conversations about medicine and life

Real live zombies: “Walking Corpse Syndrome”

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Brett Waggoner

Jules Cotard (1840–89)

There are many people today who enjoy zombie films and television series like The Walking Dead. If you are one of those people, a certain question may have crossed your mind more than once: What would it be like to walk around dead? You may be surprised to know that there are a small group of people who have got closer to this experience than you might think possible. Are these people really brain-eating zombies? No, they are not. Rather, they are people who have suffered from a rare psychological disorder called Cotard’s Syndrome.

People diagnosed with Cotard’s Syndrome (also known as the Walking Corpse Syndrome) hold to the delusion that they are dead or no longer exist. Patients who have this delusion also report that their internal organs (heart, intestines, brain, etc) are gone. Some even report that they can smell their flesh rotting. If being absolutely convinced you are dead isn’t bad enough, they usually suffer from depression or schizophrenia before the delusion that they are dead sets in. Cotard’s Syndrome can be considered a nihilistic delusion, which is another way of saying that people who suffer from the delusion feel that there is no purpose or meaning to life.

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Every morning, so far, I’m alive

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Chris Prentice

Professor Wendy Parkins was professor of literature at Kent University in the UK before returning recently to New Zealand. Her newly published memoir, Every morning, so far, I’m alive, offers an intimate and honest exploration of living with depression, phobias and OCD, and how these conditions have affected her in personal, professional, family, and social life. The title comes from American poet Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem, “Landscape”, and is a resonant epigraph for Wendy’s story. Her book is a gift to those who might find support in recognising shared or similar struggles, and at the same time to those who’ll appreciate its broader concerns with how to live in the world, and to live well. It’s also about how to place ourselves in the world, and how place shapes our ‘selves.’

Parkins’ interest in everyday life — in how people live — had informed her earlier academic cultural studies book, Slow Living (2006), co-written with Geoffrey Craig, about the Slow Food movement. They refer to slow living as an “attempt to live in the present in a meaningful, sustainable, thoughtful and pleasurable way”; and to “slow arts of the self” as processes whereby “we can ‘desanctify’ parts of our self-understanding”. In Every morning, so far, I’m alive, the process of ‘desanctifying’ self-knowledge isn’t an intellectual enterprise, or a conscious life-style choice, but an intimate challenge.

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The poetry of getting back to living

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Gail Ingram

Contents Under PressureI’m from Christchurch. On my website, I introduce myself by saying ‘writing saves my life’. Before 15 March 2019, I was going to try and persuade you how this was so. I wanted to argue that I had evidence of this, that in the experience of writing Contents Under Pressure, my soon-to-be published poetry manuscript, I supported my damaged children in the wake of the Christchurch earthquakes, and, in doing so, kept them living.

I wanted to communicate some of what it felt, as a mother, to support teenagers who were suffering severe mental stress, and how necessary and large the task was to work our family back to health. I wanted to be there; attend the hours and days and weeks in doctors’ appointments, school appointments; listen and learn and implement coping strategies, model them; and most of all, through it all, give love and survive.

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“Poetry and Mindfulness”

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Sue Wootton

Poetry and Mindfulness

Whatever the advantages of the internet and the many technologies we use to leverage it, there is growing evidence that we are paying a price in distraction and in neurological changes that are affecting our ability to concentrate, to follow lengthy arguments – and perhaps even to empathize with each other.”  – Bryan Walpert, Poetry and Mindfulness.
We citizens of the so-called developed world are living through a rapidly changing, fast-paced and information-dense time. We can trace the effects of this in our daily language. In a relatively short length of time, the digital age has appropriated certain key words, turning once qualitative terms into quantitative ones, and stretching the former meaning of words like ‘connection’ and ‘friend’ almost to breaking point. (I think also of terms once the province of human anatomy and communication, like ‘digital’, ‘fingerprint’, ‘face recognition’ and ‘voice technology’; and the emotional words ‘like’ and ‘love’.) Ostensibly we are the most connected and informed generations ever, yet loneliness, stress, cynicism, anxiety and depression seem endemic.

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Mothering: the ideals … and the real deal

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Cushla McKinney

juggling womanAs a child of the 70s and 80s I was raised with the idea that women could (and did) do anything, and always eschewed the ‘traditional’ feminine trappings of makeup, skirts and heels. As I got older I became aware that this slogan was frequently understood to mean that women should do everything, including juggling work and family, but it was not until I started thinking about whether – and if – I wanted children that I fully realised the extent to which social attitudes towards motherhood remain among the most potent and pervasive constraints on female (and male) identity and freedom.

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