Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (18 page)

THE UNBLOCKER

While these exercises are
still fresh in your mind,
you are going to (choose one of the following):

•
make a key phone call

•
send an important e-mail

•
make a significant appointment (e.g. bank manager, dentist, Citizens Advice Bureau)
 

•
arrange to meet somebody who can affect your life
 

•
ask somebody who can help you to help you
 

•
sign on for a class or a course
 

•
book into a gym, a Pilates class, a Weight Watchers class, etc.
 

•
send for a college prospectus, etc.

If there is an interval between the exercises and the action, refresh your imagination by
repeating
the improvisations as a warm-up before you start. Remember: don’t ponder the pros and the cons. Do like the seal:
Just jump in.

Reprise your ‘I can’t’ exercise

Remember that exercise you did at the beginning, when you wrote down the thing or things you couldn’t do that you felt you ought to be able to do? Look at them again. Now very quickly brainstorm some ideas on how you could do them. Write the answers down on a piece of paper.

WHAT PANEL MEMBERS THOUGHT

Maggie

‘I was reluctant to do the exercises as they seemed a bit childish but then I thought: what the hell? The one that really worked for me was drawing with both hands – I drew a lousy house with a bent chimney, but afterwards it felt odd, as if I’d had a tot! Then I made my call, not the bank manager or anything, only my sister-in-law. But I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly five years as we’d had a disagreement, and we just started chatting as though nothing had happened. I didn’t tell her what I’d just been doing. She has been diagnosed with depression. It was rather strange.’

George

‘I remember when we did these in Restart and we were all shouting out the answers. OK, I haven’t been keeping them up since, but I did do the connections ones and the Peripheral Vision one as I had a job interview. I don’t know the result yet but I tell you what – I wasn’t nervous. I kept making the bloke laugh.’

Barbara

‘The self-help thing I chose was to make an appointment to have my hearing tested. I’ve been having the telly on loud lately and I didn’t like to say anything. The exercises did cheer me up actually. I couldn’t do the drawing one, but the one looking out of the corner of your eye was good, and the wrong names for the furniture one. So maybe they helped, you never know.’

Katey

‘I thought they were brilliant, especially the wrong names and guessing the story. I did them with my mate Lisa and we fell about. I didn’t want to do any of the tasks though as I couldn’t think of one, but just to keep the faith I sent for an am-dram thing off the Internet I could have a go at – probably won’t.’

Terry

‘They didn’t work for me but I did send a couple of e-mails. One was to my old IT boss. When he called me back I asked him to give me a job and he said no. Sod you, I said, and he laughed. I haven’t spoken to him in a while. He used to have some good contacts. To be fair I think the exercises would work for a lot of people with depression because they use a different pathway in your brain.’

NOTE

1
. Keith Johnstone,
Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
. Faber & Faber, 1979, p. 84.

14

Two: the fitness challenge

When was the last time you walked in a field or down a towpath or by a lake?
Even if you live in the centre of a town, there are green spaces and parks and trees somewhere not far away. Go and find one. When Beethoven was in utter despair because he was losing his hearing, he used to stride about on his own in the countryside with his arms behind his back. It made him feel renewed. You can hear it in his music.

NATURE AND DESPAIR

Some of the earliest mental
asylums
(meaning sanctuaries) were set in large rural grounds in which patients were expected to work the vegetable and flower plots. Horticulture was seen as a wholesome therapy for the mentally ill, and these asylum grounds inspired all the hospital gardens that flourished until the middle of the twentieth century, when they were gradually replaced by drug and ‘talking’ cures. Now horticultural therapy is enjoying a comeback in Britain and the US, with initiatives underway like the Natural Growth Project in Hampstead, which helps the victims of torture, and patients’ gardens at Bethlam Hospital near Beckenham in Kent and the Blackthorn Medical Centre, Maidstone. The gardens make people who are full of pain feel better.

Nature can heal. You often see a little plaque on somebody’s lawn that reads:
You are nearer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth.
So even if you have to get there with help because you are in a wheelchair, I want you to go somewhere you can see trees or open spaces and just
breathe
. This is air that doesn’t come from central heating systems or exhaust pipes. Look around. Nature is bigger than you, and it is cyclical. Renewal goes on uninterrupted, whether you choose to take part in it or not. It doesn’t depend on human perception. If you are in despair, you need to understand that you are a part of this natural rhythmic process. You belong here. Start giving it some time.

Depressed by pain

If you are in despair because you suffer from chronic pain, this Challenge may be especially relevant to you. Close contact with nature is both refreshing and rejuvenating. If you are in constant pain that ‘gets you down’ it is very important that you do not just submit to it, as this will increase your experience of the pain. You need to look outwards, not just inwards.

You can moderate your pain levels by choosing to help yourself and gain mastery over your moods and your activities. Many physiotherapists teach that ‘motion is lotion’ and that lying in bed with a bad back, for example, can cause the muscles to contract and the pain to increase. The less you move, the more your joints may stiffen and the more they stiffen, the more you hurt.

Conversely, the brain can release natural opiate-like substances, and when we are totally absorbed in an activity we often do not notice our pain at all. I have seen professional sportsmen quite badly injured come off the field completely unaware that they have damaged themselves because they were so alive playing their sport.

THE DIRTY WORD

Now,
fitness
, for some despairing people, is a dirty word. They have escaped from the subject for so long they think it might hurt them to turn round and look at it. So let me tell you a story to give you hope.

Valentin’s story

When Russian circus performer Valentin Dikul was 24, he fell off a trapeze after a cable snapped. He was rushed to hospital where doctors told him that the injury had severed his spinal cord. He would be paralysed from the waist down for the rest of his life. He would certainly never walk again.

Valentin lay in bed grieving and thinking. He asked a friend to bring some weights in and began to exercise his arms. The nursing staff smiled to see the poor man wasting his time. His back was broken. He must make the adjustment and accept it. Valentin did not accept it. He exercised all the parts of his body that would move, and then, still working with weights, began a plan to get his brain to redirect nerve signals to strengthen his wasted legs, and even – what everybody said was impossible – to move them. Some of the nerves might still be connected. His exercise regime was gruelling, but it was his passion. He wanted to walk and he would walk. Today Valentin walks. He also works. And he is very, very strong. Now 70, he has opened clinics in France, Italy, Japan and Poland to help rehabilitate people with serious back injuries. He has had 136,000 applications for his treatment from around the world.

You may not have to go as far as Valentin. Take stock of your present state of fitness. Where are you on this list?

•
I am in a wheelchair.
 

•
I can walk with a stick.
 

•
I can walk but with difficulty.
 

•
I can walk.
 

•
I can walk fast.
 

•
I can jog.
 

•
I can run.

If you are in a wheelchair, ask someone to help you get out into the fresh air to look at trees or a garden or fields
at
least
once or twice a week. No matter what you have to do to insist upon it, and no matter what the season, make sure this happens to you.
You have a natural right to Nature.
You can also help yourself by doing what I call ‘bed callisthenics’.

Bed callisthenics

This means that you lie in bed or on a couch and, starting with your feet and ankles, stretch, tense and relax each of your muscles in turn. You can increase the tension by using, for example, your left leg to press against your right leg, your left hand and arm to press against your right, and so on. If you make a ‘praying hands’ shape, you can work your arms and fingers quite effectively. Try what you can do without hurting yourself. By strengthening your muscles you can gradually reduce both your pain and your helplessness.

If you can walk with difficulty, use all your powers of persuasion to get assistance and get out there in a green space, moving about. It will make
such
a difference to your health and well-being that it will be worth the effort. Of course, for anyone who
is
able to walk, let alone run, there is simply no excuse. Move your behind out to Nature so she can heal your mind. Walk regularly:

•
beginning once a week
 

•
then twice a week
 

•
then three times a week
 

•
then every day
 

•
ten minutes good
 

•
twenty minutes better

half an hour or more, absolutely beautiful.

If you have legs that work, use them. Otherwise Valentin would be utterly ashamed of you. Once you are actually moving about, we can be more ambitious. We can talk about big words like these that will require you to ask your doctor’s advice
before
you embark on them:

GYM
SWIM
SLIM

GYM

When we come to the fear challenge we shall be exploring adventure activities. If you want to try these – and I hope you will – you may need to advance your level of fitness beyond the baseline we are establishing here. Joining a gym is an ideal way of doing this because once you have paid your subscription fees, all you have to do is
turn up
. Even if you feel lousy when you arrive, you will soon be swept along by the atmosphere and the motivated people there. It may hurt a bit, but before you know it the sessions are over anyway. If you are lazy like me, going to a gym simplifies self-discipline. Because it places you in a fitness zone, you will get on and do the actions required, and the glow of pride you get from working out will encourage you to go back. If you can’t afford a gym, try a fitness video, but
ask your
doctor first.