5 Steps to a Happier Life; by Dorothy Rowe

Tim Teeling — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:16:26 +0000

These thoughts are an edited version of an article by Dorothy Rowe, the respected author of Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison.

Happiness is not a goal to be achieved, but an emotion that is a by product of what you do. Thinking in terms of whether you deserve or don’t deserve to be happy will stop you being happy.

There is nothing wrong with feeling sad, which is the appropriate emotion to feel after you have suffered a loss or disappointment. Depression is not just being very unhappy. We become depressed when we blame ourselves for the disaster that has befallen us.

Being depressed means feeling that you are utterly alone, locked into some kind of horrible prison, where no comfort can reach you and you will not comfort yourself. To create the conditions whereby happiness can blossom you have to do some or all of the following:

Understand that what you do is a result of how you have interpreted what happens, and that you are free to change your interpretations.

See yourself as valuable and acceptable. To do this, you may have to review your childhood and recognise that as a child you came to the conclusion that you must have been bad and unacceptable, otherwise the adults around you would not have treated you as they did. Look at this now from an adult’s perspective.

Listen to how you talk to yourself and if you are constantly criticising yourself and making impossible demands on yourself, stop doing it. Be your own best friend.

Cultivate the ability to live in the present, paying attention only to what is going on around you. By fretting about what has happened in the past and anxiously planning the future, we inevitably shut ourselves off from a great source of happiness – that of fully experiencing what is before us.

Use the ability to be in the present, every day giving yourself some little treats or reward. Do not do this because you deserve it, do it because it’s a nice thing to do.

Follow up to March Open Forum Event

Tim Teeling — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:02:32 +0000

Our March event was about concerns with the 2007 Amendment to the 1983 Mental Health Act Amendment, to which Paul Davies, AM, and Angela Burns, AM, were invited. People were angry and offended that an apparent connection was being drawn between paedophilia and mental health. It was agreed that child abusers should not be denied society’s help but our mental health community was not the appropriate place for this to be managed.

Concern was expressed that the public and media will tar with the same brush those with mental health problems and child abusers, and that twenty years of anti-stigma work is pushed backwards.

Child abuse is the root cause of mental health problems for many people, and the inclusion of perpetrator and victim under the same legislation is deeply offensive. Would abusers start to use mental health as a defence in court and thus encourage the media to make a connection?

Service users/carers found the medical model recognition (as described in ICD-10, and DSM-4) of paedophilia as a recognised disorder abhorrent.

Letters were sent out to raise awareness of this problem and we have had helpful responses from Angela Burns, AM, the Health Minister Edwina Hart, AM and Bill Walden-Jones from Hafal.

After raising awareness of the problem, the consensus of opinion is that there is little more we can do now except be vigilant as to how the courts respond to.

West Wales Action for Mental Health » Pembrokeshire

5 Steps to a Happier Life; by Dorothy Rowe

Follow up to March Open Forum Event