You Are Never Too Old to Keep on Living!

n     with Peter L Forster, MD

Sometimes people feel that it is time to end it all because they have become too old without having achieved a dream, or because they are no longer attractive. It seems to me that these feelings may have been behind Ms Kate Spade’s recent death.

Everyone faces disappointments. And as we age we have to deal with more of them.

But we also learn new skills, and develop the capacity to cope with disappointments more effectively, if we use those skills.

Perhaps you are dealing with the loss of a relationship, and thinking that you will never find someone to spend the rest of your life with. You are too old for that to happen.

A wonderful woman who has struggled with bipolar for years, and has dealt with a string of relationships that turned out badly, was just married, at age 60.

Or perhaps you have had to deal with friends who have turned away from you.

Depression can drain the energy out of friendships. Just when you need the support. Perhaps you feel too old for good friendships.

Another woman felt that all of her friends were dying or turning from her during her two year struggle with depression. Eventually, we found a combination of medications that brought her back from depression, and, as she emerged from that state, her friendships revived themselves. She now finds herself surrounded by people who care for her. This is the tragedy of depression, but also the magic of recovery.

Your life’s purpose may be achieved “around the corner,” in the next decade or several decades of your life.

You are likely to recover from the worst of your mental health symptoms, eventually. “Patience for patients” is what I preach. You could be surprised at how productive you will become once your lifetime of “percolating” your ideas yields its fruit. Fallow periods tend to be followed by very productive ones.  Exhibit One is my own experience: two books written from scratch within thirty months, following a fallow period due to bipolar of some three decades.

Maybe you feel you are too old because of the changes in how you look. You can no longer hide the changes. After years of appearing surprisingly youthful your grey hair, sagging skin, or wrinkles, and so forth, may seem to signal the end of the line. News Flash: Beauty is of character, not of the flesh.

Elders, over the course of their lives, have learned so much more than they knew when they graduated from college, or earned their last degree. It is from this store of hard-won wisdom that you will be able to create your life’s work, no matter how long it has been since you last were gainfully employed.

What you need to do to get from here to there is to Hold On! Give your treatment plan a good chance to kick in. Cooperate with your psychiatrist in tweaking the plan—scientific advances are rapid today.

Remember that you will never lose your bank of experiences so long as you live. Think about all of the lessons you have learned, all that you could teach others, if they would listen. Right now, if you are depressed, this may seem like a foolish dream, but if you live you will emerge from the depression.

Think also of how your death would affect others. Recently, Ms Spade left a note for her daughter, who is newly adolescent, telling her that her Mom’s passing was not her daughter’s fault, and that the daughter should talk with her father about this.  When told “not to think about an elephant” everyone immediately is flooded with images of pachyderms. What that daughter will be going through for years to come! Be compassionate to those you love, even if you can find no other reason to restrain your hand.

“Patience for patients.” It is a goal you can achieve no matter your current state. You only need to put one minute of waiting, of acceptance, on the table and follow it with another.

© Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.

Empathy for Your Past and Future Self

Empathy refers to “feeling with” another person. “Feeling with” for who you were—who you can become again, but better (due to your intervening experiences and learning.)

But the person you were (before your mental health symptoms became bothersome) and the person you will be (once you mature into recovery,) these are both “another person” in comparison to the you who is before your mind right now. Empathy for our past and future self is not self-pity.

It would be self-pity to decide that, because you cannot achieve today what you planned to achieve yesterday, before your mental health symptoms began, that you never will be able to actualize yourself, to be all that you can be.

“Patience for patients” is what I so often advise. You will mature out of the worst of your symptoms. You will have another chance to use your special gifts.

Our skin protects the organs of our bodies from direct interaction with the world around us. Our human skin grows as we grow. Like a snake shedding its skin, sloughing or molding It off in one piece, human beings rid themselves of old skin—but in us, it is gradual, yet it is always happening. We lose 30,000-40,000 skin cells hourly! Dust mites eat the cells, and we notice the total debris as dust that we need to clean out of our houses.

In the same way that your skin renews itself, your brain will as well.

Just give time its chance to heal.

© Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.

Choose Your Primary Aim in Life

You can’t have everything in life. A prima donna vocalist is not going to have close family ties in most cases, at least until her career has passed its peak. On the other hand, it is likely to remain the case for some further decades that most women professionals who have chosen children will be paid less than their male peers—as though the short interruptions of maternity leave and the occasional need to accompany their children during working hours were the most salient aspect of their work.

It is important in adult life to acknowledge the trade-offs that you have made. Other people’s values, no matter whether they are tied to you by your history, need not be yours if your priorities do not put family first.

In contrast, if you want to mend fences that may have been damaged by the course of your mental health symptoms over the years, it is important that you be sure of whose viewpoint(s) that impulse stems from. If it isn’t genuinely your own—even if the people you are closest to champion it—you will fail at maintaining “the new you.” Only genuine desires can be integrated into your life. Everything less will show up, sooner or later, as the mirage that it was when you began it.

All of these sentiments may seem false to you. Perhaps you have yet to find your life’s goal. Then your immediate purpose is to direct your heart and mind towards finding what it is.
(C) Copyright Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.

Be You, Not Someone Else’s Dreams for You to Be!

The drumbeat of your own heart is the rhythm you need to follow. Thoreau said it in the conclusion of his Walden, “Let [a person] step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” What does this mean in practical terms?

You have three kinds of goals:

1.       Intrinsic Goals: “Because I am” goals. These are the activities you do for the satisfaction they give your essential being. They come from your heart. Due to our uniqueness, each of us has his or her own intrinsic goals. Many authors refer to a “purpose in life” (Dr Viktor Frankl is usually cited, although of course this is an ages-old religious ideal.)

2.       Instinctual Goals: Eating, Sexual Behavior, and so forth.

3.       Instrumental Goals: “In order to” goals. The best example of this is the kinds of behaviors that you have to engage in if you want your employer to give you a paycheck.

Your life will be rewarding to the extent that you follow the order I have suggested in my numbering in choosing what you emphasize in your life choices.

Don’t Kill Yourself Over It

Whatever “it” may be, it’s not worth ending it all. You’re responding to a small matter with the ultimate termination.

Would you murder another person over this? If not, you can master the situation. Indeed, it’s a minor shortcoming for you.

You will shorten your lifespan if you don’t get this trouble out of your mind. (And, in some moods, you do care about enjoying a long life.)

If you are aware that someone else has attempted to kill himself or herself, understand that contagion is no less a public health emergency than it would be were AIDS or TB to be the risk.

Just because self-destruction in some form—perhaps, even suicide—is being heralded by the media, you are an individual who can see and forge your own path. Just because someone else has made a suicide attempt doesn’t mean that you need to follow to be “cool.” People imitate suicides that are covered heavily by the media! Please see the Anderson article.

Lemmings have gotten a bad rap. They reduce their populations in one area when food is scarce, not due to following the leader in a “monkey-see, monkey-do” parody. (Specifically, a certain portion of the lemmings drown in crossing waters during a relocation. Please see Editors of Encyclopaedia Brittanica.)

For further information, please see:

Pauline Anderson, “Celebrity Suicides Trigger Copycat Deaths by Same Method,” May 10, 2018, https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/896452_print

Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, The, “Demystified/Animals: Do Lemmings Really Commit Mass Suicide?” https://www.britannica.com/story/do-lemmings-really-commit-mass-suicide. Accessed May 10, 2018.

© Copyright Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.

Getting Firearms Out of Your Home if You Have Mental Health Symptoms

The most common means of suicide for men, and the means for many women who killed themselves, was by a firearm. This was true both in 1999 and 2014. Please see Betsy McKay, “Suicides Climb After Years of Decline,” The Wall Street Journal (April 22, 2016), p. A3, citing data from the National Center for Health Statistics, U S Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The best thing you can do as a person with firearms at home, and with mental health symptoms, is to rid yourself of the firearms and ammunition. Turn them in to a police department, sell them to get some extra cash, or give them to a relative who is healthy. The firearms are simply too potent a risk to you.

You may be worried that you won’t be able to protect yourself from intruders without firearms. Here’s how:

1. ·         Get and train a watch dog
2. ·         Have a police whistle in your pocket and another by your bed
3. ·         Put tactical flashlights that have a strobe function accessible everywhere in your home. An example is the compact J5 V-1 Pro Flashlight. It sells on Amazon for just $11.95..

(C) Copyright Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.

How to Apply for Social Security Disability Insurance Benefits

Your first step is to review the “Checklist for Online Adult Disability Application,” which you can find at www.ssa.gov/hlp/radr/10/ovw001-checklist.pdf . Contact all of your doctors’ offices to get specific information about mailing addresses and whether any of your former practitioners have left their practices. In that case, find out who is covering their cases (your case specifically). You will need this information for your application.

Now, read two brochures—

1.       “Disability Planner: How You Apply”-- www.ssa.gov/planners/disability/dapply.html and

2.       “Apply Online for Disability Benefits,” www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10550.pdf

Be aware that this will be a lengthy process. If you “meet a listing” (see more inside the box below), it will still take more than three months and as many as five. If not, especially if you have a combination of disabilities, you may have to appeal online, and then by an in-office Reconsideration (which you can initiate online.) Indeed, you may need to go before an Administrative Law Judge for a hearing. These appeals will extend the length of your case—the ALJ hearing will bring your case to a duration of more than a year, maybe eighteen months or so.

Your “retroactive check” will contain your monthly benefits from your date of application to the month before your monthly benefits will begin to be issued to your bank account (or Direct Express card) through Direct Deposit. The amount of your monthly benefits is determined by your history of earnings.

The application itself is at the www.ssa.gov homepage. You need to select “Apply online for disability benefits.”

If you do have to go to an ALJ hearing, it’s best to be represented. An attorney is best because he or she can shape your case to ensure that “an issue of law” results. Only in this way are you enabled to pursue your case to Federal District Court. (There is an intermediate review, called an Appeals Council appeal, but—generally speaking—the Appeals Council upholds the findings of the ALJ.)

However, you have free choice of who your representative is, and you are free to choose not to be represented at all. (I would counsel against that, though.)

Your representative has to have a fee agreement or petition approved by the Social Security Administration. The ceiling before a District Court hearing that can be charged is $6,000 or 25% of your retroactive check (“past-due benefits,) whichever is less. (However, you also need to pay for copying charges and other out-of-pocket costs that your representative incurred.) If you go to District Court and prevail, another 25% ceiling will work in your favor to keep the fee down.

The criterion that is used to determine whether you are automatically awarded benefits is called “meeting a listing.” Please see: the listing “12.0 Mental Disorders-Adult” www.ssa.gov/disability/professionals/bluebook/12.00-MentalDisorders-Adult.htm This is not light reading, nor pleasant reading. I suggest that you leave it to your representative, and consult the Listing only if you are not represented at the ALJ appeal stage.

Please note that some people receive benefits without “meeting a listing,” but it is much more difficult to make this case.