Get Me Sporty Spice ... Mental Illness Is One of the Defining Issues of Our Time and Will Affect One in Four of Us. but the Media Are Reluctant to Cover the Subject without the Obligatory Celebrity Endorsement

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Many of the people who start their careers wanting to be journalists find out pretty quickly that the job is not what they thought. They dream of truth-seeking heroics, but it often doesn't work out that way. They recoil from the media's cynicism. They don't want to become hacks ruled by tabloid values, and fear they will be condemned never to write about the things that really matter. So, they become charity press officers instead. At least, I did. No dumbing down or marching to the editor's tune for me. I chose the path to true virtue: the freedom to work only on the stories I really cared about ...

Yet here I am, years later, working at the mental health charity Rethink and spending my time chasing celebrity quotes and case studies that fit the "under 30, photogenic female" demographic demanded by the press. Instead of explaining to millions why mental health discrimination is the next big civil rights issue, I'm often to be found reminding journalists that our beloved Stephen Fry has bipolar disorder.

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This has been especially true while I've been working on Time to Change, the …