The Blah Blah Blog
The musings of a black sheep
That can’t be right…
Public toilets tend to assault one's senses with a profusion of smells, sights, and sounds, if I could hang on I wouldn't use them, but there is not doubting their convenience. On Sunday after sitting through a 90 minute movie and enjoying a coffee I had a natural...
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Shade into sunlight, sunlight into shade
Today is the anniversary of Mottsu's death by suicide. He died 8 years ago and I remember good times. A Mistake - —Czeslaw Milosz I thought: all this is only preparation For learning, at last, how to die. Mornings and dusks, in the grass under a maple Laura sleeping...
read moreComing Off Meds
Coming off psychiatric medication, or what we tend to call meds is something I don't know much about. I have a friend who has just been through quite a process finding meds that work for her in her situation. She is settling down now with something that is working for...
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Who’s that man?
I wasn't watching the screen but I heard a name announced that was almost familiar and I started paying attention. Some was being interviewed for an expert opinion on something. It was the psychologist who Mottsu has consulted in the weeks before he died. I haven't...
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Help Police 2
I read on the weekend that " More than one in four cases where police use force involves someone suffering a psychological issue." That's in my city. The statistic is alarming -and I don't believe the story is better in many other big cities in the world. Thankfully...
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Are we there yet?
Am I there yet? I am not sure I even know where it was I was going, let alone if I am there. My previous post was number 300. According to Wikepedia 300 has some special proprieties: " It is a triangular number and the sum of a pair of twin primes (149 + 151), as well...
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Utterly baffling
Back to the death of Gary Speed as the outcome of the Coroners Inquest has been reported in the news. The coroner could not say if his death was intentional or accidental. While intent was discussed it was not possible to determine from the circumstances. The...
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Vale Diana Bliss
News started emerging on the weekend that Diana Bliss had died by suicide. Ms Bliss, despite her own many accomplishments, was best known as the wife of Alan Bond, the man who backed the America's Cup challenge in 1983 that saw the trophy in the hands of someone other...
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Who cares?
I have sat through more aircraft safety demonstrations than I can count. "A loss of oxygen at altitude may lead to a loss on consciousness. If emergency oxygen is required your mask will appear from above you pull down on it firmly to activate the flow of oxygen put...
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Thinking, tweeting, blogging
John Birmingham's blog entry about about the incidence of suicide among soldiers and veterans is worth reading. There is something about a soldiers experience that diminishes the will to live, something that's unlikely to be physiological, something that's taking a...
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English football player talks of depression
Dean Windass is a retired English footballer, a striker. Last weekend he spoke publicly about his depression and recent suicide attempts. In the newspaper article he says "People have this image of me as this big strong man who can take anything life throws at him....
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Vale Sheniz Erkan
"Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me" I remember chanting that line in a sing-song retort to the neighbourhood bully and his taunting offsider. If only it were true... The death by suicide of a 14 year old Melbourne schoolgirl Sheniz...
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Miserable?
In my previous post I wrote about the UK based suicide prevention charity, Campaign Against Living Miserably, CALM. The acronym is not bad but I think the organisation's name is dismally inappropriate for its worthy goals. Campaign Against Living Miserably infers that...
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Campaign Against Living Miserably – CALM
An article in the UK Guardian today describes the silence around suicide as deathly. The organisation described in the story is Campaign Against Living Miserably - CALM - a suicide prevention charity. They ran a "poll [in November 2010] and it showed that nine out of...
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2012 and I just don’t know what to do with myself…
I am standing at the front door of 2012, the new year begins. The threshold I describe, the start of another year, is a just a dot on the time continuum and even so days ahead feel full of possibility. Jung used a phrase I liked when he said he was living, "an...
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Learn people better, Dream good, Stay glad
Woody Guthrie was an American folk singer, most renowned for his songs penned and sung during the Great Depression. New Years Rulins were found in one of his journals and dated January 31st 1942. I'm adopting many of Woody's resolutions as my own, so many things I...
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Vale Joe Bodolai
This is a link to Joe Bodolai, a comedy writer's, last blog entry before he died by suicide. I hope the site is taken down in time and I guess he left it to be read... Included in the posting is a list of things he regrets, including “That I am no longer able to...
read moreHappy Merry
This is the third Christmas time I have written as Wonderersheart, and I am wishing a Happy Merry to all. I also want to acknowledge that the Christmas and holiday time will be a confronting time for many. Punishing more than merry is how it can be. The astounding...
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Moment to moment
It's the time of year for reflection and dreaming, where have I been and where to next? The latter is more intriguing, the where to question holds possibilities. What next? What does the next year hold for me? What might turn up? My 2012 desk calendar, a gift from a...
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Some amazing person
Word use in the poetry of poets who die by suicide
In 2001 Stirman and Pennebaker published a research project: Word Use in the Poetry of Suicidal and Non-suicidal Poets. It could be because of the expressive nature of poetry or maybe because of particular artistic temperament of those drawn to the medium, that the...
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Enough?
It is hard to believe that I am enough, just as I am. I extort myself to be better, more, to be the best I can. There is an almost constant conversation happening on the inside asking for more, knowing I could be better, kinder, smarter, more... I was working today,...
read moreSimon says…
Simon Hogan, in his typically Australian laconic style, describes himself as a 23 year old footy player. Footy is Australian Rules football, a game with an estimated 9 million followers. Simon plays for the Geelong Football club, the team Mottsu followed and the...
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Meds?
A girlfriend was saying she thinks she may have been depressed all of her life. "It's hard to reach out" she said. "It's hard to get what you need" she said. She did reach out, and consulted her doctor who gave her a prescription for an SSRI. Selective Serotonin...
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Saying something not so stupid
I am returning, just briefly, to the comments of Joey Barton and my previous post and I am relenting. I have been feeling sorry that I said what Joey Barton tweeted was stupid, when he said that 'Suicide is a mix of the most tragic, most selfish, most terrible (and I...
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Saying something stupid
Joey Barton is an English footballer affected by the death of Gary Speed. Then he went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like: If not stupid Joey Barton's view is uninformed and ill-considered. Before anyone concludes that suicide might be a selfish act I...
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Vale Gary Speed
The football fraternity is united in grief after the news of the death by suicide of Gary Speed. He was a Welsh football player, captain of the Wales national football team, and a football manager. I would call his game soccer but for him and his compatriots, he...
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Exaggerated value
I am reading Blue Nights by Joan Didion, she's an author who determinedly dissects her experiences of loss working over the hurt, baring harrowing personal wounds. Early in the book Joan Didion refers the psychiatrist Karl Menninger's work Man Against Himself, and his...
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A story of depression
I found a fabulous story on-line written by an artist called Allie and called Adventures in Depression. Allie doesn't start with the traditional: Once upon a time... instead she opens with, "Some people have a legitimate reason to feel depressed, but not me. I just...
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Vale Ilya Zhitomirskiy
Ilya Zhitomirskiy died by suicide this week. He was 22 and one of the co-founders of the yet to be launched social networking site Diaspora* He was described as "a great friend and a brilliant person." Too few deaths by suicide are reported in the news, the exception...
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