1066 All Stars

The Eager Beaver scurried into the wood, sniffing the air before him. They had told him that he was here.

Depression!

He caught the scent of someone in the air and darted off to his left. In a clearing, sat on a tree stump, he found a lion, dancing and laughing.

'Hi, I'm Eager Beaver,' he announced.

The lion ...

For Dad. In loving memory...

This is both the hardest thing I have ever had to write and yet, in some ways, also the easiest.

It is the hardest, in the sense that this is the piece I never wanted to write.

Yet it is also the easiest as there is so much that I want to say.

My Dad will be different things to each of you, depending on how you came to know him.

I would like to share some memories of him as a father ...

If depression is spiralling down into a deep well, anxiety is spiralling up and out of the stratosphere.

Technically, depression is ruminating on the past whilst anxiety is worrying about the future. They are two sides of the same coin, each as destructive as the other. We all carry a certain amount of anxiety naturally of course, and that is perfectly healthy. It becomes a problem when anxiety becomes an unhealthy obsession.

My anxiety became almost crippl...

I entered the Priory struggling with two main issues, both closely related; depression and anxiety.

I suspect that many people do not understand depression and those that experience it. We have all said how depressed we were by an event but what we really mean of course is that we were sad. Being depressed is not like being sad. Sadness is a normal, healthy emotion that helps us to grieve. Depression is an ongoing, impenetrable gloom from which there seems no escape.