Essay - Corpus - Page 15

Promises: Mental Health in crisis

19 June 2017 2 Comments

Tracey Holden

In New Zealand, a total of 36,684 referrals were made for people needing mental health crisis assessment during the 2015-16 financial year. Nearly 13,000 referrals were made for people needing an overnight stay – some patients being referred multiple times.

Yet there are just 590 beds in acute mental health wards nationwide for people in crisis.

Recently I felt compelled to sign a petition on actionstation.org.nz calling for a National Inquiry into Mental Health Services. Up until then I had been like the silent majority of New Zealanders who have glossed over stories about how our mental health services are in crisis.

Solidarity comes when our stories align.

Pursuing darkness: musing on depression and creativity

19 June 2017 1 Comment

Heather Bauchop

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight
on the empty sky.”

I have always loved writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s opening to her novel A Wizard of Earthsea. It is the perfect epitaph. In these five lines is the enormity of life and both the vitality and emptiness of existence. Le Guin confronts the value of turning to life’s turmoil and recognising that only in each imperfect moment are we alive. Thinking about Le Guin’s trilogy and the meaning we attribute to our lives, I wondered about my life and the intersection of meaning, voice and truth.

When I was 25 I was diagnosed with ‘long-standing dysthymic disorder’ (also called dysthymia – a beautiful word meaning ‘ill-humoured’ that now wears the tedious label ‘Persistent Depressive Disorder’). I was (perversely) quite happy about this – this wasn’t depression, but a persistent low mood. The diagnosis seemed less dramatic, like being in a valley rather than at the bottom of a pit. The low mood (the low mood – something distanced from the self) responded to Prozac – a new drug at the time, requiring a $200 visit to a psychiatrist to authorise the prescription. It is not until recently I realised that such a diagnosis could be a life sentence, indeed a sentence I’ve been serving out for twenty-five years.

Housing and health

19 June 2017 Leave a Comment

Barbara Brookes

Housing is often in the news as a cause of ill-health. Cold, damp and overcrowded houses lead to illness, and various initiatives from Housing New Zealand, in partnership with the District Health Boards, aim to promote Healthy Housing.

We are now told that heating bedrooms overnight to at least 16 degrees will protect us from raised blood pressure and increased risk of heart attack and stroke. This finding may delight power companies but it increases budgetary stress on poor families where expenditure on heating may seem a luxury.

[Read more…] about Housing and health

A Medicine Buddha Sand Mandala

12 June 2017 3 Comments

Sue Wootton

The woman who greets me in the foyer of the Dhargyey Buddhist Centre smiles and puts her fingers to her lips. She leads me into a large room with high, ornate plaster ceilings where a man is bent at work over a table. It looks for a moment as if he is painting with a fine brush. In fact he’s rubbing the serrations of a slim brass conical tube with the bone handle of an old carving knife. The tube is filled with sand the way a pen is filled with ink, and from its nib flows a stream of brightly coloured marble sand. Tibetan lama, Venerable Geshe Losang Dhonyoe is making a Medicine Buddha Mandala, a healing gift to the people of Dunedin. [Read more…] about A Medicine Buddha Sand Mandala

Bowel cancer: an ABC of definitions

12 June 2017 1 Comment

Jenny Powell

A is for Anxiety

Out of the blue, an insidious private festering was developing in my husband’s bowel; a solitary spread of cells in slow time.

When the blue eventually darkened, the GP recommended tests. The hospital didn’t. The GP demanded. The hospital agreed. It was likely to be an ulcer. All the same, you never know. What is it that you never know? No one says.

An MRI scan was the first test. We arrived early, checked in with the receptionist and sat in the waiting room.

“William Pelvis 10.15”

Risk watch/wrist watch

12 June 2017 1 Comment

Koenraad Kuiper

Poems are sneaky but each poem is sneaky in its own way. We could say the same about melanomas. And so, sneakily, just like that, a little volcano on the left arm turns wrist watch into risk watch…