No more silence: mental illness should be talked about – The Drum Opinion Australian Broadcasting Corporation

I read an article today about mental illness and there were some really good points in it. You know how sometimes you read something and think to yourself that it’s exactly what you might have said except you haven’t ever managed to put those words together in just the right kind of way to actually do that?

I decided to go public about my condition late last year in the hope that it may encourage some other people to take that first step and seek professional help.Shortly after featuring in a newspaper article and a television current affairs piece, my wife and I took our young son to the Perth Royal Show.

The reaction to what I had done from total strangers was quite astounding. Many people I had never met came up to me that night to express their support and encouragement for my rehabilitation.

But what struck me most of all were the first few words that came out of their mouths. Without fail, they either said "you were very courageous" or "you were very brave" to have spoken so publicly about your condition.

I later reflected on those opening words and it indicated to me that we still have a significant way to go before mental illness is embraced within society like most other physical complaints.

Had my media appearances chronicled a battle with cancer or some other serious disease, I doubt people would have come forward and called me brave or courageous. I would think that the most common opening words might have been along the lines of "sorry to hear about your illness" or "mate, all the best".

But when it comes to admitting a mental illness people automatically seem to view one’s public admission as an act of bravery or courage.

via No more silence: mental illness should be talked about – The Drum Opinion Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

I think it’s because it’s still so misunderstood, you have to be brave because you don’t know if the people you are trying to talk to about your illness are going to be other people who have gone through something similar and so understand, or if they might be people who don’t know what it’s like but know that it’s a genuine problem and are interested in learning more, or if they might be the type of person who will scoff at the possibility that such illnesses even exist and tell you that either you’ve been scammed by the medical profession wanting you to believe you need their drugs and services or that you are a weak person who should basically just pull their socks up. There are comments like that on the article, as well as productive, thoughful non-critical comments. One in particular was well worded:

A big difference between mental illness (e.g. major depression) and diabetes or asthma, is that too many people still believe we are somehow in conscious control of our mental illnesses; that if we just “picked ourselves up” or if we just “don’t worry, be happy” we’d be OK.

It’s not hard to see why this should be the case. People rely on personal experience; everyone knows what it’s like to be down. It’s pretty difficult, therefore, for many people to appreciate that major depression is more than just a slightly scaled up version of the blues.

Plus we have a whole industry in pop psychology that tells us about the power of positive thinking; taking control of our thoughts and therefore our lives. So the attitude becomes, understandably, that surely those who succumb to mental illness just haven’t been trying hard enough!

I think we have a way to go in understanding the conditions, and I think education and openness are key.

by “Yeah so”

Very good points and worded so succinctly. It takes me pages and pages to get those kind of observations out yet I still often feel like I’ve not really expressed myself properly :P As s/he points out in the second paragraph, everyone feels ‘depressed’ sometimes, and having people understand that feeling depressed is not the same as having depression is a difficult thing to achieve. Perhaps it’s partly a result of the words we use: ‘being depressed’ and ‘suffering or having depression’ are very similar phrases. Comparing again to diabetes or asthma, though, we have ways of talking about feeling similar symptoms as those conditions that contain within them an implied transience – ‘I’m feeling puffed out (after that race)’, ‘Whoa! I’m on a sugar high (I shouldn’t have eaten so many easter eggs).’ Being puffed out or having an excess of sugar in your system is not necessarily an out of the ordinary ocurrence, and if and when most people experience those things they will be able to easily identify the causal event. And people recognise that it was the one-off event that did that and that’s what makes it different from the permanent conditions of diabetes and asthma, because when people have those conditions, the puffed out or sugar high effect can happen without a specific cause, because something in your body doesn’t work quite as it should.

I think it’s this difference that it is hard for people to understand. Yes, everyone gets depressed.. but for most of these cases there is still the identifiable causal event. You lost your purse, your period is due, your dog died, your work is moving and it’s extra stressful and that stress manifests as you feeling depressed. When those situations resolve themselves, so too will the feeling of depression. (Or with time, in the dog example, to adjust to the loss.) But when you feel down, unmotivated, defeated, etc, and there hasn’t been a triggering event – that’s what happens when you have depression, as in an actual medical condition vs a feeling.

While there is a place for positive thinking and determination, it can’t take you all the way to being better. It’s effectiveness will depend on how much external support you have providing that same encouragement and how bad your depression is in the first place. In much the same way that reducing your intake of sugary foods can help in the management of diabetes, it’s still not a cure, it doesn’t fix what is broken inside your body.

The problem with mental ilnesses, I think, is that the effect they have on you can alter your behaviour and perception of yourself and your world in a way that most physical illnesses don’t. It’s easy to see how someone with a physical illness or disability experiences the world differently, their orthotic device or walking stick or wheelchair is right there in front of you making it clear. When the problem is inside someone and you can’t see it and you’ve always been in complete control of your feelings and reactions, how do you begin to comprehend that it is a genuine, huge difficulty for many people? How can you imagine a colour you’ve never seen?

why politics suck

actually I’m not sure if it is politics that sucks or if it is just political parties. or the way that our voting system is set up.

this week there is a state government election. i quite like our current premier and would be more than happy to vote for her to keep her job. the problem is, i can’t. i’m not knowledgeable enough about the general political processes in other countries but I get the impression that in other large western countries that I am somewhat familiar with, that when they have an election for, for example, their national leader, people are voting directly for the person they would like to see in that office. here, you vote only for your local representative based on the area you live in. there are different areas and boundaries for council, state and federal electorates. in the state and federal elections, it’s the overall number of members a particular party gets elected that determines who will be the premier or prime minister. the party leader of the one that got the most members elected gets the job.

i understand that in theory this ensures that the leader at high levels is representative of the ideals that most people support.. but it really doesn’t work that way. in the current state election, in order to support the incumbent premier, anna bligh – which i would like to do – i would have to vote for my local member who is in her party. my local member is a guy called michael choi and i think he has held the position for several election periods. however i’m not going to vote for him because he does not believe that ALL of his constituents are worthy of the same representation and social and legal rights as every other person. this is not acceptable to me.

so, what to do? vote for him anyway so that i support the leader of his party (who has differing opinions to him on the issues that make him an offensive choice)? cost: this gives my implicit approval of his views that I disagree with. vote for a different person? cost: i am not supporting the premier I like. not vote? cost: $20 fine. (here, voting is not a democratic right, it is an obligation.) make an invalid vote? cost: i don’t get to have my say.

i think it may end up being the vote for him anyway option. only four of the members of labor voted the way he did on the civil unions bill, but all of liberal voted against it. and i really like anna. and i don’t know a whole lot about campbell newman, to be honest, but in all the ads i see he comes across like a smarmy salesman. i can’t see him struggling to speak through obvious emotion at a press conference. he either doesn’t value all queenslanders as equal or else doesn’t have the guts to go against his party’s official stance. economy and growth and development and all that is important, yes, but what good is doing lots of stuff for the future if you don’t show that you care for the people you represent right now? that is what i want to see in someone i elect.

moving

we are getting ready to move. our current abode has (probably) been sold and the new owners want to live in it themselves. we’ve found a new place which is closer to the school so that is good. there’s a huge yard for the expenditure of energy and a big space behind the garage that can be used for storage or a play area. or both.
the actual process of getting packed up and cleaned out and making sure that all of the relevant people and companies have been told is giving me some anxiety. i am trying to do the best I can at keeping that away by doing as much as i can to get ready. children are being encouraged to sort through their own things but are for the most part uninterested. abigail says it’s ‘boring’ and kristian seems to feel his time is better spent redecorating the walls. with his textas. i have confiscated his textas.

now i ran out of time, i was writing this on my phone while i waited to pick the kids up from school.

under pressure

A while back I watched a movie. I think my mum downloaded it and gave it to me but it might have been me that downloaded it. It is called It’s Kind of a Funny Story. IMDb’s tiny description says “A clinically depressed teenager gets a new start after he checks himself into an adult psychiatric ward”.

It may come as a complete shock to anyone reading this, but.. I really related to the movie. Like the kid in the movie there’s nothing especially wrong with me or my life.. it’s just not right. I think that is sometimes part of the problem in trying to express yourself and help other people to understand you – you can’t tell them what is wrong because there’s no specific thing you can say that explains why you feel the way you do. And in the absence of being able to name specific reasons why you might be depressed or anxious or paranoid, anyone who hasn’t experienced it themselves or maybe with someone very close to them just can’t make the connections to understand how it really works. Maybe it’s vaguely comparable to the loss of a sense: colours and lights and sounds are still always there, in the world, but a blind or deaf person’s ability to interpret and respond to those stimuli is different than fully sighted or hearing people. Everything in my world is essentially the same as in anyone else’s world, but my ability to process and have the right reactions to things is impaired. And just like blind or deaf people have adaptations in their personal environment or habits that enable them to operate in the world even though it’s not designed to be easy for them, so do I do certain things differently to try to make it as easy and painless as possible for myself to continue to live a fairly normal existence. But no matter how good your guide dog is or what kind of changes you make, it still doesn’t change the basic problem that you can’t see. No matter how good your drugs are or your shrink or counsellor.. it doesn’t change the fact that underneath all of that, your brain does not always have the ‘right’ responses to various events.

So I think part of what I liked about the movie was that it showed other people struggling with things like I do. Not all necessarily with the same problems as me but people who had problems that are not easily explained like ‘I fell out of a tree and now I can’t walk’ or ‘I am blind’ where even if people don’t necessarily know how it feels to live with that, they do at least have some understanding as to how it affects you and how they can adjust their own interactions with you to make it easier. Someone might hold the door to assist when they see a person in a wheelchair coming, because it’s obviously awkward to try to open the door and operate the wheelchair at the same time. But when the problem is in the way you think and feel, it’s not as simple to say When you talk to me, it makes me feel hot and I get sweaty and there’s a pain near my heart and I feel like the inside of me is vibrating like a seismograph needle during a magnitude 8 earthquake, yeah, really, even though looking at the outside of me I appear perfectly still which is so strange when the rest is shaking and rattling that much, and all of those things make it hard for me to have clear and focused thoughts about the interaction you have initiated and what I am trying to do right now, and that makes me wonder if my mumbled or short or stilted answers make you think that I’m drunk or drugged or crazy or unfriendly or stupid or snobbish or maybe something else entirely and then that makes me feel bad because I am not trying to be rude or standoffish, and sad because I’m not unfriendly or impaired by alcohol or pharmaceuticals, and annoyed because it’s not fair of you to think that I am drunk/drugged/crazy/unfriendly/stupid/snobbish/other when it was your fault in the first place that I started feeling … this. And then so very sad again because I realise that it’s not really your fault, because talking to people is what (most) people do and you don’t realise that it makes me feel like that.. because the problem is my reactions, not your stimulus.

When I have a string of bad days where that feeling is there more than it’s not, it becomes harder and harder to stay hopeful and cognisant that it will pass and I will feel better. It’s a type of exponential slope, and the further I slide down, the steeper the ground I have to climb to get back to the top. Or near the top, because I don’t ever really get to the top. Occasionally, I leap high and fly for a few minutes, gliding far above the ground hand in hand with my love and from up there everything looks so small and it becomes hard to understand and remember how I am always pushing, pushing in an uphill direction when I am on the ground – partly because from that far up you can barely even tell that the ground is inclined.

Having flown, I gain more energy to climb further, I get closer to the magical top of the mountain. For a while, it is easier to keep hold of the terribly steep ground that it is so easy to slip downwards on. I remember that I can get past bad days and I can be hopeful and I feel that maybe I am not actually a terrible mother and wife and daughter and person. Being hopeful and believing that I can keep going through to something better is one of the most important things I need to have. It’s quite cruel that the miswired parts in my mind that make me feel the bad things also rob me of the ability to maintain that hopeful belief. When I have a cold I know that I’ll be better in a few days or a week. When I have a Bad Head Day I feel like I will never ever have a Good Head Day again and the Bad Head Days are so black and gloomy and terrible that I might as well not even bother having them either.

The people in the psych ward in the movie all know that each of them is there because for some reason they can’t quite deal with the outside the way people are supposed to be able to. And because they know that other people are climbing the same mountain, fighting the same battles, they’re able to be empathetic without being pitying, supportive without having to understand. The mere knowledge that other people struggle and other people try gives them more hope and more energy to push off their fears and doubts that are holding them back.

This scene, where they are having some kind of group therapy which involves music, is so representative of that thought to me. They can’t really play instruments, they can’t really sing like Freddie Mercury and David Bowie, but knowing that everyone has doubts and fears equalises them and lets them just do it. It lets them dream that they are the best, most confident, talented, unafraid, outgoing versions of themselves. And the song that they’re singing has some very thoughtful lyrics. I have always liked Queen, but after I watched this movie, Under Pressure has become one of my favourite of their songs because it reminds me of this scene and this HOPE and that I’m not the only one who must climb uphill all the time.

Pressure pushing down on me
Pressing down on you no man ask for
It may push down on me but it’s not only me. And no one wants to feel this way, but generally, people do keep fighting.

It’s the terror of knowing
What the world is about
Sometimes one of the worst things is knowing that I’m not supposed to feel how I do. Knowing that so many seemingly simple tasks really are simple for lots of people and don’t cause them to feel scared, worried, panicked, unworthy, inadequate. So then: why me?

Chippin’ around – kick my brains around the floor
These are the days it never rains but it pours
Bad Head Days are like rain. Lots of Bad Head Days in a row are like .. summer in Queensland where it pours, continuously. And there’s no break and the water threatens to flood and there’s a serious risk of drowning.

Pray tomorrow – gets me higher high high
Remember that hope. Remember that tomorrow I will be higher up the mountain and the flood waters will be receding.

Insanity laughs under pressure we’re cracking
It never really makes sense. Why do I have to keep climbing and falling, climbing and falling, the same struggles over and over again. Can’t I just climb up and stay up? If I’m just going to fall down again, why bother climbing up?

Can’t we give ourselves one more chance
Why can’t we give love that one more chance

And loves dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
You bother because.. maybe this time I will stay up without falling back down. Because I’ll never get the chance for that if I don’t try. Because there are people who care about me who have invested time and effort and love in helping me to get up and stay up and I don’t want to be undeserving of that. Because I’ve had glimpses of what it might be like to live at the top all the time and not reaching out for that would be much worse than getting there for a bit and then slipping down again. Because time is not infinite and as long as I keep trying I will keep having Good Head Days that make it worthwhile. Because this is the only life I get, and that’s such an amazing gift that I am obligated to myself to try to live it as happily as I can.

the nature of

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about .. the nature of .. things.

(Some people don’t like dots in writing but I put dots where I pause in my thoughts, because I think it helps to show that I am considering what words are best to express the ideas I want to express, and also that the words I eventually settle on may be the ‘best’ ones but they’re not necessarily precisely representative of what I want to say. Just FYI.)

About .. how I am separate from any conditions that I have, or that my body has. But the weaknesses of my body are such that they sometimes directly influence the expression of my self. These thoughts are a strange combination of scientific and existential. There’s a quote I’ve seen on pinterest, and it’s usually attributed to C.S. Lewis but according to wikiquote this is incorrect.

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

I do think that basically, I am a happy person. I am an optimist. I may not always act like I am those things, but that’s because of mismatched chemicals in my brain which are preventing me from remembering that, from living that, in this physical existence. Me, the soul, is a blissful being who believes that the greatest happiness and potential for realising our inner power comes from loving and accepting and being loved and accepted. The me that is here and now in this lifetime still believes those things but is held back from truly living this and touching this power because of the limitations of the vessel required to participate in this physical existence. Perhaps it is that I am not yet evolved enough to be stronger than those limitations, to be able to believe despite the doubt inherent in the body. I have a memory of a scene from an episode of TOS popping into my head. The crew are under attack from a source that they know is not real, an illusion being planted in their brains. And they can understand that intellectually but are unable to face the situation with absolutely no doubt that it cannot harm them because of the nature of their humanity. Spock, being only half-human and having the rigid mental control characteristic of Vulcans, can face the situation with no doubt and by mind-melding with the others allows them to share his absolute conviction. (Googling informs me that the episode is Spectre of the Gun.)

So how is that relevant to me, and this caravan of thought? A couple of things come from it.. The suggestion that if only I had better mental control I could make myself immune to the ‘demons’ that plague me. Or that reality is only what you believe it to be and can only affect you as much as you allow it to? The first idea is one I rank up there with the whole snap out if it type mindset, or even worse the just take some vitamins group. I’m not saying I think vitamins are useless, it is obviously documented that certain deficiences can cause similar depressive symptoms. But that’s not everyone. Not every person on this planet who struggles with depression has a vitamin deficiency. And with snapping out of it, the point is that you can’t do that: no matter how much you tell yourself about the things you have to be happy about, no matter how you try to focus on those, no matter how logically you look at your life to see that there is no reason for you to be feeling this way… you still do. I know I have a fantastic husband, and the kind of connection with him that lots of people only dream about finding. I know we have three brilliant and awesome (if occasionally frustrating and annoying) children. I know that we have a roof over our heads, clothes and food and many things that are not really necesseties. But for all that those things give me joy — I still also have pain in my heart and my brain at the same time; doubt that I am not deserving of these things, doubt that I am doing enough to make my family’s lives’ as good as I possibly can, despair that I won’t ever be able to give enough, doubt that I am good enough for them, fear that one day my fears and doubts will push my family away because they don’t understand why I feel those things. Guilt, because I wish they could understand but knowing that true understanding can only come from experiencing and experiencing what I do is not something I ever want them to have to do.

It’s not always that terrible. Most days, because of the medicine I take and the counselling I have recieved, it’s a background noise that you are so used to that you forget it’s there. It’s the buzzing insects and chirping birds and rustling leaves making the soft noises they always make and they are just part of the landscape. It’s never perfect quiet but you learn to ignore them enough to go about your day. But every now and then, a cockatoo will fly into my garden and the screech he makes is an explosion of pain inside my heart and soul that feels too big for my body to contain and makes me feel that if only I could create some openings in my body, some of the pain would escape and I would feel so much better. I haven’t done that but sometimes when the peace is disturbed it is so hard to hold onto the rational part of my mind that knows it wouldn’t work.

It’s very hard to admit that I think about things like that sometimes. I don’t want to seem like (and I realise the irony of this statement) a real crazy person and I don’t want to seem like an emo who wants to do this because all the other cool (uncool?) kids are doing it too. We often joke about being crazy but truly I don’t think I am crazy, because that to me implies a loss of the awareness of reality. I do think that I have tendencies towards exaggeration and paranoia in what my mind tells me people think of me and feel about me but I try to remind myself that I am probably wrong because I don’t think those sorts of negative things about people so why would anyone else do it about me? The place where this comes undone though is when I get reminders that many of my thought patterns do seem to be different than the ‘average’ person — sometimes on big things.. live and let live, make love not war.. and sometimes on random things like writing on roads that always seems to me to be written backwards (they recently painted DOWN SLOW all around the driveway of the complex that we live in) but obviously if everyone thought it was backwards they wouldn’t do it that way.

Then there is the concept of my mind being in control of my reality and if I wanted it enough I could re-form my reality so that this problem did not exist for me. This is a difficult one.. it’s all kinds of philosophical and quantum physics-al and some of the research and theories there sort of make my head hurt. On some levels I do think that we are in control of the reality we exist in but I’m not sure that it’s controllable on the level of.. the person in the physical body. If I can change my reality then I can change other people’s reality, since there are so many overlaps, and that would just create a mess and paradoxical states where different people were trying to create non-compatible situations and it would all end up very… chaotic. I think it’s probably more on the level of… the me that exists beyond the physical body, my higher self if you like.. has collaborated with the same parts of the people who have lives overlapping my own, and we have ended up with this reality and time and place and circumstance that allows each of us to learn and experience what we need to learn in order to grow into something more. Saying that, however, suggests that I chose to be like this and then that just sounds.. well.. masochistic. Or else it implies that ‘all suffering has a greater purpose’ which is not something that I agree with either. But I think maybe some suffering has a greater purpose.. and if the learning does not come from the suffering itself, then perhaps the suffering is necessary to shape you into a person who will be receptive to lessons coming from somewhere else or necessary to strengthen you into a person who can do something important to help others with their lessons.

Maybe it is hard to live with this, to deal with this, to watch the sky and worry about when a cockatoo will flutter in and disturb the peace with it’s screeching.. because I don’t know what the purpose of it is. I don’t know what I am learning or what I am meant to learn. I don’t know with absolute certainty that there is a purpose and a lesson and that I can survive. I don’t have a Vulcan to give me that peace of mind but even if I did I don’t know if it would help. Knowing obliterates the need for faith, and knowing you can survive something means that you don’t have to feel the pain as deeply since you are assured that you will come out the other side anyway. Feeling the pain and struggling to keep the hope that you will survive, struggling to remind yourself that you are not the pain and the blackness, that is the hard part. Keep struggling, keep fighting, keep trying.. trying to remember the true me.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 47 year old television signals bouncing back to Earth

Way better than Hitler! :)

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 47 year old television signals bouncing back to Earth.
[...] “They are signals that left the Earth about 50 years ago and have bounced off an object or more likely a field of objects some 25 light years away”.
[...] “We now know these are original broadcasts. So far we have recovered about 7 weeks of old television signals from space. Every day in our lab is like traveling back in time. And speaking of which we have just started the digital recovery of signals that contain lost Doctor Who episodes.

This is so cool. Due to various policies that the BBC used to have about recordings and storage of TV shows, there are a lot of missing episodes of quite a few of their early shows including Doctor Who. Now, because of something in space which has reflected our own TV signals back to us, some of those episodes can probably be recovered. It’s very impressive to me that something that is very similar to one of my favourite book and movie is actually true.