Posted by JohnD
Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:34:00 GMT
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Catatonic Kid (CK) and Isabella have had an inspired exchange of posts in the last couple of months on the use of language and creativity to engage depression, take away its power and release creativity. There are so many ideas and evocative phrases in these posts that I’ve had trouble picking out responses from the dozens that run through me. So I’m going to start with notes on writing, creativity and language and how they relate to depression – and see where these jottings take me.
To be clear, though, I can only talk about how these basic elements help me in recovery. CK and Isabella have their own truths about words and creative imagination. Each of us responds differently, and what works for me may not work for another. So this is my take, a rough rendering of my truth – maybe it’s like yours, maybe not. There are as many paths to recovery as there are people trying to figure this out.
My imagination is expressed primarily through writing, and it helps distance me from the symptoms of depression by portraying them as different characters intruding on my life. These are my visitors from the theater of depression. I can laugh at them, kick them off stage or manage their movements and cues like the director of a play.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Creativity | Tags catatonickid, changetherapy, characters, creativity, depression, healing, imagination, language, play, power, recovery, theater, underworld, words, writing | 5 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:55:00 GMT
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The other day I looked back at a couple of posts by Therese Borchard at Beyond Blue about the behaviors that distinguish men and women in their responses to depression. She quoted two different studies in posts she published about a year apart, and that’s how long I’ve been mulling over writing about this subject.
I’m less interested these days in explanations and studies than in looking directly at experience, but in this case important questions come to mind. What would set men and women apart in their behaviors? How much of the difference is due to our being conditioned to behave in certain ways to fit the social role of a man or a woman?
You can read the full posts and citations to the studies they draw on here and here. I won’t repeat the differing behaviors of men and women in full.
One of the basic contrasts is that men are more likely to blame other people or external circumstances for inner turmoil and to act out in overt, often violent or abusive ways. They self-medicate with alcohol, sex or other addictions and feel they aren’t loved or appreciated enough. Women are more likely to blame themselves and ask how they can be better as a spouse, parent or worker. They tend to self-medicate with food, friends and love and ask themselves how they can be more lovable.
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Posted in Explanations, Growing Up with Depression, Men and Depression | Tags abuse, alcoholism, boys, childhood, depression, disempowerment, friends, girls, medicate, men, mother, relationship, self, terrencereal, Therese Borchard, trauma | 7 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 20 Sep 2008 21:08:00 GMT
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Marissa wrote a post at Wellsphere that made me pause. She was objecting to the idea found in Richard O’Connor’s book (Undoing Depression
) that “I am not my depression.” She interpreted this as an evasion of accountability for one’s actions. The depressed behavior that harms relationships, for example, can’t be dismissed as something you’re not responsible for – it has a real impact because of your behavior, and you remain accountable for what you do. And so, in this sense, she insists: “I am my depression.”
I agree with the need to be accountable. I have hurt those around me by being emotionally absent, self-involved, unable to talk, irritable or in a rage, or behaving badly in any of the ways that are symptomatic of depression. But O’Connor’s intention with this formulation, I believe, isn’t aimed at releasing people from accountability. It’s a way of reminding those suffering from depression that they have an illness, that there is hope for recovery, that they should not confuse the symptoms with the totality of their human identities.
I think a better way of putting this, however, is another sentence that appears frequently in books about how to deal with this condition: “I am more than my depression.” In other words, my identity isn’t defined by behavior linked to the illness, but it also says that I am my depression, in part.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Connecting, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags belief, depression, hope, identity, imagination, intention, marissa, recovery, richardoconnor, treatment | 10 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 13 Sep 2008 20:16:00 GMT
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About a hundred years ago, Robert Frost wrote a famous poem about two roads diverging in a wood: “And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler.” He makes his choice to take “the one less traveled by.” “Oh I kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/ I doubted I should ever come back.”
When I faced a choice of two roads to my own future, I believed I could follow both and be one traveler. Why were there two roads? I imagined there were two sides of myself – one creative, artistic – the other public, drawn to political and social change – and I needed both to feel whole. What followed from this attempt were years of struggling and failing to balance both, searching for the fulfillment I needed but finding it always just out of reach on either path. I tried sprinting down one for a time, then leaving that to cut through a brambled mile of thickets to get back to the other, sprint down that road for a while, cut back through the less and less penetrable undergrowth, hit the other again – and so on. What does that mean? Among other things, it means that I spend a lot of time between the roads in those thickets – lost.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Fighting Depression, Creativity | Tags career, choices, depression, double, fulfillment, life, oneness, path, robertfrost, tension | 12 comments
