Richard Anderson
“I want some help with a friend of mine because she has mental health problems and you have your own lived experience of mental health issues.”
The whispers of the past pick holes inside me as the conversation continues and I despair, as I listen to my friend’s story, that another person, somewhere out there, has to go through this stuff.
“Does she have a good relationship with her GP? Does she do the basics right? The eating, sleeping and exercising bit? Does she have any drug issues with alcohol or other drugs? What is her support network like? Are her family and friends close? Does she have a job, money coming in? Does she live alone or with people?
[Read more…] about The conversation that includes everything

How many New Zealanders are receiving chemotherapy this week for cancer and other conditions? The number must be in the thousands. Yet this common medical intervention can never be a commonplace experience, evoking as it does such wildly fluctuating levels of both hope and anxiety.
Doctor wellbeing has been in the news lately, with the recent ratification by the World Medical Association of a new clause to the Declaration of Geneva (the modern Hippocratic Oath). The change was proposed and promoted by Queentown’s 
I’m a doctor who has been writing poetry for about a year. My poetry writing was born out of a need to more deeply understand the world. Sometimes this need to understand the world arises from a frustration, like a dry seed head lodged in a tramping sock that rubs and chaffs and spoils an otherwise leisurely walk. Sometimes my need to understand stems from my lack of inner comprehension. By exploring the dusty and cobweb filled recesses of my inner self I often uncover a truth about myself and where I fit in the world.
Recently I talked at the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival as part of a panel of health practitioners who write. Called Word Balm, our session set out to explore what language contributes to the practice of medicine. At the end of a wide-ranging conversation, chair Barbara Brookes called for questions from the audience. A woman raised her hand.