Storied Mind

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This is a story I had to get out of my head onto paper purely for healing. It’s still hard, though, and I may not be getting it right – best I can do for now. A name has been changed, but otherwise this is the way I can [...]

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Lynn left a comment on Why Depressed Men Leave that ended with a question I’ve been thinking about all week. She summarized the wrenching story about her bipolar husband and his blaming her for everything that was wrong with him. Then she asked me how I gained the [...]

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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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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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Some of the comments on the last post in this series hit hard on two issues. First is the question of personal choice: is a man supposed to escape responsibility for destructive behavior by attributing everything to depression? The answer is no! Depression is never an excuse for inflicting [...]

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About a year ago, I wrote a series of posts about my experience with the fantasies of a better life that often prompt depressed men to leave their families. You can find the first of those stories here, here and here. Those brief pieces tell only a small part [...]