Memoir - Corpus

Depression: back from the dead and celebrating life

10 September 2018 2 Comments

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. The following article is an updated version of one originally posted on this day in 2016.

Mark Thomas

Like a shorter, slower version of the great All Black John Kirwan, I have decided to speak up about depression. My life is fantastic and I get immense pleasure from my love of sport, travel and the amazing people around me. But here’s a simple statement of medical fact: I have experienced major episodes of clinical depression since the age of 18. I don’t know how that works, how the same mind that allows me to drink in life like an intoxicating nectar can also turn dog on me and drag me to the depths of emotional hell, but that is the truth of it. I do know that depression can afflict anyone, regardless of how good or seemingly enviable their life is, just as cancer, heart disease or any other illness can strike anybody, regardless of how happy, famous or wealthy they are.

Mother language medicine

3 September 2018 5 Comments

Tui Bevin

Tui and her father Kaj Westerskov in Naenae 1955 — Tui Bevin and her father Kaj Westerskov in Naenae (New Zealand) 1955

My father lost his English three times. Once, he reverted to his mother language when he was very ill in intensive care while visiting Germany, but his English returned as he recovered. However he lost it twice more before he died in Dunedin Hospital ten years later.

Dad grew up in Denmark and lived in New Zealand for his last fifty years. His enjoyment of words, languages and bilingual jokes is an important part of how I remember him. It’s not surprising therefore, that the issue of language emerged when I wrote a series of poems about my parents.

“The Language of Kindness”: on being a nurse

30 July 2018 2 Comments

Cushla McKinney

After twenty years as a nurse in the British National Health Service (NHS), Christie Watson is leaving medicine to pursue a literary career. But with the generosity that characterises the job to which she has devoted much of her life, she has taken the time to share what it has taught her.

In The Language of Kindness: A Nurse’s Story of Life, Death and Hope, which falls somewhere between memoir and manifesto, she offers readers insights into an essential but undervalued profession and provides a blunt assessment of the way in which decades of political decision-making have compromised the heath system in general, and nursing in particular.

Song for Rosaleen: “the heartbreak that is dementia”

25 June 2018 3 Comments

Sue Wootton

A memoir, by definition, is composed of memories. It is almost unbearably poignant, then, that Song for Rosaleen is a memoir that exists only because of memory loss. Written by Wellington oral historian and editor Pip Desmond, it documents her mother’s slide into vascular dementia and the effects of this on the entire family.

Perhaps this sounds grim – and of course in many ways it is. But Song for Rosaleen is gripping. It is at one level a personal account, at another a meditation on memory itself, and at yet another an erudite critique of how our society treats the frail, dependent and voiceless. For this latter reason alone it should be essential reading for everyone who works in health: management, non-clinical and clinical staff alike.

The conversation that includes everything

18 June 2018 6 Comments

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?

Out of the garden

11 June 2018 3 Comments

Grace Carlyle

In autumn I began cutting back the Japanese anemones as they finished blooming. Then I became ill again and the last few still in flower were left to look after themselves. The flowers fell, the tips of the canes where they had been turning to white cotton. This held a novelty for a while, but then they began to look shabby.

I felt the same way, heading into winter barely able to walk from one room to another. Shabbiness in the garden was not a high priority. Keeping myself clean and fed was.

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