What Resonates

When I was 15, and I got my official diagnosis, I went on a quest to learn about and understand my illness and to fight that isolation where it seemed no one shared all these feelings I was having, all the suffering.

This was 1996, so I went to my local public library and checked out every book I could find about depression,  I think it was maybe 5 or 6.  I not only read them carefully, I had a grey spiral notebook, my depression notebook, and in green ink, I transcribed sections of the books that resonated with me. 
Eventually, I would sneak books into the office I was interning at over the summer, and when no one was around, I would photocopy passages. 

I still have that grey notebook, where I pasted my hospital bracelet from my in-patient hospitalization and wrote my first essay about Self-Esteem.  If I had it on hand, I’d post it! 

Over the years, as my illness has resurfaced in adulthood and come back with a vengeance, I have been through all kinds of treatment, with many suggested readings, and also from my own initiative, now with the assistance of google, searched for things that resonate.  I did make a trip back to that same public library in 2008, and found a book I really liked.   I’ve never kept a compilation of things that stayed with me, that resonated, but this is my best effort to comb my email and facebook posts to recreate it.  As I said in my opening disclaimers, this is not a blog to dole out of advice, while some of the links may offer guidance in a way I do not wish to myself, they resonated with me for what felt like was a unique voice or fresh perspective and maybe they will for you too.      

Hyperbole and A Half
My absolute favorite.  No one has ever captured what it feels like quite like these comics, and Allie Brosch does it with such an amazing sense of humor.  Her two blog posts on depression are beyond excellent, and easy clicks away, but I also bought her compilation in book form, which I have regularly returned to for comfort.   Word of warning, I tried to show it to a non-depressed loved one once to see if it could help explain what I couldn’t, and she said she didn’t get it.
Adventures in Depression
Depression Part Two
The Book Version – Hyperbole and A Half

What It’s Like in a Mental Hospital
I hope to get into my own experience in more depth in an upcoming post, but when I was searching for how to explain hospitalization to others that seemed accurate, this felt the most real.  

Empathy Cards
At the same time I went through my 10-day in-patient psychiatric hospitalization, a close family member went through a very intensive surgery.  The difference in how the world reacted to our stays and discharges was of course, incredibly stark.  And I too, wanted to be sent cards, flowers, food, chocolates.   Maybe not a Get Well Soon balloon, but honestly any expression or acknowledgement would have been appreciated.  It always felt that the shame, the embarrassment, the discomfort of recognizing my half-assed suicide attempt, always made it better in people’s head just to say and do nothing. 

Emily McDowell is a cancer survivor, and as detailed in this Slate Article, the misguided attempts to be express sympathy during her illness led her to create these Empathy Cards.  They are brilliant, and some are definitely designed for and applicable to those of us suffering from mental illness.    

Understanding Validation: A Way to Communicate Acceptance 
As I detail in my Dissecting a Diagnosis post, there was a period of time where my mental health providers decided I had Borderline Personality Disorder.  And although that diagnosis never resonated with me, what I learned about validation, and the harm of the invalidation I experienced in my youth, was incredibly helpful to me.  This article helps me to understand not only how to try to recognize why some feedback stings and guide the people around me to be more supportive, but also how to employ these strategies to the people I care about when I am supporting them (yes depressed people are not so self-absorbed that they can’t be great friends to other people!)      

School of Life:
– The Importance of a Breakdown
– How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill
The first time I watched The Importance of a Breakdown video, I wasn’t sold on it’s messaging, but the more I re-watched it, the more it struck a chord.  Your brain/ body breaking down in order to break free from the toxic status quo.  Anyways, I love it and scoured the School of Life for other helpful videos, but the only other one that stood out was How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill.  I think maybe British health care providers are viewing things differently than American ones, and I like some of the messages, without endorsing the point of view wholesale.   The School of Life shares written text on these two topics in its Book of Life, but I recommend watching the videos directly first (on YouTube links above), they are extremely well-done and a pleasure to watch.      

Personal Boundaries in Relationships: Stop Saying ‘Yes’ When You Mean ‘No’
Re-reading this article now, it’s hard for me to recall exactly why it struck such a chord for me at the time I read it.  We used the quiz at the end (if you scroll down) during a session at one of my stints in partial hospitalization.  We did a role-play where a woman was taking her broken car a to mechanic and he was talking down to her.  And instead of cowering and calling her husband, she asserted herself.  And from it, I made this connection between boundaries and self-esteem.  That if I let other people dictate everything, if I am constantly accommodating the world around me, I was losing a sense of myself.   It’s something I need to take more time to unpack and revisit.    

The Spoons Theory and Depression
The Spoons theory has become extremely popular when communicating about chronic illness and has been embraced as helpful in explaining the intense fatigue, lethargy, and overall lack of energy that accompanies depression.  I’ve dealt mainly with depression, but at times when I was not depressed, have also had recurring problems with my physical health and energy levels, and found the spoons analogy helpful in both instances.  This article does a straightforward job of explaining the theory and it’s application to depression with an infographic to boot!      

Is it Me or My Meds? 
This is the book I checked out and read from my hometown public library in 2008, and then ordered off Amazon in 2015 and re-read a few times since.  It’s a compilation of first-person narratives of people suffering from mental illness’ complicated relationship with taking medication, particularly antidepressants.  It was published in 2006, and since then, there has been a growing indictment of Big Pharma’s role in promoting depression as an illness, including the book, Manufacturing Depression, which I found interesting.  But Is it Me or My Meds? resonated with me for letting those most affected explore the topic themselves and offering at times, conflicting points of view.  I will definitely cover this topic and my own conflicted feelings in a future post.    

Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
When I first picked up this book, it didn’t seem to me that I would be able to relate to the author.  She was married with a devoted husband and loving child, wrote for a living (which strikes me as incredibly privileged), and suffered from a social anxiety that differed markedly from my depression.  But the more I read, the more I laughed out loud, which I was so thrilled to be doing and couldn’t put the book down. I love her narrative, the window into her ridiculous thoughts, even when they strike me as annoying.  

When Things Fall Apart
In recent years, I have come to resent the intense efforts to push Eastern philosophy onto me as the answer to my depression.  As a first generation American with Eastern roots, my feelings on the interplay of these topics – culture, religion, mental health —  are intensely complicated.  But when someone told me to read this book drawing from Buddhist thoughts in 2012, I did, and I remember underlining passages and it resonating with me deeply.  The title also has an eerie significance for me, as it was a book report for the classic novel “Things Fall Apart,” by Chinua Achebe that I couldn’t get myself to write that was a hallmark of my depression in my teenage years – an irony that wasn’t lost on me at the time.  

That is it for now.  I’ll be keeping better track of things for the future!