Ideas to Help - 19 July, 2104 FROM THE COUCH BY RACHEL KELLY

Sleep is such an important Key to Calm that I am returning to the topic. It is particularly relevant to those dogged by anxiety and depression: when we are sleep-deprived, our emotional brain (the amygdala) becomes more active and we can no longer regulate feelings effectively, locking us into a downward spiral of over-sensitivity and yet more anxiety.

We established last week that insomnia itself is not the problem per se: it is worrying about not sleeping that feeds our insomnia and chokes us with stress like angry ivy covering a ruined house.

The question is then what to think about instead. For me, reciting a poem is one answer. In repeating Wordsworth or Yeats, Herbert or Emily Dickinson, I soothe my hurt mind and tell myself a more positive story. I feel less alone, hearing a new and welcome voice in my head which teaches the virtues of acceptance and hope rather than struggle and despair. I’ve been particularly calmed in the last few weeks by George Herbert’s ‘The Flower’. One of my favourite lines is ‘Grief melting away/ Like snow in May.’ Another favourite is ‘Who would have thought my shrivelled heart/ Could have recovered greenness.’ Herbert is my friend in the small hours of the night. I hope he might become yours.

http://nottinghillpost.com/news/kellys-keys-calm-7/

Ideas to Help - 15 July 2014 - Huffington Post

How Poetry Can Prove a Lifeline

Would you read poetry when you are suffering from severe depression? What if you don't have the energy to cross the room? This is something people have asked in relation to my memoir Black Rainbow, which describes how poetry proved a lifeline during my seventeen-year battle with depression.

I didn't have the energy to read a book when I was at my worst, but I could listen. My mother would read to me by my bedside, or recite poems she knew by heart. Words were what I knew, what I had always relied on: loving poetry when I was growing up, writing essays at school and university, and churning out copy as a Times journalist.

'My grace is sufficient for thee; my strength is made perfect in weakness,' she would repeat from Corinthians. And even as a bored child at church I always appreciated the poetry of the Bible. In The King James Version the sound and rhythm of the words is often as beautiful as their meaning: take this from the famous Psalm 23: 'He maketh me lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.' You are lulled by that gently running stream of language.

During my depression I clung to the words I heard and repeated them like mantras. Another mantra was the last lines of Arthur Hugh Clough's poem 'Say Not The Struggle Nought Availeth,' which was a favourite of Churchill during the war: 'In front the sun climbs slow; how slowly/ But westward, look, the land is bright.' These lines began to reverse the malicious narrative in in my head. Rather than wishing to die, I would recover, and indeed be stronger. There might even be a point to the suffering.

Of course, I couldn't have recovered without medication, and I couldn't have fully understood the context of my illness without undergoing therapy later. But drugs need time to take effect, and there will be a long gap between starting to get better and being well enough for therapy. Indeed, there is a period of a depressive episode in which nothing seems to work. It is then that you need the most willpower, and, ironically, the most belief in your own ability to recover.

In the middle of the night, and subject to the double sense of isolation which depression and wakefulness at that time brings, I would repeat snatched lines of poetry to myself. I wasn't alone after all.

It was only when the antidepressants began to work that I could concentrate on full short poems. I read Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is himself thought to have suffered from a bipolar illness. As I contemplated poems such as 'The Windhover,' 'Pied Beauty,' and 'As Kingfishers Catch Fire,' it was as though nature was announcing itself and restoring me to my former sensitivity. Hopkins's ecstatic language bathed my own dormant powers of expression in light. I could newly appreciate the simplest things, such as the motion of clouds across the sky. Take these rolling lines from 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire:' 'Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-/ built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay gangs they throng; they glitter in marches.' There were words there I'd never seen, but they seemed to communicate their meanings through their very exuberance.

The most important poem I read during my depression was George Herbert's 'Love (III)'. The first lines sent a bolt of electricity through me: 'Love bade me welcome: Yet my soul drew back,/ Guilty of dust and sin.' The idea that my soul was 'guilty of dust and sin' seemed the most perfect description of what I was suffering. Why did I have the right to be depressed when I was blessed with a loving, healthy family and good career? It seemed Herbert and I had been to the same place and spoke the same language, albeit that his visit was centuries ago.

In the last lines of the poem, the compassionate voice of 'quick-eyed Love' asks the sufferer to 'sit and eat.' This was a particularly appropriate welcome for me: I hadn't been able to eat properly for a while.

Herbert may well have been diagnosed with depression had he lived today, and his poems are only with us because he intended them for the emotional and spiritual wellbeing of others. Shortly before his death he sent them to a friend, requesting he publish them only if he believed they could 'turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul.' I would certainly count myself as among those dejected souls that his words have healed and even validated.

Great literature can reassure you that what you're going through is serious and real. If you are having psychological or emotional trouble, it is often invisible to others. The written words of others are testaments to the reality of what you are going through.

There's even scientific evidence that poetry changes the way we think. The arrangement of poetry, even the clearest, has different conventions to continuous prose. This presents enough of a challenge to get our brains working differently.

Research by Philip Davis and the neuroscience department of Liverpool University discovered that readers of Shakespeare, when they came across an unusual but totally comprehensible grammatical construction, would show a spike on the graph of their neural activity. (1) Even though the readers understood what was being said, their brains were shocked into activity. It is this activity which takes your mind off the spiral of negative thinking which depression induces. In this way, poetry can work in a similar way to mindfulness techniques, forcing us into the present.

Black Rainbow began life as a series letters and emails to friends, recommending them poems to suit their pressing emotional needs of the time. With the book's publication,strangers have been sending me poems that have helped them. It gives me hope that so many are aware of, or are willing to try, the restorative effects of poetry.

1) 'Syntax and Pathways,' by Philip Davis in Interdisciplinary Science Review Vol 20, issue 4 (2008)

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rachel-kelly/how-poetry-can-prove-a-li_b_5583756.html

Ideas to Help - 11 July, 2014 FROM THE COUCH BY RACHEL KELLY

Holidays are here: in theory, I should sleep more soundly given I no longer have to fret about the school run. But like many who battle with anxiety, insomnia remains a constant challenge. I can have trouble getting to sleep, trouble with waking in the night, and trouble waking up too early. I crave the deep, oblivious sleep that helps keep my Black Dog at bay, what Shakespeare called ‘the balm of hurt minds’.

The reassuring news is that learning to sleep is a skill like any other. My psychiatrist has helped me understand that not sleeping very much is not the problem. The danger is worrying about it. That is what can stop you from sleeping and make you ill. Our bodies are cleverer than our minds. When we are truly tired, we will fall asleep. Sleeping is a natural action. You don’t have to do anything to get to sleep. It is not humanly possible to stay awake forever.

But the one topic that mustn’t be on one’s list of worries is sleep itself. It is the ultimate paradox: to achieve sleep, you have to abandon the imperative to achieve it. I also believe in taking more practical steps and practise what doctors now call good ‘sleep hygiene’. All the clichéd approaches help: a completely dark room (I put up blinds); a milky drink (dairy products are rich in tryptophan, an amino acid that also acts as a hypnotic); doing nothing too stimulating before bed (a wind-down routine); and going to bed at roughly the same time every night. Here’s hoping your hurt mind receives the balm of a good night.

Ideas to Help - July 9, 2014 FROM THE COUCH BY RACHEL KELLY

So we’ve dealt with the pesky topic of school reports (last week’s column – the gist: ignore them) but July also brings Sports Day. Naturally the only race that matters is the Mother’s: as one wise ten-year-old said to his mater in her spiked running shoes, it’s all about taking part – as long as you win. I didn’t take part. Competitive sport is not my thing. We all know we need to exercise/ the endorphin highs/ health benefits/ blah blah blah… But we must all find what works for us. For me, it’s dance. As I left my Santhosh class this week (Sanskrit for happiness), here’s why it is a key to calm. Mastering the steps requires concentration, much like poetry, and that stops me worrying. I feel natural and unforced moving to the beat, just as children dance instinctively, and indeed also love poetry, rhyme and rhythm. Dancing is the closest any ‘exercise’ can come to being an art form. My fellow dancers are warm (literally), supportive, and encouraging: it’s therapeutic to be part of such a group. I’m too old to ‘win’ or ‘lose’. And yes, you’ve guessed it: I’m off to suggest a Mother’s Dance at my child’s school …  santhoshdance and santhoshretreats.

GUEST BLOG - 7th July 2014 - Jo Johnson

Can you shrink your Smirch?

Jo Johnson is a consultant neuropsychologist with a special interest in MS. Here she explains the thinking behind her forthcoming book, Shrinking the smirch, and introduces a new Facebook group where people can share practical tips for living with long term conditions

 Shrinking the Smirch is a new workbook for helping people cope with physical and mental health challenges as well as everyday stress. 

The workbook asks you to imagine that the source of your troubles is an imaginary creature called a smirch. A smirch means a smudge that makes your life less good than it could be. Here is Kevin, my smirch, in the workbook there are many different shaped and sized smirches, they are all different.

This sounds like a strange idea but externalising your mental or physical health challenges is not a new idea. Perhaps Winston Churchill's Black Dog which represented his depression is a good example of this.

Shrinking the Smirch firsts asks the reader to imagine what your smirch might look like and what it makes you think, feel and do. The book includes a yearbook of examples from other people. 

The smirch has lots of equipment it uses to trouble humans, like contact lenses to make everything look rubbish and a fatigue pipe to exhaust you, but it's most powerful weapon is its smirchiepod, an ipod to play tunes that upset. Popular tunes include ‘You will fail,’ ‘You are less good than others,’ ‘Everyone else is coping,’ ‘You will only get worse,’ and ‘What on earth are they thinking?’

The workbook asks you to notice your own negative spirals that lead you to behaviour that is not helpful like withdrawing, over-thinking, emotional eating or too much wine. So at the beginning of the workbook, the smirch has the most power and a large bag of accessories and the reader has an empty bag.

Shrinking the smirch then takes you through twenty shrinking tips drawn from approaches like CBT, ACT and mindfulness-based approaches to help you reduce the smirch's impact on your life. Each of the twenty tips include something to put in your bag to help you shrink your smirch. Chapters include ideas for managing tricky thoughts and feelings, time and fatigue management, as well as some commonsense ideas about diet and exercise and mental health. Thus by the end of the book, the reader has a bag full of strategies and the smirch, whilst still there, is much smaller.

Whilst its tone is intended to be fun it tackles many of the serious themes that crop up for people with anxiety, depression and other psychological symptoms. The last section allows you to create a personalised revenge plan of the ideas in the book that you feel will most help you.

Shrinking the Smirch can be purchased from amazon or Speechmark RRP £16.00 and is written by Jo Johnson, a consultant neuropsychologist and illustrated by Lauren Densham.

Ideas to Help - 3 July 2014 - Depression Alliance

There is hope

Written by Rachel Kelly on 2 July 2014

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There are no side-effects, it’s free, and it just may help someone. It was with this in mind that I travelled to Maidenhead a few weeks ago to host a Healing Words workshop for the dozen or so who had gathered as part of a Depression Alliance support group. An hour later, we had laughed, we had cried, and dare I say it, the bits of healing poetry and prose that we shared had worked some magic

Of course, in the battle we face with our own Black Dog, what works is different for everyone. For me, poetry helps: it has been at the heart of my recovery from two major breakdowns, or ‘depressive episodes’ as psychiatrists prefer to call them. The first time I was bed-ridden for six months, the second for a year. Others will find other strategies that help them – it might be baking or gardening, and actually I find them helpful too (as well, of course, as therapy and drugs on occasion). But I’m a passionate believer that words can heal. Apollo was the God of poetry as well as medicine. There’s even some neuroscience that proves that the concentration required to read a poem can help root us in the present, stopping us from regretting the past or worrying about the future. (Sounds familiar?)

Here are some one-liners to get you started but once you’ve begun, you will find bits of verse and prose that answer your own needs, not mine. I would start with some healing mantras or short lines: some of my favourites are‘This too will pass’ (from Corinthians); ‘My strength is made perfect in weakness’ (ditto) or ‘Westward look, the land is bright’ – from the poem ‘Say not the Struggle Naught Availeth’ by Arthur Hugh Clough. When I feel the loss of all hope, I keep repeating these lines and they help change the dialogue in my head to something more positive.

If you’re feeling well enough, then try the poem ‘Love” by George Herbert, with the opening lines: “Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back/ Guilty of dust and sin”. That’s what depression feels like to me: I’m guilty of “dust and sin”. But in the poem Herbert says allow “Love” to talk to you instead, develop a more compassionate voice. It’s what CBT tries to do, but far better expressed. Next up “Invictus”, supposedly recited by Nelson Mandela to fellow inmates when he was incarcerated on Robben Island. It has a very good opening description of the darkness of depression “Out of the night that covers me/ Black as the Pit from pole to pole…”. The last two lines are helpful for trying to regain your own sense of self, so often crushed by depression. “I am the master of my fate/ I am the captain of my soul”. Finally, try “Hope” by Emily Dickinson. Here’s the first verse:

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all

There is hope. And I hope these poems help you as much as they’ve helped me.

Ideas to Help - 2 July 2014 - Huffington Post

Stressed Parents: Why Are Women More Anxious Than Men?

'Dear Sebastian,' the letter began. 'Thank you very much for my Birthday Present. I love 'Angelina Ballerina' books. Love Yore God Daughter Eleanor'.

As any mother reading this would expect, the likelihood of my husband sending the present himself, or knowing that his goddaughter liked Angelina Ballerina, is that of me going ten rounds at the pub. (That last bit wasn't intended to be a gender stereotype. I am teetotal.)

For the truth is, while women have made huge strides in the workplace, many men have not found the same inspiration at home. Domestic responsibilities, by which I don't just mean childcare but the million tiny acts of kindness, arduousness and remembering that make up life at home, are largely still done by mothers. Rather than scrupulously dividing these little labours, many women just get on with it.

For some, the pressure of trying to achieve perfection both at home and work is proving too much. In the early days of my career and motherhood I wanted to make good on the bounties of feminism while also taking traditional roles into the modern age. I wanted to be independent and successful and to work long hours, but I also wanted to have the same bond our ancestors might have had with their children, forged by constant closeness, uninhibited by twelve-hour-a-day jobs. Fair play to those who have managed to excel in all their roles. I found it health-threatening.

Over the past seventeen years I suffered two breakdowns and have had a long-running battle with depression. This was the subject of my memoir, Black Rainbow. With its publication, I lost the option of concealing my mental health track-record from other mothers at the school gates (should I wish to keep it secret from them in the first place). But in most cases the responses have been encouraging. They have also been alarming: many have confided that they too suffer from high levels of anxiety and depression.

The World Health Organisation assures us that "Overall rates of psychiatric disorder are almost identical for men and women." But there's no denying more woman come forward to talk about their depression.

Figures put together by the mental health charity SANE show that in 2013 almost 475,000 women were referred for counselling or behavioural therapy compared to only 274,000 men. Earlier surveys according to the Mental Health Foundation suggest that anxiety is almost twice as common among women as men. You could well say this reflects men's traditional reticence to admit to their problems, or that men manifest stress differently from women. You could equally come to the conclusion that women struggle more than men.

What then is the answer? I have been forced by mental ill-health to impose limits on the way I live. I've replaced life in an office with freelance writing and voluntary work in prisons and hospitals supporting those with poor mental health: I am entirely the beneficiary, given the well known benefits of trying to help others.

I have also been forced to reassess my relations with others: we know women are especially vulnerable to depression given the pressure they put on themselves to maintain friendships and other relationships. My new attitude to all important relationships, including that with my husband and friends, but especially with my children, is to aim to replace 'good' with 'good enough'. In 1965, when women had yet to become a sizeable presence in the workforce, mothers spent 3.7 fewer hours per week on childcare than in 2008, even though women in 2008 were working almost three times as many paid hours, according to American research. (1)

These women were like I used to be, ferrying children to ballet classes, watching every match, supervising homework and responding to every need of the priceless modern child. I've learnt that not only can I not manage; my hothousing parenting and ensuing stress may not have pleased my children, either. A 1998 survey of American children conducted by the Families and Work Institute found that 10 per cent of the surveyed children wanted more time with their mothers, 15.5 per cent wanted more time with their fathers, but 34 per cent said they wished their mothers were less stressed. (2) I've certainly been trying to put less pressure on myself of late. It won't magically stop me getting in a flurry about birthday presents. But maybe, from now on, I'll get my husband to have more of a hand in picking them.

References:

1) All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior, Virago (2014)

2) Ask the Children: What America's Children Really Think About Working Parents by Ellen Galinsky, William Morrow (1999)

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rachel-kelly/stressed-parents-why-are-women-more-anxious-than-men_b_5546856.html