WOMEN AGES 50+ FOR APRIL 2016

• 30 minutes activity x5/week
• Weigh less than I do today
• Continue to stay away from added sugars
• Be patient and kind to others
• Be grateful for each and every day and write it in my gratitude journal.

miriamwithcats wrote: »

Beth, as I was sitting in my hot tub doing my workout this morning, I was thinking about you and your son. When you say the treatments don't work, I was wondering what your definition of a treatment working is. Medication does not alleviate ALL of the symptoms. It only lessens them to a manageable level. The person, like me, that has a severe mental illness, must do a lot of other things to manage life with a severe mental illness. Someone who has schizophrenia or mania has to learn how to ignore the voices/ sounds. They don't go away entirely, they just are diminished with medication. Someone who is having paranoid thoughts has to learn to use cognitive therapy (changing your thinking) or learn how to ignore/ manage the voices or even to check with others about if their reaction is out of line or not. At this point I am reminded of the man in northern Iowa who talked back to his voices, aloud, and kept getting picked up by the police and put in the hospital since it scared others. He managed the voices, not by stopping his talking back to them (arguing with them that they were wrong) but by holding a cell phone to his ear when he talked back to them so people thought he was just having an argument on the phone!

People with depression, like me, learn how important daily exercise, eating right, sunlight, cognitive therapy (changing our thinking), not isolating, and other things are to our well being. Medication does not "cure" depression. It just gives one the ability to use other tactics to manage life. That is why a wellness recovery plan is so important. There are things one has to do every single day to stay well. (Avoiding alcohol and street drugs is probably the most important.)

Peer support (people like me helping others, since I have been trained in listening, etc.) can be very helpful. The Depressive Bipolar Support Alliance is a good source of peer support through their support groups and literature.

Sometimes people have to make a major life change to minimize stress, which makes symptoms worse. That is why my oldest sister went from negotiating contracts for the aerospace industry (big bucks) to negotiating contracts for academia WITH the aerospace industry (much less money but also a more relaxed work environment since the focus was on learning, not making money for shareholders). Throughout my career, I intentionally did not seek out supervisory roles, or management roles, since there was more stress in those roles. So I worked in direct care where there was less stress, but also far less money. I changed my standards for housework and other things, giving myself permission to be less than perfectly tidy since that was additional stress I did not need. Others go to minimizing possessions to lessen the stress of housework.

I don't know your son's situation, and if any of this applies. It was just my thoughts as I was working out in my hot tub. The mental health system will NOT tell clients these things. They have to be learned from peers. The system makes more money if you stay sick. If you figure out how to take care of yourself, and get stable on meds, you can do what I do- get a primary care doc to prescribe my meds and avoid the mental health system completely. So they really are not invested in wellness, and even worse, many of the people working in the mental health system do not believe that anyone can actually get better. That belief is passed on to clients through subtle means, so that the clients do not get better. This paragraph sounds paranoid but there is research that substantiates what I say.