What NOT to say to a depressed person

What NOT to say to a depressed person


I've posted this several times before, but each time it seems more relevant. I believe, at one point or another, I have heard all of these. When a major figure (particularly a celebrity) commits suicide, we dust off a lot of homilies, and repeat "reach out for help" with the same regularity as that other meaningless phrase, "thoughts and prayers". It's sad that the onus for "reaching out" is always placed on the suffering person, as if it's an easy thing to do or as if they wouldn't have done it already if they could - and if the help were there.

All too often, the "help" is inadequate (I was recently told by a psychiatrist that the average person with mental illness is misdiagnosed FIVE TIMES), or not there at all. Witness agonized parents sitting in the ER for three hours while their suicidal daughter, barely hanging on to life, waits for some sort of medical attention, likely dismissive (for psychiatric cases are still viewed as "mental" and somehow within the patient's control). No one realizes that if they don't have any beds in the psych ward, which they almost never do, the patient will almost certainly be sent home with a prescription and a promise never to do it again. Even if she is admitted, no one will send flowers or cards or come to visit her in the psych ward, because that very name inspires dread. (Funny thing, because people visit prisons all the time.) Having your tonsils out would inspire a very different response.

"Reach out for help" seems to be the panacea right now, and unless they have been there, people don't look beyond it. Are things changing? Perhaps, but not quickly or profoundly enough to penetrate the blank wall of gratuitous advice which is the conventional and acceptable response.





“It’s all in your mind.”

“You just need to give yourself a good swift kick in the rear.”

“No one ever said life was fair.”

“I think you enjoy wallowing in it."

"Depression is a choice, you know."

“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”





"There are a lot of people worse off than you.”

“But it’s a beautiful day!”

“You have so many things to be thankful for!”

“You just want attention.”

“Happiness is a choice, you know.”

"Just read this book. It'll fix you right up."

“Everything happens for a reason.”





“There is always somebody worse off than you are.”

“You should get off all those pills.”

“You are what you think you are.”

“Cheer up!”

“Have you been praying/reading your Bible?”

"People who meditate don't get depressed."

“You need to get out more.”





"Don't you have a sense of humour?"

“Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

“Get a job!”

“Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.”

"Just read this book. It'll fix you right up."

“But you don’t look depressed. You seem fine to me.”

“You can do anything you want if you just set your mind to it.”





“Snap out of it, will you? You have no reason to feel this way.”

“I wish I had the luxury of being depressed.”

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

"Just read this book. It'll fix you right up."

"Do you want your family to suffer along with you?"

“Can't you at least make an effort?"





“Believe me, I know exactly how you feel. I was depressed once for several

days.”

“Turn it over to your Higher Power.”

“I think your depression is a way of punishing us.”

“So, you’re depressed. Aren’t you always?”

“You’re always so negative! Look on the bright side.”





“What you need is some real tragedy in your life to give you perspective.”

"You're a writer, aren't you? Just think of all the good material you're

getting out of this."

“Have you tried camomile tea?”

"I TOLD you to read that book."

"Go out and help someone who is worse off than you and you won't

have time to brood."

“You have to take up your bed and carry on.”

“Well, we all have our crosses to bear.”

"God never gives us more than we can handle."

"I was depressed until I tried yoga."

“You don’t like feeling that way? Change it!"

“SMILE!”

Mental Health: once more, I take an unpopular view.

This was found on a Facebook friend's page, and of course, at first I felt I had to read and accept it as something positive. But unlike all these dreadful people mentioned in the first sentence, I actually DID read it all the way through. And the more I read, the less I liked. Why was this? One reason I used to skip this sort of post is that they make me feel uncomfortable, even slightly scummy. This DOES seem to be the aim of it, but how is that going to bring people on-board with the "cause"? Shaming never worked very well for me as a tool for communicating something important, or winning people over. Below is the original copy-and-paste, then my rebuttal, which took me over half an hour to write. I had to "snooze" that person for thirty days because I don't feel like being ripped apart in the comments for taking an unpopular view. These things are as dismaying as all the phony "breast cancer awareness" messages I used to get. And ultimately, I think they do more harm than good.

Posting this for a far away friend ❤️

Maybe if people's heads weren't buried in the sand of ignorance and they took the time to understand, instead of judging and thinking it won't happen to them because they have the perfect family, life would be a little bit easier for people that do experience this! This hits close to home for me, for family and friends who live under this shadow. The days of 'it' not being talked about or being taboo should be over. In the most difficult moments of life you realize who your true friends are, and the people who really appreciate you. Unfortunately, most social media 'friends' aren't true friends. They will send you a "like" here and there, but in reality they do not take time to read your status if they see it's lengthy. More than half will stop reading right here, or have already scrolled on to the next post on their page. I decided to post this message in support of all those who continue to battle with their mental illness. (Suicide is at an all time high). Now, let's see who will have taken the time to read this lengthy post right through to the end. If you have read everything so far, please "like" it so that I can put a thank you on your page. More mental health awareness is urgently needed. Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean people aren't suffering. Please, try to spare a little of your time with someone who may just want to talk (about anything). Talking can help us all to cope a little more, keeping things bottled up just makes it worse. Most people will say, "if you need anything, don't hesitate to call me, I'll be there to help you" but will they? I believe a select few of my friends will post this, to show their support for those who may be STRUGGLING. You just have to copy and paste rather than sharing. I'd like to know who will take a minute out of their day to read this all the way to the end and then copy and paste it to their page, will you? If so, please write "done" in comments!

Margaret Gunning This is all good, but unfortunately it is a "generic" message that people very often believe has been written by the person who is posting it. The copy and paste messages very often have a flavor of "most people won't even bother with this" and then pressure the reader to show a little sensitivity (unlike everyone else!) by reading it all, then passing it along. Most would likely say, "but the message is a good one, so it doesn't matter how it's delivered" - the tone and underlying implications of it. Or, "at least this raises awareness" or "gets the message across". The writer (whoever he or she is, and we don't know that or where they are coming from) just assumes that most people are utterly callous and won't even bother to read half of it but will just shunt it aside due to their insensitivity. This is dismissive and even expresses a degree of contempt for the majority of people, in that it accuses them of something pretty bad, and ultimately alienates people (potential supporters) and does not help the cause. If you go back and read it again, all of it, not stopping halfway through it, with an eye to HOW it is written, it may strike you as not so positive. If it were worded less judgementally, I'd have an easier time with it. I DO understand the stigma all too well, and have suffered from it all my life. But all these messages, no matter what the issue, have a shaming quality, or at least an implication that almost everyone out there is heartless and does not understand or care, and that YOU can be different and owe it to the world to show it by copying and pasting the message (NOT sharing, because for some reason which makes me uneasy, sharing is never good enough). I have had a lifetime of mental health struggles and watched my brother die due to the effects of schizophrenia, and have loved several people who committed suicide, so please do not accuse me of not knowing or caring! But there has to be a better way of spreading the message, as it does not bring people on-board if you right off the top tell them they have their "heads buried in the sand of ignorance". Try to open a door for them, not shut it in their face.

BLOGGER'S POSTSCRIPT. As I expected, there are more articles popping up on Facebook about "mental health" (which, five minutes ago, was called "mental illness", while the person held a whip and a chair). This was my response to a piece about men working on oil rigs and the "hyper-masculine" environment that leads to suicide from untreated depression. As usual, I'm taking a view that no one wants to hear, because, as usual, if you "saw it on the internet", it will likely be reductive (like Madonna said about Lady Gaga's performances). At least it does not have the nasty finger-pointing of the first piece (when I thought nasty finger-pointing was the problem in the first place).

Margaret Gunning I only object to the "not asking for help", which is always emphasized in these articles. People with mental health concerns are expected to be in control of their own recovery. It wouldn't be true of heart disease or diabetes, but it's very true of depression and other debilitating mental health conditions. "Reach out for help" implies that if a person doesn't, they really don't want it and perhaps don't want to be well. Personally, I think it is about as effective as "thoughts and prayers" - something you say, then wash your hands, thinking "I've done my part". These articles often provoke another response: "oh, that's terrible, look what societal conditioning has done to them" (full stop). I always seem to be taking the unpopular view, and I will likely be vilified for raising points that express the underlying complexity of these issues. I am NOT against asking for help and reaching out, if the person is able to, but might co-workers think of reaching out to the suffering person? Might they be willing to try to step out of their own awful conditioning to try to help, or at least empathize and break the appalling loneliness? In view of the nature of suicidal depression and the terrible stigma attached to it, the suffering person is at the very bottom of their capacity to be proactive. This is just my opinion, but it is based on knowing and caring about people who have suffered disabling depression and killed themselves. and I know I will be refuted because it runs counter to the popular view.

Someone drained a can of tuna. . .

. . . all over those blueberries.

Harold Lloyd: the bare facts

This was an experiment in cropping some of my five-thousand-or-so Harold Lloyd gifs down to their bare essence, then seeing how many I could get onto a page. Quite a few, as it turns out! Think of them as miniatures - tiny silent films, each expressing a few seconds of reality in Harold's amazing life.

Spinning monkey-face troll

This is why they weren't allowed to smile!

We seldom get to see out-takes from early photography, as they were likely destroyed or never printed. If anyone smiled or laughed, or even moved a little bit, the shot was supposedly ruined. But these blurry pictures of a serious couple cracking up with laughter give us a rare glimpse into the less-formal side of Victorian portrait photography.

Heartbreaking!

The candy-coloured past

HOAX! The musical fossil that fooled the world

Blogger's note. For a couple of decades now, there has been a rumor, theory, whatever, that SOMEONE out there owns an actual recording of Frederic Chopin playing his famous Minute Waltz. This was supposedly recorded in 1845, decades before the first commercial music recordings in the 1880s, and well before the famous Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville phonoautogram transcriptions of Au Claire de la Lune.  I actually remember hearing the Chopin recording on the radio some 30 years ago, and the announcer was skeptical, comparing it to the world's most famous anthropological hoax, Piltdown Man. This consisted of a human skull made to look old with sandpaper, with an ape jaw wired on to it. It sat in a museum case unchallenged for 10 years, while anthropologists scrambled to make their theories fit the "evidence". 

The recording, as I remember (it was played twice) did have that garbled, distant, deeply distorted quality of very early, primitive sound recording. It was also very noisy, with irregular thuds like dead bodies hitting the floor. The piano playing was barely audible, and the piece was played at a clip even more absurd than the inane "minute" that pianists still strive for. (The title of Chopin's famous waltz, by the way, translates as Petite Waltz or Little Waltz, and has NOTHING to do with playing it in under a minute. The spirit of Piltdown Man lives.) At the end, it was as if you could hear someone shouting something. George Sand yelling "bravo!", maybe?

The truth about the Minute Waltz recording came out when someone exposed a classical music magazine for perpetrating the hoax to titillate their readers (the CD recording was included in every issue, which is strange because none of them seem to exist any more). The issue was released on April 1, which gives us a clue - but does that mean anything?  Was it really a case of time travel? And what about those Leon Scott de-Whatever (God, his name is so long I have to look it up EVERY time) recordings made out of smoke on paper? We're supposed to believe THAT? 

To be honest, for a long time I did not believe any of it and just assumed those thin, wavery, creepy sounds I heard were just another Chopin/Piltdown flimflam. The article below (circa late '80s) is taken from a Polish music newsletter, and it is the only reference I can find anywhere on the internet to the reported Chopin recording. Strangely enough, though the article seems to be confirming the veracity of Hippolyte Sot's pioneering work, I can find no reference to him either. None whatsoever. It's as if he never existed.

A CHOPIN RECORDING?

While doing construction work in France, the workers dug up an old metal box. Inside the box they found a near faded letter and a glass cylinder. Not knowing what they had found, they turned it over to a local historian who was able to make out the writing. What he discovered was

THE FIRST KNOWN AUDIO RECORDING !!

The letter was written by one Hippolyte Sot, resident of the area in the 1840s. The letter described the techniques he had devised to record audio sounds using a glass cylinder. It went on to say that despite his efforts he was unable to obtain any interest nor recognition for his work. He therefore buried the details of this invention in the metal box along with one sample recording. The recording was none other than

FREDERICK CHOPIN playing his own Waltz in D flat major!

The magazine says that the recording was made about 20 years earlier the those created by Leon Scott, the person normally attributed with the invention of audio recording. It also gives additional detail about the inventor and how the information was retrieved from the glass cylinder. And what's particularly interesting is that H. Sot had NOT invented a playback technique, and it took 20th century technology to recover the audio information recorded on the cylinder.

To get all the details, get a copy of the latest issue of CLASSIC CD magazine. And yes, the CD included with the magazine includes the recording. Its the only recording of Frederich Chopin, and he displays some pretty fantastic playing ability.

That the text above is a hoax you may find out from the following rebuttal:

"The recording of Chopin performing the "Minute Waltz" is a now world-famous musical hoax that was exquisitely executed by the editors of a music magazine devoted to reviews of classical CD's about four-or-five years ago. To be precise, the hoax appeared on a CD that was sent as a free gift to all subscribers of the magazine, arriving with the April issue on April 1.

Now in hindsight, it is easy for those who never heard the CD or read the accompanying "historical" material to laugh at the obvious falsity of the "discovery." However, this hoax was so meticulously researched (it was based on a great deal of esoteric historical evidence that was in fact true)--and the recording itself was so brilliantly faked--that many musicians and musical experts were taken in, at least initially. I first heard the recording broadcast on the radio on the day it appeared. It introduced with great fanfare by an announcer who read about 15 minutes worth of the liner notes, and who called the recording "the musical equivalent of the discovery of the tomb of King Tutankamen." Was I fooled? Absolutely!

The original recording was not claimed to have been made on a cylinder. The basis of the hoax was Sot's experiments in recording sound on disks of glass covered with smoke. His experiments were amazing for their time. He understood the relationship of sound to the wavy lines traced on smoked glass with a diaphragm and a cactus needle. And evidently it was he who first came up with the idea of inscribing sound on a rotating disc--decades before Emil Berliner and Charles Cros were to patent their techniques. However, Sot never got beyond the inscribing stage; he could not figure out a way to play back the vibrations he had inscribed on the smoked glass disks.

The magazine's hoax took it from there, claiming that Sot had buried one of his smoke-covered disks in a sealed glass container in the hope that some day in the future science would have by then figured out a way to play back his precious vibrations. They claimed that the container had been recovered during a subway excavation at Nohant-sur-Seine (near Georges Sand's chateau), and that the sound had been reproduced and transferred by a prestigious French national scientific laboratory using optical lasers and digital conversion techniques.

Moreover, Sot was indeed a neighbor and acquaintance of Georges Sand during the period of her long affair (menage) with Chopin. What could be more natural than for him to have prevailed upon one of the world's two most famous living pianists who just happened to be living next door to play a little something for posterity?

The recording is absolutely fabulous!. First, what little musical sound that is audible is almost entirely covered by a loud continual banging, crashing, gritty surface noise of a kind one has never heard before--ostensibly the pits in the surface of the glass disk. Far in the distance, one can barely hear the tiny but very clear sound of a piano, playing the Minute Waltz from start to finish (in the correct key, of course.)

The most amazing thing about the performance is the tempo--which is insanely fast. Indeed, the piece is played in less than a minute. (BTW, I have read-- elsewhere--that the only pianist to have ever recorded the Minute Waltz in a minute was Liberace--even though the French word "Minute" did not here refer to a minute, but rather 'minute' as in small.) In any event, it is indeed humanly possible to play the piece at that speed. And if not Chopin, who then?"

NOTE: This news item was submitted to us by Dr. Barbara Milewski, a noted Chopin specialist, in response to a request from one of our readers who thought that an original chopin CD may actually exist.

POST-BLOG CONFESSIONS. I cannot find one thing about this story now, even though it's described here as a "world-famous" classical music hoax. But it explains why my first reaction to the Leon Scott recording of Au Claire de la Lune was a dead-certain disbelief. That distant, creepy nasal voice gargled a "tune" featuring only three notes, and could easily have been autotuned from ONE note (and who knows where that might have come from). Not only that,

it was sung at a dragged-out graveyard tempo, so that you wouldn't know it was a "tune", let alone a famous one, unless someone told you. So much was made of it, so many people presented papers and gave press conferences and received prestigious awards that it all smacked of scientific opportunism, not to mention jumping the gun on something very dicey indeed.

I guess I sort of believe it now, but they've mucked around so much with those three suspicious notes that they have been rendered unrecognizable as anything human. There wasn't much follow-up after the initial frenzy, and in fact the First Sounds.org website now looks as dated as anything set up in 2008. I did note that they seem to be backpedalling a bit on the veracity of the technology and how this "music" could possibly have been retrieved:

The Phonautograms of
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville

The sound files of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograms released during 2008 by the First Sounds collaborative were created using the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's virtual stylus technology, which sought to track the wavy lines scratched on soot-covered paper as though they were standard record grooves. However, Scott did not intend his phonautograms to be played back, and from a modern perspective his tracings are often malformed: the recording stylus sometimes left the paper and sometimes moved backwards along the time axis, violating basic assumptions of the “virtual stylus” approach and—for that matter—of sound recording in general. For this reason, we supposed at first that many of Scott ’s phonautograms—particularly the earliest ones—might remain permanently mute.

In late 2008, First Sounds cofounder Patrick Feaster devised an alternate playback approach, graphically converting phonautographic wavy lines into bands of variable width and playing these back using software designed to handle optical film sound track formats. This approach can’t correct serious malformations in Scott’s phonautograms any more than the “virtual stylus” approach can, but it is sufficiently robust to let us hear something from phonautograms that are otherwise too compromised to process. Many phonautograms from 1857 also survive, but they lack the tuning-fork timecode, so in these cases we have no objective means of correcting for speed fluctuations, which are generally great enough to render sung melodies utterly unrecognizable (emphasis mine).

So is First Sounds offering all this explanation as a sort of embarrassed postscript to all the initial huff and puff? I STILL believe this thing will eventually be found out as a total fraud, so that Eduarde-de-Whatsisname will have to join Hippolyte the Sot in the remainder bin of posterity.

Along with. . . 

Joyce Hatto (2007)

Joyce Hatto was an English pianist who rose to prominence in the year preceding her death. Her talent had only been discovered very late in her life, when she was in her seventies. She was noted for being able to masterfully play a wide variety of works, including compositions by Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. However, she never played in public. Recordings of her performances were produced by her husband from a private studio. But in 2007, a few months after her death, a critic for Gramophone magazine discovered that none of the recordings attributed to Hatto were actually performed by her. Her husband had been taking recordings of other pianists and claiming they were recordings of his wife.

For a feast of incomprehensibility, I welcome you to sample sound expert Patrick Feaster's bizarre blog, Griffonage: 

Griffonage.com