Shining a light on mental health

You would love GetUp! I wish it had been around in 2004. It's one of those community campaign things that might have helped restore a Certain Someone's faith in the ability of ordinary people to make a difference to the chaos that surrounds us in the world. It was Margaret Mead who exhorted us to ""Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." GetUp! helps bring such people together, online and face to face, to write messages, send petitions and from time to time, to raise cash, for campaigns ranging from saving Tasmanian forests to ending mandatory detention for refugees, paid parental leave and an end to the insane unfairnesses of the Howard Government's Work Choices legislation. I imagine it would have been one of his most commonly bookmarked sites.

Now they're turning their focus on mental health. In lobbying the government for extra funding, by asking people to pay for a candle with their personal message on it, they're also giving people a voice: for their fears as carers or people who are hurting, or for the grief of those left behind after the ultimate agony: when suicide claims another soul who was lost in a darkness they despaired of ever escaping. The messages below are from the GetUp! campaign. There are some acutely personal tales here, each told in a mere handful of words. I hope they are read by our politicians - but I also hope that they are read by people everywhere who suffer depression in some form, and by the people who care for them. Please know that you are never as alone as you think you are, and there is always another option. Always.

• "This for all those who bravely face each new day not knowing when the present struggles will subside, but always believing in a brighter tomorrow. Believing that this too, will pass."



• "For everyone affected, but particularly my husband. My hope is that he realises how beautiful a person he is and that he feels hope for the future"



• " I am buying my candle for my eldest daughter who has bipolar disorder. She has also anxiety."



• " For anyone in need... and those who love them"



• "a light of hope for those in the shadows - you do not walk alone"



• " My friend Mal and my cousin's son Andrew both suffered years of depression before they took their lives. With better mental health support services they might both be alive today."



• " I was one of the lucky ones that was treated with respect and care when I went to the hospital, suicidal because of depression. I hope that one day, everyone in the same situation can share the same story. "



• " for my mum and for all who are suffering or have suffered from debilitating mental health issues"



• "Not just for the sufferers but also the carers; without these wonderful people no amount of money would fix our mental health system. "



• "This is for my mother who has suffered for years with depression and for those, less fortunate than her, who don't have the support of family and friends or private health cover to pay for what the public system doesn't provide"



• " For our son and for all young people who are not receiving the help which they desperately need. We want our government to provide them with the support they need to lead full, happy lives."



• "The black dog runs wild in rural Australia. You can only imagine the hightened sense of loneliness of those living in remote communities and farms. We need to reach out and let them know they aren't alone."

And last but not least: For Mikko, who was so afraid of our mental health system that he felt he had only one choice left.



You are still much missed, Rakkani

Meri

Various friends have been to visit Mikko recently and have seen that he has company.
Meri Sikstrom was a brave and outgoing woman in her youth - Mikko loved telling stories about how his mum used to try to freak his friends out by telling them how pissweak modern day porn was. She was successful in business, running a series of fashion stores until the recession of the early 90s that plunged Finland into years of economic strife.
It seems something changed after that, and Mikko never understood what or why, but he was confused by the woman who, in later life, refused to learn new languages as she moved around Europe, and began to 'hate' everything: Russians, Swedes, people who drink alcohol, her diabetes, the terrible pains in her stomach that no doctor seemed able to diagnose or cure. Her failing eyesight. The vitamin-laden diet and rigorous exercise that doctors said might help.
When he died, something in her inevitably died too. Perhaps it's no surprise that she is already no longer here.
We often didn't see eye to eye, but I have always felt far more sorrow for her than anger. Parents are never supposed to bury their children. And she had, I think, so few resources to draw on in her struggle to carry what she felt was a great burden these last 6 years.
I hope with all my heart that she, like Mikko, has found peace, knowledge and acceptance now that her spirit is freed of the ravages of a body too broken for it to find balance while so confined.
I can scarcely imagine Matti's daily existance. I hope he has the love and support of family and friends.
For all that our shared journey was often awkward, some of the most powerful moments of my 20s I owe to this broken family, and I will always wish that their way in the world had been easier.

Governments still don't get it on Mental Health

Don't even start me on the fact that a manifestly inadequate system leaves paranoid and vulnerable people so scared of what they might experience in the system that they outright refuse to seek help from it... As family and friends we love and adore them, but we lack the skills to give them what they need, and sometimes, the price of failure is unspeakable.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/we-have-waited-much-too-long-for-adequate-mental-healthcare-20110105-19g62.html

The worst thing about living overseas

Some of the most poignant memories I have from the days just after you died are from people who weren't able to be here. Chaals. Jarkko, Sarah J. D and her "fuckoff big bunch of bright red roses" which we all heaped on your coffin.

Jonathan's email from Dublin, which began simply "The worst thing about living overseas..."
I'm reminded of these days just now because of the emotional farewell of our friend Nick, once of Islendinga, on the death this week of his great mate Raynes, whom you knew. You would appreciate Nick's tribute:"You were a true believer in all things viking and punk..."

Jonathan was right, you know. In the four and a half years I have lived in England and Italy, being away for marriages and even births is hard. You aren't there for some of the happiest moments in the lives of the people you love best. But eventually you go home, and meet the nieces and nephews, the new husbands and wives, see the new homes, the photos, or you follow unfolding adventures on blogs and facebook.

But the worst part is not being there to say goodbye, being unable to share in the final rituals, the making sure that people have the means to be okay... or at least to begin to cope. Sharing memories and laying the foundations of the mental tributes we will take forward, becoming the people we will be, because we knew you.

So if you see Raynes in Valhalla (for the gods know that some fall in battle against foes that wield weapons far more deadly than a mere blade, so we know that's where he's gone), have a drink with him, for us. Because I will have to wait a long time to tell those at home how much I wished I could have been there, for a final drink with them.

Birthday wishes

Today, you would be 38, and as always, I find myself wondering what you would look like. As the texts roll around through our little band of 'friends who remember', I wonder what kind of bash it would have been this year. I wonder where you would be working, would it be with wine, or food, or both? What gorgeous new look would you be sporting - a hat, a waistcoat, some new scarf... I wish, I wish we could see you now.

I figured out a long while ago that if Mikko could have found a way to reconcile the beautiful and terrible within (to say nothing of the way he experienced these forces in the world), he'd have done it. I have wished, more times than I can count, that I could have worked out how to bottle whatever it was that makes the difference between climbing out of a hole, and not.

He is not the only one of us to have sat alone in the dark at the bottom of that hole... but he is the one of us that is no longer here. I look at this circle of friends - all the people who leaned on one another during those terrible first few months - and even while I miss him, I am relieved - proud, even - that the rest of us are still here. I think he's a bit of an arse for missing it all. But more than that, I wish he was still here, because the more birthdays he doesn't have, the further away he drifts from the rest of us. He is falling behind.

Because whatever it is, there IS something that CAN keep rising in the face of darkness, even when the ground beneath our feet rumbles, shudders and disappears. There IS a capacity for Life, the Universe, Divine Intervention, the power of the human spirit or whatever you want to call it, to keep inspiring us to reach beyond ourselves and toward the stars.

I wish I could bottle that, and toast you with it every year, to keep you going til the next one.
But I can't, so I will toast you and drink it for me, and for all of us still here.

Happy birthday Mikko.

Blowing away cobwebs, and drying old tears

I'm back today from my first trip home in two years. I don't know how on earth you stayed away from Finland as long as you did... 9 years ... now I know why you shook as we were landing. I was a jumble of tears and excitement on the plane.

For Anthony, the break has been even longer - four years and a half. All his siblings have moved back home to Invercargill since we've been away and have been busily bringing forth the next generation.

So there was much rejoicing, but I also found myself contemplating a collision of past worlds and present that bears retelling here.

Anthony's dad has been sober for more than 29 years. On my first trip to meet Clan Cundall, it was his 25th 'birthday' (its an AA thing.... it wouldn't work for me, and I know you used to bag AA - but perhaps you were just afraid it might work? Anyway, it does work wonders for my father in law). So we had a party.

You had been gone a year and a week and a couple of days. I helped hand around food and stood with Hailey, my sister in law to the end of the speeches, blinking back tears of pride for this man I hardly knew, but whose struggle I can vividly imagine.

Then I quietly fled, overcome by a huge sense of 'if only' and a desperate desire to not cry at someone's party.

Anthony's family doesn't talk much, but nothing escapes their notice and after about 10 minutes, my father-in-law came looking for me. I could hardly speak through trying to hold back tears.... but eventually I managed to say that I hoped it was okay if I was enormously proud of his achievement, because I can imagine ... because I used to know someone, who never found his way.

I was embarrassed. I needn't have been. Next came a great big hug, from this man who still goes to meetings each week, still has hard times of his own, and still mentors others. On this latest visit, as I watched my father in law playing with his grandkids in the afternoon, pouring the rest of us a glass of wine at dinner then slipping out to his meeting, I felt an enormous bout of respect. He hasn't conquered his demons either - maybe you don't, in this life - but he is determined to take them on.... one day at a time.

Han...

I bought myself the West Wing on DVD for my birthday in February. All seven series, twenty-two episodes per season. Throughout seasons one and two I was flooded with memories of Tuesday nights in Abbotsford, evenings of popcorn and "doona on the couch", of red wine with biccies and cheese, of hours-in-the-making risotto. And the West Wing.

Tonight, I'm on Season 5. "Han" is the episode about a brilliant young North Korean pianist who wants to defect. Anti-nuclear negotations are underway with the "Dear Leader's" government so the president says no.

"Han" is presented as the Korean word for a feeling that has no direct english translation. "It's a state of mind, of the soul, really. A sadness so deep that no tears will come. But still there is hope".

I have known this feeling in both its parts.

It's the "But still there is hope" part that makes us able to overcome even the most aching loss, the most gasping grief, the deepest sorrow.

It's the part that makes us able to keep the best of someone in the world long after they themselves have lost the courage to remain, that teaches us to smile through our tears, to keep the remnants of dreams and evolve them into something wholly our own.

I'm changing. I think you'd be proud of who I am becoming, (even if your pride might be a little dented at the idea that I have, by necessity, learned to live without you)... but that's not why I am going through this. You will always be the greatest love of my twenties, and this great grief is still painful. But I am in my 30s now. And I am going through it for me.

Standing in someone else's shoes...

...living someone else's life. Sometimes I wonder if the life I am living is yours - the one you would have lived, if you had lived, and if you had learned to overthrow your fear.

For so many years I was in awe of your worldly upbringing: the new years' parties at ambassadorial residences (when you were 7), the grade 6 trip to Greece, to say nothing of the authentically egalitarian fundraising that went on for years beforehand, so that no kid could be excluded by their family's lack of means. Your travels around the world, the summer internship in Vienna, medic days in the navy, the radical parents (o how times have changed) who ignored local scorn for the single mum whose husband had committed suicide and left their only child with her to care for, and who made jokes about porn to embarrass your teenaged mates.... I was in awe of your education, your five languages, your latin, your encyclopaedic knowledge of history, your citizen-of-the-world view of life.

I was in awe... of you.

Now, I suddenly find I'm living a life I could never have imagined for that tongue tied, monolingual, clever-but-narrowly-educated, ardent-but-illogical, most-of-all shy girl from the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne. I am working for the UN. I am living in Rome. I go to the beach on friday nights and drink cocktails while the sun sets over the Mediterranean and talk about world politics and why WFP still sells bottled water. I work with women who have delivered aid programmes in Afghanistan and North Korea and get training on how to withstand hostage taking from a bloke (I kid you not, his name is Gordon Brown) who had his leg nearly blown off in Pakistan last June.

I wish you were here. You would love this. You would love just knowing that someone you know is doing this.

I find it humbling beyond words to realise that it is ME doing this.

And on the lonely weekends, where I have only my own four walls to talk to, I understand the constant pressure to succeed and shine and impress, the desire to ring home for hours on end and never mind the huge phone bills; the urge to go outside, anywhere, just to be out of the house... I understand the utter frustration of being the "dumb foreigner" who can't speak the language well enough to ask for even the most mundane things. And I understand, as I never did before, how sometimes the longer you're away the harder it is to go home, and how easy all that makes it to stay up too late at night and have one too many vinos.

I understand the fear of failure because I have seen it reflected in my own eyes. (Sometimes, this job is so hard. I wonder if I can bear it.)

But I also know the joy of finding a laneway whose crooked shadows reveal unexpected treasures; the old guy in a leather apron who repairs shoes for a pittance (he's just off the Piazza of the Trevi fountain, btw); the pure grinning joy of being on a bicycle in the sunshine, ignoring the faceful of windblown hair in eyes and mouth, of discovering the special places that do some signature dish, or a piece of clever recycling, or that flavour of icecream you've never found anywhere else in the world and may never again. (Fig, by the way, is my latest favorite.)

I know the frustration of making a million shallow acquaintances and the glow of wondering if perhaps this person might become a true friend.

Life is hard. Sometimes it's achingly, crushingly, lonely and sometimes bad things happen that make us want to weep. Sometimes - too often - in the wider world, those bad things are done by people, to other people. But there is always some little thing, waiting around the corner, in the smile of a child, the love in a friend's voice, the arm of a lover, or just the glitter of sunlight on the river, that makes it all worth while.

And yet.... in our quest for glory its so easy to forget those things... I wish I knew what it was about human nature that drives us to forget the good things and go diving into the darkness, following it all the way to the bottom of the glass.

It doesn't have to be this hard - this impossibility that we make for ourselves with the messages inside our heads. We may not be able to change the circumstances in which we find ourselves, but we can always choose how we respond to them. The truly hardest part is remembering that, even while sitting alone in the gloom.

Staying there can be so tempting.

And perhaps this is the thing, the "one thing" that we wish we could name and bottle....we battered and imperfect souls who have somehow climbed out of the abyss and wondered how we did it when others we have loved - people we thought were stronger than us - have fallen beside us.

I wish, more than ever, that I had had back then the insight I think I may be coming into now. But perhaps that's what makes it so precious, this hard won wisdom, that it requires hard times in order to win it, and few of us come through that are able to see past our own scars.

With or without Saint Nick...

Nick Riewoldt was the number one draft pick in 2000. An auspicious year in many respects.

Last year, I was up at 6.30am to haul my aching head and queasy belly down to the Scholars Lounge (oh how you would love and loathe it!) to watch the Saints vs Geelong in the grand final. The pub was packed by 7am.

In the end, I think I would have to back my dad's assessment of the thing... Geelong have been THE dominant AFL side for the past 3-4 years, and for them to win 2 out of three was somehow fitting. But Lady McLaughlan and I were texting one another "like mad things that texts alot" right through the final quarter, before the Saints finally went down by 12. We both shuddered to think how you would have faced the day. Probably at colquhouns, probably messsy.

Its a new season now, and I am hoping against hope that the boys finally figure out how to avoid "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory". Although with Riewoldt out for an unknown break with a torn hammy, the job just got a whole lot harder.

Still, if the Blues can do it after sacking Fev, surely a side like the Saints can learn that there's is much more to football glory than just one man up front. Even a freak with an amazing boot.

The Saints will always have a special place in my heart... right beside my very own blueboys.

And its all your fault ;-)

Proof...

Italy has given me more than a new home, new job, and new haircut.

Against all odds, and to what I am sure would be your endless amusement, Italy has taught me to enjoy coffee.

Only ever "normale" (I tried caffe macchiato, or 'baby capuccino', but it's somehow not right), taken with almost as much sugar as my engineering colleagues put in theirs, and NEVER ever 'americano'. The proof is in the piccy above.

For the record, anchovies (fresh ones, or marinated, not those fuzzy hairballs they put on pizzas in Aus), possibly artichokes and even the occasional eggplant also make the culinary radar from time to time.

Just don't expect any revolutions on olives. Or tripe. And that goes double for herrings.