Storied Mind

Some Rights Reserved by Travis Hightower at Flickr I spent years in therapy, depressed the whole time, perhaps getting a temporary lift, but quickly losing whatever short-term benefit it may have provided. Apparently, this is a common experience for men, and usually the problem is traced back to the difficulty many men have in expressing [...]

Some Rights Reserved by Guanatos Gwyn at Flickr My mother survived two heart attacks but died twice before her death. That’s the way she saw it. Her heart stopped both times, but she fought her way back. The second heart-stopping attack occurred during an operation for a different problem. She was 94. I only learned [...]

Sherwin Nuland is the best-selling author of How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter and many other books. As he says in this video, he had never before disclosed the experience behind the spiritual dimensions of his writing until presenting this talk at the TED Conference in 2001. Everyone’s reaction will differ, of course, [...]

Some Rights Reserved by pedrosimoes7 at Flickr The ongoing revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has provoked prominent psychiatrists to declare that the next version (DSM-V) is in danger of medicalizing normality. Since “normality” covers quite a few people who don’t think of themselves as mentally disordered, I thought it would [...]

Some Rights Reserved by Funky64(www.lucarossato.com) at Flickr Understanding what work means for my sense of personal identity, for a basic acceptance of who I am, has been a central issue in making progress in recovery over this past year. Yet it seems strange that both my identity and feelings of self-worth should so depend on [...]

Some Rights Reserved by (le)doo at Flickr. Medication is a hot subject on the internet, so I need to say up front that I’m not opposed to the use of medications to treat long-term depression. I have a live-and-let-live attitude about treatment. Finding anything that works for each person is the key, with or without [...]