As is often the way in blogging, when there is something current, like David Fisher attacking me for being honest about my depression, along comes other news that supports the point I was trying to make.
There are those out there, like David Fisher, who think that depression is just something that we need to harden up over…take a few pills, stop having a sook and move along. Read more »
Not content with giving those left in his under-performing KiwiSaver fund reasons to ditch it, New Zealand’s foremost economist, philanthropist, soccer coach extraordinaire, feeder of orca and killer of cats, Gareth Morgan, has decided to shoot his other foot off.
The customer is always right Gareth? Apparently not with Morgan who has labelled Phoenix fans “pathetic” and unsophisticated because they want their team to stop being the A-League’s ‘open goal’.
If only the Dom Post had their sports writers doing the news because they would blow Kim DotCon sky high but then again, the sports writers got this by that time honoured tradition of listening to Radio Sport:
“The A-League club’s co-owner, who has admitted in the past that his football knowledge is limited, has also claimed that many fans “don’t know much about the game anyway” and are only thinking about themselves, rather than the long-term viability of the club.”
Good one Gareth. After wanting to exterminate half of your fan’s pets, you now call them drongos for paying good money in other to see their (or rather ‘your’) team get thrashed. You should become a motivational speaker:
“Morgan let rip at fans for wanting “instant gratification”. He said the club’s change in football philosophy, to a more attractive, possession-based passing style, was required for success in the long-term.
No, not if you a). Not have any fans, b). right-size to a public park to fit attendance and c). have decent players avoiding your LOSER team like the plague.
The DomPost says the Phoenix have struggled with this shift, “bizarrely implemented mid-season, and are last”.
Maybe someone ought to remind Morgan what Wellington said of the French after Waterloo (the last time the French put up a decent scrap), “They came on in the same old way and we defeated them in the same old way:”
“But Morgan said they would not be reverting back to their former style, which was based on solid defence and getting balls into the box from the flanks, for the sake of results. Fans would have to put up with “short-term pain”. The bigger picture is far, far more important than the short term,” he said”.
Sir John Kirwan should now send the Blues wooden spoon to the Hurricanes’ Mark Hammett (who must be searching for a new role) given St Gareth used his gains from flogging ‘his’ fund to KiwiBank, to get a slice of the Canes.
I pity the punters who pay money for merchandise, tickets or even, buying a sponsor’s product:
“All some people do is look at the league tables and that’s all there is to the game for them. Well, they’re pathetic really.”
Then again, Gareth threw a wobbly at Morningstar for calling a spade a spade on this erratic clown’s KiwiSaver Fund. St Gareth doesn’t like league tables indeed he is allergic to them maybe because it is about accountability.
“People expect instant gratification or gain with no pain. It’s just pathetic really. I can’t think of any activity where you change like that and there’s not a short-term cost as you go through the changes.”
How about your philanthropic trips abroad, TV appearances, mad schemes to ensure we get overrun by rats and stoats, spending vast sums to fatten up Penguins, calling farmers ‘retards’ and wanting to form Gareth Morgan Farmers to rival Feds. That sounds a lot like “instant gratification” to me.
But he is not done. He goes onto trash the Club’s few remaining supporters as ‘thick’ and somehow thinks ‘his way’ will attract a new wave of supporters. Yeah the opposition to see how much they’ll win by. Can I humbly suggest he actually leaves the coaches to coach and the players to play:
“Fans are a cross section of the public, you know. A lot of them don’t know much about the game anyway and certainly, in my view, think only of themselves, not about the future of the club. This club has got a whole lot of stuff to do in order to be sustainable, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
This little angry man has a Caesar complex. Maybe we should introduce him to Michael Williams in Auckland – I think they would get on like a house on fire.
I never thought I would write this but “Bring back Terry”.
So John Kirwan has been appointed as coach of the Blues…I’m still not sure about the wisdom of JK coaching a team named after the euphemism for depression, but there you go.
At least now they will have HOPE.
The Queens Birthday Honours list has been released.
When reading through this list via No Right Turn I was gobsmacked at how many Rugby connected people have received awards…with the exception of John Kirwan…who has received his award for services to mental health.
The other thing I noticed was how many people who received awards had previously received awards….have they done more? I doubt it.
There are two very poor awards in my opinion. The awarding of a knighthood to Michael Cullen. This is outrageous. This man falsified a PREFU, he his a $1 billion deficit in ACC, bought a clapped out train set for another $1 billion when it was worth about $350 million and left this country saddled with the prospect of 10 years of deficits. He should be given something more appropriate…like herpes…in recognition of his achievements.
The other egregious and shameless pandering to the ordinary was the awarding of Simon Power a QSO. He was a minister for just 3 years, an MP for a short amount of time and did more harm than good. He deserves nothing than the pay he received in performing those tasks so poorly. The Queens Service Order is for Service…getting paid to do your job isn’t service.
There are many, many more people out there who have given a lifetime of service and done it all for no pay or recompense. The places taken up by civil servants and politicians in the honours list demeans their efforts.
Regular readers know that I have had and continue to battle depression. I have also found that talking about ti honestly helps leave a breadcrumb trail for others to to follow so that they can seek help for their own battles.
I know that the trail works because I regularly get emails from people thanking me for sharing my stories about depression and sharing about how I came off anti-depressants. Each of us who has spoken publicly, people like John Kirwan and Mike King all help in their own way to assisting people with depression understand and overcome and mitigate the debilitating effects of depression.
I have been thinking over the holiday period about writing some more about the issues but i hadn’t quite worked out the shape of what i would write. As is often the way when I am researching about something a blog post elsewhere pops up and says what i want to say for me.
And so it was that I saw on Andrew Sullivan’s blog his snip from Jenny Lawson’s blog post about her battles:
I wrote this post a month ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to post it then. I was too weak from fighting to shout, and so instead I whispered this into the night and left it unpublished until I felt like I could speak to it with the battle-cry it deserves. Years ago, coming out about depression and anxiety disorder was something frightening, but now people are more honest and open and so much of the shame has dissipated. We may not have pink ribbons or telethons but we know that someone out there understands. That is, until we’re honest about how it affects us. I’ve never written about this because I can’t talk about it without it being a trigger but I think it’s important to be honest even when it’s scary. Especially when it’s scary.
But Jenny said so much more and it resonates with me, and so I will share it too:
When cancer sufferers fight, recover, and go into remission we laud their bravery. We call them survivors. Because they are.
When depression sufferers fight, recover and go into remission we seldom even know, simply because so many suffer in the dark…ashamed to admit something they see as a personal weakness…afraid that people will worry, and more afraid that they won’t. We find ourselves unable to do anything but cling to the couch and force ourselves to breathe.
When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker…but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand.
Regardless, today I feel proud. I survived. And I celebrate every one of you reading this. I celebrate the fact that you’ve fought your battle and continue to win. I celebrate the fact that you may not understand the battle, but you pick up the baton dropped by someone you love until they can carry it again. I celebrate the fact that each time we go through this, we get a little stronger. We learn new tricks on the battlefield. We learn them in terrible ways, but we use them. We don’t struggle in vain.
We win.
We are alive.
It is now just over a year since I came through the roughest time of my life. The toughest time wasn’t being depressed, it was coming off the medication and all the side effects both physical and mentally that are associated with that. I have done a lot of rough and tumble things in my life. I have jumped from airplanes, out the back of Hercules, from helicopters, I have tramped, hunted, fallen off cliffs into rivers, white water rafted, kayaked, waveskiid and surfed, i nearly drowned once swimming across an estuary but none of those things were as tough coming off anti-depressants.
But as Jenny says above, I won and I am alive.
If the All Blacks win the final, they will get a $NZ100,000 ($77,550) win bonus per player. What did the 1987 All Blacks victors get for beating France in the final? John Kirwan yesterday recalled: ”They gave us $50 to spend in the bar after we won. Outstanding. God, I was so happy. That 50 bucks went a looooong way.” Also Kirwan was back at work at his father’s butcher shop first thing the following Monday morning.
He says now that he was joking. I don’t for a minute think this weak, pathetic individual was joking. What I find apalling is he has continued to attack people that she sees as having mental health issues, all during Movember. He undoes all the hard work people like Mike King and John Kirwan have done to get people toi understand that people with mental illness are people just like you and me, just they struggle with some aspects.
Michael Laws - C**t of the Year
Michael Laws is a coward and a bully, and a coward and bully of the worst kind, picking on people who are struggling at the best of times. Of course, he could just be talking about himself given the vast amount of time he consumes inhabiting Facebook along with his little fan club of felchers.
It is also ironic that he scoffingly talks of straight-jackets and people with mental illness when he himself has written about his issues and his flirting with suicide.
have, twice, seriously considered suicide as the most rational reply to adversity.
In the first instant, it was as a lovelorn teenager in the first year of university studies and after being dumped by my then girlfriend. It was a measure of both my insecurity and my anguish that this relationship break-up prompted such self-destructive thoughts.
Having made the decision to end it all – with as much melodrama as I could muster – my next problem was, how? By the time I’d resolved that issue, I had discovered that a combination of testosterone and the welcoming smile of another had carried me over the abyss….
…
The media, for example, deliberately restricts itself from reporting any of the salient details relating to a suicidal death. Their fear – pressed upon them by public health officials – is that talking about suicide will provoke more copycat victims.
Nonsense. Indeed to use such logic, let’s stop talking about road deaths, mental illness, welfare dependence and criminal offending. There will, of course, be dramatic reductions in antisocial and destructive activities all because we choose to ignore them.
Because, sometimes, suicide is so damned rational and right. Or so it seems.
It certainly was when I was in the child oncology ward of Starship Children’s Hospital two years ago. When I was informed that my daughter Lucy was likely to die, my world dissolved. I could see no point to existence if she were not a part of my life.
And I also started thinking of death from the perspective of Lucy. When she dies (the “if” seemed to have been removed from the equation) then where does she go? Are the rationalists right, nowhere? Or are the Christians and popular culture on the right track to think she would walk off into the light somewhere?
All I knew is that I did not want my golden girl to walk there alone. I would have gone too: I knew that then, and I know that now.
It makes no sense, it seems, to write those words in August 2010. But they made perfect sense in February 2008. And I was a sane man.
Well, we can know that all that waffle is just bullshit, from a bullshit artist, intent only on self promotion at the expense of others. No “sane” person contemplates suicide. Even if the “insanity” is temporary, it is still insanity that one can see that a permanent solution to a temporary problem is a good idea.
It is for this reason that Michael Laws is this years C**t of the Year.
If you care more about people suffering with mental health issues then you can donate to Movember and help us ignore the Michael Laws of this world. One more word of advice for Michael, as I know he reads the blog. NFWAB.
All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.
