Some years back I took part in a series of group sessions that focused on helping people confront and deal with inner shame that had haunted them since childhood. It was the first group in my experience that got me to interact with other people not just through talk but through dramatic reenactments of past […]

I’ve been looking back at the way I’ve thought about depression and my stance toward dealing with it, and I’ve started to wonder: Could I imagine and adopt in my life a different approach to this illness? What starts me on this track is my encounter with the experiences of so many other thoughtful fellow-sufferers […]

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.” […]

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 […]

Some rights reserved by Hamed Saber at Flickr When my mother died, I didn’t know what I felt. Throughout my life, I had been struggling to shed the influence of her searing and shaming words, her anger, at times rage, above all, her depression during my childhood. How many of us spend adult years still […]

I was reading Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Blonde, about the life of Marilyn Monroe, and was stopped by a line spoken by the character known as the “The Survivor.” Norma, he said, was a natural actor because she didn’t know who she was and so was driven to try to become the character completely. That […]