identity

Chronic depression, also known as dysthymia, is supposed to be a milder but longer lasting form of the illness than the more episodic and severe variety known as major depressive disorder. Yet I have come to believe that no form of diagnosable depression should be called “mild.” My concern is not about the accuracy of […]

Every list of top books on depression is highly personal, and mine may be more so than most. I’ve left out several of the standards you’ll find in other lists and added others that cover far more than this one condition because they’ve helped me make progress in recovery. They’ve deepened my understanding of healing […]

Getting well depends in part on changing core beliefs of depression that often begin to develop early in life. According to recent neuroscience findings, putting together a narrative about who you are is one of the most important parts of mental life. The narrative integrates many dimensions of mind: memory, emotion, thinking, sense perception, awareness, […]

(Anxiety has dominated more of my waking hours than I care to admit, yet I’ve written relatively few posts about it. While working on the next ebook, Depression Present Tense, I came across this early post that captures a typical incident. The new book is an attempt to capture the inner feelings of depression in […]

I can pinpoint a moment when I came to believe that depression was not just an illness that struck from time to time but part of my identity as a person. I was talking with a friend one day about how big a problem depression had become. He thought it must be brought on by […]

I have a post on emotional abuse at Health Central in which I compared the behavior of a depressed man who acts abusively with that of a true emotional abuser. It occurred to me after writing the post that fantasies of a perfect future are important for both. As I’ve written in the Longing to […]