Some Rights Reserved by Memotions at Flickr In the midst of writing about moments of spiritual insight, I realized I had to draw the other half of that picture. The lost side of spirit is emptiness. I don’t mean the emptying that can be a stage in recovery and spiritual growth. That kind of emptiness […]
Men and Depression
Depression Against Life
Anon for Now recently commented on the sense of renewal in life that served as a deterrent to suicide. This struck me as capturing the most baffling aspect of the temptation to end life. For what does the evidence of life on earth point to but the endlessly inventive will to survive? There is no […]
Depression and Suicide – Back from the Edge
Christos Georghiou – Fotolia.com_ WARNING – THIS POST HAS POSSIBLE TRIGGERS. After a tough week with a lot of down time lost to pain of various sorts – as much mental as physical – I’ve been trying to draw on lessons friends have been sharing with me. They have been describing a deeper sense of […]
Lincoln’s Adaptation to Depression
In January 1841, Abraham Lincoln, then a state legislator in Illinois, wrote to his law partner about securing a post for a physician who was then treating him for a nervous disorder called hypochondriasis, or hypo for short, a condition we would call major depression. “I have, within the last few days, been making a […]
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.” […]
How One Man Fights Depression – 2
The storm passed. The huge trees fell beside our house. My angry, blaming depression spent itself in a fury of hard work cutting up the fallen timber, hauling branches into heaps, lifting and shoving back in place every wind-strewn planter and potted tree that had rolled away under the force of a 60 mph north […]
