Recent years have brought recognition that sportsmen and women may have mental health needs that are just as important as their ‘physical’ health – and that may need to be addressed. Athletes are people too, subject to many of the same vulnerabilities as the rest of us. In addition to our everyday anxieties, the sports world contains a whole host of different stressors.

The post Olympian pressure appeared first on OUPblog.

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जब कोई बात बिगड़ जाये तो रहें बी पॉजिटिव यहां Click  करिए और सुनिए 1मिनट और 45 सैंकिंड की ऑडियो audio जब कोई बात बिगड़ जाये तो कैसे रहें बी पॉजिटिव Be Positive फिल्मी गाना “जब कोई बात बिगड जाए जब कोई …” बहुत आकर्षित करता है  वाकई में, हम किसी कठिनाई में हो, किसी मुश्किल […]

The post जब कोई बात बिगड़ जाये तो रहें बी पॉजिटिव appeared first on Monica Gupta.

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A psychiatrist’s couch is no place to debate the existence of God. Yet spiritual health is an inseparable part of mental or psychological health. Something no psychiatrist should regard with clinical indifference. But what does spiritual or religious health involve? This can’t just include normalized versions of monistic theism – but the entire set of human dispositions that may be thought of in spiritual terms.

The post Unwholly bound: Mother Teresa’s battles with depression appeared first on OUPblog.

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सोशल मीडिया बनाम डिप्रेशन -उलझन सुलझे ना हैलो चैक चैक मोबाईल चैक … !! मोबाईल – इंटरनेट और साईड इफेक्ट कल एक जानकार अपनी बिटिया की प्रोब्लम ले कर आई. उनकी बेटी अभी 9 क्लास में है और पिछ्ले साल उसे नया स्मार्ट मोबाईल गिफ्ट किया था. वो उसे हर दो चार मिनट में चैक […]

The post सोशल मीडिया बनाम डिप्रेशन -उलझन सुलझे ना appeared first on Monica Gupta.

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My little lemon-scented moist towelettes, you know how I like to keep Frog on a Dime upbeat and encouraging.

Well, this post is intended to be encouraging, but y’all best buckle up because it’s about to get real real. We’re going to talk about depression and suicide.

Yes, seriously.

Hey, hey, hey now. Come back.

Please?

This isn’t fun for me either, but it matters because you matter.

(Full transparency: I wrestled with this blog topic for weeks and the more I resisted, the more it insisted.)

So, here we go.

Creative folks in general are known for being angsty. And if we’re pursuing publication, we also ride that Acceptance/Rejection Emo-coaster. But that doesn’t mean all writers or artists are truly depressed. Feeling sad or discouraged periodically only means you’re human. It’s not fun for sure, but it’s not a clinical condition. All the same, many even high functioning, creative people struggle with depression.

True things:

• Depression is a thief and a liar.
• Depression thwarts your creativity, pollutes your work and evaporates your energy. It’s not an asset. It’s not your muse.
• Depression is treatable.
  • If the first treatment you try doesn’t help, seek other options. I mean, if your first “romantic” experience wasn’t mind-blowing or your first taste of Chicago style pizza didn’t blow your socks off,  would you swear off sex or deep dish for the rest of your life? Well, okay then.
  • Depression will limit your ability to recognize choices. You always have choices for making things better–with one exception. (Please see the next bullet point.)
  • Suicide is NEVER an option. Just take it off the table. Do not devote a second to deliberating the topic. There are many choices open to you–some better than others–but you must consider suicide as permanently an out of stock item. Period.
• You are not your depression. Let me explain it this way: a friend of mine who wore glasses all of her life finally switched to contacts. But then, she felt self-conscious about it. She’d worn glasses for so long, she’d come to think of her glasses as a part of her anatomy, and to have those “removed,” meant she was being fake. What? Uh. Think hard now. Have you ever seen a just-born baby wearing spectacles? That’s silly, you say. Of course not. So, my friend’s glassesless face wasn’t fake–it was her real face. AND you without the weight of depression is the real you. Getting help isn’t cheating, it’s simply a way to get real.

Help is all around you. For starters, consider talking to your primary doctor. She already knows you and could refer you to a counselor in your area. Or talk to a close friend or family member. Open up to your spiritual leader. If this sounds too difficult right now, check out these resources:

• I Will Listen
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

If you’ve read this far (and thank you for that) and you’re thinking, I understand this is an important topic, but I’m not dealing with depression: first, be grateful, and two, be aware, you may have depressed people in your life and not recognize it, especially if their symptoms are well-managed and they are high functioning. So, it’s important for all of us to be sensitive about the comments we make. It’s easy to unwittingly harm someone who’s already hurting. We can, instead, be an advocate, a shoulder and a safe place.

Phew. We did it–we had “The Talk.” Thank you for letting me share this with you. I think we deserve a cookie. (And next time, let’s talk about how to incorporate more rainbows and kittens into next novel, okay?)

I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and don’t want anyone else to feel like that. ~ Robin Williams

it’s about to get real real

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Blue Whale Blues Written and Illustrated by Peter Carnavas Kane Miller       9/27/2015 978-1-61067-458-4 32 pages      Ages 4—8 “When Penguin hears Whale singing the blues, he tries to help. But how exactly do you stop a blue whale from feeling blue? A delightful story about a whale with bike trouble and …

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A little over a year ago, someone I care about called to tell me they had to terminate their pregnancy. My heart skipped a beat. I'd been her biggest cheerleader concerning the pregnancy. Her first child died at a few months old. This friend had an illness that prevented healthy pregnancies. Was afraid to try again. So she'd adopted a newborn girl.

She'd finally been able to have another pregnancy. Everyone was so excited. What in the world would make her choose termination? It just wasn't like her. Then she told me it was an ectopic pregnancy. My heart broke.

I had no idea what to say. There are never good words when a person faces such tragedy.

Sometimes life termination just has to be. Not because of inconvenience. But because the child was growing in her tubes. So I told her.

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It's October and time for Chicken by Chicken. This is going to a long post. I will also post about my fun Halloween chicken project at the end. I've been doodling chickens for years. They cheer me up. This past year has needed a lot of cheer.

I joined the Presbyterian church recently, and have been reading The Book of Confessions. It's a book that affirms basic Christian truths. It's the response of this denomination of Christians when it has been blindsided with confusing and destructive ideas.

So here is my history. For the past year my poor noggin' failed me. It's connected to my work. Here is the deal: you fail much as a writer. It is part of the gig. But a dark cloud came over me last year and just would not budge. I never thought my work would fail. Church, yes. Friends and family, yes. Body, yes. Circumstances, yes. But never my work. A friend told me once that my work is what keeps me floating above it all. Well, my work sank, and I sank like a stone in a deep ocean.  I headed to the doctor and, yes, learned I was suffering from straight out major depression.

My thoughts were not about taking my life or even dying. This was all about failing at my life's work. Here's the deal, good writers get paid for their hard work. Their books sell. I put out a book as dear to me and with as much of my soul as I could on a page, PLUMB CRAZY, and the result was no one cared. I sold less than a hundred copies.The publishing house cancelled my contract. Then, I began submitting a book called PROFIT that I believed was the best thing I'd ever put to a page. I had one partial request, and the agent never got back to me. Everyone else ignored my submissions.

Here's the painful litany: Fool. Idiot. Stupid. These words branded me. All those people who said you were full of it for wanting to be a writer, they were right. No one cares. You can't write a single word that anyone cares about. All the people who have passed on you, they just didn't want you to know that your work is substandard and will not rise. You are irrelevant. The success of reaching others and making a difference in this world. The dream you would be able to make a modest living at this, over. You could have worked for real all these years and your kids wouldn't be pulling out loans to get college educations. You messed up your whole life and there are no do overs.  You chased a dream, and nada. You are a freaking failure. (It's okay, folks, these words don't burn into me like hot coals any more.)

This has been hard on so many levels. My mother suffered major depression when I was a teen. She didn't really get over it until I went to college.We had no healthcare when I was kid, so mom just suffered. Thankfully, that is not my story, but even good doctors can't wave a magic wand to make me better. It's been a long road this past year. It has been terrifying.

Depression feels like a band is tied around my waist, tight and painful. It's like being plated with metal armor that you can't take off. It like living in darkness. My art has suffered. I've thought about giving it up. Another choice mom made. Man, this has been a mess. Still, I continued to move forward, but my arms were heavy like led weights, my stomach ached, and my poor brain just sank into a pit. I cried more tears last year than I ever have in my life. I'd be standing in line at the grocery store and realize my face was wet with tears. Oh, why am I at the grocery story when every movement is agony?  I refused to stop functioning through this pain. I wiped the tears and moved to the next thing on the list. I wrote a lot of lists last year.

So here is the journey. I got clinical help, and I worked on seeking goodness. I had to let some things go. I cut down on the writing events. I shoved aside the novels for almost six months and worked on picture books. It was a struggle to write one word and that is the whole picture book game. I left the church I was attending. I'd been going there for almost five years and didn't really know anyone. This was no longer acceptable. I found a church that was more open to ideas and people with differences. I planted a tree.  I hugged the cats. I wrote my lists and drew my chickens.  Silly chickens make me laugh, and I love to laugh. I taught teens who to write through a summer program TEENS Publish at the library (no pay). Gosh, I loved those young writers, so full of passion and dreams. BTW, this was a totally unprofessional act, I know, but it brought some happiness to my heart and mind, and this year happiness has been worth more than all the gold in California.

I am coming out of the long dark night. I'm working again. The dips aren't as deep. Positive thoughts are back.  I still have a ways to go, but I am hopeful. Finally my  book  CHICKENS DO NOT TAKE OVER HALLOWEEN  http://ow.ly/SVYcB  is for sale. I was so blessed by the silliness of this book. I hope that it blesses a few of you. I will be back next week with more confessions, chicken by chicken.

Here is a doodle for you.  It's a picture from the Chicken book.

A quote for your pocket: There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke. Vincent Van Gogh

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Youth and depression सुनकर आपके मन में भी बहुत बातें आ रही होगीं. क्या होता जा रहा है आज के युवा को !! सोच कर ही धबराहट होने लगती है. सोनम शर्मा का बेटा पढाई में बहुत अच्छा है. हाल ही में उसका 12वी क्लास का नतीजा आया और उसने खुद को कमरे में बंद कर लिया. नतीजा मेरे हिसाब से बहुत अच्छा था 89.6 % अंक आए थे पर इस शर्म के मारे की लोग क्या कहेंगें. इतने कम अंक लाया है. आगे अच्छे कालिज मे दाखिला कैसे होगा इसी चिंता में खुद को कमरे मे बंद कर लिया और मोबाईल भी स्वीच आफ कर दिया. अगले दिन जब तक उसने दरवाजा नही खोल दिया.  सोनम की जान अटकी रही उसे  डर   सिर्फ इसलिए कि उनका बेटा कुछ गलत कदम न उठा ले.

इसके बहुत कारण हो सकते हैं  जिसमे से एक है माता पिता की  बच्चों से बह्त ज्यादा उम्मीदें  वो सोचते हैं कि बच्चे पर बहुत पैसा खर्च किया है अच्छी से अच्छी कोचिंग दिलवाई है इसलिए अच्छे अंक तो आने ही चाहिए. बच्चा उस उम्मीद को पूरा नही कर पाता और निराशा में चला जाता है. एक बात यह भी हो सकती है कि   एकल परिवार का होना और माँ-बाप, दोनों का कामकाजी होना. यही बात बच्चों को एकांकी और चिड़चिड़ा बना देती  है  आखिर विचार-दर्शन उन्हें कौन करायेगा, माता पिता अपने आफिस कार्य मे व्यस्त हैं और युवावर्ग चौराहे पर खड़ा है. वे जायें तो किधर जायें । अपनी जीवन-गति का निर्माण करें, तो किस प्रकार करें  कौन बतायेगा कौन सही राह दिखाएगा.

एक बात यह भी हो सकती है कि पेरेंटस हद से ज्यादा जरुरत से ज्यादा बच्चे का ख्याल रखते हैं पर इसी के साथ साथ बच्चे की इच्छा जाने बिना वो बच्चे पर अपनी इच्छा लादने या थोपनें की कोशिश करते हैं जिससे बच्चा अपना शत प्रतिशत नही दे पाता और जिंदगी मे ईम्तेहान में लगातार फेल होता जाता है.

फिर बात आती है हमारे समाज की. परीक्षा के दौरान नकल, रिश्वत खोरी, पेपर लीक आदि का होना भी युवा मे depression ,आक्रोश भर  देता है और ईमानदारी से मेहनत करने वाला युवा सिस्टम को देख कर अपना हौंसला छोड देता है.

इन सब के साथ साथ संगत बहुत ज्यादा असर डालती है. बिगडे हुए रईसों के साथ दोस्ती करके और नशे में डूब कर अपना जीवन बर्बाद कर लेते हैं.  खुद को स्मार्ट और मार्डन दिखाने के चक्कर में नशा करना वो जिंदगी का अभिन्न अंग मानने लगते  हैं  और इसके साथ साथ सबसे बडा फेक्टर है धैर्य की कमी और यही आज के युवाओं की सबसे बड़ी कमजोरी है.  धैर्य की कमी के कारण आज का युवा सब चीज बस जल्द से जल्द पाना चाहता है.  आगे बढ़ने के लिए वे कड़ी मेहनत करने की बजाय शॉर्टकट्स यानि आसान रास्ता  ढूंढने में लगे रहते हैं. कम समय में सारी आधुनिक चीजों को पाने के लालच में उनमें समझदारी की कमी नजर आती है। भोगविलास के आद‍ी  युवा में लगन, मेहनत, जोश, उमंग और धैर्य की कमी हो गई  है.

Youth  depression में होता है तो पूरा परिवार  मानों  depression मे चला जाता है. बहुत जरुरी है आज के युवा के साथ समझदारी से बात करना. उसकी मन की भावनाओं को समझते हुए उसके हिसाब से बात करना.

 

Youth depression a concern for counselors

Substantial levels of “loneliness, anxiety and depression” among Cayman’s youth, identified in a series of health surveys came as no surprise to counselors in the territory.  Read more…

New Strategies to Treat Depression in Youth

Two new strategies have been developed by Johns Hopkins researchers to treat depression in young patients using serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) while mitigating the risks and potential negative effects such as increased suicidal thoughts. The strategies are published in Translational Psychiatry. See more…

 

Picvend.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

समय प्रबंधन की विशेषज्ञ एवं चर्चित किताब ‘व्हाट द मोस्ट पीपल डू बिफोर ब्रेकफास्ट’ की लेखक लौरा वंदेरकम लिखती हैं कि अगर आप किसी चीज को करना चाहते हैं तो आप उसे सबसे पहले करिए। हमारे बीच के लोग जो आज सफलता की सीढ़ियां चूम रहे हैं एवं जिंदगी की सफलता का जमकर लुत्फ उठा रहे हैं वे इसी फिलॉसफी पर चलते हैं See more…

 

Youth and depression में कुल मिला कर बात का निचोड यही है कि बजाय चिंता मे जाने मे अपने भीतर गुणों को विकसित करें. पीपल स्किल यानि नेतृत्व का गुण, अपना व्यवहार और दूसरों को प्रेरित करने की कला खुद में डालिए. खुद को एक शानदार पैकेज बना डालिए और भेड चाल और भीड से हट कर चलने का प्रयास कीजिए.  समय को महत्व देते हुए आप अपने प्रयासों मे जुटे रहिए … और वो फिल्मी डायलाग है ना कि किसी चीज को शिद्दत से चाहो तो पूरी कायनात उसे आपसे मिलवाने में जुट जाती है तो भागाईए डिप्रेशन विप्रेशन को क्या बला है ये और नए उसाह, नए जोश और नई उमंग से उठ खडे होईए

The post Youth and depression appeared first on Monica Gupta.

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I am often asked whether eating particular foods can enhance mood and treat the symptoms of depression. With very few exceptions, the answer is no. In contrast, our mood can be easily depressed by our diet. Why? For adults, the brain responds primarily to deficits, not surpluses, in the diet.

The post Can your diet make you feel depressed? appeared first on OUPblog.

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Considerable evidence has linked an unhealthy diet to obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and cancer. We now understand how chronic obesity ages us and then underlies the foundation of our death. Furthermore, obesity leads to body-wide chronic inflammation that predisposes us to depression and dementia. However, these are all the long-term consequences of our diet upon our body and brain.

The post How does food affect your mood? appeared first on OUPblog.

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This book will appeal to middle grade readers who like spunky protagonists, are dealing with difficult family situations, and who like learning about earlier eras in America, (in this case the depression in the 1930s).

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In preparation for an upcoming 4-week club for kids that I'll be hosting, I created a book trailer for A Dog Called Homeless, winner of the 2013 Middle Grade Schneider Family Book Award,  The Schneider Family Book Awards "honor an author or illustrator for the artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences."

A Dog Called Homeless is written by Sarah Lean and published by Harper Collins. I hope you enjoy it.

I'll be adding this to my Multimedia Booktalks page.

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Esther Ehrlich’s debut novel, Nest, is an arresting story of an eleven-year-old girl named Chirp Orenstein, whose life becomes acutely sharp and complicated as her mother’s illness overtakes the family

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How are we to understand experiences of depression? First of all, it is important to be clear about what the problem consists of. If we don’t know what depression is like, why can’t we just ask someone who’s depressed? And, if we want others to know what our own experience of depression is like, why can’t we just tell them? In fact, most autobiographical accounts of depression state that the experience or some central aspect of it is difficult or even impossible to describe. Depression is not simply a matter of the intensification of certain familiar aspects of experience and the diminution of others, such as feeling more sad and less happy, or more tired and less energetic. First-person accounts of depression indicate that it involves something quite alien to what — for most people — is mundane, everyday experience. The depressed person finds herself in a ‘different world’, an isolated, alien realm, adrift from social reality. There is a radical departure from ‘everyday experience’, and this is not a localized experience that the person has within a pre-given world; it encompasses every aspect of her experience and thought – it is the shape of her world. It is the ‘world’ of depression that people so often struggle to convey.

My approach involves extracting insights from the phenomenological tradition of philosophy and applying them to the task of understanding depression experiences. That tradition includes philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, all of whom engage in ‘phenomenological’ reflection – that is, reflection upon the structure of human experience. Why turn to phenomenology? Well, these philosophers all claim that human experience incorporates something that is overlooked by most of those who have tried to describe it — what we might call a sense of ‘belonging to’ or ‘finding oneself in’ a world. This is something so deeply engrained, so fundamental to our lives, that it is generally overlooked. Whenever I reflect upon my experience of a chair, a table, a sound, an itch or a taste, and whenever I contrast my experience with yours, I continue to presuppose a world in which we are both situated, a shared realm in which it is possible to encounter things like chairs and to experience things like itches. This sense of being rooted in an interpersonal world does not involve perceiving a (very big) object or believing that some object exists. It’s something that is already in place when we do that, and therefore something that we seldom reflect upon.

Depression, I suggest, involves a shift in one’s sense of belonging to the world. We can further understand the nature of this once we acknowledge the role that possibilities play in our experience. When I get up in the morning, feel very tired, stop at a café on the way to work, and then look at a cup of coffee sitting in front of me, what do I ‘experience’? On one account, what I ‘see’ is just what is ‘present’, an object of a certain type. But it’s important to recognize that my experience of the cup is also permeated by possibilities of various kinds. I see it as something that I could drink from, as something that is practically accessible and practically significant. Indeed, it appears more than just significant – it is immediately enticing. Rather than, ‘you could drink me’, it says ‘drink me now’. Many aspects of our situation appear significant to us in some way or other, meaning that they harbor the potentiality for change of a kind that matters. We can better appreciate what experiences of depression consist of once we construe them in terms of shifts in the kinds of possibility that the person has access to. Whereas the non-depressed person might find one thing practically significant and another thing not significant, the depressed person might be unable to find anything practically significant. It is not that she doesn’t find anything significant, but that she cannot. And the absence is very much there, part of the experience – something is missing, painfully lacking, and nothing appears quite as it should do. In fact, many first-person accounts of depression explicitly refer to a loss of possibility. Here are some representative responses to a questionnaire study that I conducted with colleagues two years ago, with help from the mental health charity SANE:

“I remember a time when I was very young – 6 or less years old. The world seemed so large and full of possibilities. It seemed brighter and prettier. Now I feel that the world is small. That I could go anywhere and do anything and nothing for me would change.”

“It is impossible to feel that things will ever be different (even though I know I have been depressed before and come out of it). This feeling means I don’t care about anything. I feel like nothing is worth anything.”

“The world holds no possibilities for me when I’m depressed. Every avenue I consider exploring seems shut off.”

“When I’m not depressed, other possibilities exist. Maybe I won’t fail, maybe life isn’t completely pointless, maybe they do care about me, maybe I do have some good qualities. When depressed, these possibilities simply do not exist.”

By emphasizing the experience of possibility, we can understand a great deal. Suppose the depressed person inhabits an experiential world from which the possibility of anything ever changing for the better is absent; nothing offers the potential for positive change and nothing draws the person in, solicits action. This lack permeates every aspect of her experience. Her situation seems strangely timeless, as no future could differ from the present in any consequential way. Action seems difficult, impossible or futile, because there is no sense of any possibility for significant change. Her body feels somehow heavy and inert, as it is not drawn in by situations, solicited to act. She is cut off from other people, who no longer offer the possibility of significant kinds of interpersonal connection. Others might seem somehow elsewhere, far away, given that they are immersed in shared goal-directed activities that no longer appear as intelligible possibilities for the depressed person. We can thus see how the kind of ‘hopelessness’ or ‘despair’ that is central to so many experiences of depression differs in important respects from more mundane feelings that might be described in similar ways. I might lose hope in a certain project, but I retain the capacity for hope — I can still hope for other things. Some depression experiences, in contrast, involve erosion of the capacity for hope. There is no sense that anything of worth could be achieved or that anything good could ever happen — the attitude of hope has ceased to be intelligible; the person cannot hope.

Of course, it should also be conceded that depression is a heterogeneous, complicated, multi-faceted phenomenon; no single approach or perspective will yield a comprehensive understanding. Even so, I think phenomenological research has an important role to play in solving a major part of the puzzle, thus feeding into a broader understanding of depression and informing our response to it.

Heading image: Depression. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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It's still winter! The bone-shaking chill of a new January with its winds, ice storms, broken healthy resolutions and humourless deadlines (tax payments, school applications, etc) can make even the bravest of us want to curl up in a cave next to a blazing fire and hibernate until spring arrives.

And to some of us who suffer from depression (episodes of persistent sadness or low mood, marked loss of interest and pleasure) either constant or intermittent, winter can be one of the hardest times. Depression being a multi-headed hydra ranging from many states of unipolar to bipolar, I'm not suggesting that there is one single type of depression; for instance not all of us are affected by the winter or weather, while some people who don't even have depression in the clinical sense might be experiencing a mild case of the winter blues, or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

Creativity is like a fire that we can stoke to drive away the cold winter (whether physical or psychological, internal or external). So I'm deep in my cave trying to work out ways that I can stoke my creativity without resorting to biscuits!

Bibliotherapy's been around for a while now, and is the literary prescription of books and poems against a range of "modern ailments" - including depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. A form of guided self-help, it's not exactly a new idea - the ancient Greeks spoke of "catharsis" - the process of purification or cleansing, in which the observer of a work of theatre could purge themselves of emotions such as pity and fear through watching and identifying with the characters in a play. All of us in the modern world can attest to the feeling of connection and joy when an author so precisely describes a state that we are ourselves experiencing, and the nail-biting, cliff-hanging state of knowing exactly what our heroine or hero is going through. We root for him or her because s/he represents ourselves battling our own demons in an idealised meta-state.

But how does bibliotherapy work? According to the various proponents, it helps perpetuate a shift in thinking, so that things are not so inflexible (black and white thinking, for all you cognitive-behavioural depressives out there!) which is crucial to tackling depression. Being able to gain distance and perspective by viewing problems through the lens of fictional characters means that in real life our fixed thought-patterns which contribute to our problems can start to become unpicked.

And of course, identification isn't the only joy to be found in books; good old-fashioned escapism is surely the reason why many of us read so avidly. A new world, a new family, a new life, perhaps even new biology or physics, takes us away momentarily from the mundane world so we can return refreshed, hopefully to see our lives with new eyes.

I've obviously been self-medicating for a long time, but I always called it comfort-reading. By comfort-reading I mean a well-known book that you can plunge into at will like a warm bath or a pair of slippers. At school when I was anxious about exams or bullies I would find solace in re-reading the heroic adventures of Biggles or the magical quest of Lord of the Rings; at university it was in the dreamy memories of Brideshead and the vicissitudes of Billy Liar or Lucky Jim. When I started my first office jobs I would read 1984 or Brave New World (odd choices for comfort-reads but I think it was to remind myself that things could actually be worse!) but when I started writing my own books, I ...er ... stopped reading for some years. I think my tiny little brain could only take so much exercise!

I started comfort-reading again when we first had our children; during long and frequently painful breast-feeding sessions my husband would read my childhood favourites Charlotte's Web and Danny the Champion Of The World to me as distraction and encouragement. And these days my prospective comfort list numbers hundreds of books; for me, reading is re-reading.

So what could I take to bolster myself against the winter chill? I've written myself a prescription but I'd be interested in hearing yours!

1) A dose of James Herriot's short animal stories, to be administered when needed (they are nice and short so you're not left hanging after a few pages) or chapters from Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat, or virtually anything by PG Wodehouse;

2) A daily dose of half an hour "joy-writing" - half an hour in the morning when I can sit down and let ideas spill out onto the page. (If it ends up with me writing about what happened last night then so be it. It can often lead to something more ...)

3) A small creative project on the horizon, easily identifiable and manageable, that I can look forward to; in this case getting a small group of actors together to read through a new draft of a play that I've written (there'll be a blog post on this soon so stay tuned!)

4) Connection with others - I'm a member of a local book group, which not only makes me keep on top of what new books are coming out, but also participating in the joy of discussion; there's nothing more frustrating than reading a good book only to realise that nobody you know has read it!)

So I think that's enough to start barricading myself up against the January snows!

But what about you? What kind of comfort-reads do you enjoy to drive the cold winter away?

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Jose Nuñez lives in a homeless shelter in Queens with his wife and two children. He remembers arriving at the shelter: ‘It’s literally like you are walking into prison. The kids have to take their shoes off, you have to remove your belt, you have to go through a metal detector. Even the kids do. We are not going into a prison, I don’t need to be stripped and searched. I’m with my family. I’m just trying to find a home’.

Maryann Broxton, a lone mother of two, finds life exhausting and made worse by ‘the consensus that, as a poor person, it is perfectly acceptable to be finger printed, photographed and drug-tested to prove that I am worthy of food. Hunger is not a crime. The parental guilt is punishment enough.’

Palma McLaughlin, a victim of domestic violence, notes that ‘now she is poor, she is stigmatised’; no longer ‘judged by her skills and accomplishments but by what she doesn’t have’.

People in poverty feel ashamed because they cannot afford to live up to social expectations. Being a good parent means feeding your children; being a good relative means exchanging gifts at celebrations. Friendships need to be sustained by buying a round of drinks or returning money that has been borrowed. When you cannot afford to do these things, your sense of shame is magnified by others. Friends, even close relatives, avoid you. Your children despise you, asking, for example: ‘why was I born into this family?’. Society similarly accuses you of being lazy, abusing drugs or promiscuity, assumed guilty until proved innocent. You can even be blamed for the ills of your country, the high levels of crime or its relative economic decline. The middle class in Uganda ask: ‘how can Uganda be poor when the soils are rich and the climate is good if it’s not the fault of subsistence farmers’?’

In the US, as in Britain, it may be welfare expenditure that is blamed for stifling productive investment.

Shame is debilitating as well as painful. People avoid it by attempting to keep up appearances, pretending everything is fine. In so doing, they often live in fear of being found out and risk overextending finances and incurring bad debts. People in poverty typically avoid social situations where they risk being exposed to shame; in so doing lose the contacts that might help them out when times get particularly harsh. Sometimes shame drives people into clinical depression, to substance abuse and even to suicide. Shame saps self-esteem, erodes social capital and diminishes personal efficacy raising the possibility that it serves also to perpetuate poverty by reducing individuals’ ability to help themselves.

Shame also divides society. While the stigma attaching to policies can be unintentional, sometimes the result of underfunding and staff working under pressure, the public rhetoric of deserving and undeserving exacerbates misunderstanding between rich and poor, nurturing the presumption that the latter are invariably inadequate or dishonest. Often around the world, stigmatising welfare recipients is deliberate and frequently supported by popular opinion. Blaming and shaming are commonly thought to be effective ways of policing access to welfare benefits and regulating anti-social and self-destructive behaviour. However, such beliefs are based on two assumptions that are untenable. The first is that poverty is overwhelmingly of people’s own making, the result of individual inadequacy. This can hardly be the case in Uganda, Pakistan or India. Nor is so elsewhere. Poverty is for the most part structural, caused by factors beyond individual control relating to the workings of the economy, the mix of factors of production and the outcome of primary and secondary resource allocation. The second assumption is that shaming people changes their behaviour enabling them to lift themselves out of poverty. However, the scientific evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that shaming does not facilitate behavioural change but merely imposes further pain.

Jose, Maryann and Palma were not participants in a research project. Rather they are members of ATD Fourth World, an organisation devoted to giving people in poverty voice, and their testimonials are available to read online. Echoing Martin Luther King, Palma dreams that one day her four children will be judged not by the money in their bank accounts but by the quality of their character.

Headline image credit: ‘Someone Special to Someone, Sometime’ by John W. Iwanski. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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Where kissing is concerned, there is an entire categorization of this most human of impulses that necessitates taking into account setting, relationship health and the emotional context in which the kiss occurs. A relationship’s condition might be predicted and its trajectory timeline plotted by observing and understanding how the couple kiss. For instance, viewed through the lens of a couple’s dynamic, a peck on the cheek can convey cold, hard rejection or simply signify that a loving couple are pressed for time.

A kiss communicates a myriad of meanings, its reception and perception can alter dramatically depending on the couple’s state of mind. A wife suffering from depression may interpret her husband’s kiss entirely differently should her symptoms be alleviated. Similarly, a jealous, insecure lover may receive his girlfriend’s kiss of greeting utterly at odds to how she intends it to be perceived.

So if the mind can translate the meaning of a kiss to fit with its reading of the world, what can a kiss between a couple tell us? Does this intimate act mark out territory and ownership, a hands-off-he’s-mine nod to those around? Perhaps an unspoken negotiation of power between a couple that covers a whole range of feelings and intentions; how does a kiss-and-make-up kiss differ from a flirtatious kiss or an apologetic one? What of a furtive kiss; an adulterous kiss; a hungry kiss; a brutal kiss? How does a first kiss distinguish itself from a final kiss? When the husband complains to his wife that after 15 years of marriage, “we don’t kiss like we used to”, is he yearning for the adolescent ‘snog’ of his youth?

Engulfed by techno culture, where every text message ends with a ‘X’, couples must carve out space in their busy schedules to merely glimpse one another over the edge of their laptops. There isn’t psychic space for such an old-fashioned concept as a simple kiss. In a time-impoverished, stress-burdened world, we need our kisses to communicate more. Kisses should be able to multi-task. It would be an extravagance in the 21^st-century for a kiss not to mean anything.

And there’s the cultural context of kissing to consider. Do you go French, Latin or Eskimo? Add to this each family’s own customs, classifications and codes around how to kiss. For a couple, these differences necessitate accepting the way that your parents embraced may strike your new partner as odd, even perverse. For the northern lass whose family offer to ‘brew up’ instead of a warm embrace, the European preamble of two or three kisses at the breakfast table between her southern softie of a husband and his family, can seem baffling.

The context of a kiss between a couple correlates to the store of positive feeling they have between them; the amount of love in the bank of their relationship. Take 1: a kiss on the way out in the morning can be a reminder of the intimacy that has just been. Take 2: in an acrimonious coupling, this same gesture perhaps signposts a dash for freedom, a “thank God I don’t have to see you for 11 hours”. The kiss on the way back in through the front door can be a chance to reconnect after a day spent operating in different spheres or, less benignly, to assuage and disguise feelings of guilt at not wanting to be back at all.

While on the subject of lip-to-lip contact, the place where a kiss lands expresses meaning. The peck on the forehead may herald a relationship where one partner distances themselves as a parental figure. A forensic ritualized pattern of kisses destined for the cheeks carries a different message to the gentle nip on the earlobe. Lips, cheek, neck, it seems all receptors convey significance to both kisser and ‘kissee’ and could indicate relationship dynamics such as a conservative-rebellious pairing or a babes-in-the-wood coupling.

Like Emperor Tiberius, who banned kissing because he thought it helped spread  fungal disease, Bert Bacarach asks, ‘What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia…’ Conceivably the nature of kissing and the unhygienic potential it carries is the ultimate symbol of trust between two lovers and raises the question of whether kissing is a prelude or an end in itself, ergo the long-suffering wife who doesn’t like kissing anymore “because I know what it’ll lead to…”

The twenty-first century has witnessed the proliferation of orthodontistry with its penchant for full mental braces. Modern mouths are habitually adorned with lip and tongue piercings as fetish wear or armour. Is this straying away from what a kiss means or a consideration of how modern mores can begin to create a new language around this oldest of greetings? There is an entire generation maturing whose first kiss was accompanied by the clashing of metal, casting a distinct shadow over their ideas around later couple intimacy.

Throughout history, from Judas to Marilyn Monroe, a kiss has communicated submission, domination, status, sexual desire, affection, friendship, betrayal, sealed a pact of peace or the giving of life. There is public kissing and private kissing. Kissing signposts good or bad manners. It is both a conscious and unconscious coded communication and can betray the instigator’s character; from the inhibited introvert to the narcissistic exhibitionist. The 16^th-century theologian Erasmus described kissing as ‘a most attractive custom’. Rodin immortalized doomed, illicit lovers in his marble sculpture, and Chekhov wrote of the transformative power of a mistaken kiss. The history and meaning of the kiss evolves and shifts and yet remains steadfastly the same: a distinctly human, intimate and complex gesture, instantly recognizable despite its infinite variety of uses. I’ve a feeling Sam’s ‘You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss’ may never sound quite the same again.

Headline image credit: Conquered with a kiss, by .craig. CC-BY-NC-2.0 via Flickr.

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Some are going through a horrible time right now.
Some are feeling lost.
Hopeless.
Abandoned.
Worthless.
Helpless.
Alone.
Depression.

Feeling as if nobody hears them, sees them, knows they are alive.
God sees you, my darling.
He hears you.
He feels you.
Catches every tear that falls from your precious eyes.
I promise.

Focus on something for just a moment.
Something outside of your pain.
Focus on the Glory of God.
Take a deep breath.
Breathe.

If you can't muster the strength to say it aloud-
then say it inside.
You can do this.
I have faith in you.
I believe in you.

"Take me Lord.
Take my junk.
Take my mess.
I am Yours.
Help me.
Lead me beside the still waters.
Restore my soul.
My mess, is Yours.
Use it to be glorified.
Give me peace.
Give me hope.
I find my strength in You, oh Lord.
Bring me to the place of joy.
And bring me into You.
In Jesus' name."

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She woke up torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscous haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care. Sometimes she woke up flailing and helpless, and she saw, in front of her and behind her and all around her, an utter hopelessness

From Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When I read this passage in the above novel, I thought that this was probably the most accurate description of what depression can feel like. Depression can be a relentless and elusive entity.

There has been a lot of talk lately about depression due to recent death of Robin Williams. As writers with our creative spirit, we tend to live inside our heads. It can be very easy to go into a downward spiral. Between writer’s block, rejection letters, dealing with envy and comparing yourself to other writers, it’s easy to fall into depression’s grip.

The thing about our society is that everyone feels that they should be happy all the time and then feel guilty when they don’t. Social media doesn’t help much either because we tend to only share our sunny days instead of our stormy ones.

Then there’s the stigma that people with depression are weak and need to get a grip. This is probably the most common reason that people hide their feelings. Sometimes the happiest people can be the saddest people. Emotions are sticky and private. They can be overwhelming. It’s messy work and makes people uncomfortable. It’s hard to share when the possible reply could be a brush off instead of empathy. It’s hard to be vulnerable with your emotions. It’s much better to fake it and pretend that everything is okay.

The most important thing is that you shouldn’t ignore the feelings. It could be more than a case of having a bad day or melancholy. Events like heartbreak, death of a loved one, or other personal losses can have an effect over a prolonged period of time.

So don’t ignore these feelings. They are real. Don’t feel guilty that you should feel happy. You are not weak. And most important, don’t feel like there is no hope. The trick of depression is that it tells you that you don’t matter and nobody cares. But that is a total lie: You do matter and there are people who care. Ask for help. It is waiting for you.

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The reaction to Robin Williams’ death has been unlike any celebrity death I can remember. We all knew Whitney was going to go, and Michael Jackson’s end was as expected as it was bizarre. With Williams there seem to be few mysteries. It was a battle, and he lost. Yet the shock of his tragic decision seems to have transcended our celebrity autopsy culture with its essential question: how can someone who gave so much, who had so much to give, have turned away from the light with such finality?

It’s a question we’ve all tried to answer at one point.

It’s also opened up a floodgate of frank talk about depression. As many have pointed out, there’s a difference between the blues—temporary depression we’ve all suffered from at one time or another—and the deep, clinical depression that killed Williams and Kurt and Plath and so many others.

Depression, and its ugly twin, substance abuse, are both hazards of the creative life. My Facebook feed has been flooded with creative people discussing their own depression, sometimes with courage, sometimes with dread. Neither is the “right” response. This is a daily battle we all face, the important part is to get through, to know you are not alone, to find the light in what seems like an endless darkness. We get by in measures that are appropriate.

Joshua Hale Fialkov has a much linked to post that expresses all this much better than I can. Fialkov’s own battle is with migraines, not depression but the battle is similar.

There is never enough.  Never enough time, never enough money, never enough success, never enough praise, never enough sales.  Never enough.  That’s part of the life I’ve chosen.  We struggle to find that thing that makes us feel satisfied, that gives us joy, but, the truth is that the joy is fleeting.  The feeling of being ‘full’ only lasts for a few moments before the hunger returns.

This is the life of an artist. This is the life of anyone who aspires to be greater than they are.

This is unattainable. This is the bottom line to life, from top to bottom from the most successful man on earth to the weakest child on the playground.  Nothing you ever do will be enough.

The talking is good. I had a long talk with one of my oldest friends I don’t speak with as much as I should who had dated Williams back in the day. Some of her stories were hilarious but they are hers to tell. So many people have shared stories of Williams shopping in their comics stores or book stores (the guy liked to read!), or meeting him at charity events. All the stories are of a kind man, a giving man. I dread the day when the celebrity autopsy horror stories come out…for now keeping these kind, human moments alive helps with getting through.

I’ve had a case of the blahs myself of late. Not being productive enough, things I let slide, the dog days of August, post Comic-Con let-down. Nothing I haven’t felt before—I’ve learned to be pretty resilient in my life. Like I said, we all have good days and bad days. Last night I got together with two industry colleagues and in a few hours of smart, funny talk about life and comics—moments where I never looked at my cell phone—everything was OK again. On to the next battle.

The communal mourning and questioning is part of the healing. I almost feel like the good from all the sharing has overwhelmed the sadness. Life is both beautiful and terrifying, but its beauties and terrors are best experienced knowing you are not alone in this glorious muddle. You are not alone. We are not alone.

PS: Yes I forgot Popeye in my first post about Robin Williams. Which sucks because despite it being a horrible flop, it’s a sweet, wonderful movie— written by Jules Feiffer! Wacky as hell, a glorious muddle. And a role, like so many others, that Williams was born to play.

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"I should have taken the shortcut home from my bird-watching spot at the salt marsh, because then I wouldn't have to walk past Joey Morell, whipping rocks against the telephone pole in front of his house as the sun goes down." (p. 1)  If you know anything about me, I am a sucker for a good first line, and this one has got the goods.

This is Chirp's (Naomi's) story.  Well, her family's story really.  Her mom is a dancer who has suddenly started to have some problems with her body.  Her leg is dragging around and has been hurting her for a while, but Chirp's somewhat clinical and distant psychiatrist dad isn't really talking about it.  Big sister Rachel is distancing herself as well as she tries on teendom for the first time.

When Chirp's mom is diagnosed with MS the family verily falls apart.  Hannah's existence has always been that of a dancer, and she quickly falls into a deep depression and nobody in the family really knows how to cope.  Chirp finds an ally in a very unexpected person - Joey Morell.

Joey's family is one that Chirp's family looks down on.  They have a 3 sons who run amok, but their problems go deeper than that.  Chirp and Joey find common ground, and as two kids who ultimately are scared and feeling abandoned, they cement their friendship as they slowly reveal the pain inside each of their houses.

I don't want to spoil the plot so I will leave it there, but will also say that Ehrlich is part poet and part magician as she weaves this tale together.  "Ice-blue quiet smacks me when I open the front door after school." (p. 86)  "A little square of my blouse is stuck to my upper arm, like the wrinkly paper on a temporary tattoo before you lift it off and leave a splotchy red heart or yellow smiley face behind." (p. 164)  "The air's already thick and warm, even though the sun's still just a spritz of light in the pitch pines and the scrub oaks and not a hot, round ball bouncing on the top of my head, like it will be soon." (p. 12)  Swoon.

For sure, this is a story filled with heavy and heady stuff.  But it is through the eyes of Chirp, so while it is indeed sad, it is never too much.  It is gorgeous, quiet and filled with hope.  I fell in love with Chirp and Joey as I read. They simply became real, and I turned the pages late into the night because I could not leave their story unfinished.

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I want to cut my wrists. Don’t panic; it’s not a serious thing. I don’t want to kill myself, but sometimes, when I’m daydreaming, I like to think about cutting myself.

I’ve been doing it off and on in secret since eighth grade. Once I hit my upper twenties, I stopped caring if anyone noticed. Now, in my thirties, good friends know how things are going based on my Band-Aids.

Again, this isn’t a suicide thing. It’s not a “cry for help,” as Marla Singer might say. I don’t cut for attention. I don’t cut because I mean myself any harm. I cut because it feels good. Physical pain is better than emotional pain any day. But it very rarely comes to that anymore. Mostly, it’s just in my head. I fantasize about cutting because it calms me down.

Say I’m in a crowded room, and people are small talking around me and I’m just feeling … anxious. I zone out and picture a knife against my skin. Not cutting into my skin—just lingering above it, like a playful tickle. This is my meditation, my visualization, my Power Animal. This image calms me down. Always has.

I considered getting a tattoo on my left wrist. That way, I wouldn’t cut my left wrist anymore because I wouldn’t want to ruin the ink. But then I thought, “How does ink do on scar tissue?” The tattoo is on hold.

I spoke to a group of troubled teens a couple months ago. I admitted to a room full of strangers (who possibly had more in common with me than most “adults”) that I’d been cutting for years. One of the girls asked, “How did you stop?”

Well, I didn’t want to tell her I hadn’t. Instead, I told her I channeled the yearning to cut into something else—my writing, for instance, or yoga.

But being a cutter is like being a smoker. You quit … but you never really quit.

I’m not writing this to freak out my mother or make you uncomfortable. I’m writing this to be honest. Although I haven’t been depressed in a while (yay medication!), when I am depressed, I often question God’s intentions: Why did You give me this stupid disease? Why did You do this to me? What kind of a loving god are You?

See, I get sad, then I get mad. Once I’ve calmed down, I usually realize I wouldn’t be “me” without the depression. I wouldn’t be as weird or funny or oddly charming. I wouldn’t be an artist. I also wouldn’t be able to speak to troubled teen girls or write blog posts like this that hopefully help other people—make them feel not so alone.

Recently, when I opened up about self-harm, I brought it up, nonchalantly, with a friend of mine who shocked me by saying, “Yeah, I’ve been trying so hard not to cut lately.” Who knew? Now, I do, and now, we talk about it.

We need to talk about this stuff. In college, I hid my mental health problems. No one would ever have thought, “Wow, Sara’s a real downer.” (Thank God for closed doors.)

The older I get, the more I have learned to embrace “me,” even the psycho side of me that wants to stay in bed, never eat again, and play with knives. If anyone needs a hug, it’s her!

So seriously, I’m not trying to freak you out. I just want you to know me, and maybe someday, we can help each other. Isn’t that why we’re here anyway?

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