It occurs to me that recovery is past, well-being is now and purpose is the future. Let me explain. Recently, I wrote about recovery as a concept I no longer wanted to apply to what I’ve been going through. The word carried a set of assumptions that kept me within an illness frame of mind. […]
Creativity
Ceremonies of Magic, Imagination and Play
Some Rights Reserved by a whisper of unremitting demand at Flickr Merely Me wrote a wonderful post on the importance of bringing play back into everyday life. It is the forgotten tonic among adults in general and depressed adults in particular. She paints a vivid scene of a group therapy session where she coaxed recovering […]
Creating a Way Out of Depression – 3
Isabella at change therapy has given me much to think about, as she usually does. In her recent post, she described her take on the link between creativity and depression. She said that unlike my sense of depression disappearing in the midst of creative activity, she saw creative moments as helping her inner life get […]
Revisiting: Writing Through Depression
I’ve tried to use the creativity of writing to engage depression, to take away its power and release my mind from its prisoning obsessions. I want to offer a few notes about how these basic elements help in my experience. Each of us responds differently, and what works for me may not work for another. […]
Creating a Way Out of Depression – 3
Some Rights Reserved by Iowa_spirit-walker at Flickr isabella at change therapy has given me much to think about, as she usually does. In her recent post, she described her take on the link between creativity and depression. She said that unlike my sense of depression disappearing in the midst of creative activity, she saw creative […]
Creating a Way Out of Depression – 2
As a writer, I’ve looked for methods to keep depression from undermining the creative work I try to do. Or should I even put it that way – is it depression that stops me? For years, I told myself I couldn’t work when in a mental fog of depression, my will to act paralyzed, my […]
Creating a Way Out of Depression -1
Some Rights Reserved by KayCey97007 at Flickr WARNING: IDEAS UNDER CONSTRUCTION Thanks to a series of compelling posts on creativity by Isabella Mori at changetherapy (part of an exchange with Psyblog), I’ve been trying to understand more clearly what happens when creative work takes place. I haven’t gotten there yet (can’t say I expect to […]
Creativity and Depression – 3
Patrick has written a comment packed with ideas about his responses to depression. I’m especially interested in three points he makes about creativity and imagination. First, he notes that his years of experience of therapy led him to see it as a “misguided enterprise, that of creating and recreating ‘narratives’ to explain events of Mind.” […]
