Reading mystery books.

[The People]

While I don't like to write in this style I learned something about it the other day. I forget what I was watching. I think it was 'The Doctors.' They have a small panel of doctors who talk about a variety of topics.

The other day they were talking about reading when a person is depressed. The genre recommended was the mystery. One gets engaged in the book and in the problem solving that goes with it.

No, watching it on TV is not the same thing. In fact, a friend of mine used to watch true crime until she realized that she felt down every day once she shut off the TV.

This is good information. While I found it to be helpful to do some reading on the subjects as I started to put the pieces of the puzzle together there came a point where the sponge was saturated.

If you read mysteries who are some of your favourite authors? For something intense, I like Elizabeth George. For a quick read, I like the Prey novels. (forget the author). Michael Connely is also good IMO.

[Cammy]

When. I'm struggling with offshoots of my DID such as severe anxiety or depression, I can't bring myself to read at all. Instead, I use the TV and watch the most innocuous non-triggering plonk that I can find. This is usually cooking shows or those awful picking out the perfect dress shows. I love history, but if I watch too much stuff on WWII, the suffering totally gets to me and I end up worse off than when I started.

My husband also has DID. He reads a LOT - usually historical war chronicles, but mostly stuff describing military hardware and how it works. When he does watch TV, it is almost all fantasy stuff and cartoons. Having had such an incredibly traumatic childhood, I clearly see now how he completely indulges his littles with the cartoons, Disney movies, and superhero animated shows. He really dislikes sports and can't watch anything where there is any sort of physical or psychological a**se involved. That pretty much means he can't watch the war documentaries that I enjoy. Fortunately we have solved the problem by having 2 TV rooms in the house. If an outsider were to observe us, they would immediately see that something was 'not right' with us, especially with a grown man so involved in children's cartoons. From a DID perspective, however, it all makes perfect sense.