Depression Symptoms

I had a comment on a post at Health Central that described an experience the writer called dissociative. During a therapy session she had become so remote that she couldn’t focus on the discussion or even remember in mid-sentence what she’d been saying. She wasn’t fully present and couldn’t bring herself to come back into […]

Once my kids pulled me with them up to a water slide. I don’t like sliding through winding tubes and hadn’t done it before. But I couldn’t back out of it once I was standing in a dense line at the top of a 50-foot high platform. Nowhere to go but down. So off I […]

Why I try to understand depression, I find too few words with too many meanings. This isn’t quibbling over semantics. It’s about what you feel when living with depression and what you feel when you can finally live without it. It’s about the experience behind the words. Take the word, control. To control and to […]

Chronic depression, also known as dysthymia, is supposed to be a milder but longer lasting form of the illness than the more episodic and severe variety known as major depressive disorder. Yet I have come to believe that no form of diagnosable depression should be called “mild.” My concern is not about the accuracy of […]

My getting depressed after a cancer operation almost ended our marriage. It was the blow that forced my wife to remind me of the boundaries I couldn’t afford to ignore. I had been in high spirits for the operation and right through the recovery period. My wife and I had been especially close during that […]

I’ve had several moments in recovery when I realized that things I assumed to be true were really delusions of depression. Some were long-held beliefs about myself, others were briefly held convictions that were too far from reality to maintain for long. Psychiatrists probably wouldn’t call these delusions of the sort linked to psychosis, but […]