Stories about the struggle to recover from depression tell of repeated efforts to find a way to live well despite the recurring burden of illness. For me the key lesson is that each person in these stories keeps trying, despite repeated setbacks. I recently came across a research study that says the same thing in […]
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Inner Beliefs and Outer Action
A few months ago, I found a picture of myself from college years that gave no hint of the turmoil of inner beliefs I held at the time. There I was, a lean young guy, sporting a cigarette for a role I was acting. The strange thing about this is that at the time I […]
On Writing a Recovery Ebook
Even though I’ve written a great deal about recovery from depression, when I decided to pull my experiences together in A Mind for Life ebook, I ran into a lot of problems. It’s so much easier to write about the miseries of the condition when it’s controlling your life than about the slow, stumbling process […]
Learning How to Live Well Again
One of the strange things about recovering from depression is that the condition is so pervasive getting better can feel like learning how to live all over again. There’s a lot of disagreement about what recovery means and whether that is even the right word to capture the changes you undergo. Because there is so […]
Achieving Profound Change with Coherence Therapy
Psychotherapists can help us make breakthroughs in dealing with depression, but often the insights gained during a session don’t lead to permanent change. Why is it that we can’t always put the new insight into daily use and sometimes forget it as soon as we’re out of the room? That’s the problem that a new […]
Dreams of Depression and Healing
Dreams of depression have often marked moments of crisis or breakthrough to recovery in my experience, but it has been many years since I’ve written about them. Here is a revised version of a post – actually a journal entry – that reminded me how mysterious the cycles of the illness can be. Depression comes, […]
How Does Depression Change You? Can You Ever Be Yourself Again?
Have you ever wondered if multiple episodes of depression change you so much that you’ll never get back to your old self? Most people I hear from say: I want to be myself again. That’s their definition of recovery. Can it happen?
I found an interesting discussion about long-term changes in an online journal called Medicographia. The editors posed a question to psychiatrists and researchers from around the world and printed their responses together.
Here’s the question: Is the patient really the same after a major depressive episode?
Revisiting: Recovery and Creative Experience
All that I am, all that life has made me, every past experience that I have had – woven into the tissue of my life – I must give to … new experience. … [The] past … has indeed not been useless, but its use is not in guiding present conduct by past situations. We […]
