Posted by JohnD
Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:27:00 GMT
Some Rights Reserved by Karo666 at Flickr
I’ve been looking back at the way I’ve thought about depression and my stance toward dealing with it, and I’ve started to wonder: Could I imagine and adopt in my life a different approach to this illness?
What starts me on this track is my encounter with the experiences of so many other thoughtful fellow-sufferers who have achieved a way of living with depression that finds some positive value where I find none. What are they seeing that I’m missing? As I’ve indicated repeatedly, I see depression as an intruder, a trespasser that steals the vital energy of creativity that is its opposite. My last post recognized that while others whom I respect may have very different experiences, I have always wound up cheering on a Jane Chin or Therese Borchard or Peter Kramer who see depression as a disease that is just as welcome in life as cancer. – Ah, cancer—well, that gives me pause. I find a similar tension in the experiences even of terminal cancer patients. Some kick at their condition in anger and bitterness while others find a transformative spiritual experience in what they have to endure. This has nothing to do with the fact that cancer is a disease; it has everything to do with adapting to the experience of living with a potentially deadly problem. My own experience with cancer brought out a fighting spirit that got me through and that persists in my stance toward depression. I firmly believe in the need for using all available treatment options in responding to depression -it is an illness that can kill me. What I’m thinking about now is the way I live my life with this condition as a permanent part of my mind, body and soul. Can or should I adapt to it in a different way?
I’ve been trying to pull together my own sense of how my imagination has brought about my current adaptation to illness with ideas from Donald Karp’s intriguing book, Speaking of Sadness
. The results are surprising.
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Posted in Connecting, Fighting Depression, Creativity | Tags adaptation, cancer, creativity, depression, Donald Karp, illness, imagination, Jane Chin, PeterKramer, psyche, soul, Therese Borchard | 8 comments
Posted by JohnD
Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:24:00 GMT
Photo Credit: Derek Benjamin Lilly – MorgueFile
Depression is a strange thing. No one seems able to explain exactly what it is, yet there is no doubting the reality of its pain. I've had it with me since boyhood, though at that time, I was years away from even hearing the term, let alone getting treatment. I grew up with it, not only experiencing my own moods, headaches and gradual isolation but also watching my mother succumb for years without ever seeking help. In those days, either you had a "nervous breakdown" (something I could only imagine as a kid as writhing and thrashing about on the floor) or you were fine. I was clearly fine – the top-of-my-class kind of fine. It was bizarre hearing people praise me often when I knew damn well that it was all phoney. Those grown-ups might be fooled, but I knew deep down how worthless I was. I lived in fear that this fact would be discovered.
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Posted in Growing Up with Depression, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression | Tags belief, depression, failure, family, hope, illness, suicide, therapy, treatment | 2 comments
Posted by JohnD
Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:07:00 GMT
What's it like, the mixing of shame and despair? I am full of the sense that I have no future, there is no point to living. This is no emptiness or lack of feeling, lack of affect, as they say. It is the intense feeling of hitting bottom, overwhelmed with shame, worthlessness, convinced that this is the real me, the rotten thing beneath the surface, the monster I can't bear to live with. I feel I've lost the essence of life, the will to live, to survive, to seize a spot on the face of the earth as mine where I can feel the good solid weight of my body pushing into the ground as I stand up and breathe deeply of all that is alive. There is no place like that for me in this world, there is no love or pleasure, only a searing palpable despair.
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Posted in What Depression Can Do, Surviving at Work | Tags cycle, despair, illness, life, shame, work, writing | 1 comment
