a personal toolbox of depression resources and writings
heads up this zine talks about depression, suicide, and anxiety. this zine also talks about hope, recovery, and wanting to live after all.
break in case of life • jenn 黃 distributed by FLASH THRIVE art collective september 2019, occupied tongva land @flashthrive
☁ disclaimer ☁ i am not a professional. this zine is not a replacement for therapy. (can you imagine if it was? i prescribe you 50g of doodles and 1 gallon of pretty colors for your depression. done!) i am also one person. add grains of salt to taste. unless i say shit like “YOU ARE WORTHY” then that’s just straight indisputable.
✦ perspective ✦ this zine is written from the experience of a 25yo, queer, gendersomethinged, chinese american, first-generation, collegeeducated, able-bodied, middle class, writer and designer type who has been living with depression since 2014. ☁ do-it-yourself ☁ the message of this zine is in the compiling of it. when i pulled together all the mental health resources i could think of, it felt like i gathered a history of all the ways i tried to save myself. i came to these resources the first time in desperation and exasperation. then i came to them again out of trust and self-love. i recommend building your own toolbox and keeping all the things that comfort and support you at the ready. ☁ break in case of life ✦ break in case of life means to go ahead and use the good shit in your emergency kit. it means being brave and coming to the tools we might only see as last resorts. break in case of life also means recognizing the moment you choose to help yourself. it celebrates a point in my recovery when i realized i had finally stopped feeling suicidal and truly re-dedicated myself to living and wanting to live. the things i came to while on the edge of giving up soon became the things i came to in times of self-assertion, out of a refusal to quit. the hope is that you find something useful here: a number to call, a website to visit, knowledge, a kinder framework, a tiny axe, both a tool and a weapon. at the very least i hope this shows you that help is there when we go looking for it. break in case life sucks / break in case you want to live
☁ Psychology Today ✦
www.psychologytoday.com Psychology Today is a publication and search engine for therapists, psychiatrists, treatment centers, and support groups. The site also publishes great articles. If you want talk therapy and don’t know where to start, start here! Use this!
☁ Affordable counselors list ✦
www.tinyurl.com/y2cwg3cc This is a crowdsourced doc of affordable therapy options organized by state!
☁ National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 ✦
There’s also a chatroom! www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat 24 hr hotline. People share this number widely for good reason. And it’s not just a last resort. You really can call any time you are in need. You do not have to be in ma jor crisis or presently contemplating selfharm. You can call when you just need someone to talk to. If anything, it gets you used to asking for help and getting familiar with what it feels like to receive some.
☁ Text hotline: 741-741 ✦
24 hr number for deaf and hard of hearing folks and for when you would rather type what’s going on.
☁ Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to ask before giving up - by eponis ✦
www.tinyurl.com/yyewq2vf A checklist of sorts for those mental health days where you need help running your vitals like making sure you’ve eaten, showered, dressed, moved a little. I consult this all the time.
☁ Recovery International ✦
www.recoveryinternational.org Recovery International provides free access to support groups that you can attend virtually and in person if they’re hosting near you. You should note that RI’s model focuses on coping with symptoms. They do not practice sharing personal details. For example, you can’t get into the goings on of a divorce, but you can talk about the frustrations or sadness you felt that week.
☁ Workbooks ✦
There are CBT, DBT, GAD, phobia, etc workbooks you can buy or get from the library. They’re basically worksheets for your mental health. You address your mental health with the likes of homework and learn valuable information. Just search what you’re looking for + “workbook.” There are ones for depression, bipolar, anxiety; specific therapy modalities like CBT, DBT, reparenting, etc. If you opt for library copies, take photos or copy prompts into your journal to answer and work with the self-knowledge you get from these.
☁ School of Life ✦
YouTube: @schooloflifechannel www.theschooloflife.com The School of Life is an organization that provides educational products and services around mental health and philosophy and lots of other adulty things. Their YouTube channel is full of videos on introspective topics like “How can we grow emotionally?” or “The problem of shame.” Short, animated, and well-written. They’re like the flamin’ hot asteroids of Ted Talk type content. And their channel’s community tab, as well as their website, posts really helpful articles.
☁ Meditation videos/recordings ✦
YouTube: @PositiveMagazine, @laurenlouisefenton, @MichaelSealey The Meditation Podcast: themeditationpodcast.com On top of a mountain of health benefits like improved focus and emotional regulation, guided meditations offer kind, kind, kind as hell mental scripts. Anxiety meditations got me used to being told that I am truly okay, that I am supported by my environment like the earth I sit on or the bed I lie on, that I am allowed to let myself feel that support if just for a few minutes.
☁ Mobile apps ✦
Pacifica, Calm, Moodnotes, Headspace, etc. Pacifica offers guided meditations, habit tracking, community forums, and mood journaling. It is where I learned the mantra on the following page that I now use in my daily life. Moodnotes is a very pretty mood diary that helps you keep a record of your fluctuations and practice correcting negative thoughts and assumptions you make about yourself (à la CBT). Calm and Headspace are beautiful starting points for meditation. Download something and keep them on your phone like a little square comfort buddy.
☁ Therapists on instagram are the influencers you need ✦
@the.holistic.psychologist @selfcareisforeveryone @thefatsextherapist @thenapministry @nedratawwab @lisaoliveratherapy Therapists are motherfuckin’ postin’!!! Follow to learn about psychology and healing concepts. The more you learn about your own depression, the more you have control over it. I’m listing just the ones I’ve found, but once you follow a few, IG will do its thing and recommend you more and more.
☁ Reparenting model ✦
Search these on YouTube: • How to Parent Yourself by School of Life • 4 Parts of the Reparenting Process by The Holistic Psychologist • RE-PARENTING YOURSELF by Nu Mindframe This concept took me too damn long to learn about. I’ve been in and out of therapy for five years and basically received cognitivebehavioral therapy (which isn’t bad; it just wasn’t the right fit for me). Reparenting addresses your needs that weren’t met in childhood and teaches you to provide those for yourself— things like discipline, selfcare, joy, and emotional regulation. If you have a therapist, ask about reparenting. Don’t look at wikipedia; they have a bit of an archaic definition that suggests your therapist will become your surrogate practice parent, but from what I understand from my own therapist, the ones I follow, and further research, reparenting is about being the adult figure you need for yourself. Because you fucking can be.
Depression manifests physically. Fatigue, back pain, lack of concentration, hypersomnia, and so on are all physical symptoms. We relegate depression to mental health like it’s a whole separate realm, but where is your brain? Depression isn’t just an invisible, doomed, all-consuming feeling of failure. It occurs in your body like any other bit of health. I need you to know about this old dude from like 60 B.C. Lucretius wrote this long ass physics manual in the form of a poem called The Nature of Things. He wanted to debunk religious ideas of heaven and hell and educate people about the philosophy of materialism. Not materialism like shopping. Materialism that most simply put means “every single thing in the universe is made out of matter.” Basically, materialism says that just because there’s shit we can’t see—like air, or what we call our “spirit,” or our thoughts—doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s part of a supernatural force. The words we speak are made of molecules of spit and soundwaves. Our thoughts are created by chemical reactions happening in our brain. What we call our “soul” or “spirit” is a product of physical systems like our heart beating blood to our organs and neurons firing in our brains to produce cognition.
I’m saying all this boring stuff because this is the concept that finally nailed it for me: mental health is physical health. Depression isn’t some amorphous curse, some entity of self-loathing we caught like a cough. It’s a combination of physiological routines happening in your brain and body. Depression, with its 10 letters and numerable sensations, is made out of atoms. You are made out of atoms. You are not made out of depression. In talk therapy and meditation, I’ve learned to name where in my body I feel my symptoms. I feel tightness in my chest like a tiny fist gripped tight and lodged in my sternum— anxiety. I feel heaviness in my limbs, especially my legs— fatigue. I feel aching in my lower back (also a symptom of my aging and poor posture)— you need seratonin, baby! I feel a fogginess all around the top of my head and over my eyes— straight up depression. The more I practice noticing where depression shows up in my body, the more I feel in tune with it. The more it feels like we’re just living together and not like it’s pressed its ass into my face at the corner of the ring Rikishi-style. When I lay in bed not wanting to get out, I lay there and I name the physical sensations in my body. Soon I feel a distance between me and the cognitive lie that I am worthless and incapable of existing. Naming is disarming. Not right away, but soon. And you can always count on soon. Soon, the understanding sinks in that I feel these aches and fogs and blurs and fists because I’ve once experienced trauma that I wasn’t equipped to handle. My body stored emotional hurt in my chest and my legs and my eyes and my crown, and they are waiting for me there to be processed with the right guidance, willingness, and support system. I’m lucky enough to have been to a doctor once and heard them say that I was in remission from severe ma jor depression. I’ve still had episodes since, dipping in and out of a traitorous glum like a ferris wheel passenger who longs to be stuck in the sky. But I’m on this ride with important knowledge. When I dip ( you dip, we dip ), I know it will pass. I know my body well enough to trust it will. I trust my body to heal because I’ve made the effort to finally really know it. When Rikishi gets in the ring with me, I say I can see you, pal. I won’t tap out, and you won’t pin me. This isn’t a match anymore; it’s a dance.
🎶
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Applying materialism to how I understand my own depression changed my life. This is how I make sense of my traumas. Take the verbal abuse I’ve endured (and survived; we must always remind ourselves that we are surviving). Those words were soundwaves absorbed by my body like a plant being watered. And over time my body photosynthesized that abuse into cognitive patterns that present like what we’ve named depression. Maybe I sound like a stoner right now, but I promise this concept has helped me so much. Reframing mental illness into its atomic parts lifts so much of the selfblame of depression from my shoulders. Words mean things. I am not the first to use words to say words mean things. Naming is how you give power to the things in your life. If we can understand that mental health and physical health are the same shits, different rhetorics, then perhaps we can divorce our depression from our shame, and deliver it to a space of dignity, awareness, and manageability.
content contains description of acute anxiety episode in first two paragrahs.
My worst episode of anxiety looked like a roll call of stress signs. My face broke out in tiny bumps all over, and my hair fell out in thick masses twice as wide as the shower drain. Appetite abandoned me. Sleep abandoned me. Sunny hours saw me curling into a ball on the floor. My mind was well aware of how far my body had morphed from its usual behavior, yet still I could not bear to unfurl my knees from my chest and chin. This went on for about a week and a half. My finances fell short of the shallowest end of sliding scales, so I did not have a therapist at the time. During this week and a half long episode, I called the suicide hotline from under my covers every. single. night. Some nights I just cried, crowbarring my sobs open like locked doors just to say “I’m,—sorry,—. Is it—— really,— busy,.—right now?” A sampler plate of volunteers received me as I retold my situation every night. “But juniper, there’s always therapy out there for you,” the liar lied to me. This person didn’t seem to want to hear the details of what I was coping (poorly) with and quickly pivoted to questions about how I was or was not taking care of myself. I truly believe in the volunteers at the hotline, but this particular operator made me feel rushed and dismissed. At best, I think they wanted to snap me into action and find long-term care. At worst, they deemed me an unurgent case and wanted to hang up sooner. I felt no comfort from this person, and I was desperate for absolution from the other line. I waited with my chest tightened into a fist for an hour and dialed again. Kinder, more patient operators had helped me multiple nights in a row already. This one vinegary experience stood an outlier.
The next person talked to me until I was ready to sleep. For two hours. They let me cry, listened to my nerves, and even directed me to an actual affordable care center to call (they let me know there was like a four-month waitlist, but better than nothing). I will never forget how kind and hushed their voice sounded to me. “Have you ever felt like you made such a big mistake that you’ll never be able to come back from it?” “Yes. For years. I am still coming back from it now.” How honest. “What if I never get better?” “Well, it sounds like you have a plan. You said you were going to do [x, y, and z] about it. I think that’s good enough.” How affirming. “I know it’s hard. You can always call back.” How open. This is how I learned that I always have the option to wave the unhelpful away and move on to something else. A better is there and waiting. And if I’m in conversation with a something worse, then it’s just not over yet. I’m not writing this to say the hotline is hit or miss. I want people to know you really can reach out at any single fucking time, even as often as daily, as I once had. Recovery is a lot of trial and error at first, but it will turn to trial and win.
content discusses the language and word choice around suicide, suicidal attempts are referenced in the fifth and sixth paragraphs, but not explicitly described.
an attempt was made
Suicide’s work bank is a joke. The language of suicide keeps a very short vocabulary list. We use words like contemplate, plan, attempt, commit— and that’s about it. Thank you for spending four whole fingers on this inventory task with me. We already don’t like talking about suicide or suicidal ideation. It’s just too individually varied an experience to blanket define. But we need to, because the desire to hurt yourself, on purpose or not, is part and parcel to depression. Words mean things; I will say that forever. Suicide’s words eerily pave a terrain textured with productivity, scheduling, and permanence. There’s a hell of a lot of doing conveyed in plans, attempts, and commitments, considering that suicide is the end of all doing, a yearning that comes to us in our numbest hour wearing a gown so sinister and yet so comforting. One of my greatest tiny triumphs has been to turn the gown inside out when I wear it. At various points in my life, I imagined how my loved ones would react when I was gone. At my brain’s worst, I did not care. I was ready to be a name footnoted with selfdestruction, anything to not do life anymore, to not exist in a body so puppeteered by pain. I thought more and more about my plans, my attempts, my readiness to commit. Each verb I allowed my brain to say was like taking a new step, and I climbed closer and closer to ledges, bottles, forests, even. Even long after I’d left the clearing of suicidal attempts and ideations, words like plan, attempt, and commit never stopped being haunted. It turns out these were the very words I needed to recite to be the person I wanted again.
Long ago, the “gold star: you tried” meme earned its 15 minutes. It went like this: if you half-assed something, you received a gold star that said “you tried.” If you quarter-assed something, you got the gold star that said “an attempt was made.” “An attempt was made” has since become my motto for recovery. The phrase reads dark in a story of suicidal attempts, but in a life post-willing-to-die, it is my proof of a will to live. I say it with everything. I need to clean my whole room, but I just moved shit around so you can see the floor. An attempt was made. I didn’t do all my therapy homework, but I still showed up. At attempt was made and it counts. My existence is enough. I am trying, and as long as I am trying, I am already better than dead. At attempt made to live is always a win. And it is won just by being. Reframing words that used to hurt me into mantras that embolden has been a practice of antidoting poisons. Author of The Noonday Demon: At Atlas of Depression Andrew Soloman says “the opposite of depression is vitality.” Of all the parts of speech, verbs are the beholders of vitality. I want us to diversify the verbs we allow for suicide. Committing is the very last verb of suicide. You can contemplate it, idealize it, plan it, attempt it. Once you commit it, you’re out of verbs. I cannot judge anyone who has ever committed, or who still lives with the want to. I understand that that is so because of immense pain wrought by a web of circumstances specific to each individual. I just wish we’d let ourselves have more verbs. I want the day to come where you don’t consider suicide anymore and decide that you resist suicide. I want you to besmirch suicide, rebuke suicide. I want you to banish suicidality. To remove suicide from consideration. I don’t want to have suicidal thoughts. Have is such a passive sack of shit. I tell off suicidal thoughts. I neutralize suicidal thoughts with sustained efforts of therapy and bounties of healing. I tap suicidality on its shoulder and politely move it aside. I release suicidal ideation from my mental landscape and replace it with a more colorful promise to heal. I wish you the day you contemplate living. I wish you a plan to breathe, in and out, and in and out again. I wish you many attempts to exist and be. Because I say this from experience. Glorious is the day your brain commits to recovery instead.
At my most self-destructive, my brain convinced itself that whoever I was was beyond saving. Treatment to me looked too long a road, not worth crawling through for someone as numb, as far gone, and as willing to recede into nothing as myself. One day in the numbness, I managed to let myself imagine what treatment could actually look like for me. Getting out of bed. A therapist to teach me to be nicer to myself. The right medication and staying on it. Leaving the past behind. Replacing bad coping mechanisms like over-smoking weed with good ones like meditation or leafy greens and shit. The memory of being a person who once wanted things slowly came back to me. I missed myself. I missed dancing. I missed feeling electricity in my eyes at meeting new people. The supersonic wop from hitting a tennis ball right at the sweet spot of my racket. Petting cats. Writing in that sweet, fevered agony of expressthis-idea-now-now-now-now-now. Writing to be seen and held and reacted to and known from afar and assured I wasn’t as alone as my brain long-conned itself into believing. The picture of my healing looked beautiful to me. Personal. Numbness was not my personality; the things I loved and had yet to try being were. Healing when painted in tones of passions looked like mine. If depression is individualized, then the treatment of it is too. Recovery does not have to be a sterile, arduous threat of labor. Treatment is the search for the colors of your vitality. It is work, but it’s the kind of work that is good for you and the breaths you take. A work that makes you better because you will learn precisely the way to reinstate your youness. And what precious knowledge that is. The good news is treatment looks like you. — Mr. and Mrs. X #5. Xandra, child of Lilandra Neramani and Charles Xavier, comforting a newly power-advanced Rogue.
It’s time to collect your tools and build your kit. Get together all the shit that has helped and still helps, and put them all together. Write down a list, take a picture of it, bust out that notes app, etch it into the ceiling above where you sleep. Hold them close. Keep them all together in a special reality of things that are here to help and comfort you. Let it read like a history of ways you have loved yourself. Even if you do not feel loved right now, you still are. And you cannot deny that the times you have tried count for something. ☁ Imagine a friend has come to you for help. They tell you that they are experiencing depressed moods. What do you tell them? What’s helped you?
✦ What lessons have you learned on your journey to recovery? What adages and sayings feel good when you say them?
☁ What brings you comfort?
✦ What helps you feel like you?
Get your good shit together. Apply the good shit often and as needed. Then pass it on. Good shit begets good shit.
☁ break in case of life ✦