The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
My experience has been that it's generally a fool's errand to try to change someone's behaviour whom you're not in a position of power over (heck, I find changing my own behaviour difficult enough, at least our daughter listens for the time being). Also, sleeping 16 hours a day is not really something people do for fun, does it really matter whether it's the depression or just physical? She is 81 and clearly very unhealthy, at that point it's kinda understandable to just wait for death with minimal discomfort, even if that sounds sad. It does not seem clear to me that "just become more active and healthy again" is actually an option on the table for her.
For your father-in-law, I would consider a serious talk about wasting away since he is clearly in a better shape and would benefit more from more activity, but in the end it's also up to him. We have a somewhat similar situation with my wife's grandfather, who was struck by the unexpected death of his wife. Before, he was unusually healthy for his age both physically and psychologically, since then he has started to explicitly say he's now just waiting for his time to come to an end. He stopped almost all physical activity and he has started to show signs of a rapidly deteriorating dementia. Despite all his children constantly trying to to talk him into becoming more active again, with varying angles. It's unclear (though not unlikely) whether he will actually die anytime soon - they're certainly not letting him.
In general, I'm happy that we have the options of modern technology and medicine, but it seems to me we're culturally failing pretty hard at gracefully taking advantage of them. Though I guess that is now going beyond the scope of this thread.
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