Rings around the moon.

In answer to the question: what makes it better, cause and effect models are seductively reassuring and give simple answers which are rarely useful. People say you can stop stress by doing things that don't cause stress; a cause and effect answer. This assumes your life is like a computer game and you can just close the game and start another one. The next cause and effect answer is; do more of the things that release stress, as if stress is blocked energy that can be soothed or used up. But something is wrong and causing panic, so something has to change or stop; but as stress increases, thinking becomes full of holes, chaotic, fueled by fear, psychic pain and despair, as primitive survival mechanisms close down that tiny, bright button of conscious reasoning known as cognitive control... I see 'mental health' as a continuum, every single person will suffer psychosis if he or she is stressed for long enough and in a way that breaks that person's fundamental assump...

You know you are in the red when...I'm talking about emotions here. I knew that I was in the red when Josh ambled downstairs at around 11 am and said, "You couldn't give me a lift could you". He had an appointment in a near by town, didn't know where he was going (despite having had the appointment weeks ago, and access to Google). And as my hackles were still rising I answered, no and began to go on about how I'd done enough and there wasn't anything left - by way of compassion, sympathy or willingness to get in the car - and as I said it I suddenly remembered that I couldn't leave the house because I was waiting for the delivery of the new washing machine.... Oh yes, the new washing machine, how could I have forgotten that? So ! could just have said, "No Josh, sorry I'm waiting in for a delivery" instead of being my authentic, organismic, miffed self. Anyway, right now my classmates have begun their last year and I'm not in co...

I'm stuck at the moment, some time around 11 o'clock at night 5th of June last year when I opened the door to the police to be told that my son was having a CT scan, that he was alive, they didn't know how badly injured he was, but I can get in the car NOW and go to the hospital. Phoning my husband who was searching... Waiting... Then the blue light, the siren Us huddled together in the back of the car, me dreading what I would have to accept. So many, many bleak moments to follow. Opening the door is the sticky moment, the hot moment, I feel my blood draining away and a mixture of wanting to run, but also a need to curl up in to a tight ball and vanish. In my memory there is nothing I did right that night. My memory is sound-tracked by my daughter swearing at me down the phone because I didn't want to report Josh as a missing person... I didn't want to make it real. But if he had seen the police walking towards him... All his paranoia... The six weeks ...

I genuinely do not know where to start. A magazine dropped through my door, it contained an article about stress. I skim read it and said to the interviewee "Your son only attempted an overdose!" what's stressful about that! Which goes to show how I've taken to minimizing the cascading, echo effect of stress on myself. Probably because there is a Catch 22 involved. If you are suffering the effects of too much cortisol, you - own it?! OK then - I have got to a stage where every moment exists on the edge of panic attack. Panic attacks don't always have a trigger I can recognise. Certain sounds, events, names, places set 'my teeth on edge' which becomes a constriction deep inside me, a sense of heat and skin crawling...but panic attacks also appear to be random. Like a n exponential cascade of discomfort, vertigo almost. It makes me want to run, scream, fight, but there is nowhere to run to or away from, nothing to fight. I'll own this too, as y...