Category: Depression
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Talking Publicly About Trauma
Anna Spargo Ryan has written a riveting and widely appraised book called The Paper House, and I’m thrilled for her success (if not a bit jelly) because I’ve followed Anna on Twitter for a few years. She is intelligent, witty and an advocate for mental illness awareness and I was particularly keen to read her…
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Never Judge A Book By Its Cover
Picture the scene. I’m at the local pool, in the fast lane even though I know that I have no right to be there after two weeks of culinary debauchery and enough alcohol in my body to pickle every organ, but I don’t feel too guilty because there’s some cheeky geriatric in there, too, and…
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Friendship, And How Twenty Minutes Can Be A Lifeline
This was going to be a post about how I’ve finally found my doctor, which is a big deal in my life because I’m a bit of a messed up, menopausal, hypochondriacally-challenged shell of the former woman I was most some of the time. So finding a great doctor almost feels like I’ve won the…
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The True Test Of Parenting Is Unconditional Love
We had an impromptu visit last night from one of Kurt’s friends. This boy’s last impromptu visit was on Christmas Day, and this impromptu visit was to apologise for it. This friend of Kurt’s is a bird with broken wings who makes my heart bleed at an haemophiliac rate. He bought with him a bottle…
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The 5 Ways I’m Restoring My Mental Health
Taking the ‘body’ theme a step further from my last post, I’ve been feeling a lot better in my body recently. And when I say ‘in my body’, what I’m really talking about, is in my head. This image came up under ‘positivity’… which is obviously why I used it…PHWOAR! But first of all, (and…
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Mental Illness: Crazy, Bad or Misunderstood
How did you spend your Sunday afternoon? I spent mine mine devouring a riveting series that I missed on the ABC last year about a mental health hospital in Sydney. That’s just the kind fun person I am. But what’s interesting, is where once the subject of mental illness was a taboo one, locked firmly…
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Anxiety and Never Being Able To Truly Leave The School Playground
I talked about the joy of anonymity in a post last week. Anonymity is a joyous experience if you seek it, but it’s not much fun when that self-imposed isolation is provoked by anxiety and fear. View image | gettyimages.com Kitty Flanagan, a middle-aged female Australian comedian, recently admitted in an article in the SMH…
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The Anxiety Of Flying Solo
So when I went all bravado in my last post, in that carefully crafted mumbo jumbo about grabbing this trip to Europe by the balls and allowing happiness, rather than anxiety back into my life, I was lying. Anxiety by Leo Hidalgo at http://www.flickr.com Not intentionally; but I was kidding myself. Which is a shame,…
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Self- Esteem And Learning To Love Yourself
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/108113005 Learning to love yourself is one of life’s toughest challenges, which is unfortunate because it affects so many other facets of the life we end up living. No matter how many times our esteemed leader at ‘Bad Parent Group’ raps my knuckles for nagging Kurt about his behavior – because as she says, “that…
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I Know There Are Worst Things Than Parenting A Teenager With ADHD, But Sometimes It Doesn’t Fe
#2350944 / gettyimages.com http://www.tickld.com/x/father-finds-horrifying-letter-from-his-son-this-is-gold The story above was doing the rounds on social media last week. I get that it was meant to be funny and to most people it would have been. I did smile at the end. Bitterly. I read through the first part of the letter and a shiver ran through my…
LOUISA SIMMONDS 