A Poem a Day Keeps Depression Away

Struggling With Depression And Suicide

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So, the next day, I woke up in that cold and lonely room in the acute care emergency ward of the Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick.

Nikhil Parekh

I spent the next three days in that ward. It was definitely not everything that I hoped for or needed at the time due to the lack of space and resources that mental illness care facilities receives, but it was an escape nonetheless.

I had counseling sessions, got to spend a lot of time alone thinking about what I wanted to do next, and was set up with a plan for my mental health for when I was discharged. In this time I also moved to an apartment by myself, away from my ex and from everyone and everything that made me anxious, and I got myself a cat because cats solve everything!

I started to spend time on myself and started to do things that I needed, not what everyone else needed from me.

This began a slow process of self-discovery and self-forgiveness that continues to this day. I found that, although I had opened up about my depression and had made great strides to recover, I was still struggling. Then, one day in mid May, I opened up my computer and I wrote a poem.

So I wrote one. And then it struck me; if I was going to get anywhere close to recovering, I had to take care of myself every day.

A poem a day keeps the Alzheimer’s away

So I vowed to write a poem every day. These are poems of everyday life, and they are thoughtful and genuine and always in conversation with God. Chantale says she will probably keep writing each day. Eternity News is not responsible for the content on other websites. Yet, as Chantale soon discovered, writing days of poetry was no easy task.

This also had its challenges: Poetic Rambler Official site. More to Read Video. Eternity Jobs Find a job Post a job. Some might argue that learning by rote is obsolete in our technological age in which we can, at any moment, reach out through cyberspace and grasp the words of a half-remembered poem. It is certainly still a skill worth cultivating. Training the brain through learning verse can help improve our retention of knowledge but there are other benefits, more significant and more delightful, to learning poetry.

Survivors of traumatic events, such as the hostage Terry Waite, recall the comfort offered by reciting poetry learned by heart during their darkest hours.

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Our lives would be almost unrecognisable to the first readers of Shakespeare, Wordsworth or even Philip Larkin, but their words still strike a chord with us because our preoccupations remain so similar. Poems can tell us universal truths about love, grief, family and faith, which is why we turn to them to speak for us at weddings and funerals.

The success of firms such as Candlestick Press, which publishes poetry pamphlets on themes including babies, sheep and kindness to be sent instead of greetings cards, shows how useful we still find poetry as communication. As readers, relating to the emotions expressed in poetry can offer us solace.

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They remind us that others have felt this way and so help to reduce feelings of isolation. Reading fiction is a wonderful way to escape to imagined landscapes and absorb exotic experiences, and it gives us a valuable chance to flex our emotional and empathetic muscles. Unlike a novel, most poems can be squeezed into a tea break, offering all the benefits of fiction in a concentrated hit.

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