Category: Books and Writing

Migraine: stigma and misunderstanding

~ Jennifer Barraclough ~ 2 Comments

Although medical topics are more openly discussed nowadays, some diagnoses seem more socially acceptable than others. People are quite happy to talk loudly in cafes about their heart attacks and hip replacements, but not about conditions likely to evoke fear, disgust, disapproval – or disbelief, in cases of “invisible” illnesses that are not clearly defined or understood.

When I have been injured in falls caused by my own recklessness while playing with exuberant dogs or running on slippery rocks, other people have always been helpful and sympathetic. Such a contrast to the negative reactions I have sometimes received in relation to migraine, and I know that my experience is not unique. People who have never had an attack themselves may assume migraine to be “just a headache”, or “all in the mind”, a trivial indisposition being exaggerated to gain sympathy or avoid unwanted obligations, and brought on through the sufferer’s own fault. 

Research over recent years has identified some of the genes which predispose to migraine, and some of the physiological changes that take place during attacks, and migraine is now classed as a neurological disease. But its validity is not always recognised because it is a complex condition that can present in a wide variety of ways and follow a variable course, and there is no diagnostic test. Other conditions which have a consistent symptom pattern accompanied by specific abnormalities of biochemistry, pathology or Xray, are more likely to be taken seriously. 

Someone in the throes of a severe attack, prostrated by pain and vomiting, is clearly very unwell. But in between attacks they may look and feel quite healthy, so that observers cannot believe there is anything wrong with them, and do not understand why they may be trying to control their condition by lifestyle measures. For example, while it would be accepted that someone with diabetes needs to follow certain rules about diet, a migraineur wanting to avoid “trigger foods” when out for a meal risks being considered rude and fussy. 

Some of the stigma around migraine may be blamed on lingering sexist attitudes within the medical profession. Historically, certain doctors labelled their female migraine patients as neurotic, hypochondriacal and frigid, while describing their male ones as responsible, ambitious high achievers. Psychoanalysts have claimed, usually without any evidence, that the attacks represent sexual conflicts or the outburst of suppressed emotions such as anger or disgust. Such theories are less fashionable now that the biological basis of migraine is established, but have not entirely disappeared. 

Lastly, though I am reluctant to admit it, I believe that migraineurs themselves can play a part in perpetuating stigma. My husband has told me that my personality appears to change during attacks, and not in a good way. If this is true for me and others, maybe we unknowingly give off “vibes” that confuse and alienate people. A projection of the guilt or shame we ourselves may be feeling at these times? If we were better able to retain our self-respect, and not try to hide the attacks nor apologise for them, we might get fewer hurtful responses. 

Migraine and Me: A Doctor’s Experience of Understanding and Coping with Migraine by Jennifer Barraclough is available in e-book or print versions from Amazon and other online retailers.

Preventing migraines – beyond medication

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Feverfew, Tanacetum Parthenium

This is not an “anti-drug” post – I fully accept that prescribed medication is the mainstay of migraine prevention. Certain beta-blockers, antidepressants and anticonvulsants are long established for reducing the frequency and severity of attacks, and the newer CGRP inhibitors have even better results. But none of these drugs work for everyone, and all of them can have unwanted side effects. I took propranolol for many years with some benefit, but then its effect seemed to wear off. I then decided to look more closely at what lifestyle factors triggered my attacks, and to explore some complementary therapies that seemed more “natural” and gave me more choice and control over managing my health. Many of the non-drug options for migraine prevention are supported by evidence from clinical trials as well as by anecdotal reports, but the orthodox medical approach tends to focus on drug treatments alone. My new book Migraine and Me: A Doctor’s Experience of Understanding and Coping with Migraine aims to give a more holistic overview. Here is a brief summary of some of the preventive methods it describes. They do not offer a cure for migraine but, whether used alongside drugs or instead of them, they can help. Most of them are relevant to other chronic medical conditions too.  

Being instructed to eat better food, get more sleep, take more exercise, stop smoking, drink less, and reduce stress can be irritating – but these deceptively simple “healthy living” guidelines can make a real difference. There are special considerations for migraineurs such as not going too long between meals, and identifying triggers in the diet and environment.

Dietary supplements which have been found effective include magnesium, B vitamins and Coenzyme Q. The herb feverfew, illustrated, is available in capsule form but the most natural way to take it is by chewing its leaves, as described in one of the case histories in my book.

Relaxation techniques can help by activating the parasympathetic “rest and digest” branch of the nervous system, as opposed to the sympathetic “fight or flight” branch which tends to be overactive in migraineurs. Relaxation is a component of many other therapies such as biofeedback and massage.

 Psychological therapies may be regarded with suspicion because they are thought to imply that migraine is “all in the mind” rather than being a neurological disease with a genetic basis. I am certainly wary of psychoanalytical theories that cite repressed anger or sexual conflicts as being the cause. But more practical approaches such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can alleviate the mental distress and social difficulties that make it harder to cope with attacks and may well be exacerbating them.

Creative activity through art, music or writing is a way of processing emotions around migraine. If the results are made public, they can contribute to understanding of the condition. Some works by historical figures such as Richard Wagner and Vincent van Gogh are thought to have been inspired by the migraine experience.  

These and other approaches are covered in more detail in Migraine and Me: A Doctor’s Experience of Understanding and Coping with Migraine, available in both print and e-book versions from your local Amazon site and other online retailers. Please forward this post to anyone in your circle who may be interested.

Migraine and Me – the ebook

~ Jennifer Barraclough ~ 5 Comments

I’m pleased to announce that Migraine and Me: A doctor’s experience of understanding and coping with migraine is now available as an ebook from Amazon Kindle and various other online retailers as listed on this link, with a print version planned to follow soon.

My migraines began in my teenage years and continued until later life. In this short book I’ve combined personal stories from myself and other contributors with information from published research. Writing both as a (retired) doctor and as a (recovered) migraine patient, I’ve aimed to balance the medical aspects with the psychological, social and even spiritual ones. The book describes how lifestyle measures and complementary therapies, as well as prescribed drugs, can help to prevent attacks. It covers some sensitive topics such as the concept of a ‘migraine personality’ and the reasons for stigma, and ends on a positive note with sections about creativity and ‘silver linings’.

To quote from the blurb: “Migraine and Me offers empathy, practical insights, and hope for anyone affected by this complex neurological condition, once described in a drug advertisement as hell on earth.”

If there is anyone in your circle who is affected by migraine and might be interested, please share this post with them. Here again is the link to the book.
 

eBooks old and new

~ Jennifer Barraclough ~ 2 Comments

My new ebook Migraine and Me is nearly finished but I’ve left the final draft aside for a while, so I can check it through with fresh eyes before publication.

Meanwhile I’ve been continuing my project of “Going wide with D2D”. The aims are to bring some of my earlier books to a wider readership, and to update my basic skills in formatting text and using self-publishing technology. So Wellbeing for Writers and Beautiful Vibrations are now available not only from Amazon Kindle (kdp) as before, but also from many other ebook retailers as shown on this link http://books2read.com/jenniferbarraclough.

“A short practical guide about how to enjoy the journey to becoming a (self)published author, and how to cope with challenges such as lack of time for writing, lack of inspiration, negative criticism, and aversion to marketing. Jennifer’s experience as an author of both fiction and non-fiction books, combined with many years of working with clients in various therapeutic settings, has given her a wide personal understanding of the psychology of writing. This little book includes many practical tips for making the process run smoothly, and enhancing mental and physical wellbeing.”

“Anxiety, sadness, anger and loss of hope are common responses to serious or chronic illness. Symptoms of the condition itself, side-effects of treatment, concerns about diagnosis and prognosis, restriction of activity, and changes in relationships take their toll on both body and mind. Ideally, negative feelings will soon be replaced by a more positive adjustment, but sometimes they are severe or prolonged. Bach flowers are not a cure for physical disease but help to relieve the emotional distress often associated with it. Dr Edward Bach described them as having ‘beautiful vibrations’ capable of promoting positive mental states such as hope, courage and calm. This practical guide, illustrated by case histories and flower photos, explains how to select and use the remedies as part of a holistic approach to healing. Despite all its unpleasant aspects, the experience of illness can have a silver lining and the flower remedies help to bring this out.”

Going wide with D2D

~ Jennifer Barraclough ~ 2 Comments

In the world of indie publishing, “going wide” means listing books on several platforms rather than just one. Until now my self-published ebooks have only been available through Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), though the print versions were already distributed more widely. Amazon has led the way in enabling writers to publish their work at minimal cost and I had been quite happy dealing with them over the years. But many complaints about their customer service can be found online, and I recently had a frustrating experience myself.

I was unable to access my KDP account because the one-time passwords (OTPs) were no longer coming through to my iPhone. I wasted hours on repeated failed attempts, online chats and calls to America. The customer service agents all tried to be helpful and suggested various solutions, which included sending copies of my passport and driving licence to Amazon. Nothing worked. I eventually discovered from another author on a local Facebook group that the problem was nothing to do with me personally, but affected all New Zealand phone numbers, and the remedy was to use an authentication app instead of an OTP.

This saga prompted me to look at other options, and so far I have republished two of my ebooks through the distribution platform Draft2Digital (D2D). These books are still available on Kindle, though no longer in the exclusive “Select” program, but are now also listed by many other retailers worldwide. I found D2D easy to use, because authors just need to upload their text, and D2D’s computer will deal with formatting and add details such as the title page and table of contents if required. I sent a couple of queries to the help desk and received helpful and intelligent replies.

The next challenge is to sell more books, and this is the difficult part. I love the process of writing them, and also enjoy learning the basics of how to format texts and upload them to the internet. But I thoroughly dislike marketing and seldom do any, other than via occasional posts on this blog, and therefore get very few sales. That doesn’t matter from a financial viewpoint because I don’t depend on authorship as a source of income. But it is nice to earn a little money in return for all the work I’ve put in, and more importantly to know that some people read and hopefully enjoy what I write.

So if you haven’t seen them already, please have a look at my two most recent novels which are both gentle mystery stories involving family relationships and domestic crimes. You Yet Shall Die is set in rural England with a timeline ranging from the 1940s to the 2000s. Cardamine is set in New Zealand just before the Covid pandemic. The ebook versions are available from many different retailers as well as Amazon; have a look through this link.

“Three Novellas” ebook free this week

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The ebook version of my Three Novellas is free on Amazon this week. It includes three gentle rather old-fashioned stories which, as it says in the blurb, “include elements of romance, medical mystery and the paranormal, reflect the author’s experience of practising as both orthodox doctor and alternative healer, and her leisure interests including animals and music”. I wrote them in the early 2000s, inspired by my experience of living between two countries after I emigrated from England to New Zealand. The first two, Carmen’s Roses and Blue Moon for Bombers, appear separate from each other but the third, The Windflower Vibration, shows them to be linked. Three Novellas was described by one reviewer as “a superb trilogy finishing with an interesting twist”. The Kindle version (which can be read on any device not just on a Kindle) is on a free promotion until 2 July 2023 and you can find it on your local Amazon site.

Books I’ve enjoyed #13

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The current interest in issues of gender identity prompted me to read Radclyffe Hall’s autobiographical novel The Well of Loneliness, which was banned after its publication in 1928 but is now regarded as a classic. It is about a girl born in the late Victorian era to a wealthy family living on a country estate near Malvern. Despite being biologically female, ever since early childhood her appearance and behaviour has been obviously masculine. Although her parents feel greatly puzzled and concerned by her condition they never speak of it. When she grows up and falls passionately in love with another woman, her mother is forced to acknowledge her nature, and rejects her as “a sin against creation”. During later life in London and Paris she achieves success as a novelist and forms a loving relationship with a younger woman, but is eventually unable to withstand society’s condemnation of “inverts”. Nowadays her condition would be more widely accepted and she would be a candidate for sex reassignment surgery. This sad book contains sensitive descriptions of the main character’s tribulations, and of English country life as it used to be.

I listened to the audiobook version of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare. It is well written (by a ghost writer) and Harry narrates it fluently, He comes over as a fun loving but often troubled man whose most positive experiences have been his army service, his charity work with wounded veterans, and falling in love with Meghan. Although the text contains plenty of interesting material, it is pervaded by the author’s sense of victimhood, entitlement, hatred of the press and resentment towards the royal family. I feel these attitudes can only partly be justified by the trauma of losing his mother when he was eleven years old, terrible though that must have been. We await the next episodes of his life story.

Clare Chamber’s novel Small Pleasures is set in the suburbs of London during the 1950s. Jean is a middle-aged unmarried woman who works as a journalist on a local newspaper and lives with her demanding elderly mother. Her drab existence is enlivened after she begins research for a feature about a young girl who is allegedly the product of a virgin birth. The details of Jean’s domestic life, and the development of her character as she becomes emotionally involved with the girl and her parents, are engagingly described in a style reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor or Barbara Pym. It must have been difficult to devise a satisfactory ending to the story and the last few chapters are not up to the standard of the earlier ones. Despite this criticism I very much enjoyed the book.

Books I’ve enjoyed #11

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Many books have been written about the Second World War, but there always seems room for more, and my two non-fiction choices for this post provide entirely different perspectives. The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larsen is an extensively researched account of Winston Churchill’s first year as wartime prime minister, 1940-41. I found the book very easy to read, partly because the detailed information about political and military events is brought to life by personal insights from the diaries of Churchill’s daughter Mary, his private secretary John Colville, and members of the Mass Observation project. Even though Churchill had his flaws and made some decisions which proved misguided, it is impossible not to admire his tremendous energy and stamina, his optimism and determination, his skills as a leader and orator which inspired the British people during the darkest days of the war.

In complete contrast is the extraordinary book When I Was Someone Else by a French journalist, Stephane Allix. During a spiritual retreat in Peru, Allix had a vision of a German soldier dying on a snowy battlefield, followed by scenes from the man’s life, and including his name. Allix became obsessed with this vivid experience, and from military archives discovered that a soldier of that name had served in the brutal Totenkopf division of the Waffen SS, and been killed during the 1941 Russian campaign. Allix was able to contact surviving relatives of the dead man and discover facts which corroborated the content of his vision. Having first assumed that the vision represented a past life of his own, Allix later concluded this was not so, but that the soul of the dead soldier had contacted him in search of forgiveness and healing. I did not know quite what to make of this book, but it will be of interest to students of paranormal phenomena such as reincarnation and spirit communication.

Turning to fiction, as usual I’ve been reading mainly mysteries and psychological thrillers, and I’ll mention two of them which were written by health professionals. Deadly Cure by Mahi Cheshire is about the rivalry between two young female doctors competing for a job at a research institute developing a vaccine against cancer. When the successful candidate gets murdered, suspicion falls on her rival. Some of the medical content is not credible, as the author – herself a doctor – would no doubt admit. But dramatic licence is allowable in fiction, and as light entertainment I found this short book quite gripping.

More grounded in grim realism is The Family Retreat, by clinical psychologist Bev Thompson. The story is narrated by a burnt-out GP who, with her young family, rents a summer holiday cottage near the Dorset coast. She makes friends with another woman who has children similar in age to her own, and they share some pleasant seaside picnics until a dark secret is revealed. This is a rather sombre read, with much reference to mental disorders and troubled relationships, and constant soul-searching by the narrator raising such questions as how far doctors should take responsibility for their patients’ lives, and why so many women submit to being imposed upon by men.

My Author Bio

~ Jennifer Barraclough ~ 1 Comment

I have just turned 75, and it feels like the right time to review my long and winding journey to becoming an author.

Writing was my first love and as a child growing up in Kent I produced a variety of short stories and plays. These early works have long since been thrown away and their content forgotten, though I think they usually featured cats and dogs. I did well in English at school and was expected to take a university degree in that subject, but in my teens I developed an idealistic wish to heal the sick. The medical courses at Leeds and Oxford, then life as a junior doctor, absorbed so much time and energy that I never even thought about writing fiction again till years later.

It was after many changes both professional and personal that I decided on a career in psychiatry, and when studying for the postgraduate qualifications I compiled my notes into what would turn out to be my first book. A senior colleague suggested sending it to a publisher. It was accepted, and without any marketing on my part sold well and continued into five editions; by far my greatest commercial success. I moved on to academic posts, involving opportunities for research, writing papers for journals, and medical books relevant to my specialty of the interface between psychiatry and cancer.

In my mid-30s, when finally settled into a contented domestic life, I wrote three novels inspired by my earlier work experience in general practice and in mental hospitals. I enjoyed this tremendously, and given my earlier success with the psychiatry book, I assumed that I would have no trouble getting them published. I was soon disillusioned. Some rejection letters were encouraging but others were not, and I was so upset by one damning verdict that I put the manuscripts aside for 20 years. An overreaction, and I now realise that you can’t please everyone and that even the best of books gets an occasional bad review. Knowing how devastating it can be for writers to receive harsh criticism of their work, I will only review a book myself if I can give an honest positive opinion.

Fast forward to my 50s when, after a rewarding career as consultant in psychological medicine in Oxford, I came to live in New Zealand. Alongside many new interests, I focused on writing and editing. Twenty years later I have a variety of titles, non-fiction and fiction in a variety of genres, some traditionally published and some under my independent imprint of Overcliff Books, listed on my Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk author pages. My current project is editing my husband’s autobiography. What, if anything, I will write next I don’t know.

Books I’ve enjoyed #10

~ Jennifer Barraclough ~ 1 Comment

I had plenty of time for reading during Auckland’s prolonged lockdown and the very hot summer which followed.

First, some popular novels set in the UK. The Rose Code by Kate Quinn, about three young women who worked as code-breakers at Bletchley Park during World War Two, is an intriguing and well researched combination of fact and fiction. Watch her Fall by Erin Kelly is a complicated story which gives insights into the world of ballet, and after reading it I will watch Swan Lake with new eyes. The Black Dress by Deborah Moggach, an elderly woman’s quest to find a new man after being deserted by her husband, is full of dark humour and was described in The Times review as a “deliciously savage tale of sex and death”. And Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner is a psychological thriller in which a pregnant woman’s life is disrupted by the stalker she meets at an antenatal class.

Next, a small selection of the many books recently published by members of the Auckland Crime Writers group. Blood on Vines by Madeleine Eskedahl, Quiet in her Bones by Nalini Singh and my own novel Cardamine are all set in New Zealand and evoke the local scenery of forests, beaches and vineyards. Some describe other locations. The Girl in the Mirror by Rose Carlyle is set on a yacht, and The Forger and the Thief by Kirsten McKenzie is a historical thriller set in Florence.

Two novels in the literary fiction genre. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, narrated in the voice of a gentle and observant robot who is purchased as the “artificial friend” of a fragile teenage girl, is a readable story which raises some profound questions. More challenging is We Germans by Alexander Starritt, in which an old man writes to his grandson in an attempt to come to terms with his past as a soldier serving on the Eastern front in World War Two.

Four non-fiction books which left an impression on me. The Devil You Know by Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne contains a series of (disguised) case histories of psychotherapy with mentally disturbed criminal offenders, not all of whom could be helped. I reread an older book, The Power of Premonitions by Larry Dossey, a physician who has made a detailed study of “psi” phenomena. Against All Odds by Craig Challen and Richard Harris is a vivid description of the 2018 rescue of the young boys trapped in a cave in Thailand. Lastly, Dear John by Joan Le Mesurier is about her marriage to the actor who is still fondly remembered for his role as Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army.