Written by john on January 9th, 2010
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, [...]
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Written by john on July 11th, 2009
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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 be [...]
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Written by john on March 19th, 2009
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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 what [...]
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Written by john on March 1st, 2009
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 drugs [...]
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Written by john on February 26th, 2009
Some Rights Reserved by boskizzi at Flickr.
I’ve written a lot about the form of depression in which men look outside themselves to find the cause for an inner pain that simply can’t be faced. They may feel anger, rage, a longing to act out fantasies, or a compulsion to blame and abuse those closest to [...]
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Written by john on December 31st, 2008
Some Rights Reserved by zoutedrop at Flickr
George Eliot wrote these lines in Middlemarch about 135 years ago:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side [...]
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