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Artist illustrates what it’s like to live with anxiety and depression
01.12.2016
09:20 am
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If you don’t live with anxiety and/or depression (or know someone who does), these illustrations will probably not mean a lot to you. If you, like me, do suffer from one or both, then these illustrations will hit close to home. The wording and situations nail it, IMO.

Artist Gemma Correll sums up—with some humor—what it’s like to suffer from these sometimes debilitating medical disorders.

“I honestly think that humor can be a saviour at times of distress or, if you just live with a constant level of anxiety and depression like I do,” said Correll. “I do think that people should speak more freely about anxiety,” she added. “I know that I would have felt a little better as an anxiety-ridden teenager if I knew that I wasn’t completely alone in my fears.”

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More after the jump…
 

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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01.12.2016
09:20 am
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‘The Crystal Cube’: An early bit of Fry and Laurie

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I wonder why it’s generally the rich and famous who like to tell the public, ‘Money does not bring happiness’? It’s so condescending. Do the poor wander around informing whoever will listen, ‘Poverty does not make you happy’? Hardly. I was thinking about this as I finished reading Stephen Fry’s latest volume of highly readable autobiography, where the great man informs us:

I know that money, power, prestige and fame do not bring happiness. If history teaches us anything it teaches us that. You know it. Everybody agrees this to be a manifest truth so self-evident as to need no repetition. What is strange to me is that, despite the fact that the world knows this, it does not want to know it and it chooses almost always to behave as of it were not true. It does not suit the world to hear that people who are leading a high life an enviable life, a privileged life are as miserable most days as anybody else, despite the fact that it must be obvious they would be - given that we are all agreed that money and fame do not bring happiness. Instead the world would prefer to enjoy the idea, against what it knows to be true, that wealth and fame do in fact insulate and protect against misery and it would rather we shut up if we are planning to indicate otherwise.

It’s a clever piece of writing, and rather troubling. If money hasn’t made Mr Fry happy, perhaps that’s because he wasn’t happy before he had it? As someone who has spent a considerable part of his adult life in poverty, dirt and a miserable ease, I can assure the universally loved writer, actor, broadcaster and tweeter that money can and does bring happiness, for it allows independence. Moreover, if money’s not important, then why is so much of our politics based on the redistribution of wealth?

Of course, it’s not just money, Mr Fry is writing about, but fame, and his depression, and all that entails, which he recently discussed, along with his thoughts on suicide, in the talk-show In Confidence:

‘It is exhausting knowing that most of the time the phone rings, most of the time there’s an email, most of the time there’s a letter, someone wants something of you. They want to touch the hem of the fame, not the hem of the person.

‘You resort to not travelling on the Tube or walking round the street any more and going in a big car with a driver.

‘And people think, “Oh, he thinks he’s so grand, doesn’t he?” Well, no. I’d rather walk, but sometimes I just can’t.

‘I feel I would love to close down for a number of years in some way and just be in the country making pork pies and chutneys and never have to poke my head out of the parapet.’

In 1989, I had the pleasure of meeting Fry, when I was a researcher working on Open to Question, a “yoof” interview series where groups of inquizzitive teenagers grilled various invited guests: from politicians (Gary Hart, Tony Benn), through performers (Billy Connolly, Jim Kerr) to Royalty (Princess Anne). Fry’s show was recorded on the same day we filmed an episode with Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens), in which the seventies pop star discussed the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and his Islamic beliefs. In one corner of the green room was Fry with cigarettes and red wine, in the other Yusuf Islam with an entourage of veiled assistants.

Fry was affable, eminently likable, terribly polite and deflected the most intimate and probing questions. When asked if he had always wanted fame, Fry avoided a direct answer by explaining his definitions of fame. There was “real fame like Charlie Chaplin”; and another kind, like original James Bond (on radio) and British TV host, Bob Holness. Fry said when he was younger he wanted to be famous like Holness, and managed to slip this in without the interviewer, (future Channel 4 newsreader) Krishnan Guru-Murthy picking up on his youthful ambition.

In The Fry Chronicles, he explained this ambition more openly:

A part of me - I have to confess this, moronic, puerile and cheap as it may sound - really did ache to be a star. I wanted to be famous, admired, stared at, known, applauded and liked.

Now of course he’s bigger than Holness and as universally loved as Chaplin, which in light of his recent comments about hem-touching fans, does, sadly, seem to confirm what Saint Teresa of Avila once wrote:

“More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones”

It’s thirty years since the loveliness that is Stephen Fry first came to prominence alongside Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer and Penny Dwyer in the Cambridge Footlights’ comedy revue “The Cellar Tapes”. It’s the last really great Footlights show, as those following it may have highlighted some great individual talent (Sue Perkins, Robert Webb, David Mitchell, and Richard Ayoade) but never achieved the legendary status of “Beyond the Fringe”, “A Clump of Plinths” (aka “Cambridge Circus”) or “The Cellar Tapes”. Understandable, you may say, considering the unique and exquisite talents felicitously brought together for our entertainment.

The success of “The Cellar Tapes” led Fry and Laurie to be asked by the BBC to come up with a pilot for a possible series:

We conceived a series that was to be called The Crystal Cube, a mock serious magazine programme that for each edition would investigate some phenomenon or other: every week we would ‘go through the crystal cube’. Hugh, Emma, Paul Shearer and I were to be regulars and we would call upon a cast of semi-regular guests to play other parts.

This is that pilot, in all its VHS glory, and as someone comments on the youtube page was there a more brilliant threesome as Fry, Laurie and Thompson? Answers on a postcard, care of the usual address.
 

 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.03.2011
03:35 pm
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Mental disorders illustrated by Winnie the Pooh and his friends

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This is sort of a dark and depressing take on mental disorders by Winnie the Pooh and characters. I don’t know about you, but these kinda gave me a serious case of the sads.
 
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More after the jump…

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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11.23.2010
02:41 pm
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Even—As You and I: Rare and Excellent Depression-Era American Film Spoofing the Surrealists!

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By 1937, surrealism was in its second decade as a movement. Its artists and filmmakers were making inroads into London and New York galleries, and becoming media stars. The surrealist bug also bit on the West Coast, and underground gatherings like the Hollywood Film and Foto League screened European avant-garde films regularly.

Such gatherings attracted politically minded actor Harry Hay and Works Progress Administration (WPA) photographers Roger Barlow and LeRoy Robbins. After seeing a magazine ad for a short film contest, these jokers sprung into action, making Even—As You and I, a short depicting themselves as broke filmmakers who cobble together clichés from their fave avant-garde films into a dorky film-within-a-film spoof called The Afternoon of a Rubber Band. In a “D’oh!”-style ending, the three realize they’ve missed the contest’s midnight deadline.

A damn clever little underground film moment. Hay—the curly-haired guy in the group—would go on to become the godfather of gay activism, founding the Mattachine Society in the early’50s and the Radical Faeries in the early ‘70s.
 

 
Check out part 2 after the jump!

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Posted by Ron Nachmann
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07.29.2010
07:16 pm
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The Fast Food-Depression Connection
11.02.2009
02:50 pm
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Before you order that 1400-calorie Hardee’s Monster Burger, consider this: a research team at London-based University College has found (surprise?) a link between depression and a diet rich in processed foods.  They also (bigger surprise?) found a link between a lack of depression and a diet rich in fish, fruits and vegetables. 

The team split the study participants into two groups.  After accounting for such factors as age, gender, and education, it was determined that the whole food-eating group would have a 26% lower risk for future depression.  The group eating a diet rich in sweets, fried food, processed meat, refined grains and high-fat dairy products had a risk of depression 58% higher than their whole food-eating counterparts.

Study author Dr. Archana Singh-Manoux added, “It is not yet clear why some foods may protect against or increase the risk of depression, but scientists think there may be a link with inflammation as with conditions such as heart disease.”

BBC News: Depression Link To Processed Food

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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11.02.2009
02:50 pm
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Depression’s Evolutionary Roots
08.26.2009
08:03 pm
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Fascinating article in Scientific American that possibly answers why depression still plagues roughly 30-50% of all people, everywhere.  Since the brain plays such an essential role in promoting survival and reproduction, and depression can debilitate so thoroughly, why hasn’t mankind simply evolved beyond it?

Well, according to Doctors Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., maybe it’s time we start considering depression a “useful” disorder.  One which is, “in fact, an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits.”  The pair backs this up with some brain-confusing brain chemistry, then moves on to make some simpler sense:

This is not to say that depression is not a problem.  Depressed people often have trouble performing everyday activities, they can?

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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08.26.2009
08:03 pm
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