As I came to accept and believe that depression wasn't the result of my failings or weaknesses, but a major illness, a malignant condition, then I needed to deal with treatment more consciously. Up to that point, I had been through a lot of talking therapies and the newer medications, but while each approach helped […]
Archives for August 2007
Fighting Back – 1: Changing Belief about Depression
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 […]
Connecting – 1: What Do You See?
A long time ago, I came home from work one day and found my five-year old son carefully studying a pile of metal debris he must have just lugged into our yard from a neighboring hillside lot. We lived on the edge of a small city in the foothills, and there were frequent illegal dumpings […]
What Depression Can Do – 2: Shame and Despair
Can’t (Rights Reserved) 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, […]
What Depression Can Do – 1: Disappearing
I can’t remember when this started happening. I’m walking about in everyday life reacting to nothing, feeling nothing, and it’s happening now when I’m on the job, running a meeting with 20 people around a table. This is not the self-control I developed as a kid, the bottling up of intense feeling out of a […]