Example: Happiness Collage

Here's a collage I made to illustrate Topic: A Collage of Happiness.

This collage includes images of a kitty, a pink sunrise, Robot Chicken, chocolate, plarn (plastic yarn), mountains, yarn, and a Nintendo 3DS XL.

The thing to remember when you work on your own happiness collage: the pictures need to be things that make you happy.  What makes you happy is the "right answer" to this exercise.  We're all individuals, with different tastes.

So what makes you happy?

Topic: Your Daily Happy Thought

This is one that I challenged my friend with a few days ago.

Upon waking up, find something good to be happy about.  It can be anything that makes you happy.

Yesterday, it was feeling rested.  Today, it was pretty pink clouds at sunrise.

It sounds easy, right?  When you're depressed, it can be quite a challenge to find just one happy thought.  It's also tough if you're used to thinking negatively.  It's like drinking a really bad wine.  The first gulp is awful.  The second one isn't much better, and after the third, you hardly notice anymore.  But it still does harm to you, all the same.  And you get "hooked" on the intoxication.

It's the same way with thinking dark thoughts.  They're not good for you, but they're habit-forming.

Well, give this exercise a try.  It doesn't matter how small the happy thought is, just do it.  Get into the habit of thinking happy, one thought at a time.

Topic: A Collage of Happiness

First, for those that may not know what a collage is, it is traditionally a page of pictures cut out of newspapers and magazines, and these pictures glued onto the page.

Second, I got the idea after thumbing through a friend's Weight Watchers book and realized the exercise adapts well to those of us with mental disabilities where we think negative/dark thoughts.

So here's the challenge: Look for pictures that make you happy.  They can come from newspapers and magazines.  Paste them all in a jumble on a piece of paper.  You can even do this exercise on the computer if you wish.

If you're stuck in the "think negative" rut, this exercise is intended to get you to think happy things.

Topic: Another Coping Skill

This is one I forgot to mention, and it can be useful.

Three Things Now: When you realize that your mind is thinking negatively, stop yourself.  Now think of three good things.  This helps get your mind off of thinking that things are going bad.

I'd never heard of this technique until I went to the hospital.  But it's simple and it works.

Topic: Hospital Stays

I've stayed at two different hospitals now, one of them more familiar than the other.

But what this topic is about is concerned with patients that make us a little bit nervous.

My first stay at Green Oaks wasn't so bad.  We had one guy that threw a fit in the unit though; he wanted to take a shower and started throwing his bottle around.

The second stay in the Green Oaks ER had me a bit more nervous.  There was this creepy guy wandering around, taking the bedding off of chairs on the female side of the room.  He wanted everyone afraid of him.  And then there were the fist fights and arguments that broke out.  Overall, it was nerve-wracking.

Then there was my stay at the WYSONG unit in McKinney.  Most of the people there seemed pretty much normal.  But there were a few that didn't understand the concept of "personal space" and just seemed to be looking to pick a fight.  I had my own "brush" with one of the patients, and made sure to let the nurses at the nurse station know what was going on and that the behavior had me feeling a bit anxious.

The one thing I found sad were the number of people in the hospital because we can't find work.

Tip: Verified by Mental Health Professional

Anyway, the tip is this: even if you're mentally ill and you're taking pills, the pills alone won't fix you.  I had the idea that it's crucial to help "mend yourself".  Work with your medication and your team of professionals.  Do things to help keep your mood where it should be.  Don't dwell on the bad stuff that got you here in the first place.

And another tip I was given, more of a coping skill: the bad stuff is in your past.  You can't change it.  But you can learn from it and choose to move on.

I think what group that was in was a "learn forgiveness" exercise.  Something about "anger is like a hot coal, it burns you".  I couldn't help but bring up this dream I had years ago about being in the traditional "fire and brimstone" Hell, but not feeling any of what was going on outside of my being.  The only thing I felt was my anger, and I was told I could leave Hell any time I wanted, if I chose simply to ditch the anger.  Group found the imagery and story to be quite appropriate.

While I'll admit I've started feeling no anger or very little anger about various things in the past, I can think of at least a couple of apartments where the residents could use some "letting go of anger" themselves.  Oh well.  I can only hope they eventually will.  It's reassuring though that I can now.

Topic: Coping Skills

Since my co-author, co-crazy isn't here, I thought I'd blog about coping skills.

Believe it or not, we all need to have ways to deal with life's hardships.  But how we deal with them shouldn't be out of anger, depression, or other negative, destructive emotions.  We need positive things to focus on.  These positive things do help us through tough situations so we're not crushed.

It wasn't until I was hospitalized involuntarily that I realized a truth about myself: I have coping skills.  I just wasn't aware that's what they were.  They're essentially the "Swiss Army Knife" of mental health.

So what are some of these coping skills?

Goal-setting is one of them.  They showed us in group not only how to set goals for ourselves, but what stands in the way of that goal being fulfilled.  So in order to power through or work around the obstacle, you have to think of what will chip away at the obstacle.  That item will become your next goal, and so on, until you have some achievable steps to work with.

Leisure time is another.  It's important to work leisure time into your daily routine to help cope with life's stress factors.  Some leisure activities are cheaper than others.  Some can seem like work, like making arts and crafts stuff and selling it for profit.  But whatever it is, the leisure activity is what you do to relax and just enjoy life.  It can be relatively cheap (like walking) or expensive (like a sport that needs a lot of equipment).

Relaxation/Meditation Techniques is a coping skill that I'd already known about, but don't consciously practice.  The idea is to "breathe right".  There's a right way and a wrong way to breathe.  We're supposed to breathe by expanding our abdomens.  Don't use the ribs for breathing; expand and contract the abdomen slowly to relax.  And while you're breathing, think of a place that you find relaxing.  My "happy place" that was easy to picture was Starbucks, drinking a cup of coffee.  Believe it or not, I usually feel relaxed at Starbucks.

You'd think that being mentally ill, I'd be terrified of all of those strange people.  But I'm not shaken in the least.  The type of patrons you find at Starbucks are college students, kids that go to private schools, business people, and the elderly.  We're all doing our thing, maybe interacting a little with people we see every time we're here.  I find Starbucks (and to some degree, college) to be more socially relaxing than the bar/club scene.  But each to their own.

Journaling was yet another skill they emphasized, although we didn't really have a "set time" to do that activity.  We were pretty much left to our own devices there.  They gave us journals to write in and supplied pens.  There really was something relaxing about writing things down on paper.

Planning was another thing we discussed in group.  This coping skill was all about (basically) taking a weekly to-do list and setting achievable goals.  It was important to set up this schedule to work in leisure activities, educational events (like free seminars on a hobby), and other things.  Alongside planning was communicating with loved ones so you could spend time with them on a shared hobby.

The very first coping skill I was introduced to when I first reached the hospital was simply: write down what you're grateful for today.  It didn't matter how many or what you wrote, so long as it was an upbeat thing.

The basic gist of all of these focuses on seeing things in a more positive light.  The meds do help with the "crushing despair," but the coping skills fill a need that the pills can't cover.  The meds can't make you "think happy thoughts".  You have to do that for yourself.  That's what I've learned.

There are probably other coping skills (this is all self-help stuff, by the way) that I've missed.  So feel free to add others in the comments.

One Movie that Touches on One Type of Madness: "Chronicle"

I've got this movie in my collection.  It's done in that darned "shaky camera technique" style.

But the basic gist is three high school students run into something alien, and they gain super powers from it.  One of the guys is a loner that's picked on and bullied.  His mother is dying from cancer, I think, and his disabled father is...  a miserable jerk that's trying to make his son as miserable as he is.

Yeah, I empathize with the picked-on fellow.  Mainly because that describes my life, for the most part.  Society just doesn't "get it," doesn't understand that they are partly responsible for some peoples' madness, because some people in society just keep pushing, and pushing, and tresspassing, and invading other peoples' mental landscape to the point where the only option for the ones suffering increasing mental illness is to snap and lash out.

Sure, we can be medicated, but to a point.  "Crazy people" need to have skills to cope, to try and help themselves out, to find what works for them and utilize it.  But we also need the space to help ourselves.  We can't keep getting pushed around all of the time and be expected to bloody well function properly.

For someone like me, it's crucial to get positive feedback.  I've already had enough toxic sewage spewed all over me for the past 40 years.  Feeling good about myself has been a rarity, at best.  For so long, I've been like the cartoon character Droopy Dog--hating my life.  Toxic people need to stay out of my life.

Introduction to "Simply Going Crazy"

My ex-roommate, who is also suffering from mental illness, wanted to co-author on this blog.  Since this disability preoccupies his mind a lot nowadays, he thought this would be a good place to discuss our issues and what we're doing to get through it on a daily basis.

The recent hospitalization I had earlier this month taught me that I have a number of coping skills I can fall back on.