In my previous post I narrated the harrowing experience of my father being in the hospital for 54 days from COVID complications. He came home on November 3. My mother had successfully found two male nurses to make sure sure that Dad had help round the clock. Physically, he had become a baby again, he had to start all over again, for example, he had to relearn to walk and eat by himself because he had almost no muscle mass…
My family and I are eternally grateful to the doctors of Deenanath Hospital for saving my father. To really understand how difficult it has been for me as a daughter, an individual and a person with bipolar II disorder, I must burden you with some details of what happened over the past couple of months. I came to Pune to visit my parents on August 19. The plan was to stay here for three weeks and head back to Bangalore….
I come from a family of readers. Not just my immediate family but my extended family too. My sister was a voracious reader as a young girl. In fact, there are old photographs with her with a book and me without. So when I wasn’t reading obsessively by the time I was 10 years old, my mother started getting palpitations thinking that she had given birth to a non-reader. Fortunately for us all, it was only a passing phase and…
I am a city person. I like the buzz of a city, the activity and people and of course the convenience. But I need to escape to nature every once in a while to centre myself and find peace and quiet. Recently I spent a few days at a mountain retreat. Everything about the place was grounding- the nature, the community living, the simple technology-free life, the extraordinary people, healthy food and lifestyle, birds and animals. There were dogs, horses,…
By Sharwari Tilloo and Manasa Murari I have spent nearly the last three weeks struggling to crawl out of a fairly severe depressive phase. It is painful and slow and improvement everyday is almost imperceptible. This struggle is something that I have come to terms with. The cyclical depression will never go, this is also a fact. However, like I have always said, it does get better. It requires effort though and my life is better for the effort I…
WARNING: This post contains disturbing content about suicidal ideation and may trigger thoughts of self harm. If you are having suicidal thoughts, call a friend or a helpline. “He died of cancer… it is so sad. He was such a jovial person and was so successful. How could he have cancer?” Does this sentence make sense? What does cancer have to do with success, a family or being a jovial person? Now replace ‘cancer’ with ‘suicide’. In the last few…
I feel intensely. It’s not just stress or anxiety but all emotions- joy, anger, hurt, sadness, frustration, irritation et al. There is extensive research on emotion regulation in bipolar and anxiety disorders and there seems to be a connection. People with these disorders tend to be poor at regulating emotions. I have spoken to friends who have mental conditions and they too say they feel intensely. I used to be much worse at regulating emotions than I am today. The…
Often people ask me how they can help someone with a mental illness. This is quite tricky as it varies from person to person and condition to condition. According to me, it is less challenging to help someone who is already undergoing treatment rather than someone who has not accepted that they have a mental illness Helping a person who has not accepted their illness I think that often the person may be aware that they have some mental illness…
The last few weeks, India has seen an unbearable amount of tragedy. Almost everyone I know, including me, has lost someone to Covid 19. Sitting so far away while my country bleeds, makes it harder to be normal and go about things normally. So today instead of writing about what I was originally going to write about, I thought I will address this burden of grief that many of us are feeling. Yesterday someone I knew passed away. It made…
All the last posts have focused on symptoms, anxiety and negative feelings. I thought today I should write about the normal days, the positive days, which also exist and are significant in number. I feel one tends to take happiness and positivity for granted so the spotlight automatically falls on anxiety and negativity. Telling the difference How do you distinguish a good day from a bad day or a fine day from an okay day? It’s not black and white….