I run a race with depression that keeps me on edge. The stakes are high because we race to take each other apart. I intend to keep the lead. For years, I’d hit the wall and lose the bare will to win. But somehow I got back not just the energy to move but a […]
Depression Treatments
Am I Normal? Am I Depressed?
Some Rights Reserved by notsogoodphotography at Flickr Which insightfully bewildered comic strip character was it who said: I never knew what I was missing until I lost it? I read that line about ten years ago after a series of surgeries had removed a few expendable body parts and left me in a lot of […]
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 […]
Fighting Back – 3: The Patient Activist
I have a hard time being a patient or thinking of myself in that role. In one sense, to be a patient means to be sick, to be under treatment by a medical professional, to be undergoing all sorts of tests and therapies. See the trend there – the intolerable passive voice says it all. […]
Explanations – 1: Finding a Guide
I’d like to think of the search for the causes and treatments of depression as the tracking down of a killer, a good yarn like the fascinating medical mystery stories The New Yorker publishes from time to time. But we’re a long way from the end of such a story, and those tales can only […]
Fighting Back – 2: Becoming an Activist
As I came to accept and believe that depression wasn't the result of my failings or weaknesses, but a major illness, a malignant condition, then I needed to deal with treatment more consciously. Up to that point, I had been through a lot of talking therapies and the newer medications, but while each approach helped […]
