Posted by JohnD
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:32:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Aron Escobar at Flicker
I had lunch with M one day to talk business, and I got on with him well. We were both excited about the projects we were working on, but soon got to more personal things. I told him about the depression I kept fighting and about treatment to keep it in check. He went into a lot of things about his life I didn’t know, then paused before opening a big door into a troubled past.
He talked about his separation from his wife – how they had put everything on the table – and now were doing great again. His big problem was that he was an addict – to fantasy and sexuality. I listened hard to what he was saying, staring intently into a part of my own life I didn’t want to see.
Read more...
Posted in Partners to Depression, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags compulsive, family, fantasy, men, obsession, power, recovery, sexual addiction, shame, wife | 20 comments
Posted by JohnD
Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:38:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by AngelsWings at Flickr
Do you think it’s possible to be going through some phase of depression and have your emotions so locked away inside you that you don’t notice a thing? I’ve written about feeling anger and rage and never associating those feelings with depression, though they were tightly bound together. But here I’m thinking of an earlier time in my life – mostly in high school and college.
Through the teenage years, I sealed all feeling up tight. I guess that was an extension of childhood and being one of those kids teachers admired as so precocious, so adult. The other kids might rage, cry, scream where I would analyze and shake my head at their childish behavior. That distancing got more extreme as a teenager. I didn’t show anything but mildly friendly feeling to anyone. I did feel things deeply, at least fear, anxiety and anger – but these were no-shows externally. I was calmly cheerful most of the time. There was a mask in place, and the only symptom I thought I had were frequent migraines. But that was something inherited from my mother. I knew that because she explained it to me as she lay on the sofa sinking fast into her own depression. I would grow out of that, she said.
Read more...
Posted in What Depression Can Do, Growing Up with Depression, Men and Depression | Tags childhood, college, depression, energy, face, family, game, high school, judgment, mask, men, mother, shame, social anxiety, teenage, women | 6 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:28:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by denis collette at Flickr.
In sorting through boxes of old papers today, I came upon part of a meditation and some journal notes from the period in my life when I was recovering from a cancer operation. I was dealing with depression at the same time and searching for new approaches to healing beyond the physical treatments and medications that comprised the aftermath of major surgery. I was trying to deal more with depression than cancer since the surgery had been successful.
What I found was a part of the Loving Kindness Meditation, as that had been taught to me:
May I be healed
May I feel love
May I experience myself for what I am
May I accept myself
Read more...
Posted in Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression, Spirituality and Depression | Tags anxiety, belief, buddhism, cancer, depression, healing, Jon Kabat-Zinn, meditation, Rachel Naomi Remen, shame, wholeness | 9 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:25:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by xip at Flickr
WARNING: THIS POST HAS POSSIBLE TRIGGERS
Anon for Now recently commented on the sense of renewal in life that served as a deterrent to suicide. This struck me as capturing the most baffling aspect of the temptation to end life. For what does the evidence of life on earth point to but the endlessly inventive will to survive? There is no more fundamental drive than the will to adapt, change, reproduce one’s kind under any circumstances. Yet so many in the grip of major depression or bipolar depression act against that drive toward life and destroy themselves. As Kay Redfield Jamison points out in Night Falls Fast
, the presence of mental illness and/or substance abuse, or worse, the two together, vastly increases the likelihood of suicide. It’s among the top five causes of death in the United States for men and women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four.
What I have seen and sorrowed at is the cool determination of more than one friend to plan and carry out his own destruction. Karl Menninger described the drive to suicide as taking many forms in his classic study, Man Against Himself
. These included self-defeating behavior, dangerous addictions, certain types of self-mutilation, aggressive and violent outbursts, purposive accidents and many other variations. Some of these can lead directly to premature death; many set the stage in a person’s mind as justification for ending a life regarded as failed or too painful or destructive to others.
Read more...
Posted in What Depression Can Do, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags alcoholism, contempt, depression, Karl Menninger, Kay Redfield Jamison, life, Man Against Himself, Night Falls Fast, self, shame, suicide | 4 comments
