Today is R U OK?Day, a campaign aimed at raising awareness and encouraging the community to engage with people who might be thinking about suicide. While not without its merits, one of the criticisms of the campaign is that simply asking someone ‘are you OK?’ without knowing how to respond in a helpful way is…
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Audiences around Australia are being treated to a touching and humorous piece of theatre, It’s Dark Outside. Following the story of an old man who wanders into the wilderness at sunset pursued by a dark, shadowy figure, It’s Dark Outside tackles the little discussed and often sensitive theme of Dementia. With 332,000 Australians currently…
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There are a couple of phrases that are guaranteed to disturb; subjects steeped in so much stigma that, once raised, make most people uncomfortable and nervous. When I see a cute baby I will, without fail, gurgle ‘ermahgawd I want one’, successfully disturbing my parents. If it’s an unusually cute baby I’ll hug myself and…
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Whenever I start a new job and fill in paperwork that asks whether I have any medical conditions, I always pause for a moment. I don’t have epilepsy, I’m not deathly allergic to anything, nor do I have diabetes. But I do have bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed seven years ago after a manic episode…
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Reading Lottie Moggach’s debut novel Kiss Me First is like experiencing an extended claustrophobic fever-dream. From the perspective of an intense and unreliable narrator, this slow-burning novel explores obsession, connection, loneliness and identity, all through the mode of online communication. Leila is an intelligent, antisocial and reclusive young woman who lacks empathy or self-awareness. Following…
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‘I remember it really clearly,’ says Seraphina Reynolds, creator of the new online writing project This Place Is Yours. ‘One night I sat down in my writing chair, and it just kind of poured out of me. It was just something that clearly I needed to do.’ A book has emerged from this project, and…
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The pursuit of the ‘perfect’ body is not something new; one only needs to look at Classical Greek sculpture to realise that. And the idea that this kind of body exists and is attainable – if only we stick to the right diet – is a dangerous myth. Every week, it seems, a new diet…
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Certainty kills one’s curiosity and blinds one’s mind’s eye to the wondrous questions we need to ask ourselves as we write. Uncertainty should be our guide. Likewise self-doubt is something all serious writers worth their salt wrestle with. Without some self-doubt and uncertainty one would descend into a self-satisfied mediocrity. Yet for someone who endures…
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Just the other day, I was driving along listening to Triple J when the news came on. Ordinarily I’d switch stations as I’m always up to date with current affairs. However, I was eagerly anticipating a new Sarah Blasko song after the news, so I left it on. One particular story really struck a chord…
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Ali, the narrator of The Memory of Salt, describes drawing a line in the middle of herself (or perhaps himself, as the author never discloses the gender of the narrator), designating one side as Melburnian, the other as Turkish. While her mother is an Australian paediatrician, her father, Ahmet, is a Turkish musician who joined…
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An array of young people are in a room together competitively solving Rubik’s Cubes. We got lost on the way to the event and a young man with a Rubik’s Cube t-shirt directed us to the hall, saying ‘you won’t miss the rattling of the cubes when you’re close’. He was quite right. The plastic…
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Vincent Wants To Sea tells the story of a 27-year old Tourette’s sufferer (Florian David Fitz, Men In The City who also doubles as the film’s screenwriter). At the insistence of his busy and uncaring, politician father (Heino Ferch) and following his mother’s passing, Vincent is institutionalised and is forced to share a room with the obsessive-compulsive Alexander…
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As women and young people, we are constantly being reminded of how we should look after ourselves, how we should be presentable in public, eat the right food and get plenty of exercise… But what we don’t get taught how to do, something that is still rather hush-hush even with all of the advances in…
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I have depression. This does not mean that I am weak. This does not mean that I am an attention-seeker. This does not mean that I am not capable of normal functioning. This is not an easy thing to disclose when it should be. I’m not writing about it because I need to talk. I’m…
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