Letters from Rona / Mental health / Sort by date

Perhaps it's partly because I never had a daughter that the greatest joy I found in corporate life was mentoring gifted young women who today are leaders in their field. Then there's the protegee I will call Ellen. Her blazing intellect, zest for challenge and seemingly unquenchable energy made her the go-to person for the toughest projects---until the light went out of her smile. What looked at first like a bad day became a sour week and then a spiritless month in which Ellen rarely emerged from her office. She kept the door closed and the window covered with paper. When she started missing her deadlines, I had no choice but to confront her. She admitted that while we all thought she was working, she'd been staring at her computer screen, unable to write or even read. Depression had paralyzed my star employee. [more]

It's been a good many years since I was 37 and had just figured out that not only did the state known as happiness actually exist outside sappy greeting cards and over-orchestrated love songs, I had as much right to it as anyone else. My second life---the one that followed my treatment for chronic depression---was in its first astonishing months when I felt as green and tender as a newly unfurled leaf. [more]

I marvel that I once saw shopping as balm for my spirit. All it offered was distraction and the fleeting promise of care by a bevy of minions better groomed than I would ever be. Yet I remain a firm believer in the power of clothes to express both who I am and who I might become. So when a longtime reader e-mailed me the story of her "happy hat," I recognized a kindred spirit. [more]

Last summer, with much yawning and complaining, I reduced my coffee intake from five cups daily to two. A doctor had warned that if I didn't ease up on the caffeine, I'd have to put up with chronic insomnia. Now a study of 1400 people shows that drinking three to five cups of coffee a day can dramatically reduce your risk of Alzheimer's disease, which has ravaged my family. What to do? [more]

When I was climbing out of chronic depression more than 20 years ago, I read somewhere about a bedtime ritual that was said to nudge the weariest of hearts toward hope. You were to lie in the dark and give thanks to whatever gods there be for the best moment of your day. How simplistic, I thought. How impossibly naive. What about all the days when nothing good happened? [more]

A friend is just back from spending several days with her sister. Why am I telling you this? Isn't hanging out together just part of being sisters? Not for these two. They had barely spoken for 15 years. when my friend told me she was making this journey, she looked both resolute and anxious. Now she says her visit was "wonderful." Her eyes glisten. She means "full of wonder." [more]

I'm thinking today of a preteen boy in Windsor, Ontario, the auto town just across the river from Detroit. I don't even know his age, let alone his name, his favourite sports team, what kind of music excites him or whether he's ever loved a dog. But I know something intimate about this boy. I know what he fears. When both his parents lost their jobs in the auto industry, he worried that they couldn't afford to raise him. So he tried to take his life. [more]

Suicides are all but invisible--except when they're notorious. Nicholas Hughes, a marine biologist and outdoorsman who hanged himself last month, would have been the invisible kind if not for his mother: Sylvia Plath, as famous for killing herself as she is for her remarkable poems. Some say we've heard enough about the death of Nicholas Hughes. Writers Linda Gray Sexton and Jeremy Gavron, who also lost literary mothers to suicide, would beg to disagree. [more]

Hey, everybody: I've suffered from a mental illness. It's called depression and it affects one in five of us at some point in our lives. That's why I'm determined to help break the silence around this still-taboo subject. Here are some video clips from my recent keynote speech to the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation. [more]

This morning I asked myself how many people in my circle had been touched by the suicide of someone dear to them. Without even trying, I counted 12 names. [more]

If someone you love is an alcoholic, one question is never very far from your mind: "Why is he doing this to me?" Maybe your drunk is a she, but that's a detail. All of these stories are essentially the same, and one of them is mine. Which is why, especially around Christmas, I turn for insight to alcoholic writers---John Cheever and Raymond Carver---who have told the truth about their illness. [more]

I'm not sure why I feel so optimistic these days. It's not as if the audacity of hope has yet crossed the border to Canada's capital. Here we're stuck with the audacity of arrogance and deceit, which is the price of electing the schoolyard bully for Prime Minister. Meanwhile winter's digging in and the economic news keeps getting worse. The one thing I can control is my mood. [more]