Depression Talk

I have two favorite movies — Silence of the Lambs (1992 Best Picture) and Annie Hall (1977 Best Picture). I know — I’m cheating, but I can’t pick between the two. Annie Hall has been called Woody Allen’s masterpiece and quite a lot of other less flattering things, but there are scenes in it that people with any type of depression will be able to identify with. They certainly show how nobody seems to have a clue as to what you are going through, even if they have good intentions or work in the medical profession.

The first clip is Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer going to his first therapy session as a child.

The next is an incredible cameo from Christopher Walken. Oddly enough, I can identify with both Allen’s and Walken’s character:

The next is Alvy and Annie stnding in line discussing depression, therapy and polo mallets.

Hoped these helped.

Canadians may be the but of some jokes (especially my brother who moved to Canada), but sometimes they put out some really good television. Unfortunatley, about a million Canadians and anyone living around the Great Lakes region often get SAD. As you’ve probably figured out from this post’s title, this is CTV’s look at seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Although light on special effects and lacking a background soundtrack, it’s heavy on information.

Why I like this clip:

• Tells the difference between SAD and winter blues (or winter blahs).
• Shows one of those lightboxes touted for SAD treatment and talks a bit about how to use one.
• Points out that SAD is NOT caused by temperature, but by lack of sunlight. I thought it was both, plus the pressure of Christmas/Yule/other holiday. Ooops.
• Dr. Ganz Ferrance, the doctor interviewed. I’ve never heard of the first name of Ganz before — I kinda like it. It was also comforting to hear a doctor talking about a medical problem that he himself has gone through, so he knows what it’s like.

Although this YouTube clip contains a lot of information on SAD and winter blues, it should not be used in the place of your doctor’s diagnosis.

Before you watch this, get used to hearing that little question mark put on the end of all sentences. I think USAToday claimed this verbal quirk began in Australia, but who knows who is to blame for this. Anyway, try to stay active and enjoy the clip.

Yes, it seems to be suicide week here on Depression Talk but if you’ve skipped over the other posts about suicide thinking that they’d be too depressing, please try not to skip this. It’s a little public service announcement video put together by Denver Film and Digital. It shows people from NFL stars to high school students get suicidal thoughts.

Hey — I have yet to meet one person who honestly never had a suicidal thought (not even for one second). We all have these thoughts. When you have any type of depression or chronic illness like migraines, you tend to dwell on these thoughts rather than try to get any help with either your mental, emotional or physical pain.

Warning: Snark Ahead

If it’s a little too touchy-feely for you, then just take a gander at the really sensitive and encouraging comments just below the video at YouTube itself. Wow. My favorite is from “herorev” who wrote:

“It doesn’t take courage to recklessly go along with the crowd and denounce suicide.”

I guess we know who’s going to be up for a Nobel Prize in Medicine next year, don’t we? I’m hoping that insightful comment on the human psyche was meant to be sarcastic. I’m as big a fan of sacrasm as you’ll ever find, but I tend to prefer an audience who isn’t going to die on me anytime soon, because I still need them to dig my sarcasm. Dude, dudette or whatever you are, “herorev” — first rule of brainwashing — don’t immediately get your followers to drink the Kool Aid during the first revival meeting.

I hate Christmas. It’s the most depressing time of year. Why? Because I used to work in retail for ten years. But one of the most comforting things about looking forward to this time of terror, really bad music and money worship is A Charlie Brown’s Christmas, which came out in 1965. It’s like a warm afghan and a cup of cocoa with marshmellows on a freezing cold day.

Although best known for the pathetic little tree, the introduction of the snazzy piano theme “Linus & Lucy” and for such classic lines as “DOG LIPS!”, one thing that does get lost is that Charlie Brown is deeply depressed at this time of year. This is his journey about facing the demon Christmas and trying to laugh at it. It is left to the viewer to know whether his depression lifts by the show’s end. Personally, I think it never lifted — but Charlie Brown did find a reason to keep on going and to smile even though he was depressed. Sometimes, that’s all we need.

Not being a Christian, I especially like that Charlie Brown was not impressed by Linus’ recital of the Christmas story. I always thought Charlie Brown grew up to be an agnostic.

Because this is a clip posted onYouTube, this is only the first seven minutes of the program. There should be links to the rest of the program in the little colored squares underneath the final “Play Again” frame.

Make no mistake — if you have depression, you are mentally ill. As I write time and time again, having mental illness does not mean that you are dangerous, insane or will one day be forcibly thrown into an asylym. Many people can read this again and again and it just won’t sink in. They will be afraid to get help because they will afraid to be ostracised by their friends, employers or community. Many others are afraid of the cost of getting treatment.

Provo, Utah (not known exactly as a hotbed of liberal thinking) last month held a Mental Illness Awareness Week and had a very well-attended march with the mayor, a lot of citizens, homeless advocates and mental health advocates participating. Although the title suggests that “stops traffic” means that there was some sort of confrontation, no confrontation occurred. The only problems was the breeze that kept blowing out the candles of the candle-lit daytime march.

I recommend this YouTube clip because it shows you that anyone can be mentally ill (and probably is), that you are not alone and that life does not come to a firey cataclysmic end when you are diagnosed with any type of depression or other mental illness. I was pleased to see that people brought their kids to this thing, to help teach them that mental illness is really no big deal and is a physical illness that can be treated.

The group mentioned is NAMI, National Alliance on Mental Illness, which is a great resource for learning about how to get help treating your depression or other mental illness.

Last time, we talked about whether or not depression could be considered insanity. That got me to thinking about love, because what is love if not insanity? And that got me to thinking about great pop hits from the 1980’s. (The perfect soundtrack to any crazy love affair.) And then I remembered Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right”, which contains the chorus:

You may be right
I may be crazy
But it just may be a lunatic you’re lookin’ for

So then I went to YouTube to find “You May Be Right”. And, as it turns out, all the embedding code is disabled at the request of Billy Joel’s record company. I guess I could have given up there, but now I had the bit and my teeth and I had hit full gallop.

So, I found the next best thing I could to the official video (which really ain’t that great, so you’re not missing much). I found someone who made a karoke video of the lyrics while having a really decent audio recording of the song. Instead of following the bouncing ball, we follow the light blue highlight. Because Billy Joel is such a hard singer to understand (excuse me here as I pause to roll my eyes skyward).

Even though depression does not equal insanity, the lines can get pretty blurred. One of the best things you can do to get some release from this blur is to crank a jammin’ tune up to full blast and spin around the room until you collide with the furniture.

Okay, I’ll ‘fess up front — the “depression cooking” is not what to cook when you are depressed or what to cook when you want to make someone depressed, it was hot, simple to make filling meals from the era of The Great Depression. My Gandmother passed some reciepes to my Mom, but they’ve mostly been forgotten. However, we have 91 year old Clara to remind us.

I find it hard to believe that Clara is now 92 (91 when this video was made in 2007). She looks better than I do. She certainly can wield a cooking knife a lot better than I do. If you can’t slice an onion and peel a potato like she can, please put the foody thing on a chopping board and slice away from you. Place the food item to be chopped on the board, and slice it in half as best you can. Then, cut those halves in halves. Keep repeating and you have a slightly safer way to dice and slice.

Clara’s YouTube cooking series, “Depression Cooking with Clara” has a lot that can help people with depression, including major depression:

• Cooking is creating: Being able to cook yourself a meal is a great accomplishment, especially when you’re depressed and either feel overwhelmed with figuring out what to make for dinner or eat too much crap food because it’s already made.
• Cooking is exercise: Every little bit helps.
• Cooking helps ease money fears: Odds are, as we plunge headlong into the next Great Depression, you don’t have much money. It’s good to not only see what you can make with inexpensive ingredients, but also good to hear how other survived the first Great Depression and now laugh about it.

Hope this helps.

Although you’re an intelligent lot, Gentle Readers, I do want to point out that you should never combine Xanax and wine — unless it’s in a song title.

This video was a labor of love, since U2 never made an official video for this song. So, what “U2’sBiggestFan” did is take clips from other U2 videos, turn it all black and white and make a spiffy intro. I think it works really well. But, even if you’re not fond of the video, you can always just shut your eyes and listen to it.

Bono must be no stranger to depression, if the lyrics are any indication, including this highlight:

You should worry ’bout the pain
That the pain will go away
You know, I miss mine sometimes

Vintage.

What is Xanax?

Xanax (spelled the same backwards as forwards) is the best known brand name for alprazolam, which is part of the benzodiazepine family. This is heavy-duty stuff and not to be taken just for the heck of it. If you are diagnosed with depression, your doctor or therapist will usually start you off with a milder medicine like Prozac before prescribing this stuff.

Xanax is especially good at helping people with panic attacks or contant anxiety. Sometimes, it’s also prescribed for people in the throws of post traumatic stress disorder. Xanax helps the furniture feel a lot more comfortable and helps you to get regular sleep. For some people, it also increases their appetite. My Mom is prescribed Xanax and has never claimed to get high off of it. Of course, she probably wouldn’t know what gettign high feels like, except for perhaps one time when she misread the directions on a bottle of cough syrup and giggled for about eight hours straight.

This blog might be a little somber lately since I haven’t been well and my Mom was hospitalized this week. Then again, the whole world is probably a bit somber lately. So, I looked for a snarky but kind of funny video which somehow has to do due with mental illness. And this was the best I could find. (Hey — it’s been a hard week).

This is one of those traditional YouTube video clips where someone is talking to the camera for ten minutes. The fellow in question is Dr. Breeding. I’m not sure what he has a doctorate in or even if Dr. Breeding is his real name, but he does that touch of maladjusted charism that makes for interesting YouTube viewing. He mentions a website called Mindfreedom.org several times, but I don’t know his association with that website. I’ve never heard of the website before today, so I don’t have an opinion about it yet.

Come to think of it, there’s a lot I don’t know…

WARNING: This video is NOT to be used in the place of your therapist’s or doctor’s diagnosis. Although I do agre that there are a lot of therapists and doctors who don’t know what they’re doing and look for pills as a quick fix, there are also a lot of doctors who DO know what they’re doing and can really help someone with major depression, bipolar disorder, post-partum depression or extreme grief.

If you work in the mental health field, then perhaps you might want to skip this video and go have a cookie, instead.

When Mary Jo Codey, the former First Lady of New Jersey, admitted she had postpartum depression, money was allocated to make educational videos about this powerful disorder. This YouTube clip is one of the results. In my humble opinion, it’s one of the best educational videos on the subject ever made, as it’s not fear-mongering and rather hopeful. It also has a very nice soundtrack.

One of the nice things is that they showed testimonies of women with postpartum depression from a few races. Generally, when I see a video or news story on post partum depression, it’s only white women who talk. Unfortunately, post partum depression is not a white woman’s burden. No matter what your ethnic background or genetic makeup, if you’ve got ovaries, you’ve got a chance of getting post partum depression.

Yet another reason not to have kids, folks.

My only quibble is that the video never explains what a “partum” is. What is a “partum”, anyway? Let’s look it up. The Free Dictionary says it means post partum“>”after parturition”. Great. What’s “parituition” mean? It’s a fancy word for “childbirth”.

I guess when you’re born, you’re parted from your mother. So, birth “parts ‘em”. Oh, never mind. Just watch the video and see you next week.

Granted, this YouTube clip is an advertisement for a book by Tina Zahn, but you don’t need to read the book in order to get the jist of the clip. In case you’re wondering what Tina was jumping from that July day in 2004 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, it was a big-ass bridge. Could she have survied the 200 foot fall into the river? Possibly, but since she wanted to die, her motivation for not drowing was pretty slim.

And why was Tina jumping? She had just been laid off right after giving birth and had inexplicable chronic pain. But most of all she had postpartum depression. I suppose the cure for postpartum depression would be never having a kid, but I guess that advice comes about nine months too late for most women.

I haven’t read the book but the clip is hypnotic. I’m going to assume the book is going to be a bit gung-ho Christian, since the publisher is Revell, which specialises in Christian-themed books.

If you’ve come to this blog, then most likely you are searching for a cure for depression. It would be great if this cure for depression was easily available, made you feel better and natural.
Well, keep on looking.

But laughing at yourself can certainly help lighten the load, at least for a few minutes. For some of us, a few minutes is more than we usually get.

One of my favorite living comedians is Chris Rock. He has the gift of taking very serious issues like depression and making you laugh until you pee. There also are some serious messages underneath, such as the illogic of self-medication. Here, in this classic clip back when he had his own comedy show, he talks to a doctor about depression. It’s far more memorable than most video clips on depression.

WARNING: The clip contains adult content and the f-word. (”A Chris Rock video with adult content and the f-word in it? How rare!”) Enjoy.

No matter what your gender, sexual orientation, nationality, medical condition or musical preference, we all face that moment in our lives when we suddenly transform into Gloria Gaynor. This is my absolute favorite version of “I Will Survive”, done in a weirdly classical way by pianist Richard Hyung-Ki Joo and violinist Aleksey Iguedesman. The sparks don’t start to fly until about a minute and a half into the video, but then you (hopefully) won’t be disappointed.

“I Will Survive” was written by Freddy Perren and Dino Fekaris. Although it seems like the world’s first paramecium sung it, it was only released in 1978 and was one of the select handful of songs that made the tragedy of the Disco era worth while. Although the lyrics are about a love break up (and that’s depressiong enough to think about) they are flexible enough so that you can kind of make the song fit to whatever meaning that you need it to fit.

This is a song you can shout at to those little nagging voices in your head or to the disease of depression itself. Or you can do it to annoy the neighbors or your co-workers, which can be uplifting in and of itself. Enjoy.

When I lived in England, one of my favorite actors that I’d hear on the radio or watch on TV was Stephen Fry, known best in America as the quinessential butler Jeeves to Hugh Laurie’s bumbling Wooster. I thought him one of the most elegant of actors with classic English self-control, never at a loss for razor sharp sarcasm. Little did I and just about everyone else knew that he had manic depression (bipolar disorder). He even tried to commit suicide when he starred in a successful play in London’s West End.

He and the BBC made a documentary about manic depression in 2006 which everyone else in the world seems to have heard of but me. Keep in mind that “bipolar disorder” is not a common term in England. They prefer to use the older name, “manic depression.” Some people in America find that name derrogatory, but there is nothing mean implied in the use.

Even if you don’t know who Stephen Fry is, you can still trust him as a host into what it’s like to be a manic depressive. He turns a lot of complicated concepts into basic English (British English, as oppossed to American English, but you’ll soon get the drift, Yanks.)

Joining Stephen Fry in this clip is British pop star Robbie Williams, who is one of the most recognized celebrities in the UK. He has major depression and makes a vivid contrast to Fry’s manic depression. Kudos to whoever nabbed this documentary and put it up on YouTube.

Remember when Radiohead had hair and made CDs as opposed to downloads? Perhaps I’m showing my age. However, their breakthrough song “Creep” sounds just as brilliant today as when it first aired in the early 1990’s. It’s especially poignant for anyone with clinical depression, in my humble opinion, whether you are a man, woman or hermaphrodite.

When you have clinical depression, you don’t feel as if you fit in anywhere. You feel like an alien dropped you off on the planet somehow. You also have a very well developed sense of self-hatred, which is also apparent in the lyrics of this song. You can also dwell on comparing yourself to others, making yourself even more miserable by magnifying your shortcomings. You also mistakenly believe that you are the only person in the world who has these feelings and fears.

I’ve always wondered what the love object thought of this song. Perhaps they sing the same thing to the person they idolize.

Enjoy.