Posted by JohnD
Sat, 01 Nov 2008 22:34:00 GMT
Storied Mind has had the special honor of receiving the Arte Y Pico award from both Melinda at Melindaville and Clinically Clueless. It’s wonderful to receive this recognition from such amazing and truly fearless bloggers. As many others have said, the community of mental health bloggers has given me so much more, and more generously, than I could have imagined when I started this project last year. Melinda and Clueless hold nothing back in sharing the often searing experiences that have shaped their lives and that they have bravely faced and overcome. I thank them both from my heart.
The ‘Arte Y Pico Award’ is given to five blogs at a time based on their creativity, design, interest of content, and contribution to the blogging community, regardless of language. To learn more about this award, click here. Part of the honor of receiving it is passing along the award to other blogs that honestly seek out the truth of their authors’ experience.
Like many in this position, I’ve taken a while to look again at the moving and powerful blogs that have meant so much to me. It’s more than hard to pick just five from among so many to recognize with this award.
Here are the remarkable bloggers I have selected – in no special order. Each of them has made an enormous contribution to our understanding.
Read more...
Posted in Connecting, Creativity | Tags A Never Quiet Mind, Arte y Pico, award, Beyond Meds, Clinically Clueless, creativity, Inside Candy, Melindaville, mental health, Mental Motes, wellbeingandhealth | 9 comments
Posted by JohnD
Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:35:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by ssh at Flickr
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.
Read more...
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
Some Rights Reserved by Juria at Flickr
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 | Tags blogs, Carl Sagan, Contact, depression, hope, hurt, paradise, purgatory, song, sound, universe | 14 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:34:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Lady Orlando at Flickr
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.
Read more...
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, 20 Sep 2008 21:08:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by jairo at Flickr
Marissa wrote a post at Wellsphere that made me pause. She was objecting to the idea found in Richard O’Connor’s book (Undoing Depression
) that “I am not my depression.” She interpreted this as an evasion of accountability for one’s actions. The depressed behavior that harms relationships, for example, can’t be dismissed as something you’re not responsible for – it has a real impact because of your behavior, and you remain accountable for what you do. And so, in this sense, she insists: “I am my depression.”
I agree with the need to be accountable. I have hurt those around me by being emotionally absent, self-involved, unable to talk, irritable or in a rage, or behaving badly in any of the ways that are symptomatic of depression. But O’Connor’s intention with this formulation, I believe, isn’t aimed at releasing people from accountability. It’s a way of reminding those suffering from depression that they have an illness, that there is hope for recovery, that they should not confuse the symptoms with the totality of their human identities.
I think a better way of putting this, however, is another sentence that appears frequently in books about how to deal with this condition: “I am more than my depression.” In other words, my identity isn’t defined by behavior linked to the illness, but it also says that I am my depression, in part.
Read more...
Posted in What Depression Can Do, Connecting, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags belief, depression, hope, identity, imagination, intention, marissa, recovery, richardoconnor, treatment | 10 comments
