A COMPICATED SUMMER

Summer is over. That is my final answer. Surely on September 30 the truth of it is indisputable. Never mind that the flowers of Edmonton are still out in full bloom, and the sun can take off your sweater in a matter of seconds, so fresh is the memory of warm pavement. Never mind that the wasps still buzz when we take our supper out to the veranda. Never mind that my sandals remain at the front of the shoe rack. Never mind that my birthday, only 9 days ago, was celebrated as a garden party with all the house doors agape and the guests lingering for hours on the lawn. Summer’s over, I say stubbornly. Ignore all evidence to the contrary. “How was your summer,” my friend asks me. “Complicated,” I answer truthfully, beginning, conservatively I hope, to describe all the things that prevented me from answering her question with the more customary “It was a great summer.” The list is a longish list of complications and when its highlights have been explored, it is time to move on to another topic. Those things that might have provided evidence of a good summer—even a great summer—remain undescribed. “What were ten of your favourite things about our summer?” I ask David later in the day. “Ten?” he says doubtfully—suspecting that he might be contributing to the next instalment of THE HOPE LADY Blog. “Make it five,” I blurt. No point in giving him a task too large to handle. It was, after all, a complicated summer. And I was, after all, fishing for some way of thinking that the summer might have been good. “Our trip to Meadow Lake,” he begins. I am surprised, for I have forgotten the trip to Meadow Lake. How could I have forgotten it? Late June was only three months gone. I am vaguely disappointed in myself for cutting the list from ten to five. I’ve made it too easy. Why, now that I have remembered it, I can easily name five good things about Meadow Lake. He could too, if he thought about it. He could list the perfect sand without a pebble to hurt our feet, the cool lake water, the prompt response to our call for a boost when we drained the car battery, the family of spruce grouse that delayed our trip to the beach, the ice cream stand, our shade-dappled games of Progression Rummy, the rainy day that snuggled us into the trailer for an afternoon’s reading and then turned to sunshine so we could cook our outdoor dinner. He could name these and the list would be done, but he does not do this. Instead, he rushes on. “Our week with the Haleys in Ontario,” he says, “all the people we saw in Ottawa, and the light show on Parliament Hill, and all the Sundays we spent at Mark and Tracey’s new home, and the games of dice we played on the veranda. Is that five? What would you list?” What would I list? What were my favourite things about the summer? I would list all of these. Then I would add some others—the good fortune of finding fabulous people to rent our suite, the generosity of the work crew who whipped it into shape for renting, three happy weeks of hands-on Grannying, the sense of family and the companionship of having my sister live with us throughout the summer. There were parties and picnics with my nieces and nephews, chances to hold their babies. There was the group of seniors with macular degeneration that I loved to facilitate, the people who shook off their depression and gave credit to me, the letter from the university asking me to supervise students again, my new volunteer counselling job at Walk In Counselling. There were the warm evenings on restaurant patios in Milwaukee, our introduction to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the cruise among the Thousand Islands, the sweet corn from farmers’ markets. My tongue tingled with the memory of raspberries from the patch. There were the afternoons when Lawrence mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedge. I loved the concert with The Once at the T.A.L.E.S Festival. There were stories to tell. David had been telling some of them. I loved the story about the bird who hit our window, then fell onto the veranda. It lay there for half an hour, a corpse awaiting disposal. And then, when David touched it with a shovel, it roused itself and flew off. “It’s a good thing,” he said, “that I didn’t try to put it into a trash bag before picking it up.” It might not have been able to fight back. Judging its condition too early would have been a fatal error. And I say, with that story in mind, that the summer is over, though we are, so far, having a lovely autumn. It’s a good thing I held on to the summer long enough to be able to sort through the complications and report, with evidence presented, that it was a great summer. For how could it have been otherwise, given all that happened in the space of three short months?

INSPIRATION

“Inspiration is arousal, awakening, creativity, deep thinking, elevation, encouragement, enthusiasm! Let's Share It.” INSPIRATION IS BLISS “Inspiration is the act or power of exercising an elevating or stimulating influence upon the intellect or emotions;” Wikiquote Being an inspiration to others is one of my favourite pastimes these days. There I sit, charged with the job of spotting and reducing depression in elderly people. More often than not they have recently endured multiple disabilities or losses, Now they are trying to build a life with partial vision. “You are an inspiration to me,” they say, and I am pleased because their words indicate signs of arousal, awakening, creativity, deep thinking, elevation, encouragement, enthusiasm, the vibrant positive emotions that push aside the symptoms of depression. They will need to engage all of these positive qualities to deal with the daily challenges they will face. It seems strange to me now, but I used to bristle if someone said I was an inspiration to them. It happened often enough back in the old days when I worked with elderly blind people. They were 79, I was 29. I guess I was thinking more of what I needed and less of what they needed. I needed assurance that I was competent, professional, a normal person who just happened to be blind. They, I believed, needed a white cane, or a braille watch, or an attitude adjustment. I needed to provide those things in a most professional capacity. I was younger back in those days, still proving myself to myself. Elderly people with partial sight are probably not much different than they used to be, though they are a little older on average. I, however, am quite different. “You are an inspiration to me,” they say when we have explored the alleys of the mind where depression lurks. The words ring differently these days when I hear them from people who are 89. I hear them through the ears of a woman who is 59—though I don’t hear as well as I used to, and my bones break these days when they never used to, and my back isn’t what it could be, and my knees pop and crackle when I move. I realize that what they are experiencing is not the simple loss of vision, but a new insult to the body heaped upon layers of insult that have been accumulating for years. If inspiration is the act or power of exercising an elevating or stimulating influence upon the intellect or emotions, then an inspiration I am proud to be. For the best defence against the gloom that accompanies depression is the power to rise above it, and anyone who is still looking for inspiration at the age of 89 deserves to find it. The least I can do is make it easy to find.

REHAB THEN, HOPE WORK NOW

These days I am reflecting a lot on the differences between what I knew then, and what I know now, what I did then and what I do now. This week it will be 36 years since I got my first real professional job—a position at the CNIB, providing services to people with very low vision, mostly seniors. I was 23 years old, looking forward to a lifetime of infinite possibility. The seniors I met were inspired by me, and that was good, but they also pitied me—many of them in unguarded tearful sympathy. “You are so young,” they would cry in tremendous distress. “It is so sad.” I was immediately defensive. I did not want their pity or their tears. I wanted to give them accessible alarm clocks and library books on tape. I wanted to offer them white canes to ease their travel and magnifiers to aid their cooking. In short, I wanted them to stop grieving their losses and get on with the business of planning productive futures for themselves. Though many of them welcomed me and the great services I came to deliver, emotionally, it was difficult for me to reach them with anything more personal than professional detachment. Except for shared humour, an asset that worked wonders for me even at that early stage in my development, I wanted to set a boundary that said, “I am not you. Don’t pity me. I am young. I am doing fine. I am planning a great future. Leave me out of your sadness.” Years passed and I moved on to other employers, other educations, other life stages. Now, 36 years later, I am seeing people of that same population, seniors with low and deteriorating vision. Things are the same, and also different. The CNIB still delivers accessible alarm clocks, audio library books, white canes and magnifiers. More people are being served, and the population is older, largely because people are, in general older and healthier than they used to be. I am now a Registered Psychologist who has been hired because of my long experience in counselling for depression with people in all sorts of difficult situations. Others deliver the clocks and canes and such to my clients. My job is to deliver the emotional well-being that will inspire people to be the best that they can be. Something else is different too—and that is my point of view. A man has come to my office. He’s a young man by my current standards, only 77 years old. He’s had audio books for quite a while now. He was twice prescribed antidepressants—something that would never have happened to such an ordinary man 36 years ago. He stopped taking them both times. “They didn’t help,” he said. I start asking him about other medications he is taking—something I would never have done 36 years ago. He tells me about some, giving me the reasons why he got them. To show that I understand how he feels, I tell him I am almost 60 now, coping with ailments one at a time, quite often looking back with longing to the days when I could simply jump out of bed first thing in the morning without first causing to call a meeting of my body parts to ask who wants to move first. He starts to laugh. He tells me how frustrated he is with his television. He can’t operate it. He can’t see the menu on the screen. When I say that I too am furious that we can no longer get a television that a blind person can use, he perks up and tells me he wants to smash it. I get this. He has learned, as I have learned, that one wrong move on the remote will disable the TV and you won’t be able to use it until a sighted person comes along. He has learned how easy it is to make that one wrong move. We are different in TV watching, I not having much time for it. But I am well aware that in only a moment I also will be 77 years old, no longer employed, a woman with plenty of time to watch a TV I may not be able to use because I can’t access the information about channel and volume changes. Together we talk about the kind of message we need to deliver to TV manufacturers. We envision TV-throwing events where we will go together. He is laughing again. I am noticing that seniors don’t pity me any more. They see that I am almost 60 and have somehow wended my way through life’s challenges. Instead of talking about the magnifiers they need, we talk first about the times in their lives when they were faced with unwelcome changes. We talk about what they did in those instances. We wonder if they have changed much since then, if they still intend to be resilient, to be forward-looking, to take what comes to them and move on. They will hear and internalize this kind of talk from me because they can see me counting the years of my own future. Now that we are standing on the same ground, it’s hope talk pure and simple. “This is the kind of person you proved yourself to be. In the face of this unwelcome change, what kind of person do you hope to be?”

THE TEDIUM OF DEPRESSION, THE POWER OF CURIOSITY

The University of Alberta has a herbarium that houses pressed specimens of over 800 plants that grow in Alberta. It also contains collections made by an untold number of scientists over the years. Tucked away as it is in the botany wing of the Bio Sciences Building, a building so perplexing in design as to render it barely navigable without compass and cell phone, I had neither heard of it nor noticed it. Now that I do know about it, the fact that we have a herbarium inspires me. I like to know we have it. I like to think of all the work that went into assembling it, the vision that created it, the painstaking detail of plant collection and identification. We need plant cataloguers in this world. Without their work, how would we know what we have, what we have gained, what we have lost?
I learned about the herbarium in a counselling session, happened upon it by chance while doing the work I so often do, trying to get depressed people to think of the world as a fascinating place full of possibilities. Like any other daily work, talking to depressed people gets tedious at times, tedious and repetitive. On the worst days it can be downright mind-numbing. People with depression expect to talk about bad things. That’s what they came for, isn’t it? And that’s what we counsellors get paid to deal with, isn’t it? The bad stuff, the rotten stuff, the tragic stuff, the garbage. What do people bring to counselling? They bring all the stuff they want to get rid of, the feelings they need to dump. It can be too much at times. There are days when my office gets too small to hold me plus all the nasty feelings people dump there.
Depression is a nasty thing. Not only does it take away the fun, but it also takes a lot of other desirable things. Get yourself a stiff bout of depression, keep it around for a few years and you’ll find that there’s no joy either, no satisfaction, no pleasure, no pride. The picture of the world loses its potential for wonder, for diversity, for detail, for the richness of perspective.
It’s an occupational hazard all counsellors have to face, the over-abundance of bad feelings, the scarcity of good ones. Various solutions are suggested in the literature, getting counselling yourself, keeping up your professional development, finding pleasure outside you work. We all find it helpful to take a break, to leave, to be somewhere else for a while, to hope that like unpleasant odours, some of the feelings will dissipate while you’re out of the room.
Self-serving as it may sound, I like to fight the negative feelings by doing everything I can to make sure that my work is fun. I sometimes wish we had more respect for fun. Oh, all of us like it. Most of us seek it. And yet, so often a little cloud seems to hang over it. Now that we’ve had our fun, let’s get on with the real work. Let’s get a consultant in to plan half a day of fun for the staff—if we can find the time between meetings. In a perfect world, the world I want to work in, work would start with fun, continue with fun. Nobody would ever say we had to get back to work because we were having too much fun. That is how I came to learn about the herbarium in a counselling session. The moment the word was mentioned, I could sense that I was about to have some fun.
Even for us fun-lovers it’s not easy to have fun working with people who are depressed. This is what depression does. It takes a picture of the world using a special lens that shows you the world with the fun filtered out. Stand beside depressed people, see the world through their eyes and there’s simply no fun there at all. If, like me, you are the kind of person who wants fun, you’ve got to find ways to have it, ways that make sense in the context of the work you are doing, ways that can be defended from a professional perspective. Paying attention to what the clients are saying is a simple strategy any professional can support. So when the word herbarium was mentioned, I was on it like a fly after honey.
I like the word herbarium. It has a rhythmic quality to it. It’s a little bit exotic. What’s more, it refers to plants, always a passion of mine. Once the word had been mentioned I couldn’t let it go. Here was a chance for discovery, for inspiration. Here was the possibility of having fun. If you show a high level of interest, a person who has worked in a herbarium can tell you many things, what it holds, how it works. Other counsellors might say it was time wasted, focus misappropriated, attention diverted from the real issues and presenting problems. Generous academics and experts in compassion fatigue might label it self-care. I call it fun, plain old fun.
Because depression is so troubling to all the parties it touches, we counsellors are ever on the look-out for effective ways to deal with its devastating effects. It’s a skill set we all need. Recognizing my need for fun alongside deficiencies of skill, I used to hope my sense of humour would help me find the fun in counselling depressed people. I tried to write a Master’s thesis on the topic. Years later I am aware that sense of humour has helped, and I am also somewhat surprised to see that curiosity and interest in the world have played an important role in supporting my mental well-being, maybe even more important than sense of humour. Sense of humour has its limits. Curiosity, so far as I can tell, has none. Powered by abiding interest and a desire to learn, you can take counselling to places you never expected it to go. You can enter the daily lives of your clients, visit the places they visit. Though they may be suspicious and reticent when you begin, they sense your genuine interest. They too become interested, interested in things that seemed humdrum and tedious only moments ago, insignificant through the filter of depression. Before they know it they have become your tour guides, showing you their world, answering your questions, elucidating points of special significance. Depression has a hard time standing up in the face of such activity. Temporarily derailed, it gives over to fun, to inspiration, fun and inspiration shared by both parties.
From an insider’s perspective, depression makes the world seem dull. From a counsellor’s perspective on a weary day, depressions tend to look the same. If you’ve seen a thousand of them, it’s hard to distinguish one from another. Today I look around my office, this emotional dumping ground, this crowded space where so much sadness, anger and disappointment has been shed. How much of the grim story detail do I remember? Mercifully, not much. The detail has dissipated into the air.
What I do recall in greater detail are the new learnings. Engaging and captivating, they stand out clear, bold and inspiring. Not only are they a support to my mental health, my discoveries have done double duty. They have made a contribution to the emotional well-being of others. Somewhere in Bio Sci there’s a herbarium. It’s been there for a while, but I just discovered it. Now that’s something to celebrate!

ON HOPE AND DEPRESSION

Free-lance journalist Mari Sasano has done a great public service. She wrote about her depression at a time when she was not fully in its crushing grip (Why I'm Glad I'm Depressed, The Edmonton Journal, May 4, 2009). I believe there are many people who will find hope in her optimism about the future, set boldly alongside her admission that depression might some day pay her an unwelcome visit.
Writes Mari, “”I've been through this enough times to know that it's just something to get through. And I've always gotten better. Depression is like winter; it's, well, depressing, but every day you're in it, you're closer to spring. It's part of a process, and may in fact be necessary for flowers to bloom.””
Of the bad days Mari writes, “”I used to wish I was stable and able to get along in life like everyone else -- the neural-normatives, I call them. Depression has kept me from holding down a normal job: try telling an employer that you have to stay home because you're despondent. It doesn't fly. I am often so tired I need to sleep in the middle of the day. Or I can't stop crying. I need proper diet, sleep and exercise if I'm going to be in top condition. And then there are the relationships that have crumbled under depression's weight. It's not easy for me to live with, but at least to me it's familiar and I know what's going on. It's not always pretty, that's for sure.””
There are two kinds of people who need to read writing like Mari’s, people who are depressed and people who care for them. Both kinds of people struggle to keep hope alive on the worst days, the days when cheering up seems impossible. We need evidence that there is reason to hope on the bad days, even if a cure remains elusive.
People who struggle with depression need to read this kind of writing because there’s nothing so satisfying as hearing about the experience of somebody who’s been there. Professional opinions are valuable, but only to a point, the point as which the professional runs out of good, fast-working solutions. That is the point at which sufferers find hope in noticing that others have suffered and struggled and still been all right somehow.
People who treat depression need to read this kind of writing because we so seldom hear from people when they are feeling okay. They come to us at their worst and leave us when they start feeling better. After all, why do they need to bother coming when they feel better?
All of us need to be reminded about the things that work. Of the quirkiness that often helps, Mari writes, “”I would say that depression makes me a happier person, because I don't take being not-depressed for granted. I know that there are things that can make me happy; I study them and try to find other ways to keep myself sane. I know to monitor my moods and to appreciate every one of them, because they are all precious. Even the crappy ones.”” Easy for her to say. If I say it, it sounds trite, even condescending. Only somebody who’s been there can get away with saying such a thing.
And there’s the sticky issue of mental health meds. When I feel particularly discouraged about depression, I cheer myself up by thinking how my view of mental health medications has changed over the years. As a young social worker I firmly believed that any life problem worth its salt could be solved without adding chemicals to the mix. In those days I thought good counselling could fix anything. If I couldn’t fix things I assumed one of two things. Either I wasn’t smart enough yet, or the client was simply not trying hard enough. That’s the kind of thinking that kept my hope going in those days. These days I appreciate a broader perspective. I take seriously the remarkable power of medications to improve situations, and I also respect the fear of being dependent on medication and the shame of needing it, not to mention the side effects of being on it. I find myself offering hope that you don’t have to be on meds forever, and then offering the notion that there still is hope if you do have to stay on them in order to keep your life functioning reasonably well.
Of medication Mari writes: “”once I was diagnosed and put on antidepressants, I could tell the difference between the brain's mighty chemistry and real problems. I could sense the nuances, brush off what's just a bad mood and concentrate on, say, developing closer friendships and working on being better. Now that I'm off my meds, it's amazing. The range of emotions I used to have is back, and I can still tell the difference between a bad neurotransmitter day and true life crises. You have to respect the brain; those with no mental-health issues will never know how tenuous is the balance of brain chemistry we rely on, just to understand our world.””
Well said, Mari. I couldn’t have said it better.