Mental Healthy New Year’s Resolutions For 2013

Here’s a heart-felt Happy New Year to all of you in Whackadoomia and points beyond; and keep an eye out for what points beyond what’s out there because my point is usually even beyond that.

Let’s hope this brand new year, replete with pleasant promise and fearsome foreboding, is kind to us and ours, ceremoniously serving circumstances far superior to what we deserve.

Yes, it’s that tiresome time once again, when pundits, wags, and bow-tie wearing after-dinner speakers bloviate ad infinitum as they summarize by-gone events and predict what will soon come to be or not to be.

With lusty, disingenuous gravitas these overstuffed gasbags spout vapid generalities as enthusiastically as whales expel exhausted air from their blowholes. Astonishingly, people seem to take their proclamations seriously.

How goes the old expression? “In the land of the blind there is little reason for the one-eyed man to spend lavishly on wardrobe.”

Another venerated element of this temporal transition is the custom of making resolutions intended to guide us towards improved behavior over days, weeks and even months to come. For those of us in the mental health community, where what is frequently is what what isn’t, and vice versa, the entire concept of resolving to do better, be better, try harder, lift our very psyches up through will, grit, determination, optimism and Zig Zigler quotes, takes on a very special meaning indeed.

So let’s look at the practice of New Year’s resolutions and consider how they can benefit the mental health community. Before we begin, a quick note to all the triskaidekaphobics out there – this is going to be a very bad year for you and no amount of well-intentioned resolutions will help. My advice is to get cryogenically frozen and reanimated on 1/1/2014.

The clinically depressed should set unattainable goals since their inability to achieve them validates a sense of futility, which, ironically, serves to cheer them up. Bipolars are advised to make two lists since their manic persona presents its own unique set of flaws. Alcoholics may want to write theirs in chalk on sidewalks as aspirations this ephemeral are unlikely to last beyond the first rainfall. And compulsive gamblers should not offer to take action on how long they will be able to keep theirs.

If you are one of the millions of Americans dealing with mental health issues then you might want to consider this New Year’s resolution – be nice to yourself, and make it easy for others to be nice to you as well.

Best wishes for the New Year my fellow Whackadoomians!