Recover Life from Depression
Just as recent psychotherapies emphasize the healing power of the mind, a new approach to the practice of medicine draws on the inner resilience of each person to participate in recovery. The excellent documentary, The New Medicine, describes this emerging practice as rooted in a rejection of the artificial split between mind and body. As the leading physicians featured in the film emphasize, states of mind and feeling do influence […] Read the rest»
The psychologist Richard O’Connor believes that we tell ourselves stories about our lives to control stress. Stress has a way of becoming a chronic condition. It wears down your body and damages your brain, especially when combined with depression. Yet stress is a killer we often crave like a drug. We create stories that help us make sense of an unbalanced life. Stories of Challenge In my work, I often […] Read the rest»
I think of creativity as an opposite of depression. As the driver in my life that connects and communicates, it represents everything I cannot do in the midst of the illness. Yet there was a time when it led to panic. Creativity is usually discussed in connection with the arts, and the idea gets overblown into talk of visions, genius, divine inspiration and all that bluster – but it goes […] Read the rest»
Depression spreads through the closest relationships almost like a communicable disease. I learned the hard way that the illness didn’t happen to me alone. It happened to my children, my friends, and most of all to my wife. The pull of depression took me away from her and everyone else. I often felt I was choosing to be alone in order to feel better or to escape situations that seemed […] Read the rest»
These days, readers are finding Storied Mind posts by many different routes. You don’t have to visit the blog at all if you can read a post in Facebook, email or an RSS reader. Or you may get to the site by following a link on Twitter, LinkedIn, Health Central, Psych Central or another website. I want to spend as much time as possible producing good posts, but I also […] Read the rest»
This is an edited version of one of the first posts I wrote for Storied Mind. ………. I’m not sure where the following came from, but it turned up on my cyber doorstep recently. I guess some men have trouble living up to their fantasies: Ok, everybody knows depressed people have these outbursts of grief and crying for no apparent reason. At least some people break down like that. But […] Read the rest»
Summoning up hope and resilience for living well in 2012 helps a lot more than the brief energy for a few resolutions. So my number one wish for you, for all of us dealing with depression, is to find a way to accept what comes, the good and the bad, and draw on it to heal from within. I’d also like to thank you for all your support during the […] Read the rest»
