Writing About Mental Illness -- by Christine Lindsay

I'm not much interested in reading novels that weigh me down with the darkness of mental illness. Yet, it's an issue that's risen it's confusing head in my own family. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I steer away from stories that delve deeply into the shadows of depression.

I don't like going there. It's all just too dark.

I've had to live with the affects of emotional and mental illness in many of the people I love. My own precious daughter suffers with severe depression. If it weren't for heavy duty medications from her psychiatrist, she would be unable to function in our fast-as-lighting world today. 

My mother also struggled with depression and was even misdiagnosed by her doctor and prescribed medications that actually worsened her condition. One uncle died from an overdoes of medications, and a distant cousin committed suicide.

Horrible stuff. Horrible memories I don't wish to be reminded of.

Unless, it's to share a ray of hope.

Mental illness can be defeated. People can be set free.

My daughter modeling for the
front of one of my books.

I saw this in both my mother and my daughter. Today they are vibrant women living their lives and making a contribution to the world. 

So, I suppose it was inevitable that I would one day write a novel that touches on mental illness. In this case I put what we call Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome into one of my secondary characters. Just because they didn't label it that back in 1913 doesn't mean they didn't experience it.

But my latest book also dealt with a woman who suffers from addiction to a drug prescribed by her doctor. In this case, laudanum. I understood this too well as I watched my own mother slowly weaned off the wrong medication prescribed by her over-worked doctor.

Sofi's Bridge deals with these dark and difficult subjects, but I think the secret is in keeping this topic in small doses for the reader. The last thing the reader needs is pages and pages of dark depression. 

My advice in writing dark subjects such as depression and mental illness is to keep it short. Only place your reader in the mind of that tortured character for short periods of time, then whisk the reader out as quickly as possible to the point of view of a character that is propelled by hope.

We can't and shouldn't avoid stories about depression and mental illness, but we can write these stories in such a way as to give the reader hope for the people they love who struggle with these issues. 

My mum on her way to a
friend's birthday party.

That's the whole purpose behind Sofi's Bridge. I saw healing in my family from this disease, and bright hope for my loved ones' tomorrows.  

Christine Lindsay is the author of multi-award-winning Christian fiction with complex emotional and psychological truth, who always promises a happy ending. Tales of her Irish ancestors who served in the British Cavalry in Colonial India inspired her multi-award-winning series Twilight of the British Raj, Book 1 Shadowed in Silk, Book 2 Captured by Moonlight, and explosive finale Veiled at Midnight.

Christine’s Irish wit and use of setting as a character is evident in her contemporary romance Londonderry Dreaming and newest release Sofi’s Bridge.

A busy writer and speaker, Christine, and her husband live on the west coast of Canada. Coming August 2016 is the release of her non-fiction book Finding Sarah—Finding Me: A Birthmother’s Story.

Please drop by Christine’s website www.ChristineLindsay.org or follow her on Amazon on Twitter. Subscribe to her quarterly newsletter, and be her friend on Pinterest , Facebook, and  Goodreads

The Real Story of St. Patrick by Christine Lindsay

Just like all holidays, St. Patrick's Day takes on some ridiculous forms of celebration from green beer to dressing up in silly clothes.

There are some fantastical legends about St. Patrick, such as him banishing all the snakes from Ireland. While it’s true there are no snakes there, it wasn’t the saint to the Irish who managed that. Ireland is like New Zealand, Hawaii, and Iceland in that regard--just no snakes.

There are certain truths though that we can rely on about St. Patrick, from some of his own writing, The 

Confession and A Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. It is true that Patrick was born around the year 389 and into a Christian family in Britain. His family were Romanized Britons and not nationals. His father Calpurnius was a magistrate and a deacon in the local church. 

Patrick was indeed kidnapped when he was around 12. 

He'd been out on his father's farm when Irish raiders captured him. He was taken to Ireland and sold as slave, spending the next 6 years as a sheep herder.

But like many of us, when bad things happen we often turn our sights toward God. It was while Patrick was a captive that his nominal Christian faith grew deeper. As a teen and a young man Patrick tried to shared his faith with his captors. Eventually Patrick did escape and made his way back to Britain to be reunited with his family. 

He was not a highly educated man, but did go to France and spent time as a monk in the Abby of Lerins in Gaul. One night Patrick dreamed that he heard a voice calling to him in the Irish language (Gaelic), “We beseech you, holy youth, to come and walk among us once more.”  

While Patrick was not the first missionary to Ireland, he did return to Ireland as a bishop in 432. For the next 30 years until his death, his preaching and baptisms strengthened the already growing church. Due to Patrick’s promotion of the ascetic life of worship, he boldly went into areas that were firmly pagan, teaching the Irish Druids how to worship the Creator instead of His creation.  

He died and was buried in Downpatrick in N. Ireland, and I have been to his grave. 

My aunt, me, and my daughter Lana 2006

Like many ancient cultures, Ireland has a rich oral tradition, and while there is nothing in Patrick’s writings to confirm this, he probably did use a simple shamrock to explain the Trinity. Tradition says that St. Patrick picked up a shamrock, which in the Irish Gaelic language means diminutive clover, and explained that this little piece of flora was one leaf and yet it was made up of three leaves. 

The shamrock helped the Irish, including me as an Irish child, to understand an amazing aspect to God’s person: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, the Three in One.

Click on this link Londonderry Dreaming to hear some toe-tapping Irish music.

Irish-born Christine Lindsay is the author of multi-award-winning Christian fiction. She is currently writing her eighth book. To celebrate St. Patrick's Day, why not read some of Christine's books set in Ireland or that feature an Irish hero, check our Londonderry Dreaming and Sofi's Bridge coming May 2016.

Londonderry Dreaming available as an ebook, and Sofi's Bridge coming out in ebook and print May 2016.

MY FAMILY BUILT THE TITANIC by Christine Lindsay

There are a lot of things my ancestry did, but one of the accomplishments I’m proud of is they actually built the RMS Titanic.  I admit they didn’t do it all by themselves, but my great-great grandfather and his son (my grandfather) were both riveters in the Harland and Wolff Shipyard in Belfast, N. Ireland. In fact, my paternal grandfather’s first ship when he started as a 14-year-old apprentice was that very ship that was struck by an iceberg and went down in 1912.

However…as a family we accept no responsibility for the sinking of that infamous ship. 

You can blame my family ancestry for my fascination with the building of ships, even though having a male ancestor who worked on the Titanic is not a rare thing for immigrants from N. Ireland, especially the city of Belfast. The majority of men in my grandparents’ era were employed by the world famous Harland and Wolff.

To understand why one of Britain’s largest shipbuilders, both of passenger liners and naval vessels, was located in Belfast, you have to remember that the 6 counties in the north of Ireland have been a part of Great Britain for centuries and still are to this day. The remaining 26 counties in the island make up the independent country of Ireland. 

The number of ships built in Belfast today are much less than they were in the golden years of shipbuilding, from about 1861 until the decline, around the mid-fifties when my father followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and joined the ranks of shipbuilders. In the late 1800’s there were up to 10,000 workmen, and around the time of the Titanic around 4000.

I remember as a little child (I’m 58 now) being taken to the yard and staring up at the bow of an ocean liner sitting in dry dock. To this day the sight of the huge steel bows of ships arcing upward gives me the shivers, the scary shivers.

My father’s first job at the yard was messenger boy. He was only about 16 at the time. With the yard being 300 square acres, he rode a bicycle with an attached leather saddle in which he delivered messages, blueprints, technical drawings, etc. from one point in to yard to another. Later he became a boiler maker and eventually immigrated to Canada, in the search of shipyard work as that trade began to die. An interesting note, is that might be the last great wave of Irish immigrants to the new world.

But back in the day, Belfast was where hundreds of world-known leviathans were built for countries around the globe. They built 70 ships alone for the White Star line, aside from the Titanic and her sister ships Olympia and the Britannic.

I always knew that one day I would write about the Belfast riveters who built these liners. Always a dangerous trade, 5 to 8 casualties a year in the shipyard was considered acceptable back at when Titanic was launched. Thank God things have changed. But no doubt my grandfather and great grandfather stood on the shores of the River Lagan as the Titanic sailed out for her sea trials.

Based on my research I wrote the following piece for a novel that shows the dangerous ballet of a riveter whether it be in shipbuilding or that of bridges, the two trades featured in my next release Sofi’s Bridge.

“Watching the riveter’s ballet of throwing white-hot steel always made Neil’s stomach harden to a lump.

Neil picked out his brother, Jimmy, from among the men on the bridge deck, and expelled a long sigh. Working on those meager platforms hanging over the side, one slip, one fumble from that height...and a man could die.

On the deck, Jimmy rapped his elongated tongs against the cone-shaped catcher can, waiting for the man known as the heater. The heater sent Jimmy a nod and thrust the peg of steel into the portable cast iron forge. When the peg of metal glowed to a molten white, he pitched it forward. Jimmy caught it in the catcher can and inserted the glowing rivet into a hole in the girder. With the same concentration Neil would use with a scalpel, Jimmy waited for the bucker to place his buckling tool against the head of the rivet, and for the riveter to hammer it home.”

Like most people, I’m proud of my ancestry on both my mother and my father’s side. My mother’s family military history inspired my multi-award-winning historical trilogy, Shadowed in Silk, Captured by Moonlight, and Veiled at Midnight. But it was my paternal family history in the building of ships that inspired Sofi’s Bridge which will be released May 1, 2016.   

Find out more about Christine Lindsay 

and her books on her website www.ChristineLindsay.org