conversations about medicine and life
Annette Rose
We can’t outspend them, so we’ll have to out-think them” – Emirates Team New Zealand boss, Grant Dalton
Were he still alive the great mythologist Joseph Campbell would have been proud to see New Zealand, our small country at the bottom of the world, win the America’s Cup in yachting against all odds. This most epic of sea battles whose origin dates back to 1851 bears all the hallmarks of the Hero’s Journey myth, Campbell’s subject of interest.
Heather Bauchop
Writer Andrew Solomon explores depression in Noon Day Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Recounting his own experience, he weaves a personal and cultural analysis of the illness. His is a sophisticated and deeply human discussion of our vulnerabilities. Solomon rejects distance, embracing personal stories and the wonderful intimate complexities of sufferers and their lives. Solomon also looks at how factors such as poverty and culture enter into diagnoses, something that has been largely unrecognised, even by sufferers themselves. Poverty, too, is a dark place.
Solomon’s insight is profound and has the power of an inside view. When Eric Wilson talks about the need for unease, he is doing so from a position of privilege, one that does not recognise that, for many people, what he could call melancholia or depression (depending on the person), leads to deprivation and loss – not to an ability to challenge injustice. Sometimes it is only treatment enables a sufferer to survive. When Peter Kramer talks about depression it is from a comfortable clinician’s point of view. Solomon, however, brings his light touch and careful nuance to the language and experiences of depression. [Read more…] about The intimate complexities of sufferers
Heather Bauchop
There is wide debate about the cultural role of melancholia. American academic Eric Wilson writes of the dangers of bland candy-coloured happiness brought about, he says by swallowing pills. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008) Wilson asks what we are to make of the American ‘obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, for the innocuous smile? What fosters this desperate contentment?’
What would be the effect of ‘annihilating melancholia’ – that ‘major cultural force, a serious inspiration to invention, the muse behind much art and poetry’?
Sarah Harrison
Otago University’s Department of Preventive and Social Medicine recently hosted a guest seminar by environmental and occupational health scientist Professor Tord Kjellstrom: “Climate change impacts on Health – the underestimated effects of increasing environmental heat in already hot places”. Professor Kjellstrom spoke about projected increases in global atmospheric temperatures in relation to various carbon emission scenarios, and how these changes are likely to impact on health.
Heather Bauchop
Off Prozac after a bit over a year, for a time there were colours and movement. But not the ease that I assumed came to other people. I still felt out of step, uneasy in the world. Looking at life through glass, trapped outside on an exposed ledge. And then over time – months or perhaps years – there was the fog and the rattle of chains and the familiar cell. Looking back, I realise that twenty-five years have passed, twenty-five years where I have made my way in and out of fog, with some years encapsulated in green and white pills, and some years marked by the awareness that the fog might roll in, and underneath all, was that the rattle of chains…. (depression is a hydra demanding over-writing and mixed metaphors, while eluding all). Even with the pills, the chains are still there, I am just more aware I am carrying them and that some of the weight is shared with modern medicine. Depression is a kind of knowing – there is no unknowing.
Sue Wootton
At 99, Sir Lloyd Geering (thinker, theologian, mathematician) has published a new book, Portholes to the Past. In May, he appeared at the Auckland Writers’ Festival, interviewed by John Campbell. I was lucky enough to be present in the audience, and highly recommend listening to the podcast of their conversation here. Towards the end of the interview, commenting on the current state of the world, Geering said:
I have lately sensed a widespread apprehension for the future … We’ve lost that feeling of safety in the world… [and now with terrorism] there’s a feeling of insecurity that was not there at the beginning of the 20th century.”
In Geering’s view this wobble stems from losing, in the transition to a post-Christian secular worldview, a vital framework for supporting meaning in our lives. Geering suggests that one way we can begin to heal this loss is through establishing new rituals through which we can express our values and reconnect as a community. Geering said:
I think we’ve got to return to some festivals of nature. I think it would it be a good thing to celebrate the shortest day of the year, for example, as a turning point.”
[Read more…] about Celebrating the turning points: solstice in the south
