This is Panic 18 - "Talk about suffering here below"

Hello all, February is upon us and I was wracking my brain about something to write for the latest installment of TIP and then last Friday, I got ill. I hit the wall of tiredness and coupled with a bad back and just feeling rubbish I started to panic a bit. Now when panic sets in, I generally as a first point of call in my head go "God not now" and I realised it was time to tackle a particular issue.

I've got to admit that a part of me had been ducking this issue on here for a while because I didn't want the blog to come across as preachy and like I was saying that religion is the way to cure your panic attacks because it's more complicated than that. However this is a big part of my life and it makes sense to me to talk about how it affects me.

I am a Christian. Now I realise that for some people that word carries a lot of connotations and ideas so I will break it down further. I believe that Jesus Christ is God, that God came in human form, died and 3 days later rose from the dead.

Now this is not a big thing saying "convert! convert!" (though hey if you want to, great) nor is it going to be a massive philosophical discourse but it a big question that I get as a Christian is "how can you believe in an all loving god when there's so much suffering in the word?" and I want to explain it. If you want to get into the more philosophical side of things, drop me an email.

Now believe me, I wonder a lot why I've suffered from panic attacks for nearly 9 years. I, like you, have tried a bunch of different methods and yet I believe in a God who created the universe and can do ANYTHING and yet he won't snap his fingers and make me better.

From a Christian perspective, the world was created perfect and is now not. Whether you take Genesis as literal truth or not, you don't need a theology degree to accept the notion that the world and the people in it are flawed. From a Christian perspective that is how we attribute all the bad things in the world. For me it's the reason that allows me to be anxious so much and why anxiety even exists.

The big issue here is free will. Evil exists in Christian philosophy because of mankind's decision to either choose God or disobey him. Therefore bad things happen. I believe that because God allows us the choice to go towards him or away. I chose to go towards him.

That's the basic philosophy bit. Bad stuff happens because man has fallen away from God.

Why does God not click his fingers and make me well? The answer to that can go one of two ways.

One way to my thinking says that God uses our adversities to teach us lessons. He doesn't magic my anxiety away, nor does he exacerbate it but he uses thew situations that arise to teach me lessons about Him, His will for my life and myself. That is what I think in my more rational moments.

The other way is I have no idea. That sounds like the ultimate kop out but I can't comprehend everything God does. It's impossible, He created everything. That's how I am when I am feeling more irrational.

I realise that this has jumped from one idea to the other but it's hard to compress the entire subject into one blog post and this is a subject I wanted to talk about. It is a struggle for me to try and match these things up. I have this problem and I have a God who loves me. Does it match up at first sight? No, I'll admit that. Digging deeper sees me able to do it; I have a medical condition that affects me but it's not because God doesn't love me, it's because the world is flawed. God can use this flaw I have to improve me and hopefully when all the lessons are learned, He will take it away.

Amen to that.

This is Panic 17 – New Year Blues

Well folks, happy new year to one and all from TIP. Obviously the blog posts have become spaced out as time has gone on and it's been nearly a month since issue 16. Christmas was a busy time for me personally with 2 weddings, working till Christmas Eve, travelling to Cornwall and then to Warminster then back to work in the new year.

Either way time is rumbling on and we're into 2010. As I said, it was a hectic but a really fun December festive period for me. The weddings I went to were really good fun as well as giving me and my fiancé some useful ideas for our own wedding.
Christmas (in spite of the 4 hour train journey to Cornwall on Christmas Eve) was a lot of fun where I spent time with my in-laws and my mum, ate some good food, went out to Plymouth for football and Bath for some shopping. I got to relax loads, rest up from a hard year where I started unemployed and ended it really busy with a job I love.

We all, for the most part, have a really good time over Christmas. There's our families, people we may not see, presents, parties, any and everything can happen and the time is generally a fun one had by all.

What comes after that, when we return to our regular lives of work/school, sometimes relationships have come under a bit of stress for a variety of reasons and some of us are left with a nice hefty bill for a few things. It's what most of us call the new year blues.

The thing that occurred to me about this year is that I have a lot of things smacking me in the face with the start of this year. I will be a married man by the end of the year, I'll be renting a flat with my wife, I'll be dealing with bills for everything where before landlords were dealing with it for me. To me it feels like I am becoming a grown up and it scares me a bit to go with the post Christmas downer.

There are a couple of ways to look at it. We can either let it overwhelm us or we can look at ways to get through it all:

Know what you needs a new start and what doesn't: It's really easy to say “oh it's a new year and everything is new” and you can make a clean break but we all know that's not possible and sometimes not sensible either. The key is making sure that you take a bit of time to be reflective, pick your directions for the important things you're doing and go for it.
Take things one step at a time: if there's a long list of things that need seeing to, prioritise the list and work through it sensibly. Over stretching yourself is a sure fire way to lead to panicking as you end up trying to do too much at one time.
It's only the beginning: some people will try and say stuff like “this year is the year I do this” and think that if they don't have something concrete in place by 25th January, the resolutions they've made are voided as they're not close to what they want to be. The year is a week or so old and there's 52 of them. If you plan stuff out well rather than jumping blindly into stuff, chances are you'll do better with it.

2010 is the start of a new decade and it's another chance to re-evaluate where we are in terms of improving things when it comes to our mental health. I feel a lot better than I have for a while though I know there are some challenges to come. We all have them and we can face this one together.

In the spirit of New Year, 3, 2, 1...

This is Panic 16 - The experiment

Well folks this is something new...enjoy and let know what you think

Anthony

This is Panic 15 - Robert Enke

This one folks, will be a different format to TIP and also there'll not be a massive amount of humour involved. I am sorry for that. I try and make these entertaining to read but the subject for this one hit a bit close to home for me for a variety of reasons. However, as ever, I'm going to talk about it because that's the best thing to do.

Many of you who know me personally know that I speak German fluently and follow German football. After a couple of problematic years away from Germany, Robert Enke returned to the German Bundesliga at the time I was just moving there.
Enke had started his career in his home town of Jena before moving to Mönchengladbach and then overseas. After an unspectacular career in Europe during which he played little and was bottled by his own fans while playing for Fenerbahce, Enke moved back to Germany to join the club he would later captain, Hannover 96.

The details of Enke's last few years and death are tragic to say the least. He became depressed and had regular panic attacks, crippled by the fear that he would be overtaken by a younger, better player. However football remained his release but he never felt like he could be open about his illness.
In 2006, his daughter died aged 2 from a heart infection which is said to have really affected Enke and plunged him back into a downward turn.
8 months before his death, Enke and his wife adopted a little girl but the German international was so worried that he believed if people found out he was depressed, they'd take the child away.

We all know how Enke died and I will not re-hash that again but it spoke to the real issue and one of the reasons why I started this blog in the first place.

I sat with my laptop and watched Enke's memorial service in front of 45,000 people inside Hannover's AWD Arena and thousands more outside. These people were friends, family, colleagues, supporters and admirers of this one man and yet he felt that he couldn't be open about what was wrong.

The stigma around anxiety and depression can cripple us as much as anything else and we can spiral downwards into an emotional black hole. Believe me, it's happened to me and I know it's happened to at least one other person reading this. We can change attitudes towards anxiety conditions and other mental health problems and we can hold out our hand and help each other through this.

I beg of you, if you are feeling really low and depressed about any condition you have, please talk to your GP. There are also great groups like Depression Alliance who can help and if you really need to talk to someone right away, call the Samaritans who also do excellent work.

As a fan of German football, Robert Enke to me was Mr Hannover 96. He was the man I saw leading Germany into the World Cup and beyond and was one player who I respected greatly. Even as a hardend Hansa Rostock fan, I will admit to having wished we got to see him play more.

Please folks, never ever think you are alone with this. Together we will all make it through.

For Robert Enke; that which we do not see on this Earth will live forever in the stars. Schlaf gut.

This is Panic 14 - Finances

Hi folks, after a bit of a brief break due to the hectic nature of life, we're back and this one's been brewing for a bit.

This is another attempt by me to be slightly topical. You can't escape it on the telly or in newspapers or articles online, this financial recesion is everywhere and we keep hearing about it...constantly. With money getting tighter and things like loans and the like becoming harder to come by it can start stressing us out and that can't be good.

Think tank The Young Foundation published a report in January of this year called Receding Tide: Understanding unmet needs in a harsher economic climate. The conclusions coming out of it were that the recession will have an impact on the mental health of the nation. The report comes to the conclusions that as finances get tighter, we start trying more and more to satisfy our material needs and this means that our psychological needs suffer as a result.

It's actually something a lot of us tend to do. I certainly do; we get so wrapped up in all the other little things in life like paying the bills and doing this and that with friends and keeping up with the Jones' that we forget that we need to look after ourselves. I have done this at work from time. I try to make sure everything is done at work and run myself into the ground and make myself ill both physically and mentally.

That report points out that our system is geared much more towards the material than the psychological and I'm inclined to agree. Without getting to much into my own personal political philosophy, there never seems to be much of a focus on how or why we do things but simply that we do them and do them at the expense of everything else, including ourselves it seems.

I know I am lucky. I got laid off about a year ago, was out of work for 2 months and then got a job paying a significant amount more than what I was earning while I was employed but I still have a lot of empathy and sympathy for those out of work. It is really worrying as we sit there thinking of how far we can make things stretch or last that little bit longer. Coming up to Christmas as well and all the expectations on people regarding presents and decorations and the like.
Last year I managed to do ok. My money I got from my old work was enough for me to live and be able to do ok at Christmas along with the fact I could go shopping whenever I wanted to but what I was spending on Christmas presents could not be spent on other things.

I made a really concious choice when I had no real income that I was going to use the money wisely. I cut out anything that could be cut out. I cut back on foods that I could do without and planned more clearly what I was going to make for meals during the week so I could plan expenditure.
Budgeting if money is tight is time consuming but it is a really sensible idea. If you are worrying about stuff then you need to do what you can to minimise that worry. If you know how much you have then it makes it easier to plan it all out. Sure it doesn't improve the cash flow or get more money in but if you know what to work with, it's one less thing to worry about.

All in all the finances story is one that acts as a good similie for us in general. We need to ignore the bits and pieces around the outside and focus on the middle, ourselves that little bit more. There is no shame in putting ourselves first at all if we're low on funds or if we're not well.

In these trying times we need to orangise our priorities and making sure we are well and can live properly is one of them. To some, money makes the world go round but decent mental health cannot be bought.

This is Panic 13.1 - Therapy in the news

Well folks this is a bit of an update from the last post. Whilst on BBC News earlier I stumbled across this@

Link to "'Talk therapy for the depressed"

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (aka NICE) have come out saying that antidepressants shouldn't be used to treat depression in adults with chronic health problems but rather they should be directed towards structured physical acitvity and Cognitive Behavoiral Therapy for help.

MIND, the mental health focussed charity have responded saying that shifting too much of a focus towards CBT and computerised CBT and away from counselling could be seen as an excuse by some health providers to cut funding to other talk based therapies.

Reading the advice from NICE, I can see where they come from to an extent but it seems very much like they are trying to pick one therapy that "works" best and then tar all people with the same brush somewhat.

Depression (and anxiety as they are linked) relating to chronic health problems or even chronic health anxiety is very much a different thing for different people and to push one form of talk therapy over other kinds seems irresponsible to me. It's not scientific to assume that all people will benefit from one kind of therapy to a mental illness.

Take the drugs from the statin family, used for blood pressure conditions. There are a variety of different statins used for different people and you tailor to the patient. Essentially what this advice from NICE seems to be is totally disregarding that individual patients and thrust one kind of therapy upon people which doesn't sit well with me.

I'd hope that NICE will listen to constructive criticisms from the mental health professional community and be prepared to alter that advice in the future.

As ever, this is just the ramblings of myself so please do read the article and the advice from NICE at their website; click here for that.

Panic Buys - Understanding Anxiety and Panic Attacks

Title: Understanding Anxiety and Panic Attacks
Author: Dr Kwame McKenzie
Publisher: Family Doctor Books in association with the British Medical Association
Click here for the publisher's website
Click here for the book on Amazon.co.uk

The back of this book proudly trumpets that over 4 million books have been sold in the Family Doctor series which makes sense if they follow a similar pattern to this one.

I bought this book a while ago and it's very good if you deal with your anxiety condition and life's problems in a similar way to myself which is to bone up on a subject, read around it and use the appropriate tactics gleamed from what you've read.

The book's format has the various chapters broken up into sections making it easy to stop and start without feeling like you particularly need to race to the end of the chapters which is useful as you don't want to rush through reading anything to better inform you about your condition.

As the book covers a range of subjects within the broader field of anxiety, the book is also useful in that to get to information you may find useful you don't have to read the whole book. The break up of the chapters helps the reader to jump about as needed to and the information is never presented in massively long lumps of text. That said, if like me you are keen on reading around the subject then knowing about other kinds of anxiety disorders can be interesting reading. If that's not your bag and you want it for additional help rather than for interesting reading, the book itself normally retails for about £3-£5 so it's usefulness is not negated by the cost

The book's author Dr Kwame McKenzie is a lecturer in psychiatry at University College London and the book obviously benefits from his expertise. The issue of course with some books written by clinicians and aimed at the lay person is that the way information is presented in certain parts can come across as a bit patronising but the book doesn't bamboozle the reader with overly technical terms and any longer terms are explained.

As well as explaining the conditions and drugs used, the book also covers the different kinds of treatments and provides a chapter on self help techniques that could be useful.

Don't be mistaken, this book is a basic overview of everything rather than an in depth study. It will give you bare bones help and good signposting towards other treatments and ideas that may be useful. I liken it to an appointment with your GP; decent and to the point but short and a bit overly clinical and sterile in parts.

If you're wanting something to hold your hand a bit or help you through a hard time or provide you with effective techniques for dealing with attacks, this is not the book for you. If your problem is a new thing and you want something to read before delving deeper or you want to give something to others to help them understand a bit better than this book will certainly do the job.

With such a low price it's certainly a handy book to have around but it's a bit like taking an aspirin for a broken arm. It'll help short term but it certainly won't cure anything.