Hi, I’m Kai Conibear

What’s The Salty Mental?

The Salty Mental is a regular newsletter for personal and opinion essays, plus creative fiction and more. Expect salty commentary on mental health, mental illness, society and culture and creative short fiction.

The Salty Mental was born from my own frustration of severe mental illness being ignored by the media or trussed up as inspirational stories. I wanted to delve into what life is really like with mental illness and how it’s impacted by culture and society in general.

This is one of my jobs, and each week, I put as much work into it as the articles I write for websites and magazines. Writing is work, and I believe in the ethos that writers should be paid for what they create. Lived experience writing in the mental illness area is often undervalued. If you love this newsletter, get value out of it, and believe in paying people for their work, consider a paid subscription.

Who are you?

I'm known to be a bit weird. I know this because of the numerous times I've heard people say when they thought I wasn't around, "That Kai's a bit weird." So I've felt embarrassed and a bit ashamed of my eccentricities and really only ever opened up with my close real-life friends. But no longer!

I encourage everyone to have a plan. One that doesn't involve dieting, achieving, or making money. But about really embracing who you are.

I work as a freelance writer, writing about anything from mental illness, lifestyle pieces, video games and science fiction.

In 2021, I became a published author with my first book Living at the Speed of Light, a guide to navigating bipolar disorder from a lived experience perspective. My follow-up, publishing with Jessica Kingsley Publishers, The Myth-Busting Guide to Psychosis, is coming June 2024.

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.