Aug282010

You would be the one who was left

By admin | August 28, 2010 | Posted in Emotions | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Here’s a link to a two minute recording of Robert Patterson and his wife Karen talking about his Alzheimers. I have played it over and over, it’s the most moving piece.

The conversation had me remembering the first Process Work workshop I attended. There was an exercise the participants did that stayed with me. It was a meditative exercise, a series of steps and reflections. Each of us had to imagine ourselves at the end of our happy lives and look back at what had been important to us.

Career was paramount for me back then. I was only at the workshop with a group I worked with because we hoped to bring to some new thinking to our workplace. Imagining myself at 90 and pondering on what had been important was revelatory. Work did not feature, just people, well Mottsu in particular. Important to me were relationships and people. It was obviously something I believed but I hadn’t ever quite realised, or let myself realise. The knowledge delighted me.

When I came home I talked Mottsu through the same exercise, only he wasn’t delighted, he was half-hearted at best. It was some time later after we visited a friend in hospital that Mottsu mentioned the exercise. The projection into the future had troubled him and he hadn’t been able to picture himself as old and content, only old and ailing.

Decrepit.

Seeing himself as ill and alone he had been unable to recall joy in his life.

Overwhelmed.

The conversation led us to explore the idea of who would die first. The topic scared me, I didn’t want to be left behind. I felt I would be irreconcilably alone if Mottsu were to die first, it was a shared fear. Karen Patterson re-frames our conversation in her conversation and it touched me deep down: “…the greatest thing you can do if you love somebody was hope that you would be the one that was left, and that you would be the one who could care for you lover…”

Mottsu was so alone in his depression, and I was there. I wasn’t there in an emergency worker or rescuer kind of way, I couldn’t keep him here, and even so I was there. As best I could I cared for him. I am the one who was left.

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Aug262010

Gradually and then suddenly

By admin | August 26, 2010 | Posted in Depression experiences | Tagged , | Comments (0)

As I think about World Suicide Prevention Day, it’s in a fortnight, I can’t help but wonder how effective that initiative will or won’t be, and I’m drawn to recall Elizabeth Wurtzel’s dark and compelling work, her experience of depression. The World suicide Prevention Day site is rudely smiley and brightly coloured, it almost chuckles at me. The site irks me, as does the notion of a prevention day. Why link something that can’t always be conquered in weeks, months or even years with ‘a day’. Isn’t that a bit of whack for those who can be gripped with depression for endless periods? The notion of WSPD is all out of kilter, to prevent suicide wouldn’t we need to address depression first? I do acknowledge that depression is not the only cause of suicide but the major one.

Elizabeth Wurtzel doesn’t pin down a cause of depression, what she does is describe the burden, it’s overarching breadth and seemingly bottomless depth of the affliction. I believe understanding depression and people afflicted by depression, people Wurtzel describes as the walking waking dead, a greater priority than suicide prevention. To me, prevention is not a position to start from, it sets up an adversarial (helping?) relationship between preventer and the suicidal. Ready for battle? Building understanding is my preference.

This is one of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s descriptions of what depression can look like from the inside:

“… Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.

In my case, I was not frightened in the least bit at the thought that I might live because I was certain, quite certain, that I was already dead. The actual dying part, the withering away of my physical body, was a mere formality. My spirit, my emotional being, whatever you want to call all that inner turmoil that has nothing to do with physical existence, were long gone, dead and gone, and only a mass of the most fucking god-awful excruciating pain like a pair of boiling hot tongs clamped tight around my spine and pressing on all my nerves was left in its wake.

That’s the thing I want to make clear about depression: It’s got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal — unpleasant, but normal. Depression is an altogether different zone because it involves a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest. The pain you feel in the course of a major clinical depression is an attempt on nature’s part (nature, after all, abhors a vacuum) to fill up the empty space. But for all intents and purposes, the deeply depressed are just the walking, waking dead.

And the scariest part is that if you ask anyone in the throes of depression how he got there, to pin down the turning point, he’ll never know. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too.”

Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir, Elizabeth Wurtzel

A dear friend told me the same thing, gradually and then suddenly, that was her experience. In retrospect I can see the same in Mottsu and how he lived and left, it helps me to know that. That simple statement does more to encourage understanding and support depression than any number of world-wide prevention days.

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Aug242010

Who heals the healers?

By admin | August 24, 2010 | Posted in Reported in the news | Tagged | Comments (0)

The Clinical Advisor for beyondblue, Associate Professor Michael Baigent, was joined by Professor Patrick McGorry and leading mental health experts this week speaking at the Flinders School of Medicine on Mental Health in Medicine: A seminar on mental wellbeing in medicine.

I was in the car and heard the report on radio. The discussion was about the suicide rate among doctors which, based research of 90 studies from around the world, is higher than in the general population. By way of explanation Professor McGorry said “Stigma and I suppose lack of awareness and mechanisms like denial are stronger actually amongst the medical profession, which is very worrying.”

When asked how the stigma could be broken down he said, “In a way the same thing that needs to happen with the whole community, just to basically have these issues spoken about much more freely.”

From my soapbox I speak so much about suicide I’m in danger of preaching.

Talking, trying to be supportive and accepting of various perspectives. I am following Professor McGorry’s advice and speakly freely (writing) and trying not to preach.

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Aug232010

Vale Charlie Haddon

By admin | August 23, 2010 | Posted in Reported in the news | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Charlie Haddon, 22, lead vocalist of the band Ou Est Le Swimming Pool, died by suicide after playing at a music festival in Belgium.

His family are reported to be heartbroken, understandably. Charlie Haddon’s dramatic death is distressing and tragic.

I am a little (but obviously not completely) lost for words, suicide is a complex issue and I stand more for suicide understanding than suicide prevention. It all makes me sad. I don’t know how in the world to make a difference, although I think about suicide in terms of cause and effect a lot. To draw a simple casual link for a complex social problem isn’t possible. There is not one or even a few things to do differently.

I think we are all a little more depressed than we ought to be and we’re all suicidal in degrees. What helps? After almost a year of blogging I can only think of;
– Heart – talking, caring, sharing, empathising
– Hand – holding hands and being there in simple and undemanding way
– Hope – if hope and resilience can be learned by rats we might learn it too

My emerging view is that rather than curing any one depressed person we need to support and accept what sits within ourselves, before anything starts to change it seems important to sit with what is. I don’t have the words yet and I do know that I’m slowly getting closer. A year is hardly any time at all.

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Aug222010

Movie: The Father of My Children

By admin | August 22, 2010 | Posted in Movies | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The French movie The Father of my Children follows a narrative anchored around a suicide. The film presents an authentic portrayal of family left to deal with an unexpected loss. There are tears, disbelief and regrets, the ubiquitous why questions are asked. Watching, I was grateful too for a story of loss scripted without dollops of unnecessary sentimentality.

I also appreciated the way the screening showed some aspects of grief, providing an empathetic depiction of times when emotions spiral. The on-screen portrayal of grief aligned well with my own experience, the disbelief, the numbed acceptance, wanting to put the world on hold but not pressing the pause button. Authentic.

Almost resolutely and despite overwhelming grief the world keeps turning, we continue.

What will be will be, and what is, is…even at the movies.

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Aug202010

Ring ring

By admin | August 20, 2010 | Posted in Life after loss | Tagged , | Comments (2)

My mobile phone rang today
I answered
“Could I speak to Mottsu?” someone said
“No” was all I said

Someone introduced himself, from a vineyard in the Hunter Valley
A marketing call

“Mottsu died about 6 years ago” I said
“I am so sorry” someone said

“Thanks, you couldn’t have known” I said and then explained that Mottsu didn’t have a mobile phone and I could easily that we had signed mailing list with his name and my number – we had holidayed in the Hunter a year before he died.

More apologies, more consternation and more reassurances and we hung up.

I felt dull. The whole sequence was quite surreal and I couldn’t help remembering the time I had been shaken by the realisation he wouldn’t call me. I hadn’t imagined someone would call him.

Weird (especially given my musings in the previous post on remembering).

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t. Mark Twain

By admin | Posted in Life after loss | Tagged , | Comments (2)
Aug182010

Days for remembering

By admin | August 18, 2010 | Posted in Grief and grieving, Mottsu and me | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Memory days are perfectly ordinary days when thinking about Mottsu sort of sneaks up on me. Some days just remind me of him, quiet rainy ones in particular.

Rainy days evoke memories of Mottsu, maybe because I love how the rain falls and quietens a day. Everything shushhed, like the sound of car tyres on the wet road. I think those are days when you huddle in closer with someone, share an umbrella, shelter together. Rainy days and Mottsu and I would slip into a cinema for the afternoon. Rainy weekend evenings we’d cook, bake, roast, time in the kitchen warm and safe, nurtured. Together with nowhere else to be.

Memory days, are different to anniversaries and birthdays, or special occasions. Days when you perhaps have anticipated the remembering of someone who’s no longer here but you can just feel them present. They are days I feel more alone – if it’s possible to be more alone than everyday regular alone. Importantly I feel wistful more than bereft, and that’s comforting to recall.

He is quietly remembered and I am grieving differently. I like to remember him well.

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Aug162010

A call for debate on the reporting of suicide

By admin | August 16, 2010 | Posted in Reported in the news | Tagged | Comments (0)

In New Zealand last week the Coroner asked for debate about the restrictions on reporting suicide. The Chief Coroner said” My personal view is that there’s room for some gentle opening up of things …”

The media are bound by legislation that seeks to prevent “sensationalising, glamorising or romanticising suicide or giving it undue prominence”. Paradoxically new Zealand has the most strident laws restricting the reporting of suicide and a relatively high suicide rate by country.

The number of New Zealanders taking their lives per year is reported as 50 per cent higher than the road toll.

The less we share about suicide the less we know, and then it is hard to recognise the warning signs. How can the risks and dangers of depression be appreciated or anticipated when we don’t share what we know.

It is tragic that more open reporting of experiences is not possible and people feel uninformed,and more at risk, as a result. In Australia a month ago Professor McGorry called for suicide statistics to be reported on the television news and on the front page of every newspaper everyday. Professor McGorry and Judge Neil MacLean, the NZ Coroner seek to build community understanding. If we were better able to recognise the early signs of mental illness and support rather than stigmatise this might be a world more could live in.

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Aug142010

UK Gardening Writer died by suicide

By admin | August 14, 2010 | Posted in Reported in the news | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

If you’ve ever held ideas about the sort of people who die by suicide, the death of Elspeth Thompson might dispel some stereotypes. She’s described as a successful and dynamic woman, she was a gardening writer and a mother, who is said to have cultivated blooms in the most unlikely places. The coroner has just found that her death was suicide.

Elspeth Thompson left a note: “I’ve fed the dogs and put the heating on so that you won’t be cold. I’m sorry. So very sorry. But I’ve gone to the lake with a bottle and pills. I love you. I love Mary.”

Frank Wilson, Elspeth Thompson’s husband, writes about coming to terms with her death accepting the incomprehensible and “the unbearable burden of loss“.

Depression doesn’t play favourites.

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Aug122010

Talking about the taboo topic of depression

By admin | August 12, 2010 | Posted in Reported in the news | Tagged | Comments (0)

Mark Rice Oxley writes, in the UK Guardian this month, that you can recover from depression, he says that he’s made it and that you can make it too.

In the article (link above) Mark Rice-Oxley says “I wouldn’t wish this illness on my worst enemy; it’s the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me. But, in a strange way, I am glad of the lessons it taught me.”

Tim Cantopher, a psychiatrist and author of Depressive Illness: Curse of the Strong is quoted as agreeing, he says, “A lot of patients are grateful. They say that without the illness they wouldn’t have been able to make the changes they made to become happy.”

I had a conversation with a dear friend on the weekend and she said something similar after coming through a debilitating depression over a year ago. She says she wouldn’t change a minute of her experience for all it has helped her know about herself, for all she is still discovering and appreciating about her life.

Mark Rice-Oxley quotes four things as helping “meditation, love, time and therapy.” Even if she were to put them in a different order, I think my friend would attribute her well-being to same four things.

Depression is a horrible affliction and it’s possible to live through it, not easy but possible.

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