HEALTH PLUS:KEEPING A diary, writing a daily account of the events of the day has not died as an art form. Despite electronic calendars and mobile phone appointment systems for formal meetings and schedules, many people still turn to traditional pen and paper in the evening to write about their day and to analyse their lives.
In so doing they undertake an important emotional task. By writing about the emotions the day has evoked in them, they enter into a psychological process that has restorative aspects that is important in terms of mental health. The capacity to enter into, acknowledge, confront and articulate the events of the day has been found to be one positive way to mentally ameliorate those events that have been negative.
It is not unusual for people after a bereavement to write to those who have died, telling them each day about life without them and pouring out their loss in the process in a way that lets loose the well of sadness that has built up during the day. This release of grief, this way of remaining connected to and in conversation with the person who has died, can have a powerful therapeutic benefit in the early days of grief.
Writing in this first-person way to someone who has died can provide the opportunity for a person to say what they did not get to say before the person died. It can be a way of expressing love that did not previously get expressed in words.
As guilt is an almost inevitable part of grief, it can allow articulation of that. It can lance the well of swirling thoughts, of remembrances and ruminations that are an exhausting part of all grief. By committing these thoughts to paper in a daily letter or diary, they are often released from the mind, at least for a while.
This is particularly useful at bedtime after which the emotions which have been expressed can rest. This narrative exercise of accessing, organising and recording thoughts has been found to prevent them intruding excessively and to help people who are distressed to sleep.
There are many ways to keep a diary and many kinds of diaries people keep. The diary of childhood is often an account of specifics, birthday parties and who attended, outings of note, gifts received, people who called to the home or visitors who stayed and there is a concentration on home, school, family and friends.
The diaries of young adolescents and those secret, hidden, written diaries of life and love are still kept by many young people. They record the daily triumphs and hurts, the remarks made by others, and the longings, yearnings, fears and hopes for the future.
The Secret Diary of Adrian Moleis not just a work of fiction: it is a classic insight into the mind of a young man who is observing the world, the contradictions and hypocrisies in it, the complexity of relationships, the confusion of messages to him and the function of writing in exploring roles and trying out identities.
His passion for Pandora, the pain of being misunderstood by adults, his earnestness that is unappreciated, "his" account of his life has a poignancy that is resonant and recognisable and contains elements of all of our own past adolescent experiences of angst and anger, excitement and anticipation and terror about the future ahead.
Diaries are multifunctional. The wonderful travel diaries by writer Dervla Murphy bring us on her journeys and demonstrate the value of the written account of life as it happens, the details that can be recorded when done so daily and the value of simultaneous as well as retrospective processing of events.
Famous analyst Erik Erikson, noted for mapping the many psychosocial stages that people must go through in life, kept a diary of his extensive travels around Europe which informed his later professional writings with rich sociological insights.
Case studies are professional diaries which provide the history of the development of ideas. A meticulous record often allows a scientific breakthrough because of the cumulative acquisition of information it contains.
What distinguishes the memoir from the journal is that one is retrospective and the other ongoing, but narrative psychology is clear about the importance of written records of our lives. To record our history, to tell our own story to ourselves within the safety of the page to which we alone have access, to make sense of our lives by selecting, organising and recording what matters to us, is a powerful process and important therapeutic tool.
• Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD. Her most recent book, Living Our Times, published by Gill and MacMillan has been re-released in paperback