Clare Consultation, LLCLoneliness and Listening In
Being in positive, healthy, reciprocal relationship is the most powerful predictor of mental and emotional wellbeing. Friendships, love partnerships, neighborhoods, community groups. This fact is increasingly worth considering given the evidence that loneliness in the United States is on the increase. Perhaps the most profound symptom – suicide. Last week, we learned of the suicide of a young man we know from a rural Montana town. Montana has the highest suicide rate… Read More
Why Write?
I’m sitting in a coffee shop. It’s high summer in Portland. There’s the usual backdrop: coffee beans surrendering their abundance to the grinder, barista utensils clattering into motion and that burst of steam that, today, sounds most like the explosive exhale of a kid who’s held her breath as long as she can. Threading through is the canned music. The current crooner observing: “Everyone is lonely.” I’ve just looked back on my… Read More
Unplugged — a guest blog
Gary Ferguson is a writer. His subject over the past 30 years has the natural world and the relationships we have with it as human beings. His setting has most often been Yellowstone National Park, but here, in the first of two guest blogs, Gary tells of his three months with 14-17 year-olds in the desert wilderness of Utah. People living these years are change-on-legs as far as my memory and observation… Read More
Women Claiming Life with ECT
Today a journalist contacted me. She’s writing a story on women and Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and wanted to know two things — what I know of the history of mental health care for women over the past 40 years, and what I know about ECT. The truth is I cannot claim any expertise with regard to ECT. But I have listened to women in recent years who have considered or experienced the… Read More