Feelings & moods
'Moody' can sound like an insult – but hey, who doesn't have moods? And anyway shut up, I love you. You give me the irrits; don't go. It's normal to sometimes feel down, overwhelmed or sad: most people have the skills to bounce back after a 'low'. We'll look at how to identify problem moods, and ways to help others or deal with your own feelings such as anger, sadness, grief, low-level stress and anxiety, and how to develop a sense of optimism and aim for happiness or at least an even keel.
Mental health
Good mental health means you're feeling optimistic, capable, confident and pretty happy about life, and that you can deal with most problems and keep things in perspective – not feel utterly furious or burst into tears because you broke a fingernail. It means you can cope pretty well with stress, avoid making decisions that would complicate your life unnecessarily, and have fairly stable emotions rather than wild mood swings or a tendency to plunge into gloom or go off like a box of fireworks.
There's lots of positive info here on mental health problems, how to get help, or how to help somebody you know, or in your family. There's heaps on treatments and recovery, and positive plans for the future.
Drinking
Drinking's legal if you're over 18, and it's socially acceptable – right up to the point where you throw up in your handbag while wearing somebody else's knickers on your head, and belt out a football anthem, before pausing to say, 'Everybody, shoosh.' For several thousand years, most cultures have made a feature of alcohol. Presumably a cavewoman ate some fermented fruit, declared, 'No, yeah, no, but I loooove yewwwwww,' danced alarmingly around the campfire to the Neanderthal version of 'I Will Survive' then woke up alone in the wrong cave and decided to invent Panadol.
This chapter concentrates on healthy drinking, and on drinking problems, whether they involve a small installation of empty beer cans appearing nightly, a secret fl agon of 'cooking sherry' in the sideboard, or too many of those cocktails the colour of jam served in a vase with a twisty straw in clubs where the music goes ernst ernst ernst.
Drugs
A century or so ago, rich and fainty women would be revived with a strong whiff of chemicals, or dose themselves up with laudanum (an early form of opium liquid) to sleep or lie about in a stupor all afternoon, in order to avoid the boredom of being strapped into a corset and left in the drawing room while the maids swept out a few hundred fireplaces by teatime (no opium for you, Flossie). Now we have heroin, weed (dope), prescription drugs, cigarettes, antidepressants and cappuccinos. All are explained here, with info on how to tell the difference between addiction and dependence, and where to get help for you or a friend.