By inviting me to witness their death, they teach me to live, to craft a life with joy and attention. They call me to be bold. What are you waiting for? I imagine them asking, as the door of their life gently closes.
.. Her attention to my suffering calmed me down and made me feel deeply cared for. I focused on her quiet voice and clear instructions. Breath by breath, the doula accompanied me. This dynamic was familiar from my role in end-of-life care. She was an outsider providing help and experience at an intimate, vulnerable time.
Bleed Willingly – A Fresh View of Depression
In 2003, WTP and CAMH partnered to create the Madness and the Arts Festival, an international undertaking that brings together diverse artistic groups with similar missions from around the world to present their performances/artworks to the public. It is here that we begin to see the global force that the ‘Mad Pride’ movement is becoming.
How Do Successful People’s Sleep Patterns Compare To The Average American?
There’s a serious range here — from Winston Churchill’s nightly five hours to Ellen DeGeneres’ more luxurious eight hours.
The Ghosts of Christmas: Was Scrooge the First Psychotherapy Patient?
I immediately recognized Scrooge’s condition, in a way that I had been unable to as a child. (Dickens himself was depressive, and probably bipolar.) I realized that I had misremembered Scrooge as gleeful in his miserliness, a human version of Scrooge McDuck, whose exuberance is eternally preserved in the cultural imagination by the image of the “money dive.” In fact, Scrooge takes no joy in anything. His London is a dystopian hellscape riddled by sickness, injustice, cold, and want. Money is the only protection—frail and inadequate—against these horrors, and Scrooge’s only thought is to work as hard as he can, every day, to store up as much money as possible.
Christmas, in such a mental state, makes no sense. Suddenly, in the dead of winter, all these crazed zombies start insisting that it’s a holiday; they actually want to stop working—to stop doing the one thing any human can do to ward off chaos.
.. “Bah, humbug” isn’t an exclamation of glee; it’s an indictment. “What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry?” Scrooge demands of his nephew, whose debts exceed his income. How is it possible that everyone on Earth suffers from the delusion that life isn’t a giant vale of sorrow?
.. All of Scrooge’s thought processes, especially the miserly ones, follow the “logic” of depression. Scrooge is outraged to think that his clerk will feel “ill-used” if he has to work on Christmas, but that nobody considers him, Scrooge, ill-used when he has to “pay a day’s wages for no work.” When asked to donate to the poor, he argues that his job is to work and pay taxes, while the job of the poor is to go to prison or to the workhouse, or simply to die and “decrease the surplus population.” In the depths of depression, the idea of a “gift” loses its meaning.
.. When the Ghost of Christmas Future points at the writing on the tombstone, Scrooge understands for the first time that it can be erased and written differently: what seems to be etched in stone isn’t.