Michael Kirby: 'To honour Daniel, we must resolve to talk about depression', Launch of Daniel Solomons Memorial Scholarship - 2015

30 April 2015, Sydney, Australia

Daniel Solomons committed suicide on 23 April 2013. A Memorial Scholarship was established in his name, and Justice Michael Kirby spoke at the launch event. The name of the talk is, “Lawyers Suicide: The Influence of Legal Studies and Practice, Stress and Clinical Depression and Sexuality’. Daniel’s mother Sandra Solomons also spoke at the event.

CONTRADICTIONS AND DISCORDANCIES

This is not an evening for joy and humour. Ashurst have offered their Sydney office for the launch of the Daniel Solomons Memorial Scholarship. Daniel was their employee. Before that, he was a gifted student at Moriah College. He received the Premier’s Medal for all round excellence in his High School Certificate results. He graduated in an Arts/Law course at the University of New South Wales, with first class honours. He was respected by his colleagues at Ashurst. He was admired for his analytical skills. He was studying for admission to practise at the New South Wales Bar. Two years and a week ago, on 23 April 2013, he took his own life. His death has been a devastation to his partner and his family, his work colleagues, the members of his intended Bar chambers. His is another story of might have beens.

I honour the lovely, discordant, evocative Jewish music, played by the quintet. I appreciate the fine food and the wines. But this is not an evening for enjoyment. Losing Daniel has left a hole in the heart of too many. The sharpest loss has been felt by those present at the event:

 His parents, Sandra and David Solomons.
 His sisters Michele and Rebecca, who grew up with him.

 His domestic partner and faithful friend, David Darley, who is here with his mother, Sandra Darley, still close to Daniel’s family.
 His two grandmothers who are both present.
 His uncles, cousins and other family members.
 His school friends from Moriah College.
 His University friends from UNSW.
 His work colleagues at Ashurst, who cherished his dazzling abilities.
 Jordana Wong from UNSW Law, substituting for Dean David Dixon, who planned the scholarship to continue Daniel’s passions.
 And the rest of us who are here, seeking to find meaning out of this tragic anniversary.

This cannot be a usual dinner with laughter and celebration. We have serious work to do. And if we shed tears, that will be entirely appropriate. Yet tears are also not enough. We must respond to Daniel’s family’s determination to establish a scholarship that will recognise in others, and support, the same courage, idealism and determination to change things that Daniel exhibited in his short life.

COMMONALITIES

I feel an affinity for Daniel Solomons. Not to be too boastful (for Daniel and I would never be such) we were both pretty brilliant at school, and at university.

We were both enthusiastic and energised by our early work experience. We loved solving the problems of the law, Daniel and I.

We were both good writers. It is a genetic thing. A capacity to communicate simply. To write in the same language that we talk – a simple tongue derived from the Saxons, that now conquers the world.

We both tended to think outside the square. This irritated some people. But it helped us to see things to which others were blind.

We were both challengers of settled things. And, as we grew up, we knew, from our experiences with love and life, that many things needed changing, including in the law.

Undeservedly you might think, we both were lucky in love. We both won handsome and intelligent partners and (for a reason we could never fully understand) they loved us. Daniel’s, David Darley. My Johan van Vloten. Luck in love, we knew, could not be methodically planned. It was a gift from the Gods.

It is good that tonight we honour David Darley and his mother. Often, you know, this is done for wives or husbands but not for LGBT partners. Yet they are flesh and blood. They hurt. They weep too.

DIFFERENCES

Emanuel Poulos of Ashurst has shared with us a thoughtful and moving description of Daniel’s life in the Firm. So well-constructed and full of detail. Daniel’s sudden death, and its circumstances, would have been a terrible shock to his work colleagues. He had so much to offer and to look forward to. The support by Ashurst for Daniel’s scholarship. It will be one way to keep alive the flame of memory and to honour his unusual personality. It will support those selected who decide to make the study of law their dream. It will help those who need something more, to get started. And who demonstrate personal courage, as Daniel did, seeking knowledge and enlightenment despite challenges, whether personal, financial or both.

Still, there were differences between Daniel’s life and mine:

I am nearing the end. He was knocking on the entrance door. I applied for articles to Dawson Waldron Edwards and Nichols (a predecessor of Ashurst). I may have been brilliant. But they rejected my application. My father was not a lawyer. That was often a prerequisite in those days. Daniel was accepted here. I never made it to a top tier firm. Often in the High Court, I would look at the coversheet of appeal books. The old firms that rejected me may have changed their names. But it did not deceive me. I knew who they were. It did not make a difference to my judgment. But I still remembered. Daniel, on the other hand, entered the magic circle.

Daniel’s office was, let’s face it, a mess. Mine has always been antiseptically neat and tidy.

Towards the end of his life, Daniel, who had suffered anxiety, came to suffer from clinical depression. I never have. Depression is not an easy journey. In Samuel Coleridge’s poem “Dejection” he describes how it feels:

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy stifled unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear.

To honour Daniel, we must resolve to talk about depression. To analyse its causes. Above all, to understand why it is so common amongst law students, legal practitioners and judges. Although I did not feel its pain myself, I spent many years of enforced silence about another demon of others that Daniel knew: sexual difference. So it is not hard for me to understand the challenge of depression. The way out of the closet is to put it on the table, turn it around, examine it, acknowledge it and challenge its corrosive effects.


RESISTENCE

After I was appointed to the High Court of Australia, in February 1996, I was soon afterwards invited to address a judicial conference in Brisbane. I was asked to talk on any subject I might choose. Perhaps they were hoping for the Rule against Perpetuities or the Statute of Mortmain. Instead, fresh from a recent conference in Canada, I selected stress. Judicial stress. Stress done to judges. Stress done by judges. Little did I know that I could not have chosen a more stressful topic for my audience.

The commentator, Justice Jim Thomas of the Supreme Court of Queensland, was antagonistic to my theme. He blamed his wife, who, he said, had berated him for even coming to respond to such an inappropriate and irrelevant theme. Most of the judicial attendees at that conference appeared relieved and mischievously happy to tweak the tail of the new High Court Justice for daring to choose a “touchy-feely” subject. How rude of him. A few supported me; but not many. However, I stood my ground. That was another thing I shared with Daniel. The sometimes irrational belief in our own correctness. I have kept gnawing away at this subject since 1976: betraying a naively simple belief in rational persuasion. Now there are fewer lawyers who are dismissive of the topic. Too much evidence of its impact. Too many suicides and breakdowns to sustain the code of silence. Now, most law deans, chief judges and leading lawyers know that this subject is serious. We will honour Daniel’s life by treating is as such.

SUICIDAL DIMENSION

Suicide is now such a serious problem in our world that even the United Nations World Health Organisation (WHO) has provided a first report addressing the topic. According to the report, someone in our world commits suicide every 40 seconds. This is more than the aggregate of victims of wars and natural disasters. The largest toll is amongst the elderly. The highest rates occur in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia with 25% of cases occurring in developed countries. Men are almost twice as likely as women to take their own lives. Inferentially, this is because women have better networks; they are more willing to talk about issues that trouble them; and to seek help. They are less likely to feel an obligation of denial. They will seek help beyond their own limited knowledge and experience. Lonely self-help will often not provide the solution.

The WHO report took a decade to produce. It found that the rates of suicide in developed countries (12.7 per 100,000) were slightly higher than in developing low and middle income countries (11.2). The very highest rates in the world occurred in North Korea, India, Indonesia and Nepal. Worldwide, the most suicide prone countries included Guyana (44.2 per 100,000); followed by North and South Korea (38.5 and 28.9 respectively), Sri Lanka (28.8), Lithuania (28.2), India (21.1) and Southern Sudan (19.8). Russia and Uganda each had 19.5. The purpose of the WHO report is to encourage a new global strategy. The Organisation hopes that this will reduce suicide rates by 10% before 2020.

Australia has a rate of about 11.5 per 100,000. Every year approximately 2,000 Australians commit suicide, with up to 40 times that number making an attempt to end their lives. Suicide is the leading cause of death in Australia for young men under 44 years and for women under 34 years. One person dies by suicide in Australia approximately every 4 hours.

One issue which the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention is currently studying is the particular impact of human sexuality on the suicide rate. This is why the Institute has recently appealed to persons who know someone who committed suicide to assist them with their research into the impact of minority sexual orientation or gender identity. These are topics that can occasionally lead to feelings of isolation, low self-worth, fear of violence and hostility.

Although we have known the basic facts of the science of sexual orientation for more than 50 years, recent research and experience shows that often there is good reason for people, including young people, to feel depressed and discouraged because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. They may keep up appearances. But, particularly if they are suffering from clinical depression, the appearances may simply mask the inner turmoil that is going on. Sometimes that turmoil will lead them to an exit strategy. For people who face what they see as unrelieved stress and pain, suicide can appear a rational way out of unyielding conflict and misery.

Many young people in Australia come up against hostility and animosity because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. A recent report by Beyondblue revealed high levels of homophobia amongst Australian teenage boys between the ages of 14-17. A quarter of the cohort considered that it was acceptable to describe something they did not like as “gay”: assimilating the insult with the description. Most participants in the study agreed that homophobic discrimination was common in their circle and they realised that it could lead to depression and anxiety. However, despite this insight, a significant minority indicated attitudes that would escalate such responses:

 38% indicated that they would not be happy being friends with a same-sex attracted person;
 41% said that lesbian, gay and bisexual people make them uncomfortable;
 34% of boys were unsure whether ending a friendship if someone said they were same-sex attracted would be discrimination;
 Around 19% saw homosexuality as immoral; and
 17% regarded it as a “passing phase”.

DOING SOMETHING

The response to this problem in Australian society (which would appear to be larger than in most other western countries) demands institutional and individual responses. The places where such responses need to occur obviously include educational institutions. Some of these are under the control of religious (“Faith”) organisations that are resistant to changing the environment that gives rise to the discrimination, hostility and potentially terminal responses on the part of those targeted. Not all those who commit suicide amongst young Australians are from sexual minorities (LGBTI). But clearly some are. The higher rates of suicide amongst young males appears significant.

When the Australian Federal Government launched a “Safe Schools Coalition Australia” initiative, supported by federal funding of $8 million, to support an active campaign against bullying in schools, this was criticized by the Australian Christian Lobby. It called for a boycott. Nor is its approach confined to evangelical Christian churches. In March 2015, I wrote to a senior official in a Roman Catholic educational institution, drawing attention to reports that students had been refused accreditation of a LGBTI student group which would have financial and venue advantages for them. The institution had also reportedly refused permission to the students to meet on the university premises. The response by the senior executive of the institution was discouraging:

“As a [religious institution] recognised by Australian law, we believe that we have a right (and duty) to run [our body] in a way that is consistent with and gives witness to our Faith. We clearly identify our Objects in all of our recruitment materials and we ask all students to respect the Objects. We do not assert this as a justification for unjust discrimination, as we are absolutely opposed to unjust discrimination, but we do assert that this allows us to approach and deal with issues in ways that may be different to the practices of secular institutions but are none the less valuable and important. By way of illustration; while a secular [organisation] may well affiliate clubs with a “Pro-Gay Marriage” advocacy purpose, [we] would not, and indeed could not affiliate a … gay marriage advocacy club without completely undermining our existence… which operates within a ‘context of Catholic faith and values’. However, our commitment to pastoral care, human dignity and opposition to unjust discrimination means that we must - and do – ensure that all students continue to feel free to exercise their own judgment and discernment on such matters and are free to act in accordance with their conscience. Furthermore, we do not ban or prohibit such issues from being discussed publicly or privately at [our institution], and indeed to do so would be counter to the purpose and role. We would however, seek genuine debate, which means we would normally require the case for [our Faith’s] position to be debated together with any opposing positions. “

The fundamental message of this response remains that the institution concerned is happy to receive public funds to support its mission. But that mission is certainly hostile to the actuality of LGBTI students. Those students who are not themselves Catholic (and even some who are) might dismiss the institution’s unfriendly approach as predicable unequal treatment and just move on. But some students, particularly those raised in a Catholic tradition, could easily feel conflicted, stressed and unworthy by reason of such an environment.

Recently, the Holy See refused to accept the appointment of an ambassador accredited by the Government of France. He was openly gay. His offence, it seems, was that he did not keep his sexual orientation to himself. Demanding this of experienced ambassadors may perhaps be surmountable in countries like Saudi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Uganda and possibly the Vatican. But for young students in an Australian educational institution, it only serves to sharpen the anxieties, stress and depression. This can clearly have deleterious consequences for those exposed to suicidal thoughts. But especially for young people who may love their religion and hate themselves for being unchangeably gay, as science teaches that they are.

Earlier, there were similar religious attitudes in the United States and in South Africa to support racial discrimination against minorities and miscegenation. Apartheid in South Africa was often supported by the Dutch Reformed Church (which has since recanted) on the basis of scriptural texts. These problems are bad enough as an intellectual dilemma for people growing up. But are particularly harmful as they apply to vulnerable young people who may be suicidal in what should be a nurturing environment. I may be wrong, but I cannot see that such attitudes in publicly funded institutions in Australia are compatible either with legal and constitutional principle or with the pastoral and legal duty of care owed by every educational institution to those in their charge, given increasing knowledge of the risks.

In Daniel’s case, he had no religious conflicts we know of as he grew up in Moriah College. He was surrounded by love and protection by his family, teachers and fellow pupils. Yet, even then, he was caught in the chains of suicide. Daniel’s basic problems were that he suffered from clinical depression, a recognised pathology. And he worked in the law. For such a person, this is an especially hazardous occupation.

CLINICAL DEPRESSION

I have just returned from a conference in England, most of whose participants were statisticians and biological scientists. Statisticians are drawn from the most brilliant of students. I know this from my time as Chancellor of Macquarie University, with its degrees in mathematics, statistics and actuarial studies. I was, I think, the only lawyer at the conference. One participant, Professor Lewis Wolpert, an expert in cell and developmental biology at University College London, talked of the challenge of severe depression. He has given papers and written books on the subject. He talked openly about his own experience with depression. He explained that:

“If you can describe your severe depression, you probably have not had one. It is indescribable and one enters a world with little relation to the real one. It was the worst experience in my life, even worse than the death of my wife from cancer. With her dying, I could do things to help her and I mourned afterwards. But with my depression, there was nothing I felt I could do and I believed that I would never get better. My state bore no resemblance to anything I had ever experienced before. I had had periods of feeling low but they were nothing like my depressed state. I was totally self-involved and negative and thought about suicide all the time. I just wanted to be left alone.”

Cognitive therapy eventually gave assistance to Professor Wolpert. He gradually got better. But his family were embarrassed about his depression. They would tell no one. He knew from his reading that only 10% of patients with severe depression do not have a relapse. He regarded William Styron’s Darkness Visible as an outstanding exposition of the problem. Styron points out that:

“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances as it cannot be borne.”

Cultural and social inhibitions in many countries prevent identification, treatment and support during such an illness. Pharmaceutical drugs can sometimes help. Professor Wolpert found that physical exercise was useful. He saw an analogy between depression and cancer, in the sense that it is a normal process of living (sadness) that has become disordered and magnified. He tried to analyse the condition from an evolutionary point of view. Feelings that are so common in society could have some advantages for the individual. A “social competition hypothesis” suggests that depression is an adaptation whose function is to inhibit aggression by rivals and superiors when one’s status is low. It is a means of yielding, when there is acute social competition. It thus reduces the efforts of the aggressor. But Professor Wolpert is not convinced. Especially when depression leads to suicide, it is hard to see an evolutionary value in it. It may have a perceived individual value, as terminating unendurable pain. It may, like sexual orientation, simply be a variant in nature whose purpose is not always clear and may not matter much given its reality as part of human experience. If it exists, that is enough. Society must respond. It must seek to palliate and help the subject and to avoid needless termination of the subject’s life.

LAWYERS’ RESPONSES

Those who suffer the indescribable pain, recounted by Professor Wolpert, are rendered extremely vulnerable if their career choice has taken them into the law. The law is usually a very public vocation. Its top practitioners are on display most of the time. They face fierce competition. They are often perfectionists. Overachievers. Trapped in “pin striped prisons”. We now know that law places special and excessive pressures on students and practitioners. Working in symbiosis with depression, this can trigger suicidal thoughts and actions. As wise commentators have observed, because lawyers generally sell their talent in modules of time, there is always pressure on them to sell more and more time, until there is no time left for the other priorities of life.

There is some evidence that pressures of this kind are heaviest in large firms where it is harder to maintain a life/work balance. Although many firms today (and some law schools, even judicial institutions) have attempted remedial measures to show that they care about the challenge of depression and the risks (including suicide) that it brings, commentators repeatedly observe that the lawyers most at risk commonly do not believe that these efforts are real or intended to be taken seriously:

“… [P]rivate practice lawyers are often subject to tight, client-driven deadlines and exacting internal performance targets – the competitive and confrontational nature of legal practice leaves many believing that such wellbeing policies are not worth the paper they are written on. ‘A few months ago, my firm distributed helpful tips, printed on colourful postcards, suggesting we ought to “go for a swim in the ocean” or “go home and cook a meal with your family”, wrote one lawyer anonymously… in 2013. “Apparently the irony of recommending such fun and whimsy to a group of employees who are effectively required to remain at the office upwards of 14 hours/day for months on end was lost on the hopeful folks in human resources. Under such conditions, and with the profession’s poor track record in looking after its own, such cynicism is well placed.”

Certainly, there does now seem to be a growing realisation of the existence of a true crisis in legal employment as a career choice. In a recent poll asking “is life as a lawyer what you thought it would be when you were a student?”, more than 37% of respondents said “No, I wish I was working in a different career”. Only 11% of the 444 respondents to the survey said their law career had fulfilled all their expectations.

Plainly, we have a problem here. Estimates suggest that one in three lawyers from law school to final retirement, suffer at some stage from depression and low self-esteem. A number will face serious suicidal imaginings. If one of Google’s lawyers’ suicides and inserts the name of the city or town, names will come up that one knew but sometimes had forgotten. Tristan Jepson was such a name. His parents established the Foundation in his name in his name to tackle the issue. Daniel Solomons was another young lawyer who fell victim to suicidal depression. Most of his colleagues did not know, could not understand and could not believe that such a talented and handsome, much admired person would suffer the condition at the end of his life. Or respond as he did. But that is the fact. Lawyers have to face the facts.

Shortly before the launch of the Daniel Solomons Scholarship, yet another Sydney lawyer, a specialist in tax, who had taken a part in advocacy for a genuine response to suicide risks, took his own life. This challenge is always with us. It goes on. It does not disappear.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

The beginning of wisdom is the accumulation of knowledge. The Tristan Jepson Foundation has sponsored research by Professor Ian Hickie of the Sydney University Brain and Mind Institute. There must be more such research. The burgeoning legal industry and the multiplying Australian law schools – now numbering more than thirty five – should contribute to it. They have a stake in addressing the challenge successfully. So have we all. So has our society.

As with sexual orientation and gender identity, those who have faced the challenge of depression and suicidal thoughts need to come forward, stand up and identify themselves if they can. They should bravely become role models for those who do not yet dare. Tristan and Daniel did not live long enough to follow the lead of Lewis Wolpert in acknowledging the condition, facing it squarely in the eyes and seeking to communicate its burdens and dangers to their fellows. So this is the great opportunity loss we have suffered through the deaths of these young men. We must act before more join them.

My own decision, (with my partner Johan van Vloten) to be open about my sexual orientation was, in part, motivated by a feeling of obligation to young LGBTI people (including lawyers) coming along behind us. I cannot respect the attitudes of the Faith organisations quoted in these remarks who enter the educational space and alienate and humiliate a vulnerable cohort who came under their direct influence. They seem to be far from the loving message of the religion they purport to promote. In particular, they seem distant from the response of Pope Francis, soon after his election to the See of Rome, declaring of the sexual minorities: “Who am I to judge?”

Eventually, Faith organisations, Christian and non-Christian, will have to reconcile themselves to the science of the origins, causes and features of diverse sexual orientation and gender identity. It is not binary. Meantime, they should be brought to understand that their practices promote homophobia in society, as is recorded in the recent Australian survey on the attitude of teenage males. They cause or aggravate low self-esteem, lack of honesty and consignment to silence or duplicity that feeds depression and suicidal conduct. Especially in the stressful world of legal studies and of contemporary legal practice.

Lawyers and law students should support the Tristan Jepson Foundation and the Daniel Solomons Scholarship. These parental-driven initiatives help us to fill the void left by the loss of such gifted, young people. Not all of them are LGBTI. Not all of them suffer clinical depression. Not all of them are remembered as they should be. But all of them deserve to be respected. This way, we can learn from their pain. We can respond to their cry of despair.

The Daniel Solomons Memorial Scholarship is a practical initiative in a great ocean of neglect and indifference. Daniel’s life and death should not have been in vain.

Michael Gerson: 'In our right minds, we know that hope can grow within us', Sermon on Depression, National Cathedral - 2019

17 February 2019, National Cathedral, Washington DC, USA

When your Dean and I were conspiring about when I might speak, I think he mentioned February 3rd as a possibility. A sermon by me on that date would have been considerably less interesting, because I was, at that point, hospitalized for depression. Or maybe it would have been more interesting, though less coherent.

Like nearly one in ten Americans – and like many of you – I live with this insidious, chronic disease. Depression is a malfunction in the instrument we use to determine reality. The brain experiences a chemical imbalance and wraps a narrative around it. So the lack of serotonin, in the mind’s alchemy, becomes something like, “Everybody hates me.” Over time, despair can grow inside you like a tumor.

I would encourage anyone with this malady to keep a journal. At the bottom of my recent depression, I did a plus and minus, a pro and con, of me. Of being myself. The plus side, as you’d imagine, was short. The minus side included the most frightful clichés: “You are a burden to your friends.” “You have no future.” “No one would miss you.”

The scary thing is that these things felt completely true when I wrote them. At that moment, realism seemed to require hopelessness.

But then you reach your breaking point – and do not break. With patience and the right medicine, the fog in your brain begins to thin. If you are lucky, as I was, you encounter doctors and nurses who know parts of your mind better than you do. There are friends who run into the burning building of your life to rescue you, and acquaintances who become friends. You meet other patients, from entirely different backgrounds, who share your symptoms, creating a community of the wounded. And you learn of the valor they show in lonely rooms.

Over time, you begin to see hints and glimmers of a larger world outside the prison of your sadness. The conscious mind takes hold of some shred of beauty or love. And then more shreds, until you begin to think maybe, just maybe, there is something better on the far side of despair.

I have no doubt that I will eventually repeat the cycle of depression. But now I have some self-knowledge that can’t be taken away. I know that – when I’m in my right mind – I choose hope.

The phrase – “in my right mind” – is harsh. No one would use it in a clinical setting. But it fits my experience exactly.

In my right mind – when I am rested and fed, medicated and caffeinated – I know that I was living within a dismal lie.

In my right mind, I know I have friends who will not forsake me.

In my right mind, I know that chemistry need not be destiny.

In my right mind, I know that weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.

This may have direct relevance to some here today. But I also think this medical condition works as a metaphor for the human condition.

All of us – whatever our natural serotonin level – look around us and see plenty of reason for doubt, anger and sadness. A child dies, a woman is abused, a schoolyard becomes a killing field, a Typhoon sweeps away the innocent. If we knew or felt the whole of human suffering, we would drown in despair. By all objective evidence, we are arrogant animals, headed for the extinction that is the way of all things. We imagine that we are like gods, and still drop dead like flies on the windowsill.

The answer to the temptation of nihilism is not an argument – though philosophy can clear away a lot of intellectual foolishness. It is the experience of transcendence we cannot explain, or explain away. It is the fragments of love and meaning that arrive out of the blue – in beauty that leaves a lump in your throat… in the peace and ordered complexity of nature… in the shadow and shimmer of a cathedral… in the unexplained wonder of existence itself.

I have one friend, John, who finds God’s hidden hand in the habits and coloring of birds. My friend Catherine, when her first child was born, discovered what she calls “a love much greater than evolution requires.” I like that. “A love much greater than evolution requires.”

My own experience is tied to this place. Let me turn to an earlier, happier part of my journals, from May 2nd, 2002:

“It has probably been a month,” I wrote, “since some prompting of God led me to a more disciplined Christian life. One afternoon I was led to the Cathedral, the place I feel most secure in the world. I saw the beautiful sculpture in the Bishop’s Garden – the prodigal son melting into his father’s arms – and the inscription how he fell on his neck, and kissed him. I felt tears and calm, like something important had happened to me and in me… My goals are pretty clear. I want to stop thinking about myself all the time. I want to be a mature disciple of Jesus, not a casual believer. I want to be God’s man.”

I have failed at these goals in a disturbing variety of ways. And I have more doubts than I did on that day. These kind of experiences may result from inspiration… or indigestion. Your brain may be playing tricks. Or you may be feeling the beating heart of the universe. Faith, thankfully, does not preclude doubt. It consists of staking your life on the rumor of grace.

This experience of pulling back the curtain of materiality, and briefly seeing the landscape of a broader world, comes in many forms. It can be religious and non-religious, Christian and non-Christian. We sometimes search for a hidden door when the city has a hundred open gates. But there is this difference for a Christian believer: At the end of all our striving and longing we find, not a force, but a face. All language about God is metaphorical. But the metaphor became flesh and dwelt among us.

Becoming alert to this reality might be called “enlightenment,” or the work of the Holy Ghost, or “conversion.” There really is no formula. Historically, there was Paul’s blinding light on the road to Damascus. There was Augustine, instructed by the voice of a child to “take up and read.” There was Pascal sewing into his jacket: “Since about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past midnight. FIRE. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.” There was Teresa of Avila encountering the suffering Christ with an “outpouring of tears.” There was John Wesley’s heart becoming “strangely warmed.”

Here is how G.K. Chesterton described this experience in a poem called “The Convert”:

“The sages have a hundred maps to giveThat trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,They rattle reason out through many a sieveThat stores the sand and lets the gold go free:And all these things are less than dust to meBecause my name is Lazarus and I live.”

It is impossible for anyone but saints to live always on that mountaintop. I suspect that there are people here today – and I include myself – who are stalked by sadness, or stalked by cancer, or stalked by anger. We are afraid of the mortality that is knit into our bones. We experience unearned suffering, or give unreturned love, or cry useless tears. And many of us eventually grow weary of ourselves – tired of our own sour company.

At some point, willed cheerfulness fails. Or we skim along the surface of our lives, afraid of what lies in the depths below. It is a way to cope, but no way to live.

I’d urge anyone with undiagnosed depression to seek out professional help. There is no way to will yourself out of this disease, any more than to will yourself out of tuberculosis.

There are, however, other forms of comfort. Those who hold to the wild hope of a living God can say certain things:

In our right minds – as our most sane and solid selves – we know that the appearance of a universe ruled by cruel chaos is an lie and that the cold void is actually a sheltering sky.

In our right minds, we know that life is not a farce but a pilgrimage – or maybe a farce and a pilgrimage, depending on the day.

In our right minds, we know that hope can grow within us – like a seed, like a child.

In our right minds, we know that transcendence sparks and crackles around us – in a blinding light, and a child’s voice, and fire, and tears, and a warmed heart, and a sculpture just down the hill – if we open ourselves to seeing it.

Fate may do what it wants. But this much is settled. In our right minds, we know that love is at the heart of all things.

Many, understandably, pray for a strength they do not possess. But God’s promise is somewhat different: That even when strength fails, there is perseverance. And even when perseverance fails, there is hope. And even when hope fails, there is love. And love never fails.

So how do we know this? How can anyone be so confident?

Because we are Lazarus, and we live.

Stephen Hawking: 'Black holes ain't as black as they are painted', On Black Holes and Depression, Reith Lectures - 2016

7 January 2016, Royal Institution, London, United Kingdom

The most quoted part of these two lectures is an aside about mental health immediately below. See below that for full transcript of lectures about black holes.

The message of this lecture is that black holes ain't as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought.

Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up – there's a way out.

Although it was unfortunate to get motor neurone disease, I have been very fortunate in almost everything else.

I have been lucky to work in theoretical physics at a fascinating time and it' s one of the few areas in which my disability was not a serious handicap.

It's also important not to become angry, no matter how difficult life may seem because you can lose all hope if you can't laugh at yourself and life in general.

This is from Hawking’s Reith Lectures

Lecture 1: ‘Do Black Holes Have No Hair’

My talk is on black holes. It is said that fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, and nowhere is that more true than in the case of black holes.

Black holes are stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers, but they are firmly matters of science fact. The scientific community was slow to realize that massive stars could collapse in on themselves, under their own gravity, and how the object left behind would behave.

Albert Einstein even wrote a paper in 1939, claiming stars could not collapse under gravity, because matter could not be compressed beyond a certain point. Many scientists shared Einstein's gut feeling.

The principal exception was the American scientist John Wheeler, who in many ways is the hero of the black hole story. In his work in the 1950s and '60s, he emphasized that many stars would eventually collapse, and the problems that posed for theoretical physics.

He also foresaw many of the properties of the objects which collapsed stars become, that is, black holes.

DS: The phrase 'black hole' is simple enough but it's hard to imagine one out there in space. Think of a giant drain with water spiralling down into it. Once anything slips over the edge or 'event horizon', there is no return. Because black holes are so powerful, even light gets sucked in so we can't actually see them. But scientists know they exist because they rip apart stars and gas clouds that get too close to them.

During most of the life of a normal star, over many billions of years, it will support itself against its own gravity, by thermal pressure, caused by nuclear processes, which convert hydrogen into helium.

DS: NASA describes stars as rather like pressure-cookers. The explosive force of nuclear fusion inside them creates outward pressure which is constrained by gravity pulling everything inwards.

Eventually, however, the star will exhaust its nuclear fuel. The star will contract. In some cases, it may be able to support itself as a white dwarf star.

However Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed in 1930, that the maximum mass of a white dwarf star is about 1.4 times that of the Sun.

A similar maximum mass was calculated by Soviet physicist, Lev Landau, for a star made entirely of neutrons.

DS: White dwarfs and neutron stars have exhausted their fuel so they have shrunk to become some of the densest objects in the universe. Most interesting to Stephen Hawking is what happens when the very biggest stars collapse in on themselves.

What would be the fate of those countless stars, with greater mass than a white dwarf or neutron star, when they had exhausted nuclear fuel?

The problem was investigated by Robert Oppenheimer, of later atom bomb fame. In a couple of papers in 1939, with George Volkoff and Hartland Snyder, he showed that such a star could not be supported by pressure.

And that if one neglected pressure, a uniform spherically systematic symmetric star would contract to a single point of infinite density. Such a point is called a singularity.

DS: A singularity is what you end up with when a giant star is compressed to an unimaginably small point. This concept has been a defining theme in Stephen Hawking's career. It refers to the end of a star but also something more fundamental: that a singularity was the starting-point for the formation of the entire universe. It was Hawking's mathematical work on this that earned him global recognition.

All our theories of space are formulated on the assumption that spacetime is smooth and nearly flat, so they break down at the singularity, where the curvature of space-time is infinite.

In fact, it marks the end of time itself. That is what Einstein found so objectionable.

DS: Einstein's Theory of General Relativity says that objects distort the spacetime around them. Picture a bowling-ball lying on a trampoline, changing the shape of the material and causing smaller objects to slide towards it. This is how the effect of gravity is explained. But if the curves in spacetime become deeper and deeper, and eventually infinite, the usual rules of space and time no longer apply.

Then the war intervened.

Most scientists, including Robert Oppenheimer, switched their attention to nuclear physics, and the issue of gravitational collapse was largely forgotten. Interest in the subject revived with the discovery of distant objects, called quasars.

DS: Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, and possibly the most distant detected so far. The name is short for 'quasi-stellar radio sources' and they are believed to be discs of matter swirling around black holes.

The first quasar, 3C273, was discovered in 1963. Many other quasars were soon discovered. They were bright, despite being at great distances.

Nuclear processes could not account for their energy output, because they release only a percent fraction of their rest mass as pure energy. The only alternative was gravitational energy, released by gravitational collapse.

Gravitational collapses of stars were re-discovered. It was clear that a uniform spherical star would contract to a point of infinite density, a singularity.

The Einstein equations can't be defined at a singularity. This means at this point of infinite density, one can't predict the future.

This implies something strange could happen whenever a star collapsed. We wouldn't be affected by the breakdown of prediction, if the singularities are not naked, that is, they are not shielded from the outside.

DS: A 'naked' singularity is a theoretical scenario in which a star collapses but an event horizon does not form around it - so the singularity would be visible.

When John Wheeler introduced the term black hole in 1967, it replaced the earlier name, frozen star. Wheeler's coinage emphasized that the remnants of collapsed stars are of interest in their own right, independently of how they were formed.

The new name caught on quickly. It suggested something dark and mysterious, But the French, being French, saw a more risque meaning.

For years, they resisted the name trou noir, claiming it was obscene. But that was a bit like trying to stand against Le Week-end, and other Franglais. In the end, they had to give in. Who can resist a name that is such a winner?

From the outside, you can't tell what is inside a black hole. You can throw television sets, diamond rings, or even your worst enemies into a black hole, and all the black hole will remember is the total mass, and the state of rotation.

John Wheeler is known for expressing this principle as "a black hole has no hair". To the French, this just confirmed their suspicions.

A black hole has a boundary, called the event horizon. It is where gravity is just strong enough to drag light back, and prevent it escaping.

Because nothing can travel faster than light, everything else will get dragged back also. Falling through the event horizon is a bit like going over Niagara Falls in a canoe.

If you are above the falls, you can get away if you paddle fast enough, but once you are over the edge, you are lost. There's no way back. As you get nearer the falls, the current gets faster. This means it pulls harder on the front of the canoe than the back. There's a danger that the canoe will be pulled apart.

It is the same with black holes. If you fall towards a black hole feet first, gravity will pull harder on your feet than your head, because they are nearer the black hole.

The result is you will be stretched out longwise, and squashed in sideways. If the black hole has a mass of a few times our sun you would be torn apart, and made into spaghetti before you reached the horizon.

However, if you fell into a much larger black hole, with a mass of a million times the sun, you would reach the horizon without difficulty.

So, if you want to explore the inside of a black hole, make sure you choose a big one. There is a black hole with a mass of about four million times that of the sun, at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.

DS: Scientists believe that there are huge black holes at the centre of virtually all galaxies - a remarkable thought, given how recently these features were confirmed in the first place.

Lecture 2: ‘Black Holes Aint as Black as They’re Painted’

In my previous lecture I left you on a cliff-hanger: a paradox about the nature of black holes, the incredibly dense objects created by the collapse of stars.

One theory suggested that black holes with identical qualities could be formed from an infinite number of different types of stars. Another suggested that the number could be finite.

This is a problem of information, that is the idea that every particle and every force in the universe contains information, an implicit answer to a yes-no question.

Because black holes have no hair, as the scientist John Wheeler put it, one can't tell from the outside what is inside a black hole, apart from its mass, electric charge, and rotation.

This means that a black hole contains a lot of information that is hidden from the outside world. If the amount of hidden information inside a black hole depends on the size of the hole, one would expect from general principles that the black hole would have a temperature, and would glow like a piece of hot metal.

But that was impossible, because as everyone knew, nothing could get out of a black hole. Or so it was thought.

This problem remained until early in 1974, when I was investigating what the behaviour of matter in the vicinity of a black hole would be, according to quantum mechanics.

DS: Quantum mechanics is the science of the extremely small and it seeks to explain the behaviour of the tiniest particles. These do not act according to the laws that govern the movements of much bigger objects like planets, laws that were first framed by Isaac Newton. Using the science of the very small to study the very large was one of Stephen Hawking's pioneering achievements.
Image copyright Science Photo Library
Image caption Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics that describes particles in terms of quanta, discrete values rather than smooth changes

To my great surprise I found that the black hole seemed to emit particles at a steady rate. Like everyone else at that time, I accepted the dictum that a black hole could not emit anything. I therefore put quite a lot of effort into trying to get rid of this embarrassing effect.

But the more I thought about it, the more it refused to go away, so that in the end I had to accept it.

What finally convinced me it was a real physical process was that the outgoing particles have a spectrum that is precisely thermal.

My calculations predicted that a black hole creates and emits particles and radiation, just as if it were an ordinary hot body, with a temperature that is proportional to the surface gravity, and inversely proportional to the mass.

DS: These calculations were the first to show that a black hole need not be a one-way street to a dead end. No surprise, the emissions suggested by the theory became known as Hawking Radiation.

Since that time, the mathematical evidence that black holes emit thermal radiation has been confirmed by a number of other people with various different approaches.

One way to understand the emission is as follows. Quantum mechanics implies that the whole of space is pairs of virtual and anti particles, filled with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles, that are constantly materialising in pairs, separating, and then coming together again, and annihilating each other.

DS: This concept hinges on the idea that a vacuum is never totally empty. According to the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, there is always the chance that particles may come into existence, however briefly. And this would always involve pairs of particles, with opposite characteristics, appearing and disappearing.

These particles are called virtual because unlike real particles they cannot be observed directly with a particle detector.

Their indirect effects can nonetheless be measured, and their existence has been confirmed by a small shift, called the Lamb shift, which they produce in the spectrum energy of light from excited hydrogen atoms.

Now in the presence of a black hole, one member of a pair of virtual particles may fall into the hole, leaving the other member without a partner with which to annihilate.

The forsaken particle or antiparticle may fall into the black hole after its partner, but it may also escape to infinity, where it appears to be radiation emitted by the black hole.

Other scientists who have given Reith Lectures include Robert Oppenheimer, Martin Rees and Bernard Lovell. You can listen to them here.

DS: The key here is that the formation and disappearance of these particles normally pass unnoticed. But if the process happens right on the edge of a black hole, one of the pair may get dragged in while the other is not. The particle that escapes would then look as if it's being spat out by the black hole.

A black hole of the mass of the sun, would leak particles at such a slow rate, it would be impossible to detect. However, there could be much smaller mini black holes with the mass of say, a mountain.

A mountain-sized black hole would give off X-rays and gamma rays, at a rate of about 10 million megawatts, enough to power the world's electricity supply.

It wouldn't be easy however, to harness a mini black hole. You couldn't keep it in a power station, because it would drop through the floor and end up at the centre of the Earth.

If we had such a black hole, about the only way to keep hold of it would be to have it in orbit around the Earth.

People have searched for mini black holes of this mass, but have so far not found any. This is a pity, because if they had I would have got a Nobel Prize.

Another possibility, however, is that we might be able to create micro black holes in the extra dimensions of space time.

DS: By 'extra dimensions', he means something beyond the three dimensions that we are all familiar with in our everyday lives, plus the fourth dimension of time. The idea arose as part of an effort to explain why gravity is so much weaker than other forces such as magnetism - maybe it's also having to operate in parallel dimensions.

The movie Interstellar gives some idea of what this is like. We wouldn't see these extra dimensions because light wouldn't propagate through them but only through the four dimensions of our universe.

Gravity, however, would affect the extra dimensions and would be much stronger than in our universe. This would make it much easier to form a little black hole in the extra dimensions.

It might be possible to observe this at the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN in Switzerland. This consists of a circular tunnel, 27 kilometres long. Two beams of particles travel round this tunnel in opposite directions, and are made to collide. Some of the collisions might create micro black holes. These would radiate particles in a pattern that would be easy to recognize.

So I might get a Nobel Prize after all.

DS: The Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded when a theory is "tested by time" which in practice means confirmation by hard evidence. For example, Peter Higgs was among scientists who, back in the 1960s, suggested the existence of a particle that would give other particles their mass. Nearly 50 years later, two different detectors at the Large Hadron Collider spotted signs of what had become known as the Higgs Boson. It was a triumph of science and engineering, of clever theory and hard-won evidence. And Peter Higgs and Francois Englert, a Belgian scientist, were jointly awarded the prize. No physical proof has yet been found of Hawking Radiation.
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Other scientists who have given Reith Lectures include Robert Oppenheimer, Martin Rees and Bernard Lovell. You can listen to them here.

As particles escape from a black hole, the hole will lose mass, and shrink. This will increase the rate of emission of particles.

Eventually, the black hole will lose all its mass, and disappear. What then happens to all the particles and unlucky astronauts that fell into the black hole? They can't just re-emerge when the black hole disappears.

It appears that the information about what fell in is lost, apart from the total amount of mass, and the amount of rotation. But if information is lost, this raises a serious problem that strikes at the heart of our understanding of science.

For more than 200 years, we have believed in scientific determinism, that is, that the laws of science determine the evolution of the universe. This was formulated by Pierre-Simon Laplace, who said that if we know the state of the universe at one time, the laws of science will determine it at all future and past times.

Napoleon is said to have asked Laplace how God fitted into this picture. Laplace replied, "Sire, I have not needed that hypothesis."

I don't think that Laplace was claiming that God didn't exist. It is just that he doesn't intervene to break the laws of science. That must be the position of every scientist. A scientific law is not a scientific law if it only holds when some supernatural being decides to let things run and not intervene.

In Laplace's determinism, one needed to know the positions and speeds of all particles at one time, in order to predict the future. But there's the uncertainty relationship, discovered by Walter Heisenberg in 1923, which lies at the heart of quantum mechanics.
Image copyright Science Photo Library
Image caption Pierre-Simon Laplace formulated the law of scientific determinism

This holds that the more accurately you know the positions of particles, the less accurately you can know their speeds, and vice versa. In other words, you can't know both the positions and the speeds accurately.

How then can you predict the future accurately? The answer is that although one can't predict the positions and speeds separately, one can predict what is called the quantum state. This is something from which both positions and speeds can be calculated to a certain degree of accuracy.

We would still expect the universe to be deterministic, in the sense that if we knew the quantum state of the universe at one time, the laws of science should enable us to predict it at any other time.

DS: What began as an explanation of what happens at an event horizon has deepened into an exploration of some of the most important philosophies in science - from the clockwork world of Newton to the laws of Laplace to the uncertainties of Heisenberg - and where they are challenged by the mystery of black holes. Essentially, information entering a black hole should be destroyed, according to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity while quantum theory says it cannot be broken down, and this remains an unresolved question.

If information were lost in black holes, we wouldn't be able to predict the future, because a black hole could emit any collection of particles.

It could emit a working television set, or a leather-bound volume of the complete works of Shakespeare, though the chance of such exotic emissions is very low.

It might seem that it wouldn't matter very much if we couldn't predict what comes out of black holes. There aren't any black holes near us. But it is a matter of principle.

If determinism, the predictability of the universe, breaks down with black holes, it could break down in other situations. Even worse, if determinism breaks down, we can't be sure of our past history either.

The history books and our memories could just be illusions. It is the past that tells us who we are. Without it, we lose our identity.

It was therefore very important to determine whether information really was lost in black holes, or whether in principle, it could be recovered.

Many scientists felt that information should not be lost, but no one could suggest a mechanism by which it could be preserved. The arguments went on for years. Finally, I found what I think is the answer.

It depends on the idea of Richard Feynman, that there isn't a single history, but many different possible histories, each with their own probability.

In this case, there are two kinds of history. In one, there is a black hole, into which particles can fall, but in the other kind there is no black hole.

The point is that from the outside, one can't be certain whether there is a black hole or not. So there is always a chance that there isn't a black hole.

This possibility is enough to preserve the information, but the information is not returned in a very useful form. It is like burning an encyclopaedia. Information is not lost if you keep all the smoke and ashes, but it is difficult to read.

The scientist Kip Thorne and I had a bet with another physicist, John Preskill, that information would be lost in black holes. When I discovered how information could be preserved, I conceded the bet. I gave John Preskill an encyclopaedia. Maybe I should have just given him the ashes.

DS: In theory, and with a purely deterministic view of the universe, you could burn an encyclopaedia and then reconstitute it if you knew the characteristics and position of every atom making up every molecule of ink in every letter and kept track of them all at all times.
Image copyright Thinkstock
Image caption Information is there, but not useful 'like burning an encyclopaedia'

Currently I'm working with my Cambridge colleague Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger from Harvard on a new theory based on a mathematical idea called supertranslations to explain the mechanism by which information is returned out of the black hole.

The information is encoded on the horizon of the black hole. Watch this space.

DS: Since the Reith Lectures were recorded, Prof Hawking and his colleagues have published a paper which makes a mathematical case that information can be stored in the event horizon. The theory hinges on information being transformed into a two-dimensional hologram in a process known as supertranslations. The paper, titled Soft Hair on Black Holes, offers a highly revealing glimpse into the esoteric language of this field and the challenge that scientists face in trying to explain it.

What does this tell us about whether it is possible to fall in a black hole, and come out in another universe? The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible. The hole would need to be large, and if it was rotating, it might have a passage to another universe.

But you couldn't come back to our universe. So although I'm keen on space flight, I'm not going to try that.

DS: If black holes are rotating, then their heart may not consist of a singularity in the sense of an infinitely dense point. Instead, there may be a singularity in the form of a ring. And that leads to speculation about the possibility of not only falling into a black hole but also travelling through one. This would mean leaving the universe as we know it. And Stephen Hawking concludes with a tantalising thought: that there may something on the other side.

The message of this lecture is that black holes ain't as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both to the outside, and possibly to another universe.

So if you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up. There's a way out.

Thank you very much.

Stephen Murphy - 'Before You Push the Chair', 'The Healing', Listowel Writers Week - 2018

3 June 2018, John B Keane's Pub, Listowel, Co Kerry, Ireland

[As title of Stephen's poem suggests, contains themes of mental illness and suicide]

I was in Limerick last night, I was here for Thursday - I had a bit of a gig on for Thursday, and then I went home for Friday morning ... [inaudible] ... and then I was down in Limerick at Homeland last night, and I was thinking, fuck it, you know what, I’m going back to The Healing.

And the reason I wanted to come back to the Healing is because I wanted to give this poem at it. Because if it’s not for The Healing that we’re here, what is it?

And it’s a poem called ‘Before You Push the Chair’.

And it’s a lot less craic than most of the other stuff, sorry.

Before You Push The Chair

I want you to know that I've been there

In those moments when it feels as though
every wall's a prison
When the whole world kneels upon you
and the darkness of your vision
Has encompassed all before you
and turned your whole world black
And it feels as though you'll never get
to see your old world back.

I've been labelled with depression,
and branded with disease
And given the impression
that for anyone who sees
Past this great deception
that's been sold to us as fact
There's a template for expression
as to how we should react.

But I've come to see despair
as a product of control
That's embedded in our psyche
by the forces who patrol
What we read within our papers,
or see upon our screens
As deliberately tapered
to tamper with our dreams

And for all that we resist it,
it's there on every surface
From our buses to our bodies,
all designed to fit the purpose
To remind us that for all we have,
it's still never enough
That there'll always be that void to fill
with other mindless stuff

And though some still cling to God
to bring some structure to their lives
And others seem to need to be
destructive to survive
There's a whole new generation
wandering aimless and confused
Who were born into an age
that never had a God to lose
And in their quest for validation
they turn to the machine
'Cause they've come to know the world
through the comfort of a screen.

And I've seen the way we've gone
from being socially adept
From a people who were strong
to being totally inept
Where anxiety and loneliness
are living side by side
And everyone's just saving face
for fear of losing pride
As the constant threat of homelessness
and risk of repossession
Has come to manifest itself
as clinical depression
So we medicate the masses
just to keep them from the rope
And eradicate the last remaining
evidence of hope
Just to sell us back
the superficial versions of our selves
From the sacrificial altars
of our supermarket shelves
And then tell us that
'A problem halved is just a problem shared'
But thus a problem doubled
is a problem that's been layered
'Cause so many now despair
because to paraphrase Voltaire;
They see who rules who suffers,
yet still they're running scared.

But before you push the chair,
I want you to step down from there
And be the light you're born to be
To understand that those who see things differently
Are those who reshape history
That the prophets in the scriptures
were the poets of their time
And everyone you'll ever meet
has struggled with the mind
But one true friend will always trump
a million friends online

Where reality's distorted
and contorted to obscure
Designed to isolate us
and to make us insecure
But for all our social networks,
our net worth is obsolete
When we need the praise of strangers
to make us feel complete

But beyond our echo chambers,
when we lift our eyes we'll see
That around us lie the embers
of our own humanity
And as day is why we name the night
so too we'll come to see
That the they we like to blame in life
is only ever we
And for all we try to justify
the versions of our truth
They will always be perversions
to another's absolute
'Cause no matter where the roots lie,
the one thing guaranteed
Is that the plant will always come
to bear the hallmarks of the seed.

And I don't have all the answers,
and I'll never say I do
I've just as many doubts
and insecurities as you
But a friend of mine once told me
that I showed up in a dream
And I'm not exactly sure
what any of it means

But I was walking through a desert
with my back towards the sun
In a crowd of other people
but for every other one
Their shadows fell before them
but for me it fell behind
And he said that he just stood there
and watched us for a time

'Til at last I took an hourglass
and smashed it with a stone
Then poured the sand upon the sand
as there I stood alone
And when he asked me why I did it,
I turned to him and said;
'That was simply just the way
that the universe was made.'

I know that may sound clichéd,
but I've been thinking about it since
And the more that I've been thinking,
the more that I'm convinced
That maybe all of us are only
pouring dust upon the dust
And it's not us killing time
but more just time that's killing us

But when two people every day here now
are taking their own lives
And countless many others
are struggling to survive
At what point do we acknowledge
that this problem's epidemic
And not just a polemic
of some college academic?

'Cause we're so intent on carrying
this intense collective grief
That we seem content on marrying
our lack of self-belief
To a greater sense of victimhood
that always comes across
As a symptom of the dogma
we've adopted from the cross

But I'm tired of trying to find the words
'I'm sorry for your loss'
When that loss could be avoided
for a fraction of the cost
And I'm tired of the statistics,
'cause the numbers can't uphold
The stories of the victims
that will largely go untold
And I'm tired of the stigma
that still surrounds our mental health
As if for simply feeling
is a failing of the self
But I'm mostly just exhausted
'cause I'm all too well aware
That right now someone else
is just about to push the chair.

And I wish that I could tell them,
for however dark their plight
That through the shelter of each other
We can learn that love is light.

Stephen Murphy is releasing a book of his poetry. Please visit his facebook page and purchase a copy.

Australia: Lifeline 131144
Ireland/UK: Samaritans 116 123
USA: Lifeline 1-800-273-8255
India: suicide.org for regional hotlines

Glennon Doyle Melton: 'It's braver to be Clark Kent than it is to be Superman', Lessons from the Mental Hospital, TEDx - 2013

uploaded 31 May 2013, TEDx Traverse City, Michigan, 2013

Hi. I have been trying to weasel my way out of being on the stage for weeks. I am doing fine. But about a month ago I was up early panicking about this. And I watched in all of Tech Talk that Brené Brown did on vulnerability. Dr. Brown is one of my heroes. She is a shame researcher and I am a recovering bulimic, alcoholic and drug user. So I’m sort of a shame researcher too. It’s just that most of my work is done out in the field.

And Dr. Brown defined courage like this. She said, “Courage is to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.” And that got me thinking about another one of my heroes Georgia O’Keeffe and how she said, “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant. There is no such thing. Making the unknown known is what is important”.

So here I am to tell you the story of who I am with my whole heart and to make some unknowns known.

When I was eight-years-old, I started to feel exposed and I started to feel very very awkward. Every day I was pushed out of my house and into school all oily and fuzzy and conspicuous and to meet the other girls seemed so cool, and together and easy.

And I started to feel like a loser in a world that preferred superheroes. So I made my own capes and I tied them tight around me. My capes were pretending and addiction. But we all have our own superhero capes; don’t we? Perfectionism and overworking, snarkiness and apathy, they’re all superhero capes.

And our capes are what we put over our real selves so that our real tender selves don’t have to be seen and can’t be hurt. Our superhero capes are what we keep us from having to feel much at all, because every good and bad thing is deflected off of them.

And so for 18 years, my capes of addiction and pretending kept me safe and hidden. People think of us addicts as insensitive liars but we don’t start out that way.

We start out as extremely sensitive truth tellers. We feel so much pain and so much love and we sense that the world doesn’t want us to feel that much and doesn’t want to need as much comfort as we need. So we start pretending. We try to pretend like we’re the people that we think we’re supposed to be. We numb and we hide and we pretend and that pretending does eventually turn into a life of lies. But to be fair, we thought we were supposed to be lying.

They tell us since we’re little that when someone asks us how we’re doing, the only appropriate answer is: “Fine. And you?”

But the thing is that people are truth tellers. We are born to make our unknown known. We will find somewhere to do it. So in private, with the booze or the over-shopping or the alcohol or the food, we tell the truth. We say actually I’m not fine. Because we don’t feel safe telling that truth in the real world we make our own little world and that’s addiction. That’s whatever cape you put on.

And so what happens is all of us end up living in these little teeny, controllable, predictable, dark worlds instead of altogether in the big, bright, messy one.

I binged and purged for the first time when I was 8 and I continued every single day for the next 18 years. It seems normal to me but you’re surprised.

Every single time that I got anxious or worried or angry, I thought something was wrong with me. And so I took that nervous energy to the kitchen and I stuffed it all down with food and then I panicked and I purged. And after all of that, I was laid out on the bathing floor and I was so exhausted and so numb that I never had to go back and deal with whatever it was that it made me uncomfortable in the first place. And that’s what I wanted. I did not want to deal with the discomfort and messiness of being a human being.

So when I was a senior in high school, I finally decided to tell the truth in the real world. I walked into my guidance counselor’s office and I said ”actually I’m not fine. Someone help me”. And I was sent to a mental hospital.

And in the mental hospital, for the first time in my life, I found myself in a world that made sense to me. In high school, we had to care about geometry when our hearts were breaking because we were just bullied in the hallway, or no one would sit with us at lunch. And we had to care about ancient Rome when all we really wanted to do was learn how to make and keep a real friend. We had to act tough when we felt scared and we had to act confident when we felt really confused.

Acting — pretending was a matter of survival. High school is kind of like the real-world sometimes. But in the mental hospital, there was no pretending. The zig was up. We had classes about how to express how we really felt through music and art and writing. We had classes about how to be a good listener and how to be brave enough to tell our own story, while being kind enough not to tell anybody else’s. We held each other’s hands sometimes just because we felt like we needed to.

Nobody was ever allowed to be left out. Everybody was worthy. That was the rule just because she existed and so in there, we were brave enough to take off our capes. All I ever needed to now I learned in the mental hospital.

I remember this sandy haired girl who was so beautiful and she told the truth on her arms. And I held her hand one day while she was crying. And I saw that her arms were just sliced up like pre-cut S. In there, people wore their scars on the outside, so you knew where they stood. And they told the truth, so you knew why they stooped in there.

So I graduated from high school and I went on to college, which was way crazier than the mental hospital. In college, I added on the capes of alcoholism and drug use. This Sun rose every day and I started bingeing and purging. And then when the sun set I drank myself stupid. The sunrise is usually people’s signal to get up but it was my signal every day to come down — to come down from the booze and the boys and the drugs and I could not come down. That was to be avoided at all cost. So I hated the sunrise.

I closed the blinds, and I put the pillow over my head when my spinning brain would torture me about the people who were going out into their day into the late to make relationships and pursue their dreams and have a day – and I had no day; I only had night.

And these days, I like to think of hope as that sunrise. It comes out every single day to shine on everybody equally. It comes out to shine on the sinners and the saints and druggists and the cheerleaders. It never withholds; it doesn’t judge. And if you spend your entire life in the dark and then one day just decide to come out, it’ll be there waiting for you — just waiting to warm you.

All those years I thought of that sunrise as searching and accusatory and judgmental. But it wasn’t – it was just hope’s daily invitation to need to come back to life. And I think if you still have a day, if you’re still alive, you’re still invited.

I actually graduated from college which makes me both grateful to and extremely suspicious of my alma mater. And I found myself sort of in the real world and sort of not.

On Mother’s Day, 2002 – I am not good at years – we’ll just say on Mother’s Day, I had spun deeper and deeper. I wasn’t even Glennon anymore. I was just bulimia, I was just alcoholism. I was just a pile of capes. But on Mother’s day — one Mother’s day I found myself on a cold bathroom floor, hung over, shaking and holding a positive pregnancy test.

And as I sat there with my back literally against a wall, shaking and understanding watched over me. And in that moment on the bathroom floor, I understood that even in my state, even lying on the floor that someone out there had deemed me worthy of an invitation to a very very important event.

And so that day on the bathroom floor, I decided to show up. Just to show up, to climb out of my dark individual controllable world and out into the big, bright, messy one. And I didn’t know how to be a sober person or how to be a mother, or how to be a friend. So I just promised myself that I would show up and I would do the next right thing. Just show up Glennon even if you’re scared. Just do the next right thing even when you’re shaking.

And so I stood up. Now what they don’t tell you about getting sober, about peeling off your capes, is that it gets helluva lot worse before it gets better. Getting sober is like recovering from frostbite. It’s all of those feelings that you’ve numbed for so long. Now they’re there and they are present. And at first it just feels kind of tingly and uncomfortable but then those feelings start to feel like daggers, the pain, the love, the guilt, the shame, it’s all piled on top of you with nowhere to run.

But what I learned during that time is that sitting with the pain and the joy of being a human being, while refusing to run for any exits is the only way to become a real human being. And so these days I’m not a superhero and I’m not a perfect human being. But I am a fully human being. And I am proud of that.

I am fortunately and frustratingly still exactly the same person as I was when I was 20 and 16 and eight-years-old. I still feel scared all the time, anxious all the time. Really all the time. I still get very high and very low in life daily. But I finally accepted the fact that sensitive is just how I was made, that I don’t have to hide it, and I don’t have to fix it, I am not broken.

And I have actually started to wonder if maybe you’re sensitive too. Maybe you feel great pain and deep joy but you just don’t feel safe talking about it in the real world. And so now instead of trying to make myself tougher, I write and I serve people to help create a world where sensitive people don’t need superhero capes, or we can all just come out into the big bright messy world and tell the truth and forgive each other for being human and admit together that yes, life is really hard but also insist that together we can do hard things.

Maybe, it’s okay, to say actually today I am not fine. Maybe it’s okay to remember that we’re human beings and to stop doing long enough to think and to love and to share and to listen.

This weekend was Mother’s Day which marked the 11th year anniversary of the day I decided to show up. And I spent the day on the beach with my three children and my two dogs and my one husband. My long-suffering husband you can only imagine. And life is beautiful and life is brutal. Life is brutaful, all the time and every day. And only one thing has made the difference for me and that is this: I used to numb my feelings and hide and now I feel my feelings and I share. That’s the only difference in my life these days.

I’m not afraid of my feelings anymore. I know they can come and they won’t kill me and they can take over for a little while if they need to but at the end of the day what they are is really just guides. They’re just guides to tell me what is the next right thing for me to do. Loneliness – it leads us to connection with other people. And jealousy – it guides us to what we’re supposed to do next and paying guides just to help other people and being overwhelmed – it helps us – it guides us to ask for help.

And so I’ve learned that if I honor my feelings as my own personal profits and instead of running I just be still but there are prizes to be won and those prizes are peace and dignity and friendship.

So I received an email last week and let’s now take to my computer at home.

And it just said, “Dear Glennon, it’s braver to be Clark Kent than it is to be Superman. Carry on Warrior”.

And so today I would say to you that we don’t anymore superheroes. We just need awkward, oily, honest human beings out in the bright, big, messy world. And I will see you there.

You can buy Glennon Doyle Melton's book 'Carry on Warrior' here.

Clare Wright: 'The Year My Brain Broke', Epic Fail event - 2014

30 July, 2014, Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, Australia

You have been promised a night of tales guaranteed to amuse.

I so wish that I had a funny story to tell you tonight.

I wish I was one of the performers in the annual Melbourne Comedy Festival event, Best Comedians, Worst Gigs, so that I could have you all in stitches as I regaled you with anecdotes of falling flat on my face in front of an audience: side-splittingly self-deprecating tales of humiliation, mockery and disgrace that only go to prove what a good comedian I really am.

I wish I could tell you about the time that I toppled into a swimming pool at the wake of a prominent sporty identity and had to wear the deceased’s clothes all night until my sodden ones had been put through the dryer.  Unfortunately, that was my husband in the pool, a banana peel moment of truly epic proportions.

I even wish I could tell you about the multiple rejections I received for my recent award-winning book and how, after a decade of work, I thought it would be exiled to the Orphanage for Abandoned Manuscripts before being miraculously rescued from obscurity and skyrocketing to stellar success.  But this is not what happened, and the truth — a bidding war between multiple publishers — is not the stuff of short poppy glory.

In fact there is little in my CV that would suggest I should be standing here on this pedestal of failure tonight.  I was a straight-A student at a select entry high school for academically gifted girls.  I achieved a perfect 100% for my HSC English exam.  I received First Class Honours for my Bachelor and Masters degrees and my PhD thesis won the prize for the best doctoral work in my discipline.  I have been awarded merit-based scholarships for all my tertiary courses, and a federal grant for my postdoctoral research.  My books have been on the best-sellers lists. My television documentary was a critical triumph, and my new documentary series will hit the screens on 19 August.  So no belly flops or banana peels there.

My domestic life is pretty cozy too.  I met the love of my life in first-year university and my husband and I have now been together for twenty-six years.  (All of them bliss, he would say with only the hint of an impudent smile.)  Together we are raising three delightful, healthy children, whose company we prefer to most other human or technological interaction.  Our warm and hospitable suburban home is filled with food, love and laughter.  We have an open door policy with friends and wildlife alike.  At the moment we are breaking bread with a dog, two cats, four rabbits, twelve guinea pigs and the ever-present chooks.    We have a beach house.

So it’s perhaps odd that when I was asked by the Wheeler Centre to participate in tonight’s panel, I knew immediately and instinctively what I would talk about.  For me, the two little words ‘epic fail’ cast me straight back to a moment so vivid and visceral it could be yesterday.

But it is seven years ago and I am in a car.  I am in my little navy blue Golf and I am driving back home to my beloved husband and beautiful family from a doctor’s appointment.  I have spent two hours talking to this doctor — a woman I have never met before but who has kindly spared me eight of her precious 15 minutes appointment slots and bulk-billed me to boot.  It is raining.  Or maybe it is not raining but I am crying so hard that my memory requires windshield wipers to hone its field of vision.

I am in a state but I am also in a car so I’m stopping at traffic lights and watching out for pedestrians.  And I’m talking out loud to myself, repeating two short sentences in a spin cycle of fear and self-loathing.

I’m sorry.  I have failed.  I’m sorry.  I have failed.  I’m sorry.

I drive and I cry and I chant this mantra to the rhythm of the rain.  Or perhaps into the blinding sunshine. Does it matter? I have no idea who I’m apologizing to.  But I know without a shadow of a doubt what I’m apologizing for: I have failed.

Later, I would come to think of 2007 as The Year My Brain Broke.  But there in the car that day all I knew was that I’d left the doctor’s office with a prescription for antidepressants, a referral to a psychiatrist, and the assurance that ‘no strength of character or force of will’ would get me through this.

But what was this?  This feeling of utter incompetence.  This knowledge of my complete inability to pull myself up by my bootstraps.  This incapacity to count my blessings.  This malfunction of every system I had ever put in place to stave of disaster, avert catastrophe and neutralize chaos.

According to the doctor — who I had to admit was a highly skilled professional who had not merely raised her eyes above her glasses at me and reached for her prescription pad but rather listened while I oozed gloom for two whole hours — according to this doctor I had severe clinical postnatal depression.

My third child, my only daughter, had been born two and a half years earlier. We were instantly bonded in a deep and abiding connection.  Every photo shows me beaming with pride and joy.  With her birth I experienced a deep sense of fulfillment and a circle that I wasn’t aware was broken had finally closed.

And yet…

For at least two years, I had struggled with the daily challenge to scale the summit of my own wretchedness.  Most days were like snorkeling through tar.  Dark, heavy, suffocating days punctuated by panic and a generalized sense of impending doom.  I experienced waking hallucinations of my baby toppling down the stairs.  A bomb in her pusher.  Snakes crawling next to the bunny rug where she kicked happily in the back yard.  At night when I slept, if I slept, which was rarely, I dreamed I was falling into a black abyss.  “So this is what it’s like” I’d think wistfully as I plummeted into the void, right before I woke bolt upright, mouth dry, heart racing.

But this couldn’t be postnatal depression, could it?  Depressed mums didn’t get out of bed, and cried all day, and shouted at people, and didn’t want to touch their babies, and were afraid they might hurt them.  I wasn’t any of these things.  I went to work, wrote and published, appeared on tv shows and made intelligent, amusing speeches.  I had a hot meal on the table every night, and clean school uniforms in the cupboards.  I had clean hair and happy kids.

Yes, I often felt red raw when watching the news or reading the paper, like my skin had been peeled away, gleaning on some deep gut level that it was my fault that a man had thrown his child off a bridge, or a group of teenagers had been mown down by a drunk driver, or a baby’s pusher had blown on the train tracks in a big wind.

And yes, I often started walking to the supermarket, or the swimming pool, or a café to meet friends, only to find myself frozen to the spot, certain that going to that place or doing that activity was wrong, and that I should have made a different decision, a better decision, and if I’d made THAT decision I wouldn’t be here, now, walking around in circles, unable to make up my mind whether to stay or go, pumped full of adrenalin, without a single good reason why I should either fight or take flight, but nonetheless primed for battle, certain I was going mad.

On the outside, I was a solid citizen.  On the inside, I had fractured into a million little pieces.

But it was not until 45 year-old Audrey Fagan, Chief Police Office of the ACT, was found hanging in her hotel room on a Queensland tropical island in April 2007 that I started to grasp that something was seriously wrong with me beyond my own failure to stop myself from feeling so rotten and acting so crazy. 

Stories on Fagan’s death all took the same line: why would such a competent, meticulous, successful mentor and mother take her own life? ‘Awesome mum solved all problems but her own’ read one headline. Amanda Vanstone was quoted saying “She was always happy, there was never any nastiness about her, she got along well with everybody." AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty said: "She was a very professional, very strong woman, and I think that's what has surprised all of us, that because she was such a strong woman, such a determined woman, it's a great lesson to all of us that everybody is vulnerable."

None of the articles said that Audrey Fagan had depression, though one story published in the Good Weekend magazine a few months after her death implied it.

Reading that piece at my kitchen table, I felt such a profound affinity with Fagan that my blood ran cold.  It was not long after that I found myself a doctor. 

Now that I am well again, I know, of course, that confronting the full force of my own vulnerability was not an epic fail.  In fact, it was the complete opposite.  Only I could make the decision to step back from the brink of the abyss.  Only I could start to love myself the way my friends and family loved me.  I had to find out for myself that life is not a performance sport; that achievement is a state of grace, not the sum total of relentless activity; that ego might not be a dirty work, but it can be a ruthless taskmaster; and that hard work often brings just rewards, but it’s not what sets you free.

Clare is a guest on episode 49 of the Speakola podcast