Mental health - Corpus

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?

The recovery journey: “In My Room” by Jim Lucey

28 May 2018 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

There is no health without mental health.” – Jim Lucey (Irish Times interview, 2017)

Dr Jim Lucey is an Irish psychiatrist who has spent over three decades working in his chosen field of healthcare. In his 2014 book, In My Room: the Recovery Journey as Encountered by a Psychiatrist, Lucey outlines some of what he has learned during this time. He calls the book, which is framed as a collection of anonymised case studies, “an authentic description of the journey from distress to recovery as I have witnessed it”.

The room of the title is both the actual room of the clinic and the metaphorical ‘room’ of the mind. We all visit the former from time to time, but we must be able to live permanently in, or with, the latter. Lucey is compassionately interested in the various ways his patients learn to manage that challenge. He has much to share about the nature of recovery and of keeping well. [Read more…] about The recovery journey: “In My Room” by Jim Lucey

SSRIs: the battle of the narratives

7 May 2018 2 Comments

Heather Bauchop

British documentary film maker Katinka Blackford Newman’s 2016 book, The Pill That Steals Lives, opens with a nauseating story: a mother kills her eleven year old daughter and ten year old son, and then turns the carving knife on herself. She wakes in the secure unit of a private psychiatric unit convinced that there are cameras trained on her every movement. She’s on suicide watch and diagnosed with psychotic depression.

The mother in the story is Katinka Blackford Newman. But it turns out she didn’t kill her kids – she hallucinated killing her kids. Newman had had a toxic reaction to a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant.

The hauntological nature of tears

30 April 2018 Leave a Comment

Shanee Barraclough

Hauntology is a concept coined by philospher Jacques Derrida, in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, to describe the way that we all construct the world differently, out of what most haunts each of us from the past.

I became aware of this concept of hauntings, or the ‘hauntological’ nature of things, while immersed in my PhD and teaching counsellors-in-training. I became particularly interested in the emergence of tears in the counselling encounter and started looking at feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad’s descriptions of the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements. My hauntological inquiry into tears took me beyond their visible presence to tracking the ghostly traces of tears and the ghostly entanglements that make such traces visible.

Living well and telling the tale

19 March 2018 1 Comment

Elaine Reese

Who says teenagers don’t talk? I can assure you that they do, at least when you seat them on a sofa across from an interested and patient interviewer who hangs on their every word. They talk – oh yes, they talk. In our research on teens’ life stories, we have some 50-page transcripts of teens talking about their lives.

What do they tell us? Quite a lot.

Rhododendron Day

16 October 2017 4 Comments

Sue Wootton and Doug Lilly

2017_10_15 Botanical Gardens 01

Tick tock, tick tock. Ours is a busy culture built on clock time. With so much to do and only 24 hours a day in which to do it, no wonder sleeplessness, anxiety and overwhelm are some of the signature complaints of, well, our times. But there are other ways of living in time. There is seasonal time, for example.

Thus I could tell you it’s October in Dunedin, or I can throw a blanket over that clockwork time-bird ticking in its cage and go outside. What’s the time? Here it is: it’s seven-tui-in-the-kōwhai. It’s the time of the full-blown orange poppies, the time of pear-blossom-like-snow, the moment of wisteria-begins-to-purple. It’s the era of the slightly tattered tulips and the wind-blown dilapidated daffodils.

And most vividly of all, it is the time of the rhododendrons, a city-wide seasonal blaze of beauty, celebrated annually at the Dunedin Botanic Gardens (home of the world-renowned Rhododendron Dell) as Rhododendron Day. Season’s tidings, then, from the colour-full, spring-full south.

[Read more…] about Rhododendron Day