Posted by JohnD
Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:35:00 GMT
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Have you ever wondered what a very young boy sees when his mother is staring at him through a camera lens? I don’t mean the digital cameras that do the looking for you, leaving your face fully visible as you press a button. I’m thinking of cameras that used film, had range finders, light meters and a combination of aperture width, shutter speed and focal length adjustments – all to be coordinated by eye, hand and experience.
My mother excelled at photography, and over the years she used many types of cameras from simple Kodak snapshooters, as I thought of them, to the Polaroid instant models to a wonderful Zeiss Ikonta. But the masterpiece of them all, my mother’s tool of choice to make her amazing pictures, was the Speed Graphic Pacemaker Press Camera. All the pro’s used it.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Connecting | Tags camera, child, Cyclops, depression, eye, home, image, lens, lonely, memory, mother, photographs, picture, Speed Graphic | 4 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:09:00 GMT
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Have you ever wondered what the sound of hundreds, no thousands of blogs on depression and mental health is like? I was looking over these sites at one of the blog rating communities the other day and was struck by the differing tones of so many voices sampled in clipped excerpts and thumbnail images which I could quickly scan in page after endless page. Though they differed in many ways, all were calling out in a chorus of pain. Some recounted the daily accumulation of misery, some seized on signs of hope that they had at last turned a corner because of the latest medication or alternative treatment, some campaigned for the cure that had worked for them or shouted out against the treatments that had nearly killed them. So much hurt, so much determination flipped before my eyes in deceptive ease.
I thought of the opening scene of the movie, Contact
– based on Carl Sagan’s book
. It begins with swift camera sweeps across ordinary life, people gossiping into phones, radios crackling the news, families arguing, couples pouring out earnest wordstreams while passing in the street. Then the camera starts to pull away from eye level, to ascending aerial views in which the voices and broadcast sounds begin to merge into an indistinguishable mix, then finally, as the view orbits into space and gives us a look at the entire globe, we hear all those voices as one signal broadcast into the universe.
I thought of the thousands of blogs of anguish and the surging efforts to find relief projecting their own part of that signal from the soul-depths of millions whose lives are represented in these communities of written, muted screams. Is that a sound of purgatory, hell close behind, the promise of paradise off in a spiritual vastness we are trying to reach with this sharp chorus? Or is it a sound of hope, a hard-edged song of all trying to exorcise the most powerful demons they will ever know?
It was overwhelming but also in a strange way comforting to be one whisper in that huge, surging flow of sound.
Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | 15 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:44:00 GMT
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Recently,
Melinda wrote a post about the role of forgiveness in her recovery and the difficulty she has had in forgiving her unrepentant father for abusing her in childhood. Reading this made me aware that I wasn't very clear in my own mind about the meaning of forgiveness. It is always mentioned as an obligatory part of recovery, and yet there has always been something elusive about the idea for me. How was it different from understanding past trauma, dealing thoroughly with its impact and letting go of the feelings of anger or hate? For I did learn to stop the constant blaming of present problems on those who harmed me when I was so young and unable to stand up for myself. Is that forgiveness, or is there something more.
I started thinking and reading to stop the confusion about the ideas and feelings I have about forgiveness. I quickly found that I was not the only one who had a hard time getting at the deeper meaning of this concept. It has different meanings in different religions and cultures, but there are a few major approaches I've found that helped me grasp more deeply the connection between what I had experienced and forgiveness.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Fighting Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags anger, blame, change, childhood, depression, forgiveness, harm, recovery, soul, spirituality, vengeance, victim, violence | 13 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:34:00 GMT
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Catatonic Kid (CK) and Isabella have had an inspired exchange of posts in the last couple of months on the use of language and creativity to engage depression, take away its power and release creativity. There are so many ideas and evocative phrases in these posts that I’ve had trouble picking out responses from the dozens that run through me. So I’m going to start with notes on writing, creativity and language and how they relate to depression – and see where these jottings take me.
To be clear, though, I can only talk about how these basic elements help me in recovery. CK and Isabella have their own truths about words and creative imagination. Each of us responds differently, and what works for me may not work for another. So this is my take, a rough rendering of my truth – maybe it’s like yours, maybe not. There are as many paths to recovery as there are people trying to figure this out.
My imagination is expressed primarily through writing, and it helps distance me from the symptoms of depression by portraying them as different characters intruding on my life. These are my visitors from the theater of depression. I can laugh at them, kick them off stage or manage their movements and cues like the director of a play.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Creativity | Tags catatonickid, changetherapy, characters, creativity, depression, healing, imagination, language, play, power, recovery, theater, underworld, words, writing | 10 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:55:00 GMT
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The other day I looked back at a couple of posts by Therese Borchard at Beyond Blue about the behaviors that distinguish men and women in their responses to depression. She quoted two different studies in posts she published about a year apart, and that’s how long I’ve been mulling over writing about this subject.
I’m less interested these days in explanations and studies than in looking directly at experience, but in this case important questions come to mind. What would set men and women apart in their behaviors? How much of the difference is due to our being conditioned to behave in certain ways to fit the social role of a man or a woman?
You can read the full posts and citations to the studies they draw on here and here. I won’t repeat the differing behaviors of men and women in full.
One of the basic contrasts is that men are more likely to blame other people or external circumstances for inner turmoil and to act out in overt, often violent or abusive ways. They self-medicate with alcohol, sex or other addictions and feel they aren’t loved or appreciated enough. Women are more likely to blame themselves and ask how they can be better as a spouse, parent or worker. They tend to self-medicate with food, friends and love and ask themselves how they can be more lovable.
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Posted in Explanations, Growing Up with Depression, Men and Depression | Tags abuse, alcoholism, boys, childhood, depression, disempowerment, friends, girls, medicate, men, mother, relationship, self, terrencereal, Therese Borchard, trauma | 7 comments
