There’s nothing like extreme anxiety to make you feel like you’re falling apart. Using a few basics of mindfulness as self-help may be a way to pull yourself back together. The all-embracing anxiety I’m talking about comes close to panic. It’s an explosion of fear that hits everything. Certain situations can set it off, or […]
Can Depression Make Us Better People?
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 […]
6 Dimensions of Psychological Well-Being
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 […]
The Powerful Noise of Panic
Some of the most frightening moments I’ve had during long years of depression were not those of despairing mood or even suicidal thinking. Instead, they were the times of panic when I’d feel yanked into a wind tunnel, no hold on anything, air sucked out of my lungs, my body fired into emptiness. Most […]
Patterns of Recovery from Depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
I started learning about patterns of recovery when my mother survived two heart attacks but died twice before her death. That’s the way she saw it. Her heart stopped both times, but she fought her way back. The second heart-stopping attack occurred during an operation for a different problem. She was 94. I only learned […]
Depression Is a Free Fall in Slow Motion
Once my kids pulled me with them up to a water slide. I don’t like sliding through winding tubes and hadn’t done it before. But I couldn’t back out of it once I was standing in a dense line at the top of a 50-foot high platform. Nowhere to go but down. So off I […]
