Dark Clouds Gather

Description This book includes a true story about reaching the very edge, the very depths and heights of bipolar illness, but almost always with a sense of humour. Much like a car crash, people cannot help but look when they spy on these sort of black events. It is a new perspective on manic depression as in Prof K.R. Jamison's autobiography about her illness in An Unquiet Mind, but mixed explosively with S. Kaysen's immersion into madness in Girl, Interrupted; except this book feels like it's been written whilst on crack-cocaine and directed by Quentin Tarantino on a blood-thirsty day. This book may be dark but its underlying message is one of hope. Sometimes you have to see the depths of Hades before you can really appreciate life and health. Being a manic depressive from just 5, then adding in anorexia, bulimia, self-harm and hundreds of suicide attempts, "typical" student substance misuse on the heavy end of "normal," culminating in a long hospitalisation when I was an Oxford doctoral student in clinical medicine. I ended up totally "mad," in a long-term psychotic mixed episode (being both manic and depressed concurrently, and suffering from delusions and hallucinations) and several actual deaths that I was revived from. This had a massive impact on the lives of my friends and family who have been dragged through 25 years of serious illness whilst feeling helpless and scared. I also experienced a lot of unhelpful medical treatment and misdiagnoses - all detailed here, which should teach those in the profession what not to do. This book will also answer the questions of friends and family, and give some pointers of ways to help and not help. I lost many friends as I withdrew into my illness, but I made many friends with people similarly ill. Some have died, some have recovered, and some remain ill. All agree that such a complete and honest book like mine is needed. This is my autobiographical tale, a girl who came from nowhere "up North" to study medicine at Oxford University and spent the majority of her life quite literally mad, but never stopped laughing about it. This suits a wide audience for personal and professional reasons. I want to reach sufferers, carers, and professionals. I am proof that anything can be overcome, what should not be survived can be, and that nothing is more important in these diseases than hope. About the AuthorKaty Sara Culling was born in Liverpool, North England, in 1975. Daughter of Sue and Paul Culling, her family moved back to its roots in Derbyshire, where she grew up along with her younger sister Beth, in the village of Castle Donington, on the Derbyshire-Leicestershire border. However, even as young as 5 she exhibited symptoms of bipolar disorder. She attended a private school for girls, Loughborough High School, where she was a high achieving student. Unfortunately, due to bullying and also to numb her mania and depression, she developed anorexia nervosa and began to self-harm. Katy Sara then went to The University of Nottingham, where she studied Biochemistry and Nutrition. She did her (1st class) thesis on alcohol and metabolism, interested in the psychology of Alcoholism. All this was done despite considerable illness including over 60 suicide attempts and purging-type anorexia - and yet more bullying. Her good work at Nottingham lead to an offer of a place at The University of Oxford, where she studied for a PhD (DPhil) in Clinical Medicine. In her final year she became so ill with bipolar disorder that she was in hospital (first as a day patient, then an inpatient, and eventually a sectioned inpatient). During that year and a half she attempted suicide over 300 times, dying twice, only to be revived. She finally, at the age of 28 got a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and the correct medication, and has been mostly fine ever since. She later wrote up her PhD thesis and published her results. Now Katy Sara is mostly well and has become a writer, wanting to prevent othe

At the onset of a bout with mental illness that erupted at the age of seventeen was when the author penned her first three poems, barring a few rhyming poems written as a child. Recovery began immediately. After the standard E.E.G. and prescribed psychiatric therapy, the worst of it was short lived. Having moved from the north to a stretch of the Bible Belt, Nashville, Tennessee, at age thirty, also sets a central theme for this deep psycho/spiritual journey through an interesting labyrinth of 1960s and 70s subculture that still lives on today. We are then transported into some profound and varied as well as a dappling of somewhat more traditional experiences with Christian spirituality. The medium for this conceptual and insightful work is the author's long studied and matured art of poetry and free verse which also includes some prayers, short prose, lyrics, and original illustrations mixed in. With more than seventy poems plus other offerings, the endowment is genuinely entertaining as all creative works of art should be, but on a very thought educing level with its elements of inner personal struggles, bohemia, and the spiritual path it has all taken and led to. Easily taken in small portions, and perhaps it should be, as the writer wishes to evoke a contemplative response and challenge one's own inner heart and soul's state of being along this beautiful conundrum we call life. Take a journey down a long and winding, broken road with all its curves, hills, and valleys. The winds will take you higher along this wild and elegant …eloquent ride.

Theological discourse in the West has consistently valued the word over the image. Aesthetics, which discerns the criteria and value of the beautiful and what "pleases the senses," is the discipline that prioritizes sensual intelligence over the rational; this book advocates a reconsideration of the doctrine of the incarnation through an aesthetics of vulnerability, in which the ethical optics of attention to the vulnerable other becomes the standpoint in which to ponder the significance of "God became human." Relying on such diverse thinkers as Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Karl Rahner, and Masao Abe, Susie Paulik Babka explores visual art, images, and poetry as theological sources, designating what Blanchot called "a region where impossibility is no longer deprivation, but affirmation."

This Anthology Of Papers Presented At A Seminar Organised By The Sahitya Akademi In March 1988, Takes Stock Of The Indian Poetry Of The Five Decades After Independence, Raises Basic Conceptual Questions, Examines Paradigm Shifts And Interrogates The Established Canons By Foregrounding Marginalised Voices. The Papers Examine The Growth Of Modern Sensibility In Indian Poetry In Specific Linguistic Contexts, Relates It To General Cultural Issues And Examines Post-Colonial Avant-Grade Trends Including The Feminist And The Dalit Movements. The Papers Are Collected Under Three Heads: ýModernism In Retrospectý Examines The Historical, Political And Aesthetic Aspects Of Modernism;ýAfter Modernism: Articulating Resistanceý Takes A Close Look At The Alternative Trends That Challenge The Status-Quoist Mainstream Poetry;ýPoetry As Discourse: Some General Issuesý Takes Up Some General Issues Concerning The Present And Future Of Poetry, Including The Problems Of The Translation Of Poetry. K. Satchidanandan Who Has Edited This Volume Is A Pioneer Of Modern Poetry And Criticism In Malayalam With 18 Collections Of Poetry, Two Plays, 15 Collections Of Critical Articles And Interviews And 15 Collections Of Translated Poetry.. He Now Heads The Sahitya Akademi, The Indian National Academy Of Letters

People do things for reasons, but what are reasons and how are they related to the resulting actions? Bittner explores this question and proposes an answer: a reason is a response to that state of affairs.