Category: Mental Health

HOW ARE YOU?

How are you, is so common our responses are automated. That’s fine for chit chat with the checkout chick, but when you’re with your nearest and dearest, when you have big emotions you’d love to share (or would benefit from sharing), it’s not helpful to reply with a conditioned, I’m fine. But what other options are there? Are you okay? is becoming popular, but it’s still not enough.

WHEN HOPE FEELS DEAD

Navigating a lifetime of depression is like being an avid bushwalker and mountain climber. For years on end the scenery is stunning, the flora and fauna breathtaking and the hard yards well rewarded. For short periods of time steep, rocky, unnavigable mountains appear that seem interminable and impossible to navigate. Clambering over invisible rocks always happens in the dark and every inch of your body screams, No! I can’t do it any more! There are people at the summit cheering, saying, Come on – not far now! You know there are people below struggling on the same mountain, or back in the safety of the pretty woods. But on that dark mountain, you’re alone, lost in that sense of hopelessness – completely reliant on voices from afar – and the squabble between the angels on your shoulders.

MY EMOTIONAL BOUNDARIES

Highly sensitive people are often empathic and empaths often feel other people’s emotions radiating out like a solar flare. No amount of 50+ sunscreen can shield the soft flesh from the onslaught of heat – so we absorb it. Which is fine, because not all emotions are dreary. Joy, hope and excitement wash through me in the same way as grief, fear and despair. Trouble is – I don’t let it go. I spend more time grieving and despairing for someone else’s woes than they do. I’m more invested in other people’s problems than they are. This seems like an inappropriate boundary – not to mention, an excuse to stop dealing with my issues.

VALUABLE

“We belong to what we value, not what we desire.” A cool guy I know. I love that statement – it really resonates with me. I spend time and energy, make commitments and secret pacts, with the things I value. Not with the things I desire.

ABCD THERAPY

It takes very little time in the world of mental health treatments, before acronyms and mnemonics become everyday language. Psychiatric therapies have come a long way from the induced seizures, exorcisms and lobotomies of the past. Today there are countless methods of treatment – pharmacological, behavioural, community, and medical. Psychiatrists tend to be the big boss of drugs and medical treatments like ECT or TMS, while psychologists tend to deliver the behavioural and community therapies. And they love their acronyms. For anyone out there that hasn’t been blessed with the opportunity of gracing the couches and uncomfortable plastic chairs of therapy groups, I thought I’d share a summary of my experience of the ABCDs of therapy.

BURDENED

When the burden of being a burden becomes so burdensome the burden can no longer be bourne, it’s crunch time. Disappear into Wonderland with the big white rabbit, going permanently mad? Or just go – permanently? Or do what needs to be done and reach out? Clearly the latter is the healthier option.