I started thinking about the value of writing stories to deal with depression when I read Alcoholics Anonymous, the book that named the growing self-help movement in 1939. For me, it was not the method the book describes but the stories that first hit home so deeply. A psychiatrist I was seeing at the time […]
depression
Creativity: Is Writing Safe?
Depression shuts down creativity so completely that I think of these two as polar opposites. When I’m free of depression, my mind is working, my feelings are alive, and I can generate ideas, I can write, I’m effective at whatever I’m doing. But in the midst of depression, everything is shut down, and I can’t […]
Fighting Depression: Why Get Well?
Recently, I’ve started asking myself a basic question: Why get well? What do I really want in fighting depression? After all, if I’m working on recovery, I ought to be able to see what I’m aiming for. I thought for a long time that what I wanted was to be free of depression. That would […]
Anger Therapy
Photo Credit: Eric Gevaert Today gave me a lesson in the value of anger. Yes, I’ve heard it all: anger bad – positive feelings good. Fine. Too much anger, and I’d better manage it or I’ll be out of a job, family, the whole works. Right. But there are times when the purely valid human […]
Support or Defeat?
One of the hardest admissions I have had to make about the effect of depression was to say bluntly to myself, after years of denial, that my performance in my profession had steadily deteriorated under the impact of this illness. The truth had been obvious for some time to colleagues depending on me to be […]
Explanations – 1: Finding a Guide
I’d like to think of the search for the causes and treatments of depression as the tracking down of a killer, a good yarn like the fascinating medical mystery stories The New Yorker publishes from time to time. But we’re a long way from the end of such a story, and those tales can only […]
