Things TO say to people with depression

By popular (and eminently sensible) request!

From alt.support.depression

As you can see, these boil down to taking it seriously, not judging, and being supportive. I'd add something like "Why don't I drive you to the doctor?", since people with depression are notorious for not being able to get their shit together. >:-)

If you're trying to help someone who's mentally ill, it's also very important to look after yourself - make sure you give yourself time to get a break, to relax, to get enough sleep.

The Final Programme

The DVD arrived! (Don't worry, Jon, I hugely want to re-watch it with you.) And unlike watching it at the tender age of about eighteen, I can navigate this, I know just where I am. It's an early seventies SF film, a bit like A Boy and His Dog (ETA: or A Clockwork Orange), with a large dose of late sixties / early seventies satirical whackiness a la Head. Large spaces, silences, apocalypse, and you just have to focus and keep up, it's not going to be spoon-fed to you. At eighteen I couldn't have made head nor tail of it and would only have been noticing what had been changed from the novel.

ETA: With his deep Shakespearian voice, Finch's Cornelius is like an alarming mashup between Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner and Mick Jagger.

ETA: Oh good grief, that's Graham Crowden. I knew I knew the voice.

ETA: omg Sandra Dickinson!!!!!!!!!

ETA: I think the main problem with this film is that there are a few scattered references to the world ending, but we see almost no actual apocalypsing, and in fact it's sort of forgotten by the end. The changes are mostly intelligent ones to draw the story together a bit more conventionally, bu you don't feel that the ending is really set up by the beginning - instead there's a huge exposition dump right at the finish, unconvincingly broken up by a contrived fight. Plus they left out Jerry's marriage.