You may not have noticed if your weather is anything like mine, but the Winter Solstice passed about an hour ago. This means the longest night, the bottom of the year to people with SAD, is behind us, and daylight tomorrow will last longer than today. Hang in there.
Here’s a multimedia article with video first person accounts, and great cartoons by Dan Meth. Mental Illness Awareness Week was in October for some people. For others, every week is a mental illness awareness week.
This cartoon by Yumi Sakugawa caught my attention for two reasons. First, it affirms my introvert/HSP/recovering depressive need for downtime.
But the second reason is something I’ve been wrestling with for several weeks now. I’ve become aware that a lot of my abdominal muscles live in a constant state of contraction. This is so automatic that I’m utterly unconscious of it most of the time. Even when I turn my attention to those muscles, it’s hard to figure out how to relax them. And the minute I start thinking about something else, they revert to their habitual contraction again.
The contracting is complex. There are at least three different areas involved, and if I try to relax them in the wrong order, the first group contracts again when I relax the second.
One set of muscles is around my waistline, and sucks my abdomen in under my diaphragm. You know, into the space where air is supposed to go when you breathe deeply? I have often noticed that I had trouble taking deep breaths during exercise or yoga. Now I realize it was because I was fighting against the inflexible girdle of my own muscles. What impact has constant under-oxygenation for all those decades had on my physical and mental health?? Continue reading
I’ve always believed Van Gogh was a depressive, probably with seasonal affective disorder (complicated by alcohol and perhaps absinthe addiction). This Upworthy post illustrates his instinctive comprehension and reproduction of a principal that still challenges scientists in one of his most famous paintings. What a stirring example of the connection between “neurotic personality” and creativity, which I wrote about recently. I was struck to learn that this painting was one of numerous works representing the view from his asylum window – a window which was barred. Talk about seeing beyond the limitations of the current moment! Don’t miss the video at the bottom of the post.
It has become increasingly obvious over the past few years that figuring out how to make a living is a – if not the – major issue of my life. For those of you who speak astrologese, Saturn in the second house squares my sun. Translated, Saturn represents limitations, the second house concerns self-worth and income, the sun expresses identity, and a square indicates major challenges. Yup, sounds about right.
So the fact that I stayed at my last job only two months is not much of a surprise. It’s more surprising that I took the job in the first place. The pay was very low, the owner was laden with obvious baggage, and the work sounded overwhelming to HSP/introvert-me. But it was close enough to home to walk, and I felt an intuitive impulse to try it anyway. I just had a feeling it would be a worthwhile experience whatever happened.
And that turned out to be the case. I learned a lot about what I enjoy and need in a job, which is certainly an area in which any new insights are welcome. However, I was already financially behind when I started, and the job never came close to meeting my financial needs, despite representations that were made to me at the start. So it’s back to the food bank. I’m trying to stay optimistic, but it isn’t easy.
One of the things that makes poverty and confusion even more difficult than usual is family conflict in the wake of my father’s recent death. I guess it’s natural for people to focus on a person’s positive attributes after death, since that is what they miss about him. Out of respect for others’ pain, I sat out of that conversation. But my family members could not quite return the favor. Instead, they nudged posthumous accolades about what a great guy he was at me, as if to say, everybody loved him, baby, what’s the matter with you?
Is it so terrible to speak honestly of the dead – and the living?
In answer, I offered to give them a whole lot of excellent and historically verifiable reasons why I feel as I do, but was told that now is not the time. Only a brute would argue with that, but let’s be honest, my inconvenient truths were no more welcome in happier times.
Being the family truth-teller sucks. Continue reading
This article proposes an adjustment to a widely used theory in psychology, shifting the definition of “neuroticism” from overly reactive to highly reactive, and concluding that such reactivity offers benefits in the form of foresight, creativity and drive, not just the costs of anxiety and depression. Do I see subtle signs that HSP and introvert advocates are making a dent?
Those who have wrestled with depression and/or anxiety will immediately recognize the references to “Self Generated Thought.” There’s actually an acronym for that, SGT. Who knew? It’s more judgmentally known as “brooding” by those who never do it.
Just because everything’s been said doesn’t mean everybody’s heard it.
I thought for most of my early life that I had very little imagination. In fact, I despaired over it in my twenties, around the same time I realized that everything profound had probably already been said. (I later realized this doesn’t really matter, since wisdom needs a constant stream of carriers across the generations to keep it alive and relevant. Just because everything’s been said doesn’t mean everybody’s heard it).
Twenty years later, when I became conscious of “negative self-talk” and other fantasies of doom that fueled the ouroboros loop of depression, I was ROFL at the notion that I had no imagination. Au, so contraire! In reality, I was constructing scenarios in my mind non-stop. Almost all of my energy went into it. Maybe the content needed a little tweaking, but it had been irrefutably established over decades that I was not only creative, I was extremely focused and prolific!
About those other things that have been going on with me lately? One of them is the weather. We just had a nasty heat wave, and I have Seasonal Affective Disorder.
SAD, or, as it is officially (but inaccurately) known, Major Depression with Seasonal Pattern, is clinical depression in response to factors in the physical environment.
Winter SAD, which you may have heard of, results from insufficient exposure to light. It was first observed as a winter-related phenomenon, since sunlight is weaker, days are shorter, and clouds are more common during winter in many climates.
However, SAD can also be found year-round in people who work at night and sleep during the day, or even those who live in sunny places but spend very little time outdoors. That makes the name misleading, and the official diagnostic criteria just plain wrong in far too many cases.
Summer SAD, which you probably haven’t heard of, is major depression triggered by heat, usually in conjunction with humidity (I’m fine in the desert). It also is not necessarily seasonal, but can occur wherever someone is exposed to hot and humid summer-like conditions, whether natural or artificial.
I have both types of SAD. Continue reading
Just wanted to share Nick Seluk’s great comic strip, inspired by Sarah Flanigan’s story of what it’s like to live with depression and anxiety. Here’s a frame a lot of us will recognize, but definitely check out the whole thing.
I view the “happiness movement” with skepticism. If you aren’t familiar with it, it argues that unhappiness comes from framing our experiences “negatively,” and if only we reframe them “positively,” we can be happy. Here’s a TED talk from one of its most visible proponents.
Note that our speaker, cruising on the silken waters of Harvard cachet, is marketing a service to large corporations. If your boss sent you to happiness school, would you dare to test less happy at the conclusion of the class? No wonder this guy is happy. He’s found himself a sure thing! Continue reading
There are many depictions of non-usual mental states in story and song, including some excellent first-person representations of mental disorders. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, is famous for his accounts of psychotic breaks in the first person. Sometimes we know we are witnessing “madness,” as Poe called it, but sometimes these descriptions are framed as something else. Continue reading
sensitive type 