – are outlined below.
I know what it feels like to be trapped. If I am honest, before I found treatments for my condition, I was pretty sure there was no escape. My time was up.
You might think that getting another shot at psychopathological freedom would be a liberating experience. That is what the movies show you, right? Find a treatment and it’s all plain sailing to the promised land of euthymia.1
In real life, it is work all the way up. It turns out that you cannot just disappear from the world for half a decade and expect to land right back on your feet. During these years of frustratingly small steps, writing this Substack has given me a sense of purpose. It has provided me with an escape – a way to reach out into the world.
I also hope that The Psychiatric Multiverse has been (and will be) valuable to you. I strongly believe that problems in one occupational discipline will have solutions in another. And this Substack is all about exploring and finding solutions from a wide array of areas.
It has now reached a point where I’m well enough to start thinking about returning to the working world. And I am a realist at heart. While meaningful work, and I plan to continue writing this Substack for the foreseeable future, I have no ambitions to be a full-time Substack writer.2 But I would love for it to become one small, rewarding strand of my working life.
So, while I’m turning on paid for this Substack, I’m doing so in a way faithful to the style of the Psychiatric Multiverse: convoluted with a side of absurdity.
Inspired by Tommy Blanchard,3 I’m introducing a flexible supporter model. You can choose a standard paid subscription, a discounted subscription, a one-off contribution, or choose to pay nothing at all. It truly doesn’t matter to me the reason why you might want to pay less or nothing at all for a paid-tier subscription. Maybe times are tough and a Substack subscription feels a bit too much right now. Maybe you are a millionaire and, well, you simply don’t want to pay money towards this Substack, but nevertheless like what I am trying to build. All good reasons.
If in any doubt, please go down the free paid-tier subscription route. The act of going out of your way to show you find this Substack valuable is a meaningful and supportive gesture to me.
If you decide to support me, please choose whichever option you would prefer:
If a one-time payment is more your thing, a herbal tea would be much appreciated!
Or click below to upgrade to a paid-tier subscription without having to pay a penny (or cent4):
Subscriptions can be cancelled at any point, and your paid-tier access will continue until the end of the period you’ve paid for. The price you choose will remain the same for as long as you keep that subscription. Also, you can switch to a free paid-tier subscription at any time (This will be applied at the end of the current billing cycle, but happy to offer pro-rated refunds).
Wait, what? Why are you offering a free paid-tier subscription?
Firstly, what is useful often isn’t popular. A month writing about planes didn’t exactly produce engaging material, but I would strongly argue that if every therapist and psychiatrist had a distinct interest in aviation, we would have built a much safer mental health system. Monetary exclusivity comes with an internal pressure to write what an audience wants, rather than what an audience needs.
Secondly, when someone has previously subscribed to this Substack, it is difficult to tell whether they are a casual reader (who might have just subscribed because of, say, the cool logo) or a reader who is generally more invested. A free paid-tier subscription provides the most inclusive blunt tool to help me learn this.5
Finally, living with a mental illness makes one inherently unreliable. There will be times when output is low. Having a free paid-tier option helps keep the burnout pressure off.
Will there be (optionally free) paywalls?
For the most part, no. The types of articles free now will stay free in the future. Optionally free paywalls will be for new types of articles and content.6
If I decide to pay for a subscription, what will the money go towards?
Your subscription would go to helping me spend more of my time trying to help prevent what happened to me, from happening to other people. One consequence of experiencing long-term illness is a burning desire to help improve the healthcare system. Whether writing research papers, giving talks or working with academics, professionals and policy makers.
I want to do the unsexy work. I want to discuss problems, agonise over repercussions of actions, spend hours upon hours reading, rereading, then rereading again until I understand all the complexities required to improve systems, and ultimately improve people’s lives. I want to help build, not debate.
The Psychiatric Multiverse is the scaffolding which helps me build. There is a point to all this absurdity you know! By exploring new areas, gaps in knowledge and understanding appear. I’ll give you one example: LFPSE7
Other than a terrible acronym, it is also a terrible name for an incident reporting system (Learning From Patient Safety Events), and most pertinently, terribly difficult for patients to use.
Incident reporting systems are mostly set up as a way for healthcare professionals to report mistakes, so that the system can “learn”. But few reporting systems accommodate patients, who make up the other half of the healthcare system. Of the systems that do allow patients to report mistakes, like LFPSE, there are significant usability problems. LFPSE isn’t promoted to patients, the forms are long and confusing, and you are forced to remain anonymous – you never know whether your report led to any system change.
I discovered the problems of LFPSE through my Psyverse series on incident reporting systems. I subsequently proposed potential solutions in the final article. I want to find, and hopefully work with, people who could help improve the LFPSE form. I believe that even though the change would be small, it would have a significant impact on patient safety.8
A subscription would also, of course, go towards the time needed to write this Substack. Ironically, we are just entering the “break” phase of the season model, where my output will be lower while I work on the next Psyverse (I told you I was a terrible marketer!). Nevertheless, I will still be publishing essays, interviews, Footnotes from the Margins and Scientific Paperverse articles. And, I am always experimenting with new ideas!
Edit: When challenged on whether there were actually any movies that showed this, my brain came up empty. See my Mistakes page for details.
I spent 5 years agoraphobically trapped inside my house – the very last thing I desire is to spend the rest of my working life voluntarily trapped in a home office!
And I thoroughly recommend his Substack Cognitive Wonderland.
Or [insert your lowest denomination of currency here].
And who knows, maybe when I have more energy in the future, I’ll open up a Discord or start a book club or something!
For example, in the Footnotes from the Margins article series, where I will share other people’s work, the final few footnotes will be behind an optionally free paywall.
Gesundheit.
Even something as small as a notation could have a significant impact on patient safety.
I wish you all the success with this. I'm interested in personal experience, rather than formality, so I hope you continue with your creative writings. This said, as a consumer who occasionally does go for a paid subscription, I only pay when I'm getting something I can't get elsewhere-- for me that's interaction in the comments section, and this includes the chance to interact with both authors and other commenters. I imagine my own free substack someday being full of lively back and forth conversation, and with me keeping up with regular posts, but I realized early on up here I would have to work for this, getting followers by following others making comments thoughtful enough that others feel inspired (or compelled) to do the same for me. I have a few of these right now, but honestly I've not been too aggressive. I've been dwelling in the unpaid world, I don't need the money or notoriety of having paid subscribers. I just want to feel the human connection, which is something that's getting more rare these days. Good luck again, and I'll see you soon.