Beyond Blue: Five Humor Strategies? Make That Ten ...

Therese Borchard recently posted this item on her blog, "Beyond Blue."

I love Therese and her blog, but I realize first of all, she's a nicer person than I am, and secondly, that the mentally ill mind works in strange and mysterious ways.

So with that in mind, here is my AMENDED list of five humor strategies to help you find laughter every day ...

In the "America Fitness" article I quoted yesterday, I found a list of humor strategies by Joyce Saltman, a Gestalt therapist from Southern Connecticut State University, who believes laughter is a prescription for survival. Here are some of her recommendations on how to find laughter everyday.

1. Have a place devoted to humor. Designate a section at work as a place for a new joke of the day, everyday.

I have whole areas of my house that make me laugh. The kitchen. The laundry area. The spare room stacked floor to ceiling that's just "one good afternoon" away from being transformed into a beautiful den.

2. Surround yourself with positive people. Avoid people who are constantly negative. They can diminish positive energy.

Or people you can laugh at. They are usually easier to find, too.

3. Buy clothes that make you smile.Wear the brightest clothes you can find to brighten your day and others around you.

Clothes that make you laugh work. Twenty years later, my mother and I are still cracking up about the time I brought her this beautiful sweater to try on but it had this weird ... bulge in the front. Our hilarity knew no bounds when I discovered I'd grabbed it from Maternity by mistake!

Clothes that make other people laugh work, too. So does laughing at other people's clothes. See #2.

4. Have a VCR readily available. Make tapes of the funniest TV shows you can find. When you or a friend need a pick-me-up, play them.

Watch the recordings of all the soap operas you made in the '80s. Laugh at everyone's clothes and hair. See #2.

5. Make a list of 20 things to do in a day that make you happy. Every couple of months, update this list and make an effort to do at least 10 of these items each day.

Make a list of 20 things in a day that make you laugh. Look in out-of-the-way places. Count the number of times the local news anchors stumble over words. Watch their graphics, note all misspellings, and email the station with your edits. Turn on your set's closed captioning and watch the voice-recognition software struggle with proper names. Read along -- out loud.

More suggestions as they occur to me ... this could be good.

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Jezebel.com: Is Blogging Better Than Prozac?

From Jezebel.com:

Yesterday on CNN.com, Anna Jane Grossman tackles the very heart and soul of personal blogs. Grossman says some may question why people share their deepest thoughts and feelings with strangers online, but the better question is: Why not?

Grossman writes, "Overeating, alcoholism, depression — name the problem and you'll find someone's personal blog on the subject." Grossman spoke to Stacey Kim, whose husband died of pancreatic cancer. "Kim curled up next to her husband and held him as he succumbed to a long battle with pancreatic cancer," Grossman explains. "The next morning, she went online to post about the experience."

Stacey's emotional blogging helped her cope. "Right after he died, people kept asking if I was in therapy," she says."I'd say, 'No, but I have a blog.'"

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(Thanks to Beyond Blue for the link ...!)

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How I Spent My Nervous Breakdown

In her column this morning, Therese Borchard of Beyond Blue talks about the importance of humor in healing. I think you can tell you're on the road to recovery when you can find something in your circumstances to laugh about.

With that in mind, here is how I spent my nervous breakdown last year. Handwork helped calm me down ... and the pictures I designed helped me find something to -- if nothing else -- smile grimly at ...

The "Snap Out Of It" picture came out of a book of Mary Engelbreit cross stitch. The folks at group loved it so much I still think I need to make one for the group room/s!

The one below I designed myself. I saw the quote on a bumper sticker and it cracked me up so throughly it was the first project I started on. Which is pretty astonishing, actually, when you consider the only thing keeping me alive at the time was that I couldn't stop crying and shaking long enough to kill myself ...



My dad's been quoting this line from "The Last Angry Man" for years, whenever it seems the universe is conspiring against you. I designed this one myself, too ...



This one's not funny, but I did design it and stitch it up for the people in the outpatient program that saved my life ... and the folks that had yet to come in and sit in those chairs. The quote comes from Joshilyn Jackson's "Gods In Alabama":


And I made this for my therapist -- it's a favorite quote of his:

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Beyond Blue: Mothering When You Are Depressed

Therese Borchard writes in Beyond Blue:

As I sit down to write my Mother's Day post, I am filled with both tears and goose bumps.

Yesterday at the park I talked to a fellow preschool mom in length about her father, who left for a loaf of bread when she was one year old, and never came back. He had many breakdowns, was hospitalized about 20 times, and was eventually treated for bipolar disorder. The family has never discussed it. She only knows all this because as a young child she found the divorce papers and read them. Now she worries about the genes that predispose not only herself and her siblings to mental illness, but also her children.

I hugged her, feeling a piece of her pain, and trying to keep from tearing up (it's been awhile since I've cried at the park!), as I looked at David climbing the ladder to the big slide. How I wish I could protect this little boy of mine from the torment of mental illness. I am so afraid for him because he (more than Katherine who luckily got Eric's brain) seems to have inherited my fragile chemistry and acute sensitivity. I want him to be happy more than I want just about anything else in my life.

Then, just a minute ago, I read the very moving message from reader Elemgee on the "If You Can Dream" post, about growing up with a mother who suffered from a severe, clinical depression, but was undiagnosed at the time--and about how she and her siblings would sit in their living room next to the stereo speakers, singing along to the refrain "you are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here!" based on the poem "Desiderata" I posted a few days ago.

"We kids were isolated from many of our next-door-neighbor peers," Elemgee wrote, "mostly because their own mothers kept them from playing with us. They got together and talked about our mom, making fun of our house being so messy, her occasional alcoholic episodes during the day, her late night suicide attempts and subsequent hospitalizations. Then the kids would get on the school bus with us and repeat their insults, taunting us in public, humiliating and shaming us for something over which we had no control.

"The truth was, we were often terrified when our mother acted out, and sometimes we even hated her for being so different, but when others picked on her, it was one of the most painful things in our lives, because we knew that deep down inside, she loved us and was trying to be a good mom."

Now that I reread it, I am in full-blown tears.

So much suffering. In the midst of so much love.

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Beyond Blue: 30 Ways Motherhood Is Like a Mental Illness

Therese Borchard writes in Beyond Blue:

Motherhood provides a host of useful lessons on how to live with mental illness, and vice versa. Here are just a few things the two have in common (in my opinion, of course):

1. Five years into both of them, plastic surgery is your only way of looking young again.

2. There's only one boss, and it's best if that's you.

3. In both, you have to handle a lot of crap.

4. Both require deep breathing.

5. Time Outs are encouraged--especially for Mom (psych wards stays count for this).

6. Both feel like you're being pecked to death by a bird.

7. You must learn on the spot--pop quizzes are thrown at you every half-hour.

8. Both drive you insane (of course).

9. Both are full of surprises and force you to tear up any script you may have written (how things were supposed to go).

10. They require a support system, discipline, and a ton of self-control.

11. You have to get out of bed in the morning for both.

12. Bedtime often spells relief.

13. Both take a chunk out your heart but give it back to your soul.

14. You never graduate from or complete your responsibilities.

15. You get used to frozen dinners, canned soup, and spats with your spouse.

16. You must sort out tons of advice, much of it horribly shallow and not at all useful.

17. Both benefit from lots of sunshine and time at the park.

18. They are tolerated best with a sense of humor.

19. Both can make you fat if you're not careful.

20. They are more challenging to the soul than the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. (I don't think he was either.)

21. A bad day of either is more physically exhausting than an Olympic-distance triathlon.

22. After only a few years they transform you into a more compassionate and loving human being, possibly a candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize.

23. With them comes a lot of wisdom and patience, possibly world peace.

24. A love for your kid(s) keeps you going through both.

25. You have to strike that difficult balance between keeping busy but not too busy.

26. The mornings and evenings are typically the hardest.

27. Stress complicates thing. Best to avoid it as much as possible.

28. Comparing yourself to others will paralyze you.

29. There's no going back.

30. Your best is all you have, and that's good enough.

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Beyond Blue: J.K. Rowling's Suicidal Days

(I am so grateful to Therese Borchard for being the lone voice to say what I think. Knowing that I'm expected to live for my daughter and feeling, because it's not enough for me, she probably would be better off without me ...)

While I know that severe major depression and cycles of depression with bipolar disorder can be triggered by life events, they don't make the depression. Depression, as I have said 100 times on Beyond Blue, is a brain disease, just like cancer or diabetes or arthritis. It is not caused by a divorce, or a bad breakup, or a job failure, just like a person doesn't become diabetic when her husband is caught having an affair (unless she stuffs her face with Ben and Jerry's to cope, that is). Even if those things precede a severe episode.

"The thing that made me go for help was probably my daughter," said Rowling, referring to the then-infant, Jessica, reports the Telegraph. "She was something that earthed me, grounded me, and I thought, this isn't right, this can't be right, she cannot grow up with me in this state.”

While I appreciate her point here, it once again deceives the masses on the complicated and disabling bio-chemistry, on the neurological shut down, that happens inside the brain of a person with a serious mood disorder.

Despite Rowling's suicidal thoughts, it's possible that her depression wasn't that severe. Because when a person wants to die as much as I wanted to die, no one thing is enough to save her. While I knew that I had to hang on for my kids, I also wanted to disappear for my kids. My self-esteem was so low that I wanted to get out of the picture so that they had a shot at a normal life without the baggage of a whackjob mom.

My God, think if everyone just had to think of their kids to save their lives! There would be so many less suicides. I truly wish that was all you needed to think about. But I know that this disease is so powerful and manipulative, that it finds a way to persuade you to end it FOR THE GOOD of your kids.

I applaud Rowling for speaking publicly about her darker days, for saying this: "I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed. Never. I think I'm abnormally shameless on that account because what's to be ashamed of?"

I congratulate her on telling anyone who suffers from depression to "go and get help." But I warn people of the shallowness in this one profile: that falling down with a breakup and picking yourself up for the kids can itself send a superficial impression of what, exactly, this brain disease is capable of.

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