It took me a long time to understand the connection between depression and anger. One psychiatrist I visited would often ask a simple question toward the end of a session: How’s your anger? I couldn’t understand why he asked. I hadn’t been talking about anger. Depression was my problem. I’d usually respond with a puzzled, […]
Depression Symptoms
If You Can’t Escape Depression, You Can Try Making Do
It’s hard to escape depression when it dominates your mind. The illness has many faces, but its most visible one is your own. You see it everywhere because you can’t stop thinking about what’s wrong with you.
The illness is filtering out everything that would disturb your isolation – like brighter feelings, hope, the reaching out of a loved one, self-confidence, the energy to connect with people. It keeps your mind roiling with your flops, dumb mistakes, broken relationships, and acid self-contempt.
When you’re well, you can lose yourself in the daily flow of living, but when you’re depressed you never lose yourself.
Depression and Worry: Tales of Mere Existence
I hope you enjoy these classics. They’re good notes to end the summer on. 1. How to Cope with Depression Lev Yilmaz: If you’re feeling down, go to your Co-Workers, Elders, Family and Friends for help. They are sure to give you great, great advice… 2. Things I Have Worried About Lev Yilmaz: Just a […]
How Does Depression Change You? Can You Ever Be Yourself Again?
Have you ever wondered if multiple episodes of depression change you so much that you’ll never get back to your old self? Most people I hear from say: I want to be myself again. That’s their definition of recovery. Can it happen?
I found an interesting discussion about long-term changes in an online journal called Medicographia. The editors posed a question to psychiatrists and researchers from around the world and printed their responses together.
Here’s the question: Is the patient really the same after a major depressive episode?
Mapping Recovery-5: Does Your Life Support Depression?
Mapping the full scope of your depression requires a searching look beyond symptoms to include the way you’re living your life as a whole. When tracking symptoms, the focus is on what’s wrong, what you can no longer do. Following daily life means focusing on what you do, the specific actions you take in response to the situations you run into.
By following your daily actions, it’s easier to spot the patterns of depression’s impact on the way you’re living. You can see more clearly when the illness seems to drive everything you do and when you feel have some room to maneuver. Those are the openings for change that let you begin a recovery process.
Great Self-Help Therapy for Depression: Why Don’t I Do It?
The force for change and healing can start with excitement and promise, then slowly dissipate until settling back into the stillness of depression. There are great self-help therapies to achieve well-being, and I have great intentions to get them all done. So why don’t I do them? I feel like a basketball. It hits the […]
Mapping Recovery-4: Matching Therapies to Your Symptoms
If you’ve been tracking your symptoms for at least a month, you should have a fairly detailed picture of your particular variety of depression. You understand the full range of symptoms, when they occur, what other conditions in your life accompany them and which ones you’ve got to deal with first. Now comes the hard […]
Mapping Recovery-3: Reviews of 4 Web Apps for Tracking Depression
The best way to understand depression is to track your symptoms and triggering events each day. The question is: How to do it. To start with, you might use a written diary, or just a list on note paper. But the more symptoms and triggering events you follow and the longer you keep up with […]
