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Tag: my life

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.

ROLL ON 2019

For me – I feel good about 2019. I choose to believe the worst of my grief and issues are behind me and my journey forward is now much closer to everyone else – ie I’m sure I won’t get everything right but I’ll try not to make a royal fuck up every time a little snag comes my way. I’m calling resolutions ‘goals’ this year.

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN… THEN UP WE GO

It’s 35 days since I touched down on terra firma. Jet lag’s done and dusted, the big adventure receding into once upon a time status, and I’m settled back into normality – taking for granted the luxuries of my pillow, my car, and our pristine drinking water. Yet for most of those 35 days, my mental health has been really shit.

TRAVELS IN PARIS

The Arc de Triomphe was within spitting distance of our hotel (we elected not to spit on it). Of all the iconic Parisienne landmarks, this was our favourite. It’s enormous – towering in the center of the Place Charles de Gaulle, with 12 streets radiating out in all directions. We explored Paris on foot, meandering almost all 12 at one time or another.

TRAVELS IN THE DORDOGNE

Our first morning we visited the Saint Cyprien farmers market. Oh my lord – how fabulous! I’d heard French farmers markets were pretty special, but they really are pretty special. The produce and the atmosphere, and the cheese and strawberries and nectarines and sausages and tomatoes and baguettes and yoghurt and more cheese and we were in gastronomic heaven!

TRAVELS IN BERLIN

Yep – I spent a week in Berlin, and by day three I was bored. By the time we arrived in the city that birthed Oktoberfest, the Brandenburg Gate, and Adolf Hitler, we’d been away from home for 46 days. So looking at old rocks, old churches, and old history, was wearing a little thin. As are funny-tasting tap water, pay-to-use toilets, European heatwave, and whatever-that-yellow-stuff-is-they-call-cheese.

TRAVELS IN KRAKOW

The Krakow signal bugle call, or Hejnal Mariacki, dates back to the Middle Ages when it was announcing the opening and the closing of the city gates…The melody abrupt ending is said to commemorate a trumpeter from Krakow who was shot through his throat by a Tatar archer in 1241 when the Mongols besieged the city. Every full hour a golden trumpet shows above Krakow’s central Grand Square in the west window…of the Basilica of the Virgin Mary’s. Then a characteristic signal trumpet melody…resounds all over the city’s Old Town…Next the same bugle call is played towards the east, the south and the north.

TRAVELS IN BUDAPEST

Budapest is a city of statues – there are statues for everyone and everything. The beautiful wide streets, flanked by stunning gothic buildings, have small parks and plazas filled with statues and fountains every couple of blocks. There is no shortage of places to sit down and have a lovely rest.

TRAVELS IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

The small old city of Sarajevo where we spent five serene nights, is full of historic buildings with beautiful Georgian architecture, displaying the brutal wounds of gunfire and shelling from two decades prior. Much of the city is graffitied and dirty as post-war economic devastation still remains, and a third of the population are unemployed. The busy streets are a kalediscope of cultures, with nuns, muslims, westerners, arabs, and people from every ethnic and religious background wandering the streets, ordering thick bosnian coffees, decadent icecreams, or the local must-try dish, cevapi.

TRAVELS IN TURKEY

Endless fields of tall, ripe sunflowers lined the roads to our first stop – Gallipoli. Blue skies, green grass and sandstone memorials line the shores of Anzac Cove on the banks of the Dardanelle strait. I waded into the water to see the coast of Gallipoli, just as thousands of young men did in 1915. As the local Turkish man sunbathing on the pebbles said, Too many lives lost for nothing.