Breakthrough flash of insight!!

After having a dream last night that kept recurring in different forms, I’ve had a real breakthrough insight into what my depression is all about!! Amazing! Now this may be a real no-brainer to everyone else, BUT, I’ve discovered that [due to my upbringing] I know fuck-all about relationship maintenance!

My relationships become un-rewarding for me because I DON’T PROVIDE ANY RELATIONSHIP MAINTENANCE in the way of affection to my partners. I don’t put more than the slightest bit IN so I eventually find I’m getting nothing OUT. Gradually my poor bloke becomes more and more discouraged about his input efforts with me, ergo I feel the zip is gone and I shut down and get depressed.

Now I’ll have to set about being demonstrative and that will be difficult and may not work immediately, but it’s POSSIBLE, so I’ll give it a go.

Flash of insight

How’s that? I feel quite proud of myself for sorting that one out after sixty years living in a black hole!

We need this program in Oz: Ruby Wax’s Mad Confessions

Ruby Wax

Ruby Wax’s Mad Confessions | Channel 4 goes mad | Documentary | Blog | Time To Change.

Reading the summary and readers’ comments on this British TV program from their Channel 4 made me think about how I am coping right now with my own head.

Crepe myrtle from L Street

In the midst of a few physical health issues I’m not doing too badly. As the people in the above program and the commenters pointed out, I could do with some company and a  bit of real-life support. I feel a bit stigmatised as people don’t invite me to stuff. Now maybe they’ve just forgotten about me because I’m not around much or maybe I DO make them feel uncomfortable. That must be the difficulty about having a mental illness that doesn’t make you think or behave in  unexpected ways – you can never quite tell if a drop off in friends is just chance or if they’re deliberately avoiding you.

As I’ve said before, I never really feel lonely and I AM alone during working hours; I just feel the need for different environments and social input from different human beings. Now I can’t drive or walk to the bus stop, my lack of regular company apart from Spotrick and the cats has become more salient. What strategies could I use, apart from spending even more time on the Interwebs?!

I’m writing a post. Duh!

I haven’t posted much in either blog for a while- just the occasional outburst. However, my head has been FULL of ideas on what I want to say to the world. My drafts are also getting a bit overwhelming.

So- here I am. The first thing is about my disappearance from Facebook. I was quite happy on Facebook and made lots of online and real life friends there. It also allowed communication with various groups I belong to in photography, wine and dining. The problem happened over the last four weeks, with Facebook twice banning me from “Adding new friends” for 7 days. I hadn’t been aware of trying to friend anyone unusual or completely unknown to me and I hadn’t said anything offensive to anyone there. Maybe the new relatives I had been given the names of in New Zealand and Queensland complained about me, believing me to be a stranger, despite sharing my surname. Or, they suddenly got worked up about some feud my father is supposed to have had before I was born- who knows?

Most likely it was a series of totally false “complaints” by people connected with our mutual friend’s suicide last year as the first Facebook ban came around the anniversary of his death. If people want to blame me for a suicide, I don’t want to argue with them- but they needn’t interfere with my interactions with other people I know as friends. Further hints that these people might be behind the Facebook bans was at a dinner I attended, about which I previously blogged (above)- a woman came up to me and said something like “Oh you’re that Kay Walker from Facebook- humph!”. I didn’t know her, but vaguely recognised her face from some social events years ago. I guess she wasn’t pleased to find me at the dinner with a Facebook Group so made further complaints. It’s a mystery to me.

Maybe I am paranoid, but I’ve also discovered that some people on Twitter and Google Plus have recently banned me as well- or “blocked” etc. I have commented on one person’s blog a few times as I share similar experiences with depression and drugs with her, but the comments never appear. What have I done to her? Maybe I should learn to use more lists on Twitter so friends from one sphere don’t suffer the Tweets of my other spheres. Irrelevant Tweets don’t bother me- I know people lead multi-facted lives- but if they bother others, perhaps I could change my ways.

You see, the Internet is one of the few ways I get to interact with other people these days. I’ve been completely unemployed for 5 years now and was only employed sporadically for 7 years before that. I’ve been up and down with my depression [like the Assyrian Empire], but managed to maintain a small group of real life friends over all that time. The rest of my socialising has been via the Internet. With my exit from Facebook (I feel I have been hounded off there) and the way others are blocking or dropping me elsewhere, I’m starting to get a bit worried. I’ve made a few moves to join some other sites to make up for my losses, but they are not so much with people who could ever be friends IRL- eg. on Pinterest or Tumblr. They’re more to share interests.

Speaking of interests- Spotrick & I attended a pleasant (if freezing cold), sunset photography meetup yesterday at Gillman, near the industrial Port Adelaide, north of the City Centre. There we met some previous acquaintances and a bunch of new people who all seemed very pleasant. We also took a few good photos and shivered together!

Here are several pix from the trip.

Disaster – OMG!

Yep- that “little” thing that sends the whole day to hell, is one of my most destructive habits! My therapist & I call this “disaster-ising” and I really have to keep trying hard to stamp it out. [Does anyone else remember the "father" of Cognitive Therapy, Albert Ellis, whose Rational Emotive Therapy talked about disasterizing and awfulization?]

Dr Albert Ellis

Something ALWAYS seems to happen when I’m doing a trivial or loathed task that “puts me off” for the rest of the day. It’s often when I’m getting our breakfast things out of the dishwasher- a glass that’s been leaning on a cup crashes down on its side, breaking. My automatic thought is “Oh no- that’s terrible- the whole day is going on bypass while I deal with this unthinkable occurrence!”

I KNOW why I do this also- but 55 years of fearing the same thing is A BIT MUCH!! I still react as I did as a kid when, if anything I was near, broke or was dropped, I’d get yelled at- “naughty, bad, WHY?, smack, shout, smack” from my father. Mum would HIDE broken stuff from him when he wasn’t there- he was just irrational- obviously doing his own disaster-ising. However, the emotional wreckage & humiliation persisted and when I’m in a down phase, it leaps out & gets me.

All I can do is “self-talk” and maybe play a silly video like Eddie Izard’s “DeathStar Canteen”. Most times currently I might be able to do a few mundane things after a breakage, but it still stops me from doing pleasurable stuff, like hobbies. I just try to carry on regardless, thinking “Accidents will happen- the world is a chaotic place- get on with the day”.

Thanks for the reminder post, Natasha!

This post was inspired by Natasha Tracy’s blog post Emotional OverReactions – Depression.

I’m glad I’m not Matthew Newton

The local press have been full of comment and criticism about an interview of a minor Australian “star” [Matthew Newton] by a popular current affairs reporter [Tracey Grimshaw]. The main division is between people who think Matthew was brave and is doing others a favour by “coming out”, and others who think Matthew should be held responsible for and explain his “domestic violence”, committed while apparently ill. [He assaulted and injured two former girlfriends, Brooke Satchwell and Rachel Taylor and has faced court over these incidents]. Many insist that he has a bad personality disorder and is just simulating mentall illness in order to get away from assault charges, including a psychiatrist and a Mental Health Case Manager! [see the comments on the Meshel Laurie article].

Here is a link to the TV interview: http://aca.ninemsn.com.au/celebrity/8377461/matthew-newtons-tell-all-interview

Here is the article by Meshel Laurie containing some rather negative views about Matthew Newton. Matthew Newton: The day after.

Lastly, my response to the interview and article:

I thought Matthew Newton was very brave to admit his illness and shortcomings in the interview. Tracy obviously didn’t understand his type of mental illness by the way she asked her questions, but he coped admirably in the segments shown. IMHO Matthew didn’t go into the domestic violence/assaults in any detail because he simply has no memory of the details of the incidents. That what usually happens in the “brain storm” of a psychotic “frenzy”. The brain is firing off in all directions and anything that might have become a memory is totally mixed in with the feeling and actions going on at the same time. He could well be very shocked at what he did to those unlucky women because he seems a gentle and reticent soul by nature. I suggest that he may have written or recorded apologies and explanations privately or intends to do so with advice from his lawyer. I don’t think he would be the sort of person to write it all off as bad luck for Brooke & Rachel- his personality seems full of shame & guilt and depression about his lack of “perfection” and feeling he hasn’t measured up to his parents’ expectations. He is an adult, his former partners are adults and I think we should let them deal with their previous troubles privately and whenever they choose- it’s none of our business nor Tracy’s.
Matthew appearing on TV and describing his symptoms will help other young people to “come out” and/or seek help for their own mental difficulties they will identify with him and may tend to follow his example in seeking longer term help. On the other hand some aspects of the interview could have been frightening to parents and friends of people with similar diagnoses to Matthew’s. With bipolar or manic depressive illness it IS true that the sufferer will have the problem for life, it’s almost impossible to predict manic or depressive episodes and the medications can control it, but not cure it. I don’t think Tracy made it clear enough that Matthew was NOT cured and will never be cured of the psychotic condition, but could fully recover from the OCD.  I wish she had asked him about having friends and supportive people around him that he is NOT in an emotional relationship with, as these sorts of people are essential to living life with mental illness in the community.

Lastly, why would anybody [even someone with money to spare- which I doubt Matthew would have after his manic episodes] spend 7 months cooped up in a small psychiatric hospital with their daily activities continually supervised and scrutinised, if they didn’t need to? You wouldn’t get me staying there more than 2 nights with a bunch of other troubled and miserable people (no offence intended)- and I DO have a mental illness [major depression]. Think carefully, critics.

Cutting the rave short to post!

Today some of my Twitter friends seemed to be getting very concerned about what has happened and what may be happening soon, to the Australian health system. I am a little worried about progress on mental health care, but not convinced that the government can force much privatisation on the populace.

First, several Tweeps were convinced that the article by Mark Metherell in The Age newspaper http://m.theage.com.au/national/health-group-lures-private-patients-from-public-system-20111104-1n04h.html
Health group lures private patients from public system, meant that the government was quietly divesting itself of publicly-funded healthcare and “forcing” people to buy into the private system. The article also implies that the private hospitals will “lure away” people who need particular types of care by demonstrating a better record on several health measures, eg. rates of hospital-acquired infections, higher recovery rates from some surgery etc. As I read it, there ARE some advantages to private hospital care for some conditions, but ONLY for younger, less complex cases. Public hospitals take the sickest people and are often willing to risk complications in the hope of saving a life that others might not see as worth the extra investment of time and effort.

On the other hand, hospitals already co-operate in the use of resources and specialists. For instance, when my partner needed an emergency operation to have his gall bladder removed, the health system did lots of juggling between different surgeons and hospitals so that he could be operated as soon as possible.The public hospital that gave him 24 hours of doctors, nurses, drugs & accommodation didn’t charge him a cent for this care! Meanwhile they rushed him by ambulance to a private hospital where the surgeon got theatre time, operated swiftly, and only had one extra day there.
If he had been able to stay in the public hospital and have the same surgeon operate under his “public hat”, then he wouldn’t have paid a cent for anything.

This sort of cooperation is the norm.

At a public training hospital...

NONE OF THIS WILL CHANGE for publicly funded patients under the health reform arrangements in Australia. If you need care, you will get it as quickly as possible and necessary. For people who HAVE PRIVATE EXTRA INSURANCE [only NECESSARY if your income is over $140 000 for a family, or you pay an extra 0.5% tax], the government will require them to USE it if hospitalised in the public system. Previously you only had to claim on it if you used extra private services while in the public hospital. Soon people will have to draw on it when it’s available. That’s all.

Touch of the Henries

[This post is also Day1 for NaBloPoMo]
No this is not about unwanted sexual touching in the workplace. Nor is it about the Annual Henry Mancini Musical Theatre Awards; nor the greeting card industry’s awards; nor even the standard unit of electrical inductance! It’s about motivation.

Large dose of the Henries

*”A touch of the Henries” = ennui. Haven’t you ever heard that feeling described this way?

IRL this means I can think of millions of things I could be doing but I can’t be f**ked. It’s not to be confused with procrastination, as I know why I do that! This is an awkward feeling of being motivated in one part of the brain and disinclined in another. I guess it relates to procrastination, but it’s a feeling of general hopelessness rather than some fear of failure that stops the action from happening.

Surrounding me here on the sofa are stacks of little projects I could attack, and others that need completing, but somehow none really appeals most of the time.

Pile of crafty stuff

My stickability at really simple routines and habits makes me take my pills every morning; my hatred of pinging sensations in my head soon reminds me if I miss! Guilt about putting off various tasks because I can’t commit my whole head to them makes me think about re-starting. But then I remember that half a head’s commitment will not get those tasks finished with any sort of quality, so I put those aside fairly legitimately.

The boring, routine things like housework are the most easily put aside as rarely does anyone die from my neglect of this! I’ve seen houses where there WAS a risk of the owner dying (like the one with the blind 83 year-old who had to negotiate a backyard obstructed with huge vines and tree-roots to go to the toilet), but I manage to wash the basic utensils and kitchen bench so we don’t get food poisoning! Vacuuming, mopping, tidying, changing quilt covers and window-cleaning are the things I let slide.

I Tweeted a minor victory today because I put Spotrick’s black T-shirts through the wash for the week, he mopped the [yesterday flooded] laundry & I followed up with the bathroom floor. This is a good day!

Righto- I wonder what I’ll attack tomorrow; any bets? I could sew a skirt, plant out some seedlings, de-pot tulip bulbs or a dozen other things. I’ll see what I feel like tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

For the psychologically and/or philosophically inclined [which I am when not suffering an attack of the Henries], here is a diagram by Csikszentmihalyi showing how ennui (which, to me, is halfway between Apathy and Boredom), fits into the spectrum of emotions:

Diagram of the Henries plus other emotions

Try Wikipedia for starters, or go to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s separate entry to track down his writings.

*For the unenlightened, my own use of the term “henries” is derived from the works of one John Clarke, a local writer/philosopher/comedian.

My mental health is interfering with this Mental Health Day post

I wanted to do a really interesting post, but my motivation is totally crap at the moment. This is what it’s like having depression and I continue to learn to live with it. The weather here has something to do with me not perking up as summer approaches [here in the Southern Hemisphere]. It has been fairly cool and grey for two weeks after a few very warm days of almost 30 degrees C! The gardens started growing madly, the depressed people cheered up and many started visiting the beach. Alas, it didn’t last and I have had a little hiccup in my climb towards January’s brightness.

Cool & cloudy at the beach

I’m at the stage in my depression where I know I CAN feel better but I can’t force it. I was really good last year when I was taking my pills and managing my thoughts while being occupied with study and other interests. Since  that time various delays have had their effects on me so that I can’t finish things to which I had committed. I have been having a rather hard time, in spite of the efforts of my partner and friends to entertain me and add some spark. However, I try to do the things that keep me more cheerful, like meeting friends for coffee or a meal, going on walks to keep a bit fit and having photographic excursions to the beach. For instance, last week I met two old friends from uni and had an extraordinarily cheap lunch at the Casino! We got lunch for $6 each, including a 600ml drink! One friend was feeling very down about her job, post uni as it is far too much being an unpaid social worker with indigenous people and no data crunching as she had foreseen. We tried to get her to focus on the money & experience for the meanwhile and think about changing jobs when she is performing well in this one. My other friend, an Indonesian pharmacist, is doing postgrad work with an established group at one of the local unis, so she just has to put her nose down and get moving! I was setting her straight on what to concentrate on so that she gets her proposal in quickly- she was trying to read the entire literature without putting pen to paper. I said she should make a list that said “Wanna know” and another headed “Quickest way to get there”. She thinks I saved her life!

Anyway, back to me. I really love photography and it is one thing I can make myself do even when I’m at my lowest ebb. When I can’t even be bothered getting dressed properly, I take photos in the backyard and inside the house. I take photos of odd things like rusty bolts or I take photos from strange angles to make it difficult to recognise the subject.

At the end of the jetty

Last time I ventured to the beach a girl tossing sticks and balls into the waves for her dog asked me why I was photographing them. I told her “This is what I do to make me feel happy. I photograph things and people at the beach”. She seemed OK with this, so I captured some more shots, then headed out along the jetty for alternative subjects.

Waiting for a stick

It was a cool, windy day, but the sun was shining often enough that lots of people had ventured out, hoping that Spring had sprung.

I was hoping the photos of this dog, happily jumping about in the waves would cheer me up a bit and I think they have.

Come on

Must get it

I’m hoping for more sunshine in my life so I can enjoy myself as much as him.

The Hunter

Brain too full to post!

Trying to finish this Masters degree means I have to work hard on restricted topics for long periods of time. So why can’t I write a bit about one of those? Well- I feel guilty devoting any words to anything other than an essay or dissertation! My other blog has also died, even though I could write exactly the same thing in that blog as an essay (http://healthforhumans.blogspot.com).

My dissertation could have been finished by the end of first semester if I had been able to get ethical clearance and worked on the data then, but life ain’t like that in the Land of Research! I had written the background to the project, a “skeleton” article to pop the results into when I got them, plus an ethics committee submission for the university in the first 4 weeks of Semester 1. Now it is nearly Week 9 of Semester 2, with that plus weeks 10, 11 and 12 before uni breaks up for Christmas/summer! I still haven’t been granted access to the de-identified/anonymised data from the state health department- it takes forever until each little level of bureaucracy is satisfied I don’t want to publish the names of the patients and hospitals who have problems on Facebork or whatever! My supervisor and Head of Department have signed so many pieces of paper, they are getting RSI. And I have a wonderful task for them on Tuesday (Monday is a public holiday here)- ANOTHER bit of tree to sign! Must be patient…

I even had a little lecture on how to address an envelope suitably for the health department when I ended up trying to deliver a report to the exec officer for the ethics committee- the security guy said I should put my stuff in their internal mail to make sure it got to the top of her desk when she returned. So I got a security pass from him and toddled up to the first floor. There, an autistic person objected to the name I had put on the front of the reports with “To: X on 10th Floor” or whatever. I had to listen while she told me that my boss at the university should find out how the health department likes addresses to be formal, formatted in a certain way and on a WHITE label, ON an opaque envelope. I had a set of reports in a transparent plastic folder so they didn’t get separated! I could have clobbered her, but figured she really was autistic and had to go through her spiel no matter what anyone said. So I stood and took it.

Now I’m fiddling with the data I managed to get for free and without password from the Australian Medicare database containing info about how many prescriptions are dispensed for every medication in the system, in which state and whether paid for by Medicare itself (Public), Privately or by the Veteran’s Affairs Dept. I was able to download all my necessary numbers from here in January- now I have an extra 6 month’s worth to play with, thanks to everyone stringing me out!

I was so distracted when I was writing my first essay this semester for my last course-work subject, that I almost wrote a whole dissertation on it! The topic was in Indigenous Health (mainly pertaining to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples) and we had to choose a disease or illness that was a public health problem in this group. I chose Trachoma (an infectious eye disease, familiar in poor, developing countries like the Sudan and Afghanistan). There was masses of material to digest, especially from the World Health Organisation and UN. In addition, Australia has had decades of government policies about providing various health services which would have fixed the problem in no time flat, but they never implement them fully… You might have heard of a bloke named Fred Hollows- he set up a Foundation to care for vision problems, firstly in Australia and then internationally. His wife Gaby now administers the Fred Hollows Foundation and they mainly work in war-ravaged nations such as Democratic Republic (sic) of Congo, East Timor and Uzbekistan etc. Anyway, fred’s team charged out into the bush and fixed trachoma and other eye problems using surgery and antibiotics in the mid to late 1970s, ie. last century. However, the pussyfooting governments since haven’t followed up and the trachoma and blindness is coming back. Hopefully a new campaign, organised by a doctor who was just a young whippersnapper on Fred’s first expedition, Hugh Taylor, will get in there and hopefully eliminate the disgusting scourge over the next year or two.

The head lecturer even lent me a beautiful book by Hugh Taylor (and signed!) to help with the essay, but I’m afraid I just got even deeper into the subject and ended up having to cut what I’d written by two thirds at the last minute!! Oh dear- what a hash. Hopefully I’ll at least score a pass!

Anyway, I’ve learnt my lesson and I’m not consulting nearly as many references for the second (and last ever) essay which I have chosen to write on “Indigenous Mental Health, ‘Country’, and Land Rights”. It sounds like social studies rather than public health, eh?! ABC TV has some programs which help explain indigenous peoples’ attachment to ‘country’- which I certainly needed explaining to me 2 months ago, but now have a good understanding for a white person.

Now I guess I have made a bit of a post, so I can stop. I might be able to write something about analysing my data on possible connections between several drugs and adverse events in South Australia, once I get the de-identified information from the health department. It’s pretty weird stuff, but I think I could explain the essence of it simply!

SO, there you are- pretty boring, huh!