Recovery

My latest ebook, Depression Present Tense, is now available at Amazon and the other major online retailers. Like Surviving Depression Together and A Mind for Life, it draws together a number of posts from Storied Mind and weaves them into a book to capture the immediate feelings, sights, sounds, terrors and joys of living with […]

My understanding of mental health recovery came from experience with the standard treatments: psychotherapy and medication. Until the 1990s, I worked exclusively with psychiatrists for both. In that setting, I can’t recall anyone talking to me about recovery or what I wanted to get out of treatment. The assumption was that I would be in […]

As many know it, forgiveness is a feeling that can’t be forced, one that often comes after a long inner struggle. I’ve lived with the need for many forms of forgiveness, and each has been important in my recovery from depression. I’ve felt the need to acknowledge hurt that I’ve caused and to ask for […]

I’ve often mentioned how crucial it has been to my recovery that I made basic changes in my work and way of living as a whole. Did I have to give up on hope and lower expectations of life in order to get better? My answer is No. But if you had asked me before […]

Depression can collapse your life the way an earthquake can take down a city. So how could this same depression make us better people? Tom Wootton takes the idea farther than anyone else with his belief that depression can be a beautiful part of your life. Most of us haven’t imagined such a possibility but […]

Recovery should aim at restoring psychological well-being as well as ending the symptoms of depression. Naturally, you get into treatment to stop the pain of those symptoms. It’s a huge achievement if the treatment works, and you can keep depression from ruining your life. But so many people relapse after initially getting better that full […]