Snapshots, Books, and the Countdown: Five, Four, Three

I feel like there's so much to say; like we haven't talked in ages. 

(1) Parenting

My six-year-old granddaughter draws a stick figure picture of herself running away from my son. In the picture he's counting down: Five, four, three, two, one. Bedtime. He posts that he has no recollection of doing this, counting down.

I remember it. He and his brother are six, their sister, four.

Me: Better be in bed at the count of one.

There's a thrill to this intervention, despite the total lack of consequences.

The magic of counting down to bedtime is that it is a competition. Can I beat the parent? Can I make it to bed before he says, One?

And a kid needs a good reason to run, not walk to bed, because running is fun and walking is not, and it is much more fun jumping into a bed, feeling the fluffy pillows and covers receive you.

Probably the best reason for the countdown, however, at least from the kid's perspective, and maybe my son knows it, maybe he doesn't, is that the parent is going to slowly follow you to the bedroom, making this feel dangerous if you lose, and as soon as he catches up, as you dive into bed one step ahead, he'll snuggle his much larger face into your hair, and then your neck, and say,

"I love you. Now go to sleep."

(2) The Stinking Flu  


The primary care docs are compelled to prescribe the flu vaccine, and why not, it is cheap and sometimes effective. When it isn't effective, that's when everyone is up in arms, or shall we say, dead to the world, useless in bed.

My brain on the flu:

reading flu test

The season is almost over, but still worth advising that if you have a fever and flu-like symptoms, go to the doctor, not that he'll be paid, a topic for another day, but he can't charge you more than your co-pay.

Certainly don't go to work to spread the joy. Or to therapy.

(3) SADS

It is February so all my SADS (Seasonal Affective Disorders) patients have been coming in. We're all good sports in the beginning of the winter, those of us who live in the midwest. In the beginning, in December, our skies are blue.

But by now everyone's saying, enough already. The days are still too short, the nights, too cold.

Brain feels frozen, landscape dirty, dull, like a futuristic movie. People are saying, "It doesn't know if it should rain or snow" and our cars beg washing, not that it will last more than a day.

Oh! As Alan Sherman used to sing in Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda, about the kid complaining about malaria, the poison ivy and the weather at summer camp.

Wait a minute, it's stopped raining. Guys are swimming, guys are sailing, playing baseball, gee dat's better. Mudda-Fadda kindly disregard this letter.

It IS sunny out there, and a toasty 50 degrees!

But since we've started, let's finish up.

SADS sufferers have to fool the brain. All that light therapy, do it, spend the money on electricity in the winter, turn on everything that holds a lightbulb, anytime you're home. Raise the shades, open the blinds.

And take up one of those health club offers to try the machines on the cheap for a month, even a week, if that's all they give you, but pay in cash so they can't keep your credit card. The fine print is blinding. Then quit when the weather gets warm, get outside and see what's green.

Sledding in February

Or take someone mud-sledding, now, before the snow is completely gone.

One more month to go.

(4) Annihilation Anxiety  

Not phallic symbols. Weapons 

Most people don't know this about me, but before I get out of my car, before I leave the office to head home, I peek outside and look around. Basically I'm worried that someone will want to kill me for no reason.

Not that the neighborhood is bad, it isn't. But if you hear enough neighborhood lore, or read the local news police blotter, you can become hyper-vigilant. Secondary trauma.

Last night, seeing the sidewalk clear of dangerous-looking citizens, my car dusted with new, wet snow, I reached into the back seat and grabbed a new retractible snow brush. When I flipped it across the windshield, the brush extended easily to the width of the car.

Snow drifting in my face, I felt I'd emerged from work victorious, waving the snow brush high into the air, daring the traffic or anyone on the street passing by.

Ditto, the selfie stick. On a vacation we rented bikes, stopped at the beach to take a picture. The stick whips out to three feet, maybe more. Light-weight, FD declares that a slap from one of these will hurt. He's reading my mind.

Paranoia?

For sure. But still.

One more. This time it is a Soda Stream canister. The slim canister that makes the fizz has lost its CO2. I take it into my hand, really feel it before exchanging it for another at Target, my grip naturally testing the weight. The shape, the feel, it is powerful, wieldy.

In the spring, when we ride bikes to work, it will be the titanium lock that magically saves us. Something a coyote won't forget, is what I tell FD, who nods empathetically.

(5) Being Alive

A new one from Colin Beavan

Feeling quite dead from the first few snapshots, this book appealed to me.

Colin Beavan (he's been on Stephen Colbert, enough street cred for me), thinks that most of us merely go through the motions, don't live the life we want to live.

You could say that therapy is all about that, finding ways to live life, in a way that we feel it, feel alive. Nobody's happy all of the time, after all. We get a few minutes a day if we're lucky, and have to work at those (says your therapist). We know some of what works, what is tried and true.

You feel alive when. . .you finish a brisk workout. When a baby smiles at you. When the IRS refund is in hand. When you ask your adult kids on a random afternoon:

Hey, anyone want to come for potluck dinner?
 and they say, Sure.

That's happiness.

Colin will tell you these thing effect the world, your smile, the one inspired by the baby's smile, spreads a wave of goodness into the ecosphere. The potluck dinner, because there are multiple good vibes buzzing into the cosmos.

His new book is an attempt at debunking the myths most of us buy into, the ones that keep us (his opinion) from doing what we would really want to do. Whether it works for you will be a personal thing, because How to Be Alive recycles (appropriate for a book designed to help the world) what self and cognitive psychologists have said before. Yet he offers so many different stories, metaphors, and examples, that you have to learn something new. And he squashes irrational thoughts like gnats.

So this is a non-sequitur, but speaking of gnats, a year ago January I started my first herb garden ever, little pots on a window sill; the yield amazingly, shockingly successful, a jungle in the kitchen. But by summer the house was inundated with midges, little bugs that land on white shirts. They look and act like gnats. But we still had a lot of basil and dill, so could only complain so much, and handed out plants first come, first serve. That's being alive.

Getting back to that book, it could have titled Green Therapy. But How to Be Alive: a Guide to the Kind of Happiness that Helps the World  has so many more key word.

You might remember a story somewhere on this blog, about the people in the park, and dogs off their leashes, me, and maybe you, too, on bikes, becoming a part of that ecology. It is one way to connect with the world.

Colin, on connecting:

Your life is equal to all of your relationships added together.
All of your relationships together are equivalent to your relationship to the world.
Therefore, your life is equivalent to your relationship to the world.  

 And, what you do in your life, affects the world
 And what happens in the world, affects you.
 Therefore, you are important to the world and the world is important to you.

So make a dent, he's saying. Or grow something other than roots and give them away, maybe develop a community garden. Or a community compost.  Or both. There's a story on that.

(6)  Sheer Numbers

NAMI APP for HELP

Recently a reader wrote to thank me for universalizing her problems, for reminding her that she's not alone, not the only one who finds life difficult, who has bizarre thoughts or brain twists that no one else seems to understand.

We all have bizarre, irrational thoughts. See above.

The letter got me thinking, however, looking up statistics.

NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness has always been a wonderful resource:

43.8 million people experience mental health problems is a given year

1 in 5 adults in America experience a mental illness.

Nearly 1 in 25 (10 million) adults in America live with a serious mental illness.
One-half of all chronic mental illness begins by the age of 14; three-quarters by the age of 24

1 in 100 (2.4 million) American adults live with schizophrenia.

6.9% (16 million) of American adults live with major depression and 18%, or 42 million have anxiety disorders

There are many more statistics like this. My friend, you are not alone. 

The one that blows my mind is that nearly 60% of adults with mental illness had no services in the previous year. Did we notice? I think we did. 

Visit to the NAMI website for resources and more stories. And write to your governor if you don't like how he's balancing his budget. 

(7) Prison Isn't Good for Us

The Mental Health and Safe Communities Act , S.2002,or Cornyn Law is waking us up to what goes on in jails and prisons.

Mary E Buser is a social worker

We know about homelessness, that the chances that the woman in the park, the one in the sleeping bag, might be suffering a mental illness or addiction are high.

Most of us don't know, however, that a quarter of our prison population has a recent history of mental illness. It isn't all about sociopathy, which is what you would expect. They have garden variety depression, anxiety, and psychoses.

And being in jail aggravates it. 

And naturally, we pay to take care of the treatment, which every prisoner wants, because it gets them away from other prisoners. So while the healthy but sociopathic fake it, resources are squeezed for the truly ill.   

The Cornyn Law is a snapshot of the remedy, proposes training for police and first responders by way of the

 National Criminal Justice and Mental Health Training and Technical Assistance Center. 

Here recruits learn to recognize mental illness, steer future "convicts" away from federal custody, and divert them o community social services. In a perfect world.

Mary E. Buser's book, Lockdown on Rikers reads like a diary, what it's like to be a social worker at the famed Rikers Island, New York City's jail. Buser exposes the tragedies of the system, the pain of inmates who might be innocent but can't afford bail, who wait for months on end, sometimes years, for a day in court. A plea bargain gets them out, but with a record.

At the jail, waiting for the hearing, innocent men and women miss visits to sick relatives in the hospital, funerals. They can't help their families financially, too many cases for the system to process. You'e seen The Good Wife, Law and Order. You read about them and wish that the varied stories about Rikers are exaggerations.

But they're not.

Solitary, by the way, is hell.

As is the flu, but hey, wait a minute, it's stopped raining.

therapydoc   

That was a lot, but March will be busy for me, and I forgot to mention Vessels, a love story I promised to review. You think it is a love between a couple, but the story is much more mysterious, more cryptic than that. Written like poetry (the kind you actually get), rich in paradox and metaphor, VESSELS is a story about art, an artist, and bad breaks, and keeping a marriage together under the most trying of circumstances. 

I've already given too much away. 

Daniel Raeburn teaches non-fiction writing at the University of Chicago. 

Just one more thing, bear with me. For links to therapy experts, check out Social Work Careers. 

Experts

SADS is back

From thisTo thisin only a week.

I can't believe it. It seems like I just terminated with my SADS patients for the spring and summer, and already the calls are coming in. The days are short, the nights are cold. And the bloggers, like Master of Irony, are worried.

But come on, Chicagoans! The sun peeks out every so often, and although it might be cold, the wind doesn't always whip up, it's not supposed to tomorrow, and we live for tomorrow in our neck of the woods.

Get out and jump in some leaves. Put on a heavy sweatshirt, get a pair of warm, fuzzy, boots at Target. Black ice in Indiana? Who cares! (Well, those of you who commute to or live in Indiana do, I suppose, sorry about that).

So a quick check list on battling November thru March seasonal depression:

A brisk walk every day (or if you're me, a bike ride when there's no precip or wind chill). Just do it. Bundle up and do it. Don't worry what you look like.

Turn on the lights when you get home in the evening, all of them. Pay the electricity, but spare the depression. Ditto about the heat in the house, if only for an hour or two, get warm.

Make soup. Big pots of thick, wonderful soup.

Don't think about the weather. Think about anything but the weather.

Make it your business to get out and visit someone who is shut in.

See how much it might cost to buy some used skis, or snowshoes, a sled or a tray. If you can afford it, consider an exercise club membership. There should be some deals coming up.

Take hot showers.

Get creative, not drunk. Make your holiday cards if you can, and make them meaningful.

Don't even think about spending a lot on presents this year. Everybody gets it that times are hard.

Sing.

Learn to whistle.

Call a friend. Play a game. Write a book. Move the furniture.

This isn't a comprehensive list. I know there's another one on the blog somewhere. I just thought you should know, it's not your imagination. The weather does affect mood, probably because we're simply receiving less by way of sensory stimulation. If we choose to stay in we make matters worse. It's a challenge.

What's this I hear about Wii, anyway? Should I go see someone who has it? I've always wanted to play drums.

therapydoc

SADS is GETTING to ME

Okay, it's not really getting to me. But it sure does get to some who haven't seen the sun in 8 days. We're weather weary, friends, here in the northern latitudes.



So you're not alone if the short days and lack of sunlight are contributing to your alternatively cranky/sad otherwise cheerful disposition.

FD is so sick of SADS he's named it something else,

HLWD, Higher Latitude Winter Dysphoria. One day we should rename all of the disorders. That would be fun. For want of anything better to do.

I for one am feeling a little pent up moving from the house to the car to the office to the car, to the car to the house, the house to the car to the office to the car, with an occasional stop at the grocery store for provisions.

As a younger person, having a winter sport helped. It's a default thing that a person who grew up making snow-people simply doesn't think twice about. If you can't afford a week or two in a warm, sunny climate, then you HAVE to have a winter sport. Hockey, ice skating, snow ball down the back, snow boarding, skiing, not to mention the indoor sports like basketball, volleyball, tennis, racketball, swimming, golf. Okay, not golf.

I think I told you about the last time I skied. Up in Utah, staring at the sky, horizontal. One ski about ten feet away, another nowhere to be found. The clouds looked nice. And the sky in Utah is an unforgettable shade of blue.

There are evergreens in Utah. So although snow tends to be white (and we're talking WHITE white, not slush-white, not gray, not tar-sullied-salt-grainy ochre), the forest-green aspen, those happy blue skies, the sunshine bursting off of snowflakes, well, it doesn't even seem like winter.

It's more like Disneyland without those scary cartoon figures that dance around and shake hands with crying babies.

But most of us can't afford to do that, chase off to Park City or Aspen to ski. We can't even ditch school to drive up to Wisconsin (Alpine Valley) to shake the lead out. So we hate people who do. They're tan!

We've seen you guys with the tans. It hurts, honest, seeing you people looking so healthy, out on a winters days having FUN, coming home from that winter junket looking so INVIGORATED and healthy. Hey, too much sun in Bermuda isn't healthy, either, according to Gentle Doc, my brother the dermatologist. Remind me to tell you one day what he says about skin creams. (Use one, it doesn't matter which one).

So one might think that a winter sport is good for Seasonal Affective Disorder (SADS) the disorder some say is associated with too little vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin. Someone once told me that there IS an association, but I'll be honest, it's hard to be vitamin deficient in America unless you're eating disordered or a substance abuser. So I don't buy the vitamin deficiency explanation, although too lazy to look it up right now.

I remember telling a man who had a terrible case of Seasonal Affective Disorder that he ought to get his kids out on a tray and go sledding before it melted. Chicagoans understand that a person doesn't need to buy a real sled to slide down a hill. Since we have only a handful of hills in Chicago, this assignment isn't as easy as it sounds.

The natives here, however, "sled" on lunch trays, newspapers, winter coats, plastic swimming pools, even those colorful plastic disks and sleds sold at Toys R Us that are intended for sledding, if they want to play it safe. Wooden sleds, ala Citizen Kane, aren't even valued. What they lack in originality they make up for with metal glides, not terribly safe, really. Rosebud, that's the name of that sled.

I asked FD if he wanted a snow-blower. He acted as if I had asked if he wanted strep throat. Why would anyone want to give in to that, a snow-blower?

What he's saying is there's something very wonderful about shoveling snow, assuming you don't drop dead doing it (check with your local physician, please, before shoveling snow). There's no hurry to get it done, really the walk.

We're all pretty mellow when it's snowing. If we drive too fast we'll skid and hit someone. If we walk to fast, we'll slip and fall on a hidden patch of ice. When it's coming down, it's best to simply watch. Outside, preferably.

The clean-up, certainly, quite the challenge. Oh, but the quiet of snow! It puts a buffer on the noise of the city, absorbs so many sounds, sounds we don't even realize that we hate! And there we are, carefully moving snow from the sidewalk, making sure we don't break our backs or pull a muscle. And all around, silence.

It's usually a 3-4 Advil affair!

And your neighbors are out, you know, shoveling their walks, saying Howdy. Haven't seen you since the summer. How's the family?

Indeed, if it weren't for snow, no one would stop to talk to anyone in Chicago in the winter. Too darn cold half the time to waste the time. You want to hurry up and get inside so you can do something important like watch TV.

Oh, you wanted to know about SADS, Seasonal Affective Disorder. I think there's something on it somewhere in the archives, but basically, YES, you need to light that house up like a Christmas tree if you can. Pay Com Ed, not your therapist. Use flourescent bulbs to keep the cost of the wattage down.

And yes, diet. Don't let yourself eat too much. On the other hand, a person should gain about five pounds in snowbound climes in the winter. That's just the way it is. We're a little like bears and squirrels, storing it up against the cold. Exceptions are people who are making a simcha (a happy occasion) like a wedding, cotillion, or a bar mitzvah for their kids. That kind of stress, you're allowed to lose weight.

The rest of us have a responsibility to eat more, socialize while eating, and do our best to exercise a little so we don't totally hate ourselves by spring.

Which is why I finally did it, hearkened to Ebay's call and scored the cross-country skis I've threatened to find for years. They haven't arrived yet, and I still have to buy boots (those I just can't bring myself to buy used). And hopefully Z (the vendor, that's really his name!) will remember to send me the poles. Empath Daught says she'd give anything to see me traipse around the city in skis.

Just my luck, this will be the last snow storm of the winter.

Or should I say, just your luck.

therapydoc