Photo Credit – JesterArts – Stockxpert One of my wake-up moments arrived decades ago when I read a New York Review of Books essay on a government practice known as “channeling.” This was during the Vietnam draft era, and the term referred to the decisions that young men were forced to make about their lives […]
Archives for 2007
Working Depressed: Mind Trap
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 […]
The Longing to Leave – 3
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 […]
Depressed for Success
Photo Credit: JesterArts – Stockxpert I’ve been a bit overwhelmed reading the many moving responses to my post dealing with depression at work, Support or Defeat?, that have appeared on Beyond Blue and Furious Seasons. The comments describe many tortured work histories, some with good outcomes, others with no end in sight to an anguished […]
Recovery and the Big Book
I started thinking about the value of writing stories to deal with depression when I read Alcoholics Anonymous, the book that named the growing self-help movement in 1939. For me, it was not the method the book describes but the stories that first hit home so deeply. A psychiatrist I was seeing at the time […]
Creativity: Is Writing Safe?
Depression shuts down creativity so completely that I think of these two as polar opposites. When I’m free of depression, my mind is working, my feelings are alive, and I can generate ideas, I can write, I’m effective at whatever I’m doing. But in the midst of depression, everything is shut down, and I can’t […]