Tag Archives: depression and anxiety

May 20

“Lady Dynamite” Starring Maria Bamford

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Coming to Netflix today is Lady Dynamite, a comedy about Stephen Colbert’s favorite comedian, Maria Bamford. In addition to its star, the cast includes Ana Gasteyer, Bridget Everett, and Lennon Parham, as well as Ed Begley Jr. and Mary Kay Place as Bamford’s parents.

Jesse David Fox, Vulture, succinctly describes Lady Dynamite: “The occasionally surreal, often silly show knowingly winks at, subverts, and outright makes fun of the now-common semiautobiographical stand-up TV-show genre.”

Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times: “Created by Mitchell Hurwitz and Pam Brady, it is cheerful, dark, surreal, profane, aspirational, meta-fictional and packed with people playing versions of themselves or other people entirely (or playing versions of themselves playing other people entirely); it plays with visual and verbal puns, with moods and acting styles and moves around in time and dimension.”

James Poniewozik, New York Times: “…a journey to the center of Ms. Bamford’s mind that dives through fantasy after loopy fantasy and emerges with something real.”

The part of her life Bamford’s showcasing? The aftermath of a mental breakdown. Several years ago she was hospitalized a few times for psychiatric reasons—which is not news, as Bamford has been open about her struggles, which have included anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts, binge eating, a form of OCD called “unwanted thoughts syndrome” (for which she named a comedy CD) and her more recent diagnosis of Bipolar II Disorder.

Melissa Maerz, Entertainment Weekly:

The tone is as manic as Bamford herself…Characters talk fast and walk fast…Like in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, tension radiates behind that relentlessly upbeat energy. She’s forcing you to get inside her brain. Flashbacks show her getting treatment as a child in Duluth, where her therapist encourages her to get angry. ‘Isn’t there anyone here who chaps your crapper?’ the therapist asks. When Bamford says no, the therapist frowns. ‘Donna,’ she says, pointing to a sad-looking patient, ‘is a straight-up B.’ Our heroine hangs her head in shame.

From Daniel Fienberg, Hollywood Reporter: “I think a Louie or a Curb tries to filter Louis C.K. or Larry David’s sensibility, but Lady Dynamite feels like it’s delivering Bamford’s wounded psyche in whole chunks, sometimes eager to please, sometimes awkwardly confrontational and generally compassionate.”

Phil Harrison, The Guardian: “This peculiar but queasily hilarious sitcom could well end up being the TV buzz show of the summer. It’s certainly hard to think of anything else quite like it.”

In real life, Bamford believes in and seeks therapy in various forms. Sara Corbett, New York Times, two years ago:

She is, if anything, a dutiful seeker of help. One night in 1990, when she was a sophomore at Bates College in Maine, experiencing a period of despair, she wolfed down a huge amount of food and then called a suicide help line. Ever since, she has maintained faith in support networks. She has participated in 12-step programs for eating disorders, money problems, sex and intimacy struggles and addiction, though substance abuse has not been an issue for her. She just appreciates the company, and also the honesty. ‘I think 12-step programs are genuinely cognitive behavioral programs,’ she told me. ‘You are out of isolation, and that helps you think differently about things.’ When traveling, Bamford looks for local support-group meetings to visit. Otherwise, she attends them by phone. She has found a sense of community in online chat rooms and is a vocal fan of Crazymeds.us, a website that gives advice about psychiatric medications.

Apr 27

“Reasons to Stay Alive”: Matt Haig’s Still Here

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The recent news report that deaths from suicide have been on the rise highlights the need for increased prevention efforts. Author Matt Haig hopes his 2015 book Reasons to Stay Alive, based on his young-adult experiences with severe depression and anxiety, is a resource that can help. British novelist Haig, now 40, has learned how to survive.

An excerpt from Haig’s Guardian article called “As Therapy Shows, Words Can Be Medicine” gives some important background to the writing of Reasons to Stay Alive:

On the inside, your head can feel crushed under a raging psychological tsunami, but outwardly you can look like a healthy 24-year-old man. Even when I got a little better, I found that reading and talking about depression could be hard.
But then a trusted friend told me to write about my own experiences, and feeling a now-or-never moment was upon me – 10 books into my career – I did. I imagined writing to myself at 24, when I very nearly tried to solve my life by throwing myself off a cliff…

According to Kirkus Reviews, in Reasons to Stay Alive Haig has written “brief, episodic vignettes, not of a tranquil life but of an existence of unbearable, unsustainable melancholy. Throughout his story, presented in bits frequently less than a page long (e.g., ‘Things you think during your 1,000th panic attack’), the author considers phases he describes in turn as Falling, Landing, Rising, Living, and, finally, simply Being with spells of depression.”

Entertainment Weekly: “…(H)e addresses the guilt and shame that comes with clinical depression—especially for men, who are disproportionately more likely to take their own lives—and the ways its symptoms can be misunderstood and dismissed by even the most well-meaning outsiders. (The 21-item list in a chapter called ‘Things That Have Happened to Me That Have Generated More Sympathy Than Depression’ includes ‘consuming a poisoned prawn,’ ‘breaking a toe,’ and ‘bad Amazon reviews.’)”

On the issue of what helps, “Haig…assesses the efficacy of neuroscience, yoga, St. John’s wort, exercise, pharmaceuticals, silence, talking, walking, running, staying put, and working up the courage to do even the most seemingly mundane of tasks, like visiting the village store. Best for the author were reading, writing, and the frequent dispensing of kindnesses and love. He acknowledges particularly his debt to his then-girlfriend, now-wife.”

Lettie Kennedy, The Guardian: “Medication is discussed briefly; notable by its absence is any discussion of therapy, presumably an avenue Haig did not himself explore. Among the most affecting passages in the book are three ‘Conversations across time’: dramatised exchanges in which ‘Now Me’ reassures ‘Then Me’ that the fire in the brain will burn out and life will once again be full of promise.”

A Few Notable Quotes From Reasons to Stay Alive:

You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic.

Things people say to depressives that they don’t say in other life-threatening situations:

Come on, I know you’ve got tuberculosis, but it could be worse. At least no one’s died.’
Why do you think you got cancer of the stomach?
Yes, I know, colon cancer is hard, but you want to try living with someone who has got it. Sheesh. Nightmare.
Oh, Alzheimer’s you say? Oh, tell me about it, I get that all the time.
Ah, meningitis. Come on, mind over matter.
Yes, yes, your leg is on fire, but talking about it all the time isn’t going to help things, is it?
Okay. Yes. Yes. Maybe your parachute has failed. But chin up.

The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them. Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.
Aug 03

Charlie Brown: A Cartoon Kid With Mental Health Problems

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An article in Time on the occasion of the death of Charles M. Schulz, creator of Charlie Brown and his gang, notes that he’d originated something very different for comic strips of his era—the “Peanuts” kids he drew actually talked about having real problems.

On October 2, 1950, at the height of the American postwar celebration — an era when being unhappy was an antisocial rather than a personal emotion — a 27-year-old Minnesota cartoonist named Charles M. Schulz introduced to the funny papers a group of children who told one another the truth:

‘I have deep feelings of depression,’ a round-faced kid named Charlie Brown said to an imperious girl named Lucy in an early strip. ‘What can I do about it?’

‘Snap out if it,’ advised Lucy.

As a shrink, Lucy was ineffective. Charlie Brown continued to be plagued not only with depression but with other types of angst as well. Probably at least in part because, like Charlie Brown, Schulz himself had similar issues. States David Michaelis in the Time piece, “Melancholy would dog him all his life, as would feelings of worthlessness, panic, high anxiety and frustration.”

And yet Schulz was—and still is—unbelievably successful in reaching a devoted legion of fans of his work.

Long-time fan Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, related his childhood appreciation of Charlie Brown’s neuroses: “In four frames [Charles Schulz] told truths that every child knows but too often go unrecognised when adults write for kids: namely, that life is difficult, one’s shortcomings feel insuperable and that, when fate has laid you low, it comes along to kick you again in the proverbials.”

Jeffries goes on to say, “For adults, the only certainties in life were death and taxes. For kids like me and Charlie Brown there was a third one – our constant companion is, and will always be, worry. ‘Sometimes you lie in bed and you don’t have a single thing to worry about,’ Charlie Brown reflected once. ‘That always worries me.’”

CHARLIE BROWN SPEAKS: Some Pertinent Quotes

This is my depressed stance. When you’re depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you’ll start to feel better. If you’re going to get any joy out of being depressed, you’ve got to stand like this.

I’ve developed a new philosophy… I only dread one day at a time.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, ‘Where have I gone wrong?’ Then a voice says to me, ‘This is going to take more than one night.’

That’s the secret to life… replace one worry with another….

It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black.

Jul 31

Exercise As Important Therapy: John Medina, John J. Ratey

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It turns out that physical exercise isn’t just about watching the Summer Olympics. It’s also something just about everyone can and should do. Scientist John Medina states the following about the first of his 12 “brain rules” (USA Today):

Exercise boosts brain power. Humans adapted during evolution by constantly moving (both to get food and to avoid predators). Medina says we think better in motion. He suggests that people might be more productive if they spent some of the working day (separate from the gym) on treadmills. Another provocative idea: ‘Board meetings might be conducted while people walked 2 miles per hour,’ he writes.

Medina also states that symptoms of depression and anxiety can decrease via workouts. In fact, it’s likely that a combination of therapy and exercise is equally as effective as a combination of antidepressant medication and therapy. According to one study, both combos are 80% successful. He recommends regular aerobic exercise two or three times a week for 30 minutes; and adding a strength training component can further boost cognitive functions.

There are scientific explanations for our workouts positively affecting mood and anxiety levels, of course, one of which has something to do with increased blood flow to the brain and other body parts. Exercise can also stimulate BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor), a growth factor in the brain that aids in neuron health and development. John J. Ratey, M.D., author of the 2008 book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain calls BDNF “Miracle-Gro for the brain.”

For more info that supports Medina’s, investigate Dr. Ratey’s book. Its description says it was “the first book to explore comprehensively the connection between exercise and the brain,” and observes that Ratey shows that “exercise is truly our best defense against everything from depression to ADD to addiction to aggression to menopause to Alzheimer’s.”

A sample quote from Spark: “Studies show that if researchers exercise rats that have been chronically stressed, that activity makes the hippocampus grow back to its preshriveled state. The mechanisms by which exercise changes how we think and feel are so much more effective than donuts, medicines, and wine. When you say you feel less stressed out after you go for a swim, or even a fast walk, you are.”