Mood Watch - 5

Had enough energy yesterday to take care of a back log of chores, most notably the laundry, of which there was quite a stack following my return from vacation. Also spent at least a couple of hours uploading our new church directory to the web site, though for privacy reasons, I’ve limited access to church members only. And I caught up with the ceaseless rain of incoming email correspondence. Doesn’t seem like much. Point is, I felt like a member of the human race again.

Recently this blog has been getting a number of visits from one Shazer, aka Shae (hi there, Shae!), a 20-year old undergraduate at Brigham Young University. Shae, as you can see from her blog, has been writing with unusual honesty about her own experiences with counseling. As I’ve watched her blog evolve to incorporate a short blogroll, I’ve naturally been intrigued by her selections and this has led to my discovering several other interesting blogs, all of them concerned, in some way, shape, or form, with mental health issues.

Finally I stumbled upon Bipolar Planet, a recently created blog that serves as a gateway to a Net Ring devoted to blogs whose prominent theme is the struggle with bipolar disorder. It occurred to me that this was both an audience inclined to be supportive of my venture and also one to which I might have something to contribute. So I threw my blog into the ring, so to speak, and embedded the relevant code at the bottom of the main page. It isn’t active yet, since apparently someone has to visually inspect each applicant blog to make sure it’s indeed appropriate for the ring and not something like Manic Nymphos on Webcam.

A reader comment about the stigma that still attaches to mental illness got me poking around the web in search of sites devoted to extinguishing it. I was particularly interested in finding a sort of patch, like “Another straight for GLBT rights,” that would be a suitable addition to the blog’s sidebar. I did find a few things here and there, but not as much as you’d think, and certainly nothing of the scope that is usual for many other social concerns. And no patch; at least, not one that was sufficiently self-explanatory.

Well, anyway, I’m out of time for this entry. It’s off to church. Oh joy: another chance to warm a pew!