Recent Posts on the Storied Mind Newsletter

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the Storied Mind Newsletter, I’d like to give you a glimpse of the posts you’ve been missing. Each week the newsletter has a new one, but you can only read it if you subscribe by email. These posts are not published online.

Each one responds to a reader question, and you can suggest any topic about depression that concerns you. If you’re interested, please sign up from either the sidebar form or the newsletter page. After you confirm your subscription, I’ll send a welcome email asking for your ideas for discussion in future newsletters.

Here in reverse order are the topics of the first twelve newsletters.

12. Self-Activating When Depressed

How can you activate yourself to get anything done when you’re depressed? Several readers have asked about this basic need to keep functioning when your mood, mind and body do not want to cooperate. It’s not only about work.

11. What Happens After Partners Get Through the Worst?

You’ve been desperate to understand how your intimate partner could possibly have abandoned you, grown silent, angry, emotionally never there, reluctant to touch or talk to you.

10. Am I Done with Depression Now that I Feel Like Myself Again?

It’s easy to worry excessively about the chance for future episodes. That’s only natural in the early phases of the turn-around. However, it’s not much of a recovery if your life remains dominated by that concern or by a sense of doom about the future.

9. Talking to Friends about Depression

Talking to friends and family about your depression can be tough to do. Over the past few months, several readers have asked whether they should even try. Sometimes, they feel there is no one they can trust to listen without judgment. Sometimes they worry about alienating friends who have been supportive for other needs.

8. Can Buddhist Psychology Help Heal Depression?

During this week of flu and groggy brain, I’ve managed to catch up on some long-delayed reading that has helped me finish this long-delayed post. It’s about healing an aspect of depression that prompts more reader questions than any other: the anger, rage and aggressive behavior that can so completely distort a personality and ruin a relationship.

7. Couples Therapy with a Depressed Partner

Many readers ask for advice about a crisis brought on by depression in their closest relationships. They often mention couples therapy, but few report much success with it.

6. How Do I Know What’s Working?

One reader posed this question about his attempts to stop frequently recurring depression: “How can I know if I am doing the right things and doing them enough to get well?” At first glance, you might think the answer is straightforward. Feeling better is the measure. If there’s no change in the depression, then the treatment isn’t working and you should try something else. There are several reasons why it’s not that simple.

5. Depressed Partners Out of Love

In the first Storied Mind Letter, I talked about the effect of depression on close relationships, mostly from the undepressed partner’s point of view. This time, I want to look at the other side. What are depressed partners going through that could turn them into cold and blaming strangers?

4. Stressful Work

Have you ever felt that you were stuck in a job that was killing you with stress but had no way to get out of it? One reader wrote in with exactly this problem, and her situation is all too common. I was in that position for years but finally came up with a few strategies that helped me get through.

3. Pain and Depression

Pain and depression are a team well-designed for long-term misery. Unfortunately, a lot of people live with both. One reader asked if depression could be a cause of fibromyalgia and chronic pain that originated with an injury. The short answer seems to be no, but the relationship is a close one.

2. Depression and Your Children

A reader asked me recently about how his depression might affect his children. He knew he had put his wife through hell and didn’t want to have the same thing happen to their kids. He was even wondering if there were parents who had thought about not getting married and not having children because of the harm they might cause.

1. What Can You Do If  Your Partner Is Depressed?

Two readers have asked about the best ways to respond to warning signs and symptoms of depression in their partners. The illness tends to separate two people in many ways, so the question always arises: What can I, the well partner, do when the symptoms start to push us apart?