Men, Depression and Sexual Addiction

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.

Posted in Partners to Depression, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags compulsive, family, fantasy, men, obsession, power, recovery, sexual addiction, shame, wife | 20 comments

Surviving Work, Surviving Depression

Posted by JohnD Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:08:00 GMT

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A few months ago, Therese Borchard of Beyond Blue was describing in one of her insightful videos the nature of her belief in Catholicism. She had been accused of being a “cafeteria Catholic,” picking and choosing which of the Church’s teachings she would accept. She emphasized that she read the Church Catechism as a bipolar person, and, as she was clarifying what she meant by that, started with: “Staying alive is my first priority.” That stopped me.

I’ve watched that video a couple of times since then, and, though I hear and respect her thoughtful discussion of Catholicism, that simple statement about staying alive is what cuts right through me. There is no getting away from that stark reality. The deepest depression turns on the neon light of suicide.

Posted in What Depression Can Do, Surviving at Work, Fighting Depression | Tags depression, energy, Getting It Done When Youre Depressed, Julie Fast, Karl Menninger, living, Man Against Himself, obsession, optimism, suicide, surviving, Therese Borchard, transition, work | 3 comments

Working Depressed: Changing Careers

Posted by JohnD Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:45:00 GMT

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I’ve just gone through a six weeks experiment to see if a moderate dose of lithium would strengthen an antidepressant that’s been fading in effectiveness. No such luck. Instead, I went through a tortured sequence of headaches, dizziness, muscular wobbliness, loss of balance, tremors and thick mental fog that always hits in depression but this time was intensified by the strange poison in my blood. I felt mentally impaired for several weeks, with difficulty retaining enough organizing facility to give a short presentation. Try doing your job when you’re under that influence. The crisp one-two-three main points at a meeting become uh, one is something like this or maybe that and somewhere in here is two and was there another point, uh, let’s see, uh, well, never mind. Eyes glaze over, exasperation is high, things are said, I am called on the carpet afterward. That’s humiliating, though plainly justified, and it’s just not the way I’ve been regarded by my peers before the onset of this last period of illness that now adds up to several years.

The lithium experience may have intensified the sluggishness of thinking that always comes with depression, but that symptom even without the impact of lithium has done more to undermine my effectiveness at work than any other. I’ve written other posts about this problem, but things have only gotten worse in terms of performance. Since I can’t function at anything like the top of my game anymore, I’ve decided to pull back from active practice and instead focus on using the knowledge I’ve gained through 25 years in a profession to write and mentor younger people trying to learn the ropes. Those are things I can still do quite well.

Posted in Surviving at Work, Experience with Treatments, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags career, change, depression, failure, joy, mind, obsession, profession, work | 8 comments

Working Depressed: Mind Trap

Posted by JohnD Sun, 02 Dec 2007 07:50:00 GMT

Photo Credit: Yakobchuk – Stockxpert

It can be so hard to get work done when a depressed mind is guiding you into a maze of mirrors. At each moment you seem to see clearly, but what you see is only your own image staring right back at you. I remember an incident, from quite a few years ago, when I was managing a board meeting of a group I had set up and run for some time. In a months’ long depression, I had been isolating myself from the other staff and neglecting key issues that needed to be addressed. That didn’t keep me, though, from imagining that everything was fine. Toward the end of the afternoon session, I suddenly felt the tone of the meeting changing. I became convinced that my fellow staff members – we’d been friends for years as well as colleagues – were turning things against me. Each of the three of them went out of their way to insert one-liners about this or that problem, and each comment seemed a needle of accusation that took me by surprise.

Posted in What Depression Can Do, Surviving at Work | Tags depression, maze, mind, obsession, projection, shame, work | 1 comment

The Longing to Leave - 3

Posted by JohnD Sun, 25 Nov 2007 00:11:00 GMT

Reading the comments that appeared at Beyond Blue about The Longing to Leave-2 has been a continuing inspiration. I realize how different everyone’s experience is about the impact of depression on marriage, and how desperately hard everyone works to reach what is for them the right answer about staying married or not. For some, the “longing to leave” is a justified move to safety from a destructive relationship. For me, though, it was a fantasy borne of depression. I often wonder how it is, given where I began in my struggle to build a loving relationship with another human being, that my wife and I have stayed married for so long. “Marriage is survival,” I once heard a pastor say at a wedding, and the uncomfortable laughter in his large audience confirmed the truth of it. Despite all our struggles, we’ve managed to survive the worst of times.

For so many years, though, and long beyond adolescent dreams, I was searching obsessively not for the real work of two people always learning about each other but for a drug-like love that would give me a shortcut to salvation.

Posted in Partners to Depression, Men and Depression | Tags depression, dream, fantasy, love, marriage, men, obsession | 10 comments