Writings about mental health issues

Not my writings, but I've been making an unofficial collection of things that make sense to me or make me cry (often both). I find these helpful, either because they resonate with me, or because I use them to help understand/support others. 

I'll keep updating as I find things.

The Happy-Sads by Gerard Way
We were talking about depression. More specifically- the flash-flood of bulletproof mania, and it’s inevitable descent into lengthy, paralyzing anguish- our shared condition. “The Happy-Sads.” they said. “That’s what my doctor calls them”.

10 Ways to Show Love to Someone with Depression by Kelley @ The Darling Bakers
If you have a partner or are close to someone who struggles with depression, you may not always know how to show them you love them.

some thoughts on running and depression by Zack Handlen
It’s an odd thing, to recognize depression. It kind of always feels like bullshit. You start bleeding, you see a doctor; your car breaks down, you see a mechanic. But there are no easy external symptoms with depression. The experience is entirely internal, which means it relies on your ability to assess your own feelings as accurately as possible. When I was a kid, I used to feel guilty when my mom kept me home from school for being sick, because I wasn’t sure I was sick enough. This was like that, only worse.

Depression part two by Allie Brosch

At first, I'd try to explain that it's not really negativity or sadness anymore, it's more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can't feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you're horribly bored and lonely, but since you've lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you're stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is.

Sydney Film Festival 2013: round-up reviews

I've been doing Sydney Film Festival fairly cautiously in previous years - a movie or two each time - but this year I decided to see six movies in seven days. It didn't seem like an enormous undertaking while making the bookings - friends of mine did eight, nine, even ten in similar time periods - but of course I came down sick the weekend screenings started and of course work was going through a busy period. 

Despite the sniffles and the eventual fatigue I enjoyed myself anyway! And I also managed to double the amount of movies I've seen this year in one fell swoop. :) 

So here be some quick thoughts. 

Stoker (2013, d. Chan-wook Park)

India's (Mia Wasikowska) beloved father dies on her 18th birthday, and in the wake of this tragedy her long-lost uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) comes home to charm India's barely grieving widow of a mother (Nicole Kidman) and unsettle India. 

The creepiness of the film was unnerving at the time of watching but this one really grew on me. While on first watch it seemed to show its hand too early, making Charlie's backstory and his connection with India too obvious and over-the-top; but in all honesty I was surprised by the ending, and the more I think about it, the more the whole movie works for me as a whole, the meticulous construction of mise en scene and plot and atmosphere. 

I'd warn that while I've heard it's not as violent as Park's other movies, it's not without its horrors. But it's all so elegantly stylish, taking its gothic elements and drenching them with sunlit days and shadowy nights, and an almost anachronistic opulence in the setting of this amazing, lonely house. Mia Wasikowska is wonderful as always, Nicole Kidman is great too, and as Alison and I discussed afterwards, Matthew Goode continues to work that niche of 'good-looking yet creepy' like a pro. 

Blancanieves (2012, d. Pablo Berger)

A Spanish black-and-white retelling of Snow White as a silent film where Carmencita (Sofia Oria, as adult) takes on her dead father's profession as a bullfighter when she runs away after her evil stepmother (Maribel Verdu) schemes to have her killed. 

What a great concept! What a beautiful lead actress! What an attractive throwback to old film! And yet - this is slight, so very slight, and maybe a little too faithful to the original fairy tale. Even with its inventions and new locales, it just unfolds without much tension or feeling until an unexpectedly bitter, but tender, ending. And I really liked the ending for diverting from the expected. But the fact it doesn't fit in tone and direction with the rest of the movie just serves to make the rest of it more disappointing. 

The Look of Love (2013, d. Michael Winterbottom)

Steve Coogan plays Paul Raymond, the King of Soho" who built an empire starting with the UK's first strip club and popular soft-porn magazines. The film is interesting from a salacious, recent history point of view, with a good eye for the changing fashions and attitudes towards sex throughout time, from the conservative 50s to a high point with the swinging 60s and 70s and then in decline during the bleaker, more hardcore 80s. 

But overall it's a bog standard biopic with a fairly loose story arc. The real drama is in the story of his daughter Debbie, a lost little rich girl, groomed to take over for her father, without the steel in his soul, the ability to cut and run. Imogen Poots is really lovely in this role. Actually, all the women are quite interesting in this and the actresses are great - Anna Friel as Raymond's first wife who loses him to other women once his empire starts to grow, and Tamsin Egerton, leggy and gorgeous, as his long-time girlfriend who's a big part of that growing success. But the constant parade of female nudity with more than a dash of tired "ooh-er" naughtiness remains unexamined throughout the film and that gets kind of depressing by the end. 

I was really looking forward to this reunion of director Michael Winterbottom and Coogan, but this is the least of their collaborations for me; it could've been so much more.

Stories We Tell (2012, d. Sarah Polley)

It hurts me to say this as a Sarah Polley fan, but this was probably my least favourite of the films I saw at the festival. It's not bad, per se, but it doesn't pull off what it promises - a look at how we tell the stories of our personal histories, how our pasts are shaped by the storytellers, our futures shaped by things of the past. 

And the thing is, Polley does have a really interesting story to tell, and comes up with what appears to be an interesting way of telling it through this documentary. She discovers as a teen, after her mother's death, that the man she has always thought of as her father is not her biological dad. But when she goes searching for the man who everyone believes to be her bio father, she accidentally stumbles across an unexpected truth. 

The film itself is really ambitious. It layers interviews with her two dads, her siblings and friends of her parents with archival footage of her mother (herself an actress) and a rereading of her father's elegant memoir of the events.  There are also re-enactments by actors of stories from their shared family history, embedded as super 8 home movies.

But that's part of its downfall - it appears to reach for too much and doesn't quite know which avenues to explore, how to focus on what it wants to say. Plus Polley is just too close to the subject to be ruthless in paring it back. So in the end, it's more than a little messy and doesn't know where to end. Barely 90 minutes, it really dragged in the last third, when the beats of the film kept making me think/wish it was finishing, but the "story" would keep going, becoming looser and looser with each thread Polley chased. 

Dragon Girls (2012, d. Inigo Westmeier)

Probably my favourite film of the festival. I was really moved by this and it resonated a lot with me even as I felt at the same time that I was watching lives so removed from mine. But the film captured and conveyed so strongly a sense of the "idealised Chinese person", this unattainable perfection of body and moxie and nationalism that I recognise from my parents, embedded into their upbringing and values, which has trickled down to me in dribs and drabs. 

The documentary focuses particularly on three girls (ages 9 to 16) with somewhat varied experiences of the Shaolin Tagou Kung Fu School in the Henan province of China. The little girls are so great before the camera, often wise beyond their years and able to withstand so much internal and external pressure and hardship; so much so that I did feel somewhat manipulated by the possible clever construction of the story. And yet, I can't get a lot of this movie out of my head, and I really want to find a copy of this to show this to my parents as well to see what they think. 

The Bling Ring (2013, d. Sofia Coppola)

A thinly-fictionalised account of the teens who robbed the homes of celebrity Hollywood during a period in 2008-09. This was another very light, sort of formless movie that was easy to watch but ultimately felt very empty. 

It's at times really beautiful and striking - the silent robbery at Audrina Patridge's box of a house, filmed from a distance with the lights of Hollywood twinkling in the distance lasted long in my mind after other details about the movie faded. And as you'd expect from Coppola, the film is great at capturing aimless, teenage energy in music and look and mood.

But the thing is, the real story is fascinating, and left me wanting to know more, an itch that went unscratched by this film. I read The Bling Ring - Nancy Jo Sales' book expanded from her Vanity Fair feature on the subject - after seeing the movie and felt it much more satisfied my desire to dig and dig deeper behind these kids and what might have led to them dream up and actually, casually, carelessly go through with this string of robberies. 

The thing is, the movie had access to and seemingly works from similar sources of truth so it's inability or unwillingness to say anything made me frustrated the more I thought about it afterwards. It's not helped by some miscasting - Israel Broussard as Marc, our 'everyman' character entrance to the story, Leslie Mann as Nicki's airhead "cool" mom - that even stronger performances (Katie Chang, Emma Watson) couldn't quite save for me. 

Garbage - 25 Feb 2013 - The Metro

Not a band to see live, I've learnt. For nostalgia's sake, the show was fun, and Shirley Manson is as beautiful and hot as ever. She had great presence, coming out in a severe bun and a cape (which she removed after the first two songs), and it was exciting to watch her pacing round and round on stage as if barely contained, prowling with feline grace. Her voice was great too, slinky and strong.

But the sound was so muddy, the crisp cool stuttering music not coming across live at all with the pedestrian grunt of the guitars and drums. I saw a review that called it a colourful wall of sound, but it just sounded like an unsubtle messy noise to me, with songs having no place to go as they started at full throttle and bludgeoned their way to end (ruining the quiet melancholy of classics such as #1 Crush).

Set list was fun though - lots of old songs, particularly from the first and second album including some deep cuts that were enjoyable for an old fan. Highlight was probably (and somewhat surprisingly) I Think I'm Paranoid, which had the requisite lightness, and I got to hear Only Happy When It Rains, which was the song that made me love them in the first place all those years ago so the show was worth it to the 13 year-old fangirl inside of me. :)


Automatic Systematic Habit
Queer
Blood for Poppies
Push It
Hammering in My Head
Control
Why Do You Love Me
#1 Crush
I Think I'm Paranoid
Milk
Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)
The One
Battle in Me
When I Grown Up
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing
Only Happy When It Rains
Vow
You Look So Fine

Special
Stupid Girl
Beloved Freak

Tripod: Men of Substance

13 Jan 2013 - Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House

from 3pod.com.au

I hadn't been sure of what to expect actually - this was the first time I'd seen Tripod perform something closer to a comedy set, rather than their D&D musical 'Tripod versus the Dragon'. As we sat down in our great seats (third row, in the middle) my friends nodded approvingly, but joked that we didn't need this good a view as we'd had in my previous feat of excellent ticket karma that saw us admiring the um, talents of the bare-chested cast at Pirates of Penzance. 

"No shirtlessness here!" we chortled - then BAM! Tripod opened with pasty middle-aged beer guts for comedy. ;) It made me wonder what the 'substance' in their show title referred to. Thickening waistlines? or maybe the experience gained with age, after more than 15 years together as an act. They milked this for all it was worth throughout the show, memorably about Yon not changing in all that time ("He's like Benjamin Button - on pause!"). 

Other highlights in the compact show (a little over an hour) included the opening song, Adult Contemporary ("Haven't had a new musical experience since 1994!"); Close all the Local Pubs Down ("Let's move to where the music is - and stop it."); the tax song that becomes a Barry White parody to great effect (and was educational too!) and Yon's hilarious paen on looking back on your twenties with unrealistic fondness ("I think I would've remembered sacrificing a child..."). Oh, and encore song YouTube Party though my only complaint would be that there weren't enough references to cats. :)

In fact, this show felt like it made just for me and my friends - I mean, it featured stupid dancing, age anxiety, musical geekery and just plain geekery, things we're all extremely familiar with. Tripod even sang about Waiting for the Game to Load when we'd literally had a conversation about the days of cassette-loaded games before walking in. What were the chances of that?!

All in all, this show was terrific fun. It was a great showcase of their ability to knowingly and lovingly parody a wide range of musical genres. And apart from being good musicians with great harmonies, I appreciated how nicely constructed the set was, jokes upon jokes that set up for even bigger laughs later in the night. It left wishing for a longer show, more jokes, more songs...so here's to another 16 years!

Two Door Cinema Club/The Vaccines - 3 Jan 2013 - Hordern Pavilion

Due to a mix-up with the run times on the Hordern website, we rocked up not long after doors opened and had to queue, the horror (no really, I don't think I've queued for a band since forever). Once we were in we decided to give The Jungle Giants a go. They struck me as very young, and as Al noted, their sound is just like a dozen other bands you'd hear on triple J at the moment (we thought maybe early Dappled Cities, Vampire Weekend, Givers, etc etc). But props for a confident, tight set that was a crowd-pleaser. 

The great thing about punk(-ish) bands is that if you don't like a song, you know another one will be along in less than two minutes. The Vaccines were on for only 40 minutes but they managed a full-sized set in that time! Since they're quite bouncy on record, I kind of expected them to be even louder and more fun live, but it didn't translate completely. Justin Young's vocals were a bit thin and seemed a lost in the mix at times; so upbeat singles like Teenage Icon and If You Wanna didn't quite have the punch expected. Highlights for me were I Always Knew with good audience sing-a-long, and surprisingly, All in White from 2011's What Did You Expect...  

No Hope

Tiger Blood

Wreckin' Bar (Ra Ra Ra)

I Always Knew

Wetsuit

Aftershave Ocean

Teenage Icon

Ghost Town

Post Break-up Sex

All in White

If You Wanna

Bad Mood

Norgaard

I'd been told good things about Two Door Cinema Club as a live experience, and I'm happy to say they lived up to them. It was an energetic, enjoyable set - tuneful and lots of fun to dance to (which meant, unfortunately, lots of flaily, drunk dudebros, but what can you do?). Lead singer Alex Trimble's voice was good and strong, cutting through the sound and rhythm to soar in songs like Wake Up and Sun. Nice staging too - the ever-changing light show backdrop was simple but effective and worked well with the music. And you can never go wrong with giant balloons for a strong finish. :)

photo thanks to Al

Sleep Alone

Undercover Martyn

Do You Want It All

This is the Life

Wake Up

You're Not Stubborn

Sun

Pyramid

I Can Talk

Costume Party

The World is Watching

New Year

Something Good Can Work

Handshake

Eat That Up, It's Good For You

Someday

Come Back Home

What You Know

Theatre 2012

So Al and I have been joking that you can tell we're getting old because we're starting to swap music gigs for theatre productions. 


26/10/2012 Les Miserables @ Riverside Theatre (Riverside Lyric Ensemble)

Musically the cast and orchestra of this production were very good; at the start, it even sounded (spookily) similar the CSR but the main actors managed to give their very well-known parts a bit of their own character. My only quibble musically would be that the whole show was played at a quicker tempo than I'd like, which gave some of the more emotional moments a rushed feeling (though it possibly allowed the quite long show to end at a decent hour??). 

The actor playing Valjean was the standout, vocally and in acting. Eponine was also great in her part vocally, and she had the best death scene with a fantastically judged performance of A Little Fall of Rain; but bizarrely, she also decided to play all her scenes with Marius with hunched shoulders and sagging posture as if she were Gollum watching over his precious...it was very distracting. 

The major problem with this production was probably direction, or lack of it. It was particularly noticeable in how movement around the stage was terrible; often actors were left to sing their solos at the front of the stage as if in recital rather than in a theatrical performance, and in some group scenes the energy of the main performances would be sapped by background characters haphazardly moving across the stage into each other's paths and in distracting ways.

I went with a mixed group of friends, from Les Mis diehard fanatics to someone who turned to me after the show and asked, in all seriousness, "So tell me about this French Revolution thing". So I think the fact that everyone really enjoyed it speaks to the appeal of the musical despite the flaws to be expected from an (semi-)amateur production. 

20/10/2012 Much Ado About Nothing (Globe Shakespeare on Screen)

This would've been so much fun to see in person, I think, and even on film it comes across as a really charming production that handles the balance between comedy and drama in this play really well. Beatrice and Benedick's sparring never gets tiresome and still gets laughs, no matter how many times I've seen/heard it. Nice, simple staging and I loved how the actors used the audience as part of their performance!

30/9/2012 Private Lives @ Belvoir

Fairly straight-forward adaptation, though in modern-dress with some other anachronistic touches that mostly worked (still not quite sure about that Phil Collins moment). Very funny, and the actors did well with the furious pace of Coward's cracking script, but there's still a weird disconnect when your brain registers the casual racism and the violence against women that's just laughed off.

6/7/2012 The Duchess of Malfi @ Playhouse, Opera House (Bell Shakespeare)

Oooh, depressing. I mean, any synopsis of the plot would make that clear but geez, when it's compacted down like this it's just one terrible thing after another. Coupled with a dark, claustrophobic set full of sharp edges and it was all a bit much after a while. Lucy Bell delivered a nice, subtle performance of as the Duchess but the male cast veered between OTT villainy and blank ambiguity. 

19/5/2012 Les Liaisons Dangereuses @ Wharf 1 Theatre (STC)

Simple and elegant staging, overall really good production with particularly strong performances by the female cast. Justine Clark was heartbreakingly lovely as Tourvel. Pamela Rabe was great too, though almost unrecognisable in her grey wig. But - and it's probably an unpopular opinion - I thought Hugo Weaving was a bit too arch in this, even allowing for the source material. 

21/4/2012 Macbeth @ Drama Theatre, Opera House (Bell Shakespeare)

Hm. Great staging - instead of the traditional stone walls of Scottish castles, it all takes place on an empty, grassy stage with a mirror above casting a reflection that serves to make the emptiness seem ever darker and more foreboding. Interesting choice to collapse the three witches into one portrayal, using body shape and voice distortion to bring a creepy, eerie tone to Lizzie Schebesta's intriguing performance. 

But overall, I didn't enjoy this - didn't enjoy the choice to sexualise Macbeth's connection with the witches, didn't enjoy Katie Jean Harding once again histrionically playing another bereaved mother, didn't enjoy the way it dragged and dragged even as it got closer and closer to everything falling to pieces. 

24/3/2012 This Is Our Youth @ Drama Theatre, Opera House
Really enjoyed this. Despite it being a play written in the 90s about kids in the 80s it still felt relevant and applicable to the predominantly (and unusually) young audience watching 20, 30 years on. I like that Lonergan managed to capture a portrait of youth that's going to feel true even if the clothes, the drugs, the phones and presidents keep changing. 

The three young actors were all very good. Michael Cera played to type as the hapless perpetual screw-up Warren, and at first his distinctive voice took a little getting used to in a live setting, but he is a very good, subtle physical comedian and he also managed to bring to surface surprising moments of joy and choked-up sadness in turn. Emily Barclay was all coltish teenage girlishness and nerves, perfectly performed. But Keiran Culkin was the best as the fast-talking Dennis, full of barely-suppressed rage. He owned the part so well that we were surprised to find out afterwards that he'd originally played Warren in a NY production! 

**


I also saw the all-male production of Pirates of Penzance at Sydney Theatre, which was very enjoyable and provided a lot of food for thought about gender roles, but I forgot to make notes on that...

Anyway, I have a Belvoir subscription for next year (5 plays!) and I'm hoping to get some tickets to some of the major productions STC will put on, so bring on 2013! 

Les Misérables (2012, d. Tom Hooper)

Unpopular opinion time...

So the Boxing Day movie for this year was the new Tom Hooper directed version of Les Misérables. Some of you have asked what I think of it, and some of you unfortunate souls who saw it with me already heard this rant, so I apologise in advance.

That said, I stand by my opinion that this a bad movie. It's still a fantastic musical, but it is a bad film.

Seriously, Tom Hooper confirms for me with this movie that he is completely undeserving of that Oscar. The direction is DIRE. It's stolid, heavy-handed, unimaginative and ridiculously literal. 

Though the religious aspect is obviously a big part of the story with the key themes of mercy and grace, of justice and repentance, Hooper again goes for entirely unsubtle visual reminders on top of the lyrics and story, hammering home the Christ-parallels for Valjean, and he didn't seem to meet a cross he didn't want to shoe-horn in. 

And the whole thing, despite the roller-coaster vista shots, and the many changes of time and place, still feels frustratingly static, with performers moving awkwardly around sets while singing their key songs (e.g. Valjean singing What Have I Done while pacing the chapel, Javert singing Stars while standing figuratively and literally on the edge of the fakest looking Paris ever, Marius singing Empty Chairs and Empty Tables, etc etc). The camera does nothing but twirl around them and up their noses while they sing, and the pace slows to the a crawl. It's perfectly standard for the stage show, but it begs the question: why bother translating it to film if you're not going to use that to your advantage at all?

So that the movie succeeds as a piece of entertainment at all is in spite of Hooper's work, is because there's still some fantastic performances, and the story and music itself remain wonderfully involving and moving. 

Anne Hathaway stood out the most for me; she does her best with a rushed sequence of Fantine's fall from grace, and I Dreamed a Dream is so heartrendingly good, from her singing to her huge, sad eyes, the way she can subtly convey the change from bitter reminiscence to dead-eyed present within the performance...it was probably the most emotionally true moment of the film. 

Hugh Jackman is great too as Valjean, though I expected as much, and I was also pleasantly surprised by how much I liked Eddie Redmayne as Marius, both acting-wise and vocally. Most of the others in the main cast are good, if not outstanding: Amanda Seyfriend makes a beautiful Cosette and her clear, high voice works for the character; Samantha Barks sings Eponine a little more stagey than the others but is fine; Aaron Tveit is a suitably stern and a little fanatical as the idealistic Enjolras; Helena Bonham Carter was better than I thought she would be 'cos much as I love her she's not a great singer, but the part of Madame Thenardier calls more for comic timing than singing ability, and she got great laughs from the audience. 

While Sacha Baron Cohen couldn't quite match her as Thenardier and was given some incredibly broad humour to carry, he was not the worst performer - that title would fall to Russell Crowe, who clearly struggled vocally with the demanding role of Javert. His higher register was noticeably weak, verging on nasal, and he didn't have the vibrato which meant a lot of his lines were clipped and lost their power. And he didn't give his actual performance a lot of colour either, so overall it was just plain that he was out of his depth with this. 

In the end, I couldn't hate this movie because of my love for the musical, and I don't regret the 3hr+ sitting. But I spent more time thinking about what was wrong with it, and snorting about the literalism and the anvil-ly emotionalism, than actually being carried along with it. And my impression on coming out of the theatre was not 'what a beautiful, grand and uplifting end!', but rather 'Tom Hooper, you hack'.